“I still had hope she was lost.”



Karrie Bateman was 10 when her mother, Faye Aline Self, above (top row, far right), disappeared. Bateman said pictures are really all she has to remember her mom by.

Bateman said she looked for her mom in the faces of strangers for years.

After 23 years of not knowing what happened to her mother, woman learns Browne killed her

By ANSLEE WILLETT
THE GAZETTE

For years, Karrie Bateman pictured her missing mother’s face when she spotted petite, blond women in grocery stores.

“I’d be disappointed when they turned around, and it wasn’t her,” she said. “I still had hope she was lost.”

Bateman was 10 when her mom, 26-year-old Faye Aline Self, vanished in 1983 from Coushatta, La. Since then, 23 Mother’s Days and 23 anniversaries of the disappearance have passed.

Twenty-three years of not knowing what happened — until El Paso County sheriff’s officials revealed in late July that serial killer Robert Charles Browne says he killed Self in her apartment.

“I wept like a child for almost the first time in a quarter of a century, because now I know she’s dead,” said 33-year-old Bateman, who lives in Houston. “The not knowing is what drives you insane, but in a way, it gives you hope.”

As in Self’s case, the bodies of some of Browne’s victims weren’t recovered, giving hope to relatives who wanted to think they were missing.

Browne’s confessions made them face the worst.

“When a case is solved, and particularly if it’s in the media, it’s bittersweet,” said Michigan psychiatrist Frank Ochberg, former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “The trauma memories, they feel like they’re now. It comes back and it hits you, and it’s right here.”

How the victims’ relatives deal with the news after years of uncertainty — and how they’ve dealt with it up until now — depends on the individuals, said Seattle psychiatrist Ted Rynearson, who’s done studies on homicide bereavement.

“Generalizations can’t be made. Some family members go through it in a healthy way. I think resilience is the norm,” he said. “Nobody gets over it. Everybody, to some extent, is forever changed by this.”

The grief may have been compounded or delayed when cases weren’t solved.

“People who go through the court process, that piece of uncertainty is removed,” Ochberg said. “At the gut level, I think a lot of us have an almost uncontrollable preoccupation to the point of obsession with solving the crime. The grief hasn’t begun to flow when you’ve assigned yourself the job of detective.”

Browne, imprisoned on a life sentence since 1995 for killing 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church of Black Forest, claims he’s killed 50 people in several states. Sheriff’s officials have corroborated six cases, including Self, but no charges have been filed.

Browne received a second life sentence in July after pleading guilty to another Colorado killing, saying he strangled 15-year-old Rocio Sperry in 1987 at his Colorado Springs apartment before dismembering her body.

Her remains haven’t been found.

Sperry vanished while her husband and 3-monthold daughter, Amie, were in Florida.

“Growing up, I kept thinking I can never really say that she’d left or had been killed,” Amie Sperry, now 19, said. “You have to weigh it and decide which one you want to go with.”

Maybe her mom had returned to her native Cuba. Or, she thought, maybe her dad killed her. Other relatives wondered the same.

She cried — “but it was more like happiness in a way” — when she heard Browne was a suspect in her mom’s case. “After so many years, anything is better than nothing,” she said.

She traveled from Mississippi last month to watch Browne plead guilty to killing her mom. Even after getting answers 19 years later, some things remain the same.

“There is no closure, I’m sorry,” she said. “How do you put closure on death? You don’t. I learned that two years ago when my best friend died.”

The day sheriff’s officials said Browne claimed to have killed 50 people, they established phone lines for information from the public about his activities. Calls poured in, including from people wondering if Browne was responsible for killing their relatives.

Jill Seng of Westminster was one of the callers.

Her sister, Leesa Jo Shaner, 22, disappeared in May 1973 from the Tucson, Ariz., airport.

Her unclothed body was found five months later in a shallow grave in a streambed in the remote Garden Canyon area of Fort Huachuca.

Seng, 53, knew Browne didn’t claim any victims in Arizona and that he dumped bodies instead of burying them. But she still called.

She doubts she’ll find out why her sister was killed 33 years ago, but she’d like to know who did it.

“It would just give us a chance to put it all to rest finally,” she said. “The not knowing, the waiting and the waiting to hear something, it just grinds at you day and night. It’s unbelievable torture.”

Bateman learned about her mom’s killer while driving home from work in July. Her grandmother called her cell phone: someone had confessed, and it was on the TV news.

Bateman was stuck in traffic, in shock and wanting to get home to the TV.

Browne was the maintenance man at the apartment where Self lived. He says he entered her unlocked apartment, found her asleep, placed a rag with chloroform over her face and went to get a rope to bind her. When he returned, she was dead. He dumped her body in a river.

“I’m glad to know that if what Mr. Browne says is true, then she did not suffer,” Bateman said. “I’m hoping that’s true.”

She’s gathered as much information as she can on Browne, but sometimes it’s too much and she has to stop.

“I’ve been praying for closure on this for the majority of my life. When it finally did happen, there’s a big weight that went away — at least I know,” she said. “But now I’m angry she died the way she did.”