Prime suspect

The Baltimore Sun

MARPINGEN, Germany -- The snapshots show a family across an ocean in a foreign city called Baltimore. There is Denise Brown, thin and pretty with her dark hair pulled back, alongside her father, Robert L. Brown Jr. There is Denise's aunt, cheek to smiling cheek with her uncle. There is a gaggle of cousins, and her grandmother, in a silly purple wig.

It was about a half-dozen years ago when Denise Brown, now 25, last saw her American father, a man who was in and out - but mostly out - of her life since childhood. He had lived here once, with her and her German mother. In the early 1980s, Robert Brown had been stationed as a private first class at a sprawling Army base in Bad Kreuznach, not far away.

Then something terrible happened. On a summer night in 1984, a 19-year-old German just days into nurse training in Bad Kreuznach was raped and killed, her body dumped in a grove of beech trees off a two-lane highway in an affluent suburb of Frankfurt. Within days, authorities said, Robert Brown left Germany, apparently for good.

Twenty-three years later, Brown was arrested by FBI agents last week in Baltimore, where he had been living and working as a maintenance man at the Wellington Gate apartment complex. The whole time, authorities said, he was the prime suspect in the killing of Nicola Stiel, a thin, curly haired woman who had planned to practice nursing in Africa, but the evidence against him was hardly enough.

Jutta Wegmann, Brown's former wife, said her daughter cried after hearing of her father's arrest from an aunt that Denise had come to know during her one and only visit to Baltimore, a trip he financed.

After all, it was she who provided what turned out to be the crucial new piece of evidence against him: The DNA in her tissue sample matched the pattern of that found in semen on the victim's pants. Denise Brown had given the sample voluntarily, but reluctantly.

"She doesn't want to hear it," Wegmann said. "She had a positive picture of her father."

A search for peace

In two quiet villages in Germany's wine country are two families that, for more than two decades, have been caught in separate, private struggles between a need to confront the past and an equally compelling desire to forget it.

Wegmann, her present husband and Denise Brown live in a plain, pastel-colored building on one of two main streets in Marpingen, near a pharmacy and a tanning shop. Barely 50 miles away is Mengerschied, where Nicola Stiel grew up and which her parents and two of her brothers still call home.

On a hill overlooking Mengerschied is the cemetery where Nicola Stiel is buried with a simple headstone engraved with a dove and a cross. On a hill overlooking Marpingen is a tiny chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

It's a sought out, if not quite famous spot, where three girls claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mother more than a century ago.

Candles burn inside the chapel and out. The inscription on the altar says: "Thou Shalt Pray And Not Commit A Crime."

The long, cold road

Robert Brown is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Baltimore today in another of what is likely to be a series of hearings on Germany's request to extradite him for trial. He first appeared before a Baltimore judge on Thursday, hours after his arrest, dressed in a blue sweat shirt and baggy blue pants, answering each question the same: Yes, he understood the proceedings. Yes, he understood the extradition process. Yes, he understood the charges against him.

It has been a long road here for German authorities; Case No. 33/78 Js 22312/84 had been considered cold since 1989. But, in recent years, it had joined the ranks of a growing number of cases being revived by police and prosecutors because of advances in DNA technology. In Germany, there is no statute of limitations in murder cases, a result of the desire after World War II to prosecute Nazi war criminals, however long after their crimes they were found.

"When that happened in 1984, they didn't have this method" of DNA testing, said Doris Moeller-Scheu, spokeswoman for the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt, which has jurisdiction in the case because of where Stiel's body was found. Robert Brown, she said, "was a suspect at the time, but we didn't have enough evidence to prove he was the murderer."

What they had were fibers from Stiel's shirt, found in his rented Volkswagen Golf; matching tire tracks found near where Stiel's body was discovered; fibers from a blanket in the car found on her body; even a statement from a former cellmate in Pennsylvania that Brown had confessed to, and boasted about, the crime (in an interview last week, the cellmate denied having been an informant).

What they needed was a sample of Brown's DNA, which they are still seeking, and testing techniques that did not yet exist.

In the past four years, according to the prosecution, German investigators had been seeking his blood and saliva samples, but were told that U.S. officials could not obtain them without arresting him. That would have tipped him off that the investigation was active, and there was a risk that he might flee.

So, in 2005, German authorities called on Denise Brown and her mother to give samples instead. Denise, who Wegmann said has long known about the accusations, initially did not want to. Wegmann urged her. She reminded her of what had happened to Stiel, when Stiel was not that much younger than she. It was such a horror that Wegmann had once felt compelled to visit the young woman's grave.

Wegmann said one other thing to her daughter.

"You might be able to help him," she said. "Or not."

Connections

Interviews in Germany and official documents from police and prosecutors provide a picture, albeit incomplete, of Robert Brown's life here.

As a young soldier, he was stationed in Bad Kreuznach, known largely for two things: its rejuvenating natural spas and the fact that it served as headquarters for the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division. Brown joined the military in May 1978, according to records included in his Baltimore court file, and received an honorable discharge in January 1983. His military ID card, a copy of which is included in the voluminous court file in Frankfurt - it spans 12 thick brown folders - shows him as a private first class, 6 feet tall, 176 pounds.

