In Part 3, hospitals, crazy car rides and adrenaline finally yield long enough for David and Morgan to sit down with a suspect for an interview. You will be amazed just like they were. No more hints and spoilers, go listen!
Show Transcript
Part 3 of 4
Morgan Bragg: She had accosted a 93 year old man. He had opened the door, she forced her way into the residence, began to choke him, violently, started to take things off of his bookshelf was going to… Now luckily a neighbor had pulled up out front, had honked the horn as he customarily did. This victim had indicated or suggested to her that that was a police officer and for whatever that spooked her and she ran from the residence and ran away.
Wendy Lyons: Warning. The podcast you’re about to listen to may contain graphic descriptions of violent assaults, murder, and adult language. Listener discretion is advised. Welcome to the Murder Police Podcast, the murder of Ronald Browning, part three of four.
Morgan Bragg: She’s our prisoner. Let’s let her. Let’s get her to a different hospital for treatment. So we said, “Well at the very minimum, let us follow you. We’ll follow you out there. Let’s let’s just make sure everything’s safe.” Now. As we leave the jail, pulling down, it’s a little stretch of little hillside to leave to get on the airport road there, and we just see this cruiser in front of us, just wildly dart across the road, almost into the oncoming lane, almost over the hillside. And we’re thinking what in the world has just happened. So we get out, we get up there and we’re talking to them. And at this point we see everybody is coughing and gagging and we talk to them and what they’ve had to do is she became so combative that they had to pepper sprayer inside the vehicle. And there again, not a partitioned vehicle. So everybody gets a little bit of that. And as I’m sure you’re aware of pepper spray is not enjoyable.
Morgan Bragg: So they were all really having a hard time at this point, but they pressed through, they wanted to get her out there. I think everybody just wanted to get her treated and get her somewhere else other than with us.
David Lyons: Yes.
Morgan Bragg: So at that point we said, “Well, if you’re good, let’s go. Let’s just go, we’ll follow you. You’re good to drive.” He said, “No problem.” So we start down the interstate and we’re going to take the exit and go to Beckley Appalachian Regional Hospital who actually specializes in dealing people that are combative. They have restraint systems and so forth to be able to handle that kind of situation. And as we’re driving there, we missed the exit.
David Lyons: Oh.
David Allard: We don’t but…
Morgan Bragg: Well, yeah.
David Allard: The cruiser that’s transporting her, missed the exit.
Morgan Bragg: Yeah, absolutely. So we were shocked. We’re behind this vehicle expecting it to take this exit, go to the hospital. It does not. So here we are, we’re going down toward Princeton at that point, which is not where we want to be. So unfortunately we didn’t have direct communication between the cars. So we weren’t able to say, “Hey, where are you headed because that’s not where we’re supposed to be.” But we were able to contact them through our local EOC, our Emergency Operations Center. And they just, I guess in the ruckus had missed that.
Morgan Bragg: So at one point we’re driving down the interstate and they just suddenly pull off the side of the road and just come to a screeching halt. And we’re thinking, “Oh no.” And we see one of the officers jump out and he runs to the back door. He’s trying to get in the back door, but he can’t. So we’re thinking the worst of the worst at this point. As we approach the vehicle, I remember distinctly that this guy opens the door and he screams, “Her finger just fell off. Her finger just fell off.”
David Lyons: Oh my.
Morgan Bragg: And she has gotten so combative at that point that she’s actually leaned over the front, there again, not partitioned, so she’s leaning over the front, into the driver’s floorboard, she’s just going, thrashing about and just everywhere. So luckily we were helping restrain her. At that point, we wanted to get her out of there. And then I said, “We really need her in a partitioned car.” So I said, “We can provide that. Let’s have an officer come out so that we can get her there safely.” So we did, we had an officer come, we loaded her into this partition car. We wanted to get there quick. And at that point she had just been so violent and so chaotic that we said, “Just run lights and sirens the whole way. Get us to BARH hospital. We’ll follow you the whole way. Let’s just get her in there, get her cleared, get her to the jail.”
Morgan Bragg: So that’s what we did. We took her out lights and sirens all the way to BARH or Beckley Appalachian Regional. We got there. At that point, they don’t really know what to expect either. So they’re trying to triage her. They want to find out what’s going on from the officers before they bring her in. So I spent some time with Camille at that point, kind of stood at the car. Didn’t ask her any questions. Didn’t really have a lot of conversation. Just tried to kind of calm her down and said, “Look, you’ve got some severe injuries. You know, your hands are obviously in really bad shape. Please let these people treat you.”
