SLEEPWALK OF DEATH

Bernie Brown’s sleepwalking escapades were a bit of a joke with his family.

Brown: On a couple of occasions I found myself sitting in the loungeroom with a cup of coffee in my hand … I woke up with a warm cup of coffee in my hand! On another occasion, I woke up with a smoke and a cup of coffee, just sitting there smoking and drinking coffee. Other times, I woke up sitting in the doorway of my son’s room just staring at the wall. Another few times, I was in my daughter’s room just kneeling down on the floor in the bedroom, just next to the bed and then I’d wake up and go to bed.

Brown said that he had been a sleepwalker as a child growing up in a Western Australian orphanage.

Brown: I used to wake up in strange, strange places … In like the airing cupboards. They didn’t have doors, just little alcoves in the hallway with sheets and pillows and stuff and I used to wake up in there on one of the shelves. I also used to wake up in bed with my younger brother, or sleeping on the floor beside my older brother’s bed – and they were in different dormitories.

He said that at the orphanage he had walked in his sleep three or four times – that he knew of. After being taken into a foster home at the age of 13, he did not sleepwalk, or at least did not know whether he did or not, for nearly 25 years – until 1988. That was when he fell while painting a railway station and hit his head hard. He believed that caused ongoing headaches, memory problems and made him more easily irritated. Brown also believed hitting his head somehow renewed his childhood sleep problems.

Brown: I snore very loudly and quite often stop breathing when I am sleeping. I don’t know that personally, that’s just been relayed to me. My wife Susan would give me an elbow to get me breathing again.

He also said he had had a few ‘night terrors’.

Brown: I would just wake up very cold but sweating, you know, at the same time. Just terrified, absolutely terrified.

Some nights he slept on the couch so Susan – his wife of 10 years – could get a decent sleep. For Brown, sleep was often anything but restful; he would wake up in the morning feeling ‘virtually brain dead’.

Brown: Just no energy, can’t think straight, nothing really registers for a while.

In August 1992, Brown’s sleepwalking increased. That was when for three nights in a row, he made his strange nightly visits into the bedroom of his 13-year-old stepdaughter, Kathryn. He found himself kneeling next to her bed, staring at nothing. The first time it happened Kathryn asked: ‘Dad?’ ‘It’s not Dad, it’s your mum,’ he oddly replied. Again she said: ‘Dad?’ This time he replied blankly: ‘Oh, you’re awake,’ and walked out.

Brown’s increased sleep disturbance might have been triggered by his rising anxiety about losing his job as a house painter. Although considered a good worker, there was very little work in or around the tiny town of Harrisville (population about 500), about 100km southwest of Brisbane, just south of Ipswich.

Brown: Work was getting scarce. There was talk of laying people off … I was very upset.

The 41-year-old was so worried, he organised a day off on 26 August 1992 so he could talk to another contractor just in case he lost his job.

He never made it to that interview.

In the early hours of 26 August 1992, according to Brown, his sleepwalking stopped being a joke, stopped being a weird eccentricity, and caused a tragedy.

• • •

On 25 August 1992, Brown had come home at his normal time of about 4.30pm. Susan and Kathryn were arguing so he got a beer – a light one – and went to tinker in his workroom. After a while, his wife joined him. They discussed whether Kathryn should move to another school. Kathryn overheard some of it.

Kathryn: Mum wanted me to go to another school and Dad’s sticking up for me … I heard him say: ‘Why are you always picking on Kathryn?’

Brown had a shower and then another light beer before the family sat down to dinner at about 6pm. After dinner Ben and Kathryn went to their rooms – Ben, 15, to do some homework, Kathryn to listen to her music. The family then watched a science-fiction video. It was so bad Susan and Bernie went to bed about five minutes before it finished – about 10.30pm.

In bed, Brown said later, he and Susan continued discussing whether to move Kathryn to another school.

Brown: We were just throwing the fors and againsts around and I suggested she had been picking on her a bit much.

During the evening Brown had a couple of Panadol, some Sudafed and a couple of other drugs to try to get rid of a headache. He said that at about midnight he got out of bed to take a couple of Mogadon.

Brown: I hopped back into bed and we spoke for a while longer. I don’t know exactly how long – about half an hour to an hour – and then I kissed her goodnight and we rolled over and went to sleep.