According to Wegmann, they met at a discotheque. He gave her some good times and some bad times - sometimes they would fight, she said, and he would physically shake her - but best of all he gave her a daughter, Denise, born in the summer of 1981. After Brown left the military, Wegmann said, he worked as a civilian at a U.S. Air Force base nearby, and doing odd jobs.

It is not known how, or where, Brown met Nicola Stiel; one account had them meeting, as had Brown and his ex-wife, at a disco. Stiel had moved from Mengerschied to begin a nursing apprenticeship in Bad Kreuznach, less than an hour from home, at the Protestant-affiliated Diakonie facility, a campus with a red-brick hospital where girls from all over the country trained. She hoped to one day work in Africa, her brother Rainer Stiel said, for a reason as simple as it sounds cliched: to help people.

Young men - Germans and American soldiers alike - knew what was to be found at Diakonie: lots of single young women. They lived in a dormitory there. The staff tried their best to look after the girls and to shelter them from temptation.

Stiel's three brothers tended to look after her, too. Rainer gave her spending money and said she could borrow his car while he was on vacation in Italy.

According to the prosecution in Frankfurt, Brown told Stiel his name was Robert Montana. Court documents show the two ate together on the night of Aug. 1, 1984. He made an impression that Wednesday: She told her friends of him, authorities said, and noted her meeting with "a black American called Robert" in her diary the next day. She planned to see him again on Friday, she wrote. A witness in the case said Brown told him he would again be seeing this girl, who was a virgin and whom he wanted to have sex with, court documents show.

It is not clear when they saw each other next. Authorities say they went out in Brown's rented Golf on Aug. 4, a Saturday, though where they were going has never been established. Along the way, authorities say, Brown struck Stiel, forced her to have sex, then, fearing that she would report the crime, killed her. She was strangled, perhaps in the car.

Stiel's body was found the next day by someone walking in a wooded area in Bad Homburg, about an hour's drive from Bad Kreuznach. According to the prosecutor's office, the coroner determined that she had died before midnight.

"She only saw the good in everybody," said Gunter Sauer, a neighbor of the Stiels who runs the Gasthaus zur Post, a hotel in Mengerschied where residents drink beer and play cards before noon on Sundays.

"She was very open," said Rainer, himself the father of two young daughters who, in ways that they don't understand, have helped the family cope.

Openness - that, he said, was his sister's flaw.

A world away

Four days after Stiel was killed, Brown allegedly left the country. Wegmann says he did so on a forged passport. His rented car was found at the airport in Frankfurt; it had been parked there for weeks.

Wegmann heard from him intermittently after that, though he told her nothing of Nicola Stiel, she said. There were long stretches when she didn't hear from him at all, including when she wanted him to sign divorce papers. Part of the time he was in jail.

In early 1985, Brown and another man were arrested and accused of holding up two men in a rural township in York County, Pennsylvania; Brown received a five- to 10-year sentence and was paroled in 1991.

A world away, Denise Brown, who declined to be interviewed for this article, began to feel a natural curiosity about her father, Wegmann said. When Denise was around 14, Wegmann tracked down her former husband through his mother in Baltimore. In her choppy English, Wegmann left an answering machine message, reminding him that he had a daughter in Germany. Two days later, he called back. Eventually, Denise went to Maryland to visit.

The pictures Wegmann flips through now, including a few faded Polaroids, show the family at Denise's grandmother's house. Denise looks as if she fits in.

It was last summer when they last spoke to Robert Brown. Wegmann doesn't know what will come of the 23-year-old case that, for now, is playing out in a courtroom in Baltimore. Her daughter has told her that she will visit if he is imprisoned in Germany.

"He told me nothing," Wegmann said.

Because he didn't want to talk about the past. But now it's time, she said.

"Now, he must speak."

erika.niedowski@baltsun.com

Sun reporter Nicole Fuller contributed to this article.

TIMELINE

May 1978: Baltimore native Robert L. Brown Jr. joins the U.S. Army.

June 1981: While Brown was serving at an Army base in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, his daughter, Denise, is born. He later married her German mother.

January 1983: Brown receives an honorable discharge.

August 1984: The body of nursing apprentice Nicola Stiel, who had been dating Brown, is found in a wooded area. Brown leaves Germany days later.

February 1985: Brown is arrested for an armed robbery in Springettsbury Township, Pa.

June 1986: Brown begins serving a 5- to 10-year sentence in Pennsylvania.

December 1988: German authorities go to Pennsylvania to talk to Brown and a former cellmate. They say Brown confessed to the cellmate that he killed Stiel. (In a recent interview, the cellmate denies talking to authorities.) Brown refused to be interviewed.

September 1991: Brown is released from prison.

July 2003: Brown files for personal bankruptcy, saying his debts total $52,207.23.

December 2005: Using DNA from his daughter, German authorities link Brown to the Stiel killing.

March 2007: FBI agents arrest Brown at the Northeast Baltimore apartment complex where he lives and works as a maintenance mechanic. He faces extradition to Germany in the murder of Stiel.

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