Morgan Bragg: And at that point she made some utterances. She made the statement that she had killed an old white man today. She made that statement to me that she had made a statement about God telling her to do it. There were some things that I documented throughout that process, but didn’t question her further on. Procedurally, it wouldn’t have been really been appropriate at that time. So we certainly documented the things that she said, but we kind of just let her talk. At that point, took her in the hospital, it took five or six staff and officers to hold her down. They were able to sedate her at that point and they restrained her to a bed so they could treat those hands.
David Lyons: Interesting. And you used the word, right, utterances. That’s a big deal. When we’re talking about statements from people and things like that and the procedural part of interviewing them. And that’s the whole thing I was picking up on too, is that one of the vested interests you all had in been with her the whole time was the spontaneous utterance possibility, is you want to be in earshot. And Mabscott could have done it. They could have testified anything they’d heard and everything, but being that it was in your all’s jurisdiction that it just shortens the path going in the court a little bit. But yeah, if somebody just spontaneously utters something, that’s a lot different than anybody from the government asking a question.
Morgan Bragg: Absolutely it became important later.
David Lyons: It was one of those planets aligning for sure. Good deal.
David Allard: And I don’t recall at that point, or if it was later, that we began to talk to Mabscott officers about their incidents that led to them being called and them arresting her ultimately, but those were some pretty violent attacks that had taken place at a couple locations. And as the crow flies, it’s not far from where this victim lives to Mabscott’s jurisdiction. It’s literally hundreds of yards to Mabscott’s jurisdiction from his house and then not far to where these other victims were located. I don’t recall if it was at that point we, at some point during the conversations with them or if it was later that we did.
Morgan Bragg: Both. We had talked, I know that we had talked to them at Raleigh General a good deal about how they had come upon this situation or how they had taken her into custody. What we learned from that is that she had actually forced herself into a couple residences in Mabscott. In the first one, she had accosted a 93 year old man. He had opened the door. She forced her way into the residence, began to choke him, violently, started to take things off of his bookshelf, was going to… Now he, luckily a neighbor had pulled up out front, had honked the horn, as he customarily did. This victim had indicated or suggested to her that that was a police officer and it for whatever that spooked her. And she ran from the residence and ran away.
Morgan Bragg: So Mabscott gets that call. They start investigating that. And as they’re dealing with that situation, they receive another call that she has forced her away into another residence. And at this point it’s a male and a female who have children and a grandmother at the residence. And they state that this black female has forced her way into the home and that she will not leave. And that she’s gotten violent, has shoved the grandmother and they were requesting help at that point. And that’s how Mabscott got originally comes into contact with Camille.
David Allard: And that she was covered in blood.
Morgan Bragg: Yeah.
David Allard: You know, that’s one thing they were reporting that she had injuries and was covered in blood, when they initially received those calls.
David Lyons: Huge help from Mabscott then. Gigantic.
Morgan Bragg: Absolutely.
David Lyons: I mean, all those efforts and relaying important information in that early timelines. That’s really good of their part too.
Morgan Bragg: It’s one of the neat things about this case is the way it kind of all came together, that they did their part, we did our part, patrol did their part. It all kind of worked out in the end together. It was all very important,
David Lyons: Good stuff. And so where do we go from there? We’ve got her at the hospital. They’ve sedated her and they’re treating her, correct?
Morgan Bragg: Yeah, yeah. At that point now, we pretty much relinquished custody of her at that point. We took her out of our Beckley PD cruiser and she’s Mabscott’s prisoner. So we went back to the office, began to speak about the next steps in this investigation. She’s been sedated at this point. So we didn’t, obviously, didn’t want to try to talk to her in that state. And also there are some procedural things there. We didn’t want to delay her presentment to the magistrate and so forth for Mabscott charges. So we knew we wanted to interview her, but we wanted to make sure that we did that right.
David Lyons: Interject, because I’m a Kentucky boy and I’ve always been interested in this, tell me how that process works with presentation through a magistrate, because that’s not a thing in Kentucky. What’s that based on what’s that process look like?
Morgan Bragg: Well, there is a certain time period. I don’t know that there’s a exact set amount of time. There’s been some case law on that, but they must be able to see a judge and be arraigned on the charges that they are charged with in a reasonable amount of time. Now our magistrates are not out 24 hours a day, so there was no magistrate out at that point, but we felt it more prudent and through consultation with some of our local prosecutors that we basically postpone our interview until the following day, after she had seen a magistrate and been arraigned on those Mabscott charges. They just felt that would be more prudent.