He said the next thing he remembered was waking up about 5am.

Brown: I had to have a leak … I sort of sat up and looked across at the time on the digital readout. I saw ‘5’ – that’s all I saw. I put the touch lamp beside my bed on and I got up and walked down my side of the bed and across the foot of the bed and I just looked across to my left and it was just a bloody mess…

I just stood there for a second, then I sort of moved forward. I didn’t really run because it’s not that many steps to take, and I sort of shook my wife and I felt for a pulse in the neck…

Pausing and shaking his head, Brown tearfully said: ‘There was no pulse. I felt nothing.’

Brown: I tried talking to her but there was no response … I said words to the effect: ‘Come on, it’s time to get up’…

I went to make two cups of coffee. I don’t know how far I got with making it. I went back to the bedroom and I said: ‘Your coffee has been made. Come and have a coffee.’ She didn’t answer…

I was a mess. I was crying. Then I tried to sit her up and put her legs over the edge of the bed … and I said: ‘Come on, stop fucking around. It’s not funny.’ And I was shaking her…

I was getting, I think, a bit angry because she wouldn’t answer and she slid off the bed onto the floor and I thought she was just, just foolin’ around, you know. So, I put her back on the bed. I lifted her under the arms onto the bed and that was when I realised I had blood on me.

And all I can remember saying virtually from the start of the whole incident until just before I realised there was blood on me, I just kept saying: ‘Oh no! Oh, Jesus, no!’ and just virtually talking to nothing. I mean obviously God wasn’t, wasn’t there but that’s who I was talking to and it didn’t make any sense later on.

Brown said he then started taking off the blood-soaked sheets.

Brown: My wife hates a mess … And for some reason I thought: ‘I have got clean up this mess because if she sees a mess she is going to kill me.’ That’s what I was thinking.

I just started grabbing everything off the bed … I took it down to the car. I had no shoes on at the time, I don’t think. I just kept going back and forth to the car, I think with sheets – whatever it was – I was just grabbing everything.

I wanted to hide it, which now seems stupid because she wouldn’t have found it.

When I got rid of all the sheets and stuff, I grabbed something off the floor, I don’t know what it was, a rag, and I started wiping the [blood off] the wall … I didn’t want her to see the mess.

My wife felt very cold easily, so I covered her with the … doona. It was some time then that I realised she was dead…

The next thing I remember was having a shower … I was some time under the shower and it was then that I stopped crying … I didn’t feel any better but I stopped crying…

I was walking around for a while thinking: ‘Jesus, I can’t let the kids see that mess.’ So woke I them up for school and told them their mum was sick and that she was sleeping and virtually just let them get their own breakfast and whatever.

Ben and Kathryn both said they had found it strange to be woken up by their stepfather instead of their mother at 6am. They also found it odd that their lunches hadn’t been prepared.

Ben: He came in and woke us up and then I dozed back off to sleep and then he came back in and gave us $5 and said like: ‘Here’s $5 for lunch because your mother is sick,’ or something. ‘She’s in bed, so you buy your lunch today and I’m going to stay home.’ He said that she had had to go in to the doctor and they got some sedatives and something and she was asleep and that she wasn’t to be disturbed…

He seemed a bit nervous. He was sort of pacing around a bit.

He just sort of mentioned that about two o’clock he went and took her to the doctor and they spoke to the doctor and he said that my mother was under a lot of stress and that she would have to go to have a lot of rest and then she would have to seek counselling or something…

He said there might have been a bit of a row and he was surprised that I didn’t get woken up by it…

Ben said his stepfather seemed very tense that morning, that he was constantly pacing around the lounge and up the hallway. Kathryn agreed their stepfather seemed a bit upset that day.

Kathryn: He said that mother was sick and he took her to the doctors and that I didn’t have to eat my breakfast, which I normally did. He said: ‘Don’t go and see her because she needs her rest and when she wakes up she will just have to have a meal and go straight back to sleep.’

Brown’s increasingly convoluted lie even extended to him putting some of the blame on Kathryn.

Kathryn: He said that she was tired and I said, ‘Is it because of me?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ He said that they got up at two o’clock in the morning and took her to the doctor and he asked me if I heard the car and I said, ‘No.’