David Lyons: Smart. A lot of challenges constitutionally on that once somebody’s in custody and then the phases of when you move around. It’s much different than if you pick them up and bring them right to an interview room. When those processes start, that’s a more complex issue. Good thinking, good thinking.
Morgan Bragg: Well, and so at that point we continued to look in the investigation, kind of plan our approach to her, kind of discussed that amongst ourselves as to how we wanted to approach meeting with her. The next morning, that’s what we did. We went to the jail, they had actually treated her at BARH hospital. They were able to accept her at the jail after that. So when we went out there, the jail was kind of shell shocked, to be honest. All the guards out there had dealt with her. So apparently she had become violent again. Had caused quite a scene out there. Had to be restrained in what we call restraint chair for a long period of time.
Morgan Bragg: And it actually got to the extent that they did something I’ve never witnessed them do before. She got so violent that they had to put her in a basket, kind of like a basket that you would lower into the canyon to bring out a victim, injury victim in that kind of situation. So they had to actually lay her into this basket and restrain her hands and legs. And that was something that I know I had never seen before. So they actually got her out for us, took us into this little interview room, kind of a video arraignment room is what they call that, and Dave and I began to interview her.
David Allard: I think also during the night after we left the hospital, we met with the state police crime scene team. They relinquish the scene back to us, done a final walkthrough with us, showed us everything that they had learned from their investigation, the items they had collected. The one thing that sticks out that I recall and remembered was she had an earring missing. And then there was an earring found at the residence that matched that earing. And then after that, I think we always consulted with our prosecutor’s office during these types of events. We ended up getting a search warrant, search warrants for DNA, for nail scrapings, for hair samples to compare with the fabric of those braids, all the different items you would expect us to collect.
David Allard: So we drafted those. Got the search warrant signed and then we went to the jail. While we’re at the jail, I remember collecting all the different evidentiary things that we would need, scrapings of her fingernails, anything that we could use, ultimately for evidence later. Any types of trace evidence, pulled hair samples, things like that that would connect her to that scene and then the interview heard right after that.
David Lyons: That’s a good stroke to be able to get seen information before you go in that box, because you all have had cases too and I’ve had cases, actually we produced and put one out, where sometimes you have to run before you have a whole lot. That’s your one shot, right? And you cross your fingers that you can uncover some things, but being armed with those details that makes that interview have a higher potential of doing well. So that was good you had the opportunity to get a scene summary before you even went in.
Morgan Bragg: Oh, absolutely.
David Lyons: Now when you interviewed her, was she still in this basket gizmo?
Morgan Bragg: No. No. They had brought her out of that. They brought her into this video arraignment room. We actually had a little bit of trouble getting them to not restrain her. They had seen the worst parts of Camille. They had seen the way that she could act. So they were a little cautious and we didn’t really want her to be restrained for our interview purposes. So we had to make that request a couple times, but finally they did remove the cuffs and we began to speak to her. And to be honest, as far as interviews, and I know Dave and I have both done thousands of interviews, this was one where you just kind of had to turn it on and let her go. She remembered extraordinary details. Details that we would’ve never thought to ask her. And we just began to talk to her about this incident. And she really just told us things that we would’ve never, never even thought to ask.
David Lyons: Well, run through that as best as you recall, because I’m just on the edge of my seat.
David Allard: I know when we first walked in, as we’re speaking with her, we asked her, “Do you remember us? We were out with you at the hospital last night.” And I had been wearing a North Face jacket the night prior. And that’s what she referred to me as. She’s like, “Yes, I remember you. Your North Face.” And I mean, it was just the level of detail that she provided with some of the things was very eerie.
Morgan Bragg: Well, she was just, she was quite docile at that point. You’re expecting… We had seen her fight and thrash and just wrestle with us all night and at the time that we did the interview, she was actually pretty calm and spoke very, very feminine, very gentle. Now the details she gave obviously were not gentle in any fashion, but her demeanor was quite calm at that point. Almost eerily calm, I would say.
Morgan Bragg: So we’re asking her about this and she tells us. And now some of the things that she said kind of stood out to us as odd, obviously. She didn’t remember leaving the house, remembers jogging down the street. She says that forces, she didn’t really describe as to what, but she would say the wind pushed me a certain direction or I remember she said Northwest. It pushed me Northwest. And she said that it had led her down Odessa Avenue and that she saw that residence and decided that she was thirsty and she said that her first contact with Mr. Browning ever was knocking on his door and asking for a glass of water.