Kathryn was so upset that her behaviour at school might have triggered her mother’s breakdown, she wrote a note to her and put it in a glass cabinet. Poignantly, Kathryn did not know that her mother had been shot twice in the back of the head and hit with a claw hammer in her bed some hours before.

Kathryn: He said: ‘I’ll give it to her when she wakes up’ … He said he’s got to stay home and look after Mum.

Despite being told not to disturb her mother, Kathryn could not resist a quick peek.

Kathryn: He was in the loungeroom, I think. I quickly walked past and I think I saw her laying in the bed with the covers on her.

It was only later that she found out that she had caught a glimpse of her mother’s bloody corpse.

Nothing had woken the teens that night – not their parents arguing in their nearby room, not gunshots and not their mother’s screams. It seemed Ben and Kathryn’s sleep was also extraordinary, but not in the way their stepfather’s was.

After the children left for school, Brown said that he kept up his logic-defying refusal to accept his wife was dead.

Brown: I kept walking around the house, just pacing up and down and I kept asking my wife to ‘Come on, stop fooling around.’

Finally about 9.30am – four and a half hours after he said he had found his wife’s dead body lying in their bed – Brown phoned a friend. Weeping and stuttering badly he said, ‘I’ve done something really bad and I think I am going to jail.’ He went to see a lawyer and then the police were notified.

Senior Constable Paul Foley got the call to check the Brown home in Hall Street, Harrisville just before 10am. When he got to the home – an old hospital divided into units – he had to climb a chicken-wire fence and negotiate his way past a German shepherd pup and a ‘little black dog which was quite savage’. He found the home very neat and tidy and all the doors closed. In the master bedroom he saw a waterbed ‘roughly covered’ with a white doona.

Sen Constable Foley: I felt this blanket and felt two legs. I then went to the foot of the bed and pulled back the blanket and found the deceased person.

She was lying face up with her left arm across her stomach and the right arm wedged between the side of the waterbed and the waterbed’s bladder. There seemed to be a large quantity of blood around her skull, her face and left shoulder … and blood spatter on the wall behind the bed, on the bed and on the bedhead. She was only wearing a T-shirt and necklace.

The policeman discovered a bloody claw hammer under the waterbed. Police also found – inside a silver case in a locked gun cabinet in Ben Brown’s room – the .22 Springfield rifle used in the killing. In the boot of Brown’s car they found blood-stained sheets, a pillow and a pillow slip, each with a bullet hole, and a pair of Brown’s grey tracksuit pants with two discharged .22 calibre cartridge cases in the pocket.

An autopsy found that Susan Brown had been shot once in the lower back of her head and once in the upper back of her head. She also had cuts on the right side of her head, which could have been caused by a claw hammer.

When police asked Brown how his wife died, he told them: ‘I don’t know. I think I shot her. I don’t know. I have no idea.’

• • •

So in June 1993, 10 months after 36-year-old Susan Brown’s gruesome death, a Queensland Supreme Court jury had to decide whether her husband was guilty of her murder. His barrister, Debbie Richards, said her client could not remember anything of the death of his wife but that the most likely explanation was that he had killed her in his sleep and, therefore, was not guilty of her murder.

Ms Richards: Brown was acting while not conscious of his actions, while not in control.

Prosecutor Kevan Townsley said that Brown had cold-bloodedly murdered his wife and that his claim to have been sleepwalking at the time was a ‘furphy’.

In his cross-examination of Brown the prosecutor tried to cast doubt on his claim that he had increasing bouts of sleepwalking in the weeks before he killed his wife, asking him why he didn’t tell a doctor about them, especially as that would bolster his worker’s compensation claim over the fall at the railway station.

Brown: Because I had enough problems at the time with my headaches, memory and the dizziness … I didn’t want to keep running to the doctor with all sorts of complaints.

He said he had not realised his sleepwalking would be important to his compensation claim. He agreed that he and his wife were shooters and would go out hunting animals, but he denied this meant he should have more quickly realised that his wife had been shot dead. Mr Townsley also quizzed Brown about his reaction to finding his wife’s bloody body.

Mr Townsley: Did you scream for help or anything like that?

Brown: No … I was just shocked. I didn’t do anything for a short time…

Mr Townsley: But you did yell and scream?