Morgan Bragg: She said, he invited her in, gave her this glass of water and she said that something told her to kill that man at that point. And she described having shoved him over backwards and he fell in an area right in front of a TV stand with TV on it. Talked about the TV falling over and she saw the jar of change. And she acknowledged having grabbed that jar of change and just bludgeoned him. She was very frustrated with him. One of the things she kept talking about is that she was very upset that he would not die quick enough. So she kept doing things in trying to make him die. And she talked about there again, beating him with the jar of change. She talked about trying to stab his eyes. She felt that that would help him die quicker. So she stabbed his eyes with a tart burner, like a candle burner.
Morgan Bragg: One of the things that she didn’t really get into that we determined from medical examination is the ligature strangulation. At the scene, he did have a extension cord kind of laid across his neck so we thought that was significant. And one of the other things that she got into was she talked about getting very frustrated with him there again, for not dying. She said, it just took way too long. And she talks about, she kind of mocked him at one point. And she says that at that point he starts yelling for his dog is how she describes it. And she says that he’s yelling, “Rex, Rex, Rex.” And she thought he was calling a dog or another pet. And she was very annoyed by that. That’s one of the things she illustrated to us.
Morgan Bragg: We knew, at that point, the Rex was his wife, Rexanna and that he had been pleading for her, unfortunately. And that was one of the most horrible facts about that interview. She just kind of mocked that. And she talked about, that’s when we discovered, why he injuries to his ribs. She said, there again, that he was not dying fast enough. So she actually kicked him in the ribs and it broke several of his ribs, caused some internal damage that we had seen during the autopsy.
Morgan Bragg: As far as explaining why I don’t know that I can tell you that. There was really not a whole lot in that interview that explained motive per se. She just very detailed. She had talked about things she had seen in the house. She brought up news clippings, little newspaper clippings that she had seen inside the residence. Just random facts and things that she had seen that we knew matched our crime scene. And one of the things that really stood out when they, crime scene team processed the scene, is they discovered that the suspect had actually spread gasoline throughout the lower level of the residence. They found the gas can was covered in blood, and you could immediately smell the gas in the second floor or lower floor.
Morgan Bragg: So we knew that someone had done that and obviously the assumption there is that they’re trying to destroy the evidence is what we would assume. And without our prompting, that’s what she said. She said, “I did. I spread gas around there.” And she said, “I figured if I got caught, I better burn it up.” So she talked about… We said, “Well, why didn’t you?” Because we’ve determined she’d been in that house for hours. She talked about having taken a shower in his shower. She had placed her bloody clothes in his washing machine. Those were still there when the evidence team processed the scene.
Morgan Bragg: She spent a long time there. So we thought, “Well, why didn’t you burn it?” You know? And one of the things that she talked about was in her explorations of the house, she had actually lifted this furnace grate and accidentally stumbled into the basement. Fell through the furnace grate and into the basement of the house. Now she was not able… She said she would’ve burned it down. She had seen matches upstairs, but when she tried to reenter the upper level, the basement door was locked. She couldn’t get back up there. It was another one of those lucky things for us, lucky breaks, because we’d had a whole different scene if this had been burned up. So she couldn’t get back upstairs. She said she would have if she could, but she couldn’t get to the matches to do it.
David Lyons: Did she ever go into detail about the milk or the milk of magnesia or to explain going into the attic?
Morgan Bragg: She did. She didn’t go into great detail about why she went into all these various areas, but she did talk about the milk. She had this seemed to be almost an insatiable thirst. That’s how this incident started. She wanted a glass of water from the gentleman. She had talked about drinking the milk, trying to get satisfied from that. Another thing that we hadn’t mentioned earlier is that the Mabscott police had mentioned that she had feces on her at one point, when they were dealing with her. That she wanted to go to the bathroom and they were trying to keep her restrained and she didn’t make it in time, basically. You know, obviously that was odd to begin with, but one of the things that we determined from the crime scene and from talking to her is she had had a laxative. That had a drink of this bottle of laxative because she saw that it said cherry flavored and there again, that thirst, she drank the whole bottle. And we knew from the scene that that’s what actually caused that.
David Allard: And in Mabscott, when she went to those houses, she was that same thirst. She kept asking for something to drink at each house that she went to. That’s one of the big things that she really wanted was something to drink. So she definitely had an unquenchable thirst it seemed to me. She drank half a gallon of the milk.
David Lyons: Hmm. So when she falls in the basement and can’t get back upstairs, what’s her next move there? Does she…
Morgan Bragg: Well, that’s, from our first arrival on scene, we suspected that the assailant had left through a basement door. There was a basement door ajar down there. We had talked to Rexanna and determined that door was never open. That it was typically secured from the inside. From looking at that scene, there was blood on the latch where she clearly left that way. So it appeared she had… That’s also where the jacket that Dave mentioned earlier, it was kept in the basement. It was a Raleigh General Chaplain’s jacket. She had obtained that there. And we later found out that she took some personal items, a small box full of letters and just various documents, nothing of any real importance, but she took that with her and actually left. We didn’t discover until the next day, Dave and I went back and looked and kind of canvased the area in the daylight, and we found a blood trail and basically where her hands had bled up this kind of wooded trail that led toward Mabscott. And that’s what we kind of tracked her back to the incidents in Mabscott from that point.
David Allard: And it was kind of odd because the trail he’s describing would’ve led back to her house as well. So she could have left there and went back to her house yet she chose not to and chose to continue on. The things she described in the interview were weird. I mean the birds directing her, the wind directing her. She would recall things in detail that she saw on the sides of vehicles, tag numbers, license numbers, or something that was written. And we would later find, as we canvas the area and obtained surveillance video, that she was describing a truck that had been parked there and she was able to describe some of the things in a real estate office she passed. But she said that she had been watching some shows on TV and then when she got to this house that there was an old timey southern show on. And you know that kind of made her feel like he wasn’t a good person. And that, as she said, that something told her, some force told her to attack him and that’s what she did.
David Lyons: She departs. You’ll find the blood trail. Am I getting the chronology correct on this? The other break ins and assaults happen before or after this one?
Morgan Bragg: They would’ve been after the homicide.
David Lyons: Okay. Gotcha. I just want to make sure I’m keeping that straight in my head to keep the chronology straight. During the interview, did you ever directly ask any why questions? I know that I wasn’t real big on going into that avenue until I got the substantial things. That was just my thing because you never know when they’re going to stop. Right? Did you ever get to a point where you tried to go a little deeper as to the why?
Morgan Bragg: You know, we did. We tried to dive into motive a little bit, but to be honest, she didn’t have answers for those questions. She could go into great detail about the residents, go into great detail about what she did to him, what she had done prior in the day, but when it got to the why of it, she really couldn’t explain those things. It was always just something told me to do this or…
David Allard: She read his mail and she quoted things back to us that she saw on the mail. I mean, she remembered his name, his last name, from the mail that she had read. The little religious handouts, Our Daily Bread, she had talked about reading those and her grandfather had given her those as she was a kid. So she read those and we could tell the milk was in the room where he was. It almost appeared that someone had sit there and looked through things and read things and drank the milk, because obviously the milk wasn’t in the kitchen, it was in the room where he was found. So she had got that, it appeared and drank it while he’s laying there. Whether he’s alive or dead at that point, we don’t know because we do believe and I think the medical examiner is able to say that he could have lived for an amount of time prior to expiring. So it wasn’t a quick, unfortunately, it wasn’t a quick death.
David Lyons: During the interview, you talked about how she’d calmed down a lot. Right?
Morgan Bragg: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Lyons: Did she display much emotion in any kind of direction or did she describe the events? Did she display anger when she gets to certain parts or was she matter of factual? How did that look on her demeanor?
Wendy Lyons: Hey, you know there’s more to this story. So go download the next episode like the true crime fan that you are.
David Lyons: The Murder Police Podcast is hosted by Wendy and David Lyons and was created to honor the lives of crime victims so their names are never forgotten. It is produced, recorded, and edited by David Lyons. The Murder Police Podcast can be found on your favorite Apple or Android podcast platform, as well as at murderpolicepodcast.com where you will find show notes, transcripts, information about the presenters and much, much more. We are also on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which is closed captions for those that are hearing impaired. Just search for the Murder Police Podcast and you will find us. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe for more and give us five stars and a written review on Apple podcast or wherever you download your podcast from. Make sure to subscribe to the Murder Police Podcast and set your player to automatically download new episodes so you get the new ones as soon as they drop. And please tell your friends. Lock it up.