Brown: Not that I know of.

Mr Townsley: This was someone you loved?

Brown: That’s correct.

Mr Townsley: Did you rush out to see if your children had been murdered?

Brown: No.

Mr Townsley: Didn’t cross your mind?

Brown: No, nothing entered my head except what I saw.

Mr Townsley: You were … with her body from 5 o’clock to 9.30 – four and a half hours … So, if you were so inclined, you could have rung for an ambulance and the police, couldn’t you?

Brown: If I had thought of it, yes.

Mr Townsley: Why didn’t you do that?

Brown: Because I assumed I had done it.

Mr Townsley: You assumed you had done it?

Brown: That’s correct.

Mr Townsley: How quickly did you realise that?

Brown: I don’t know when I first realised it, but it was some time after I started taking the bed clothes off and having a shower…

Mr Townsley: You have got no memory of all of this?

Brown: No.

Mr Townsley: You didn’t do it?

Brown: Not as far as I am concerned.

Although the defence’s main argument was that the jury could not dismiss the reasonable possibility that Brown had been sleepwalking – an unthinking automaton – when he killed his wife, it said someone else could also have killed Susan Brown when her husband was either sleeping next to her, or had gone to the toilet. To back this admittedly less-likely possibility, Ms Richards pointed out that police had found fingerprints in the bedroom they could not identify.

Mr Townsley: You weren’t woken up by the report of two shots of a .22 rifle?

Brown: No…

Mr Townsley: Why did you want to get rid of the blood-soaked bed clothes?

Brown: Because, the way I was thinking at the time, I knew my wife hated a mess of any sort and I was determined to get rid of that mess before she saw it because at the time I thought: ‘If she sees all of this shit, she will kill me.’

Mr Townsley: You would, however, have felt for the pulse and found none before you removed the sheets?

Brown: That’s correct.

Mr Townsley: How could she kill you?

Brown: It doesn’t make any sense to me.

Mr Townsley: It’s nonsense you have made up, isn’t it?

Brown: No.

Brown denied the prosecutor’s claim that he (Brown) had early on suggested a psychiatric defence to his lawyer, saying he had not known his lawyer would go with the sleepwalking ‘automatism’ defence until a few days before the trial. He said he could not remember suggesting soon after his arrest that he should have a psychiatric examination because he was a Vietnam vet.

The prosecutor also asked Brown why he told his children such an elaborate false story – about taking his wife to the doctor in the early hours of the morning.

Brown: I did not want to let them go in and see the horror that was in the bedroom…

Mr Townsley: There was something she said in that discussion with you in bed that triggered the shooting…

Brown: No.

Mr Townsley: … that you are not telling us?

Brown: No, there was nothing said.

A sleep disorder expert, Dr Phillip Lethbridge, told the jury that it would have been possible for a sleepwalking person to have gone to the Browns’ gun cabinet, unlocked it, taken out a gun, walked back to bed, shot Mrs Brown twice, hit her with the claw hammer, put the fired cartridges into his pocket, returned the gun to the cabinet, locked it away and then returned to sleep beside the bloody corpse. He said that, if true, Brown making himself a cup of coffee and lighting a cigarette while sleepwalking showed he was capable of complex actions while sleepwalking.

Dr Lethbridge said people had committed quite complex crimes while sleepwalking. He said the most famous recent example was a Canadian man who drove more than 20km to his in-laws’ home, where he beat and stabbed his mother-in-law to death with a tyre lever and a kitchen knife. In the bizarre 1987 attack Kenneth James Parks, 23, of Ontario, also badly injured his father-in-law. On the evening of 23 May, shortly after falling asleep on the living-room couch, Mr Parks got up, put on his shoes and jacket – but no socks or underwear – and left the house, leaving the front door open. He drove 23km to his wife’s parents’ townhouse. He took a tyre iron from the boot of his car and opened the townhouse’s door with a key. He later remembered, according to a report in The Journal of American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, seeing his mother-in-law’s face and hearing the children yelling from upstairs and running up the stairs calling out to them. The children later said they only heard Mr Parks grunting. Luckily, the robot-monster uncle did not go into the children’s bedrooms. Instead, he drove to a nearby police station and babbled out a confession.

Mr Parks: I just killed someone with my bare hands. Oh my God, I just killed someone; I just killed two people. My God, I’ve just killed two people with my hands. My God, I’ve just killed two people. My hands; I just killed two people. I killed them; I just killed two people; I’ve just killed my mother- and father-in-law. I stabbed and beat them to death. It’s all my fault.

At his trial Mr Parks claimed he had been asleep the whole time – on the drive to his parents-in-law’s, while attacking them, and on the drive to the police station. The jury heard that he and his family had a history of sleepwalking and sleeptalking. It also heard that the year before the killing he had been very stressed: he had worked 10-hour days as a project coordinator for an electric company; lost money on betting at the horse races; stolen $30,000 money from his employer to cover these debts; been sacked after this theft was discovered; and had been charged with theft. His problems had put a strain on his marriage but – as Canada’s highest court, the Supreme Court, noted in 1992 – Mr Parks’ wife’s parents always supported him. He got on really well with his in-laws, particularly with his mother-in-law, who called him a ‘gentle giant’. Mr Parks’ jury found him not guilty of murder, accepting the defence’s sleepwalking claim. The judge rejected a prosecution call for Mr Parks to be kept in a mental institution, ruling that sleepwalking was not a disease of the mind. Both Ontario’s appeal court and Canada Supreme Court upheld this decision, throwing out prosecution appeals.

What the jury in Brown’s trial did not hear was that sleepwalking has been a nightmare for legal systems around the world since at least 1846. That was when a celebrated Boston lawyer, Rufus Choate, managed to persuade a jury that his client was sleepwalking when he slit the throat of a famously beautiful high-class prostitute so badly her head was nearly severed. Albert Tirrell’s highly publicised trial heard that he had become so besotted with Maria Ann Bickford that he left his family to live near her. It heard he wanted her to give up prostitution but she refused – the money was too good. After brutally slaying Maria, Albert started three fires in the brothel, which the prosecution said he did to hide the evidence – not the sort of thing a sleepwalker would do. The jury, however, disagreed and took less than two hours to find Tirrell not guilty. He was set free and lived the rest of his life a free man.

Dr Lethbridge told Brown’s trial that while a third of children have walked in their sleep, only three per cent were regular sleepwalkers and only one per cent of adults were sleepwalkers. He said adult sleepwalkers had usually been sleepwalkers as children. The neurologist said Mogadon was one of the drugs believed to trigger sleepwalking and that sleepwalkers tended to walk more in their sleep when they were stressed. He said it was possible for a sleepwalker to continue sleeping through gunshots, particularly if a pillow had been used to stifle the gun’s noise. He agreed, however, that it was unusual for sleepwalkers to try to conceal what they had done.

On July 1 1993, Brown’s jury took less than two hours to find him guilty of murder. As the verdict was announced, Brown sighed and told Justice Brian Ambrose he had ‘absolutely nothing to say’. Shortly afterwards, declaring it a ‘horrible crime’, the judge sentenced Brown to life in prison – the only sentence available in Queensland for those convicted of murder.

Outside the court, Susan Brown’s mother, Moureen Deakes said she was ‘more than happy’ with the verdict and sentence.

Ms Deakes: No-one else will suffer the way we did now that he’s been put away. Knowing what he did, the terrible fear was that he would be released and hurt someone else.

But it wasn’t over.

In December 1993, Queensland’s Court of Appeal overturned Brown’s conviction and ordered a new trial. The appeal judges ruled that Justice Ambrose had unfairly undercut Brown’s chances of being believed by telling the jurors that when they came to consider what he said in the dock they should treat him as any other witness but ‘keep in mind’ his interest in the case; that they should look ‘carefully’ at his evidence. They said even though the prosecution case had been strong, Brown could have been acquitted if the jury had believed him. The judges said Brown ‘was undoubtedly entitled to have the jury consider the possibility of somnambulism … properly’.

Despite this win – about a year later and before his new trial started – Brown surprisingly ended his legal tussle. On 4 January 1995 he pleaded guilty to murdering Susan. He told Justice Des Derrington: ‘A lot of people have been hurt by this whole bloody nightmare. I can’t help them any more, but I’d like to say sorry for everything that happened.’

Once again he was imprisoned for life.