Original subtitles

Yakima is central in the state of Washington.

We are a high desert community,

a lot of ranches.

But we're in the top 10 in homicides

per capita in the United States.

It's sad when there's a lot of evil out there

that you don't even have a clue about.

I get a call from my dispatch.

There was an injured female

found on the Parker Bridge Road

in Yakima County.

It was attempted murder.

The person who did this, we didn't know anything more

beyond a first name and the fact

that he was sort of a cowboy.

But that is all we knew.

It quickly became apparent

that there were many more women.

This cowboy just has one thing on his mind.

The one thing was murder.

People think that because our area

is so close to Portland

that there's not a rural sense.

But, you know,

there's many cowboys and cowgirls.

People that have animals and livestock

very close to the city of Portland.

For so many people in Clackamas County,

in the rural areas, that is their culture.

I got a page to go out on a call.

It was human remains that had been discovered.

Some children playing located what they believe

was a human, um, skull.

You know, as soon as that pager goes off,

there's an adrenaline rush.

This is where the remains were found, um,

scattered over a pretty large area.

We saw that there were, uh,

fragments of bone all over.

And in fact, as I'm standing there

while, uh, people were searching the area,

I start to see small fragments of bone.

And we realize that they're just everywhere.

Do we have a natural death or could this be a homicide?

Every bone has a tale to tell.

Based on the size of the skull,

we were dealing with female remains.

And so we ran any missing person.

And one that became interesting

was a woman named Velina Larson.

I met Velina in a bar.

I was playing pool.

And when I got up to go shoot,

she grabbed my beer, and was drinking my beer,

and she said, uh,

"Where are you buying me dinner?"

It was love at first sight.

She was all smiles. And, you know, she was pretty,

always had her nails done and her hair done,

and she always wore cowgirl type shirts and ropers, boots.

That was just her. That was her...

That's the way she dressed, you know?

She got pregnant. Then we got married.

She made an excellent wife, but her habits

and addictions started getting in the way.

You know, everybody has a breaking point.

And we got a divorce.

But she would come around

when she wanted to see the kids.

The kids loved her a lot.

A few months go by after that.

I remember she'd told me that she'd met this man

named Mike.

He was kind of a cowboy.

He had a real act for playing the guitar

and singing,

which a lot of ladies like that.

It's one way to get in a lady's pocket, I'd say,

you know, singing and playing the guitar.

A couple of weeks went by and she says,

"I'm gonna have to go get my stuff,

it's in the storage." And we both have...

And Mike had the keys.

She told me that, uh, she's afraid for her life,

that, uh, if she told me that what he might do to her.

She wanted me to go with her.

I didn't really wanna go with her,

so I dropped her off right here at this bus stop.

She said she'd be back by 5:00.

And this is the last time I seen her.

She never showed up.

I mean, I sat there.

I waited for that phone to ring

day after day after day.

I called anybody that she possibly

could have known.

I can't even describe what it put me through

just having to answer to the kids,

you know, they, "Where's Mommy?

When's Mommy coming?" You know what I mean?

Uh, and all I could say was, "I don't know,

you know, I don't... I don't know.

I don't know."

About four months had been by,

they found something that they believe

possibly could be my ex-wife, Velina.

It was just something I didn't wanna hear.

Told the kids something had happened

to their mom and it wasn't good.

I remember that day.

You know, it's...

It was, uh, it was a long day.

And it was a sad day.

And the girls were so young, but they still,

you know, they knew what

"You're never gonna see your mom again" meant.

You know what I mean? They knew what that meant.

I remember there were TV,

like, news crews at our house

asking about what had happened,

asking about everything that my dad knew.

That was my first memory of she's gone

and she's not coming back.

A lot of times, I feel angry.

A lot of times, I feel very sad.

She was my mother, but she wasn't my mother

because I have nothing,

you know, just pictures and stories.

When you work with suspicious death

or a homicide, you're gonna work

from the inside out, the people closest to someone.

And just because someone reports someone missing

doesn't preclude the fact that they might have,

in fact, done this person harm.

When they first found her,

I was, like, their first suspect, I mean,

they even took me in and did a lie detector test.

They told me that, uh, it was inconclusive.

Well, of course it was.

Even though we were divorced, we remained friends.

You know, being with the kids,

still to this day, there's not a day that goes by

that when I wake up in the morning,

she's not the first thing that crosses my mind.

I know that my dad's

never been able to move past her.

He's had a lot of relationships.

And, you know, none of them have matched up to her.

We never... We never talked about it at home.

It was just a big question that no one asked.

Moving forward in my life has always been tough

because there's no resolution.

You're just kind of in this weird limbo all the time.

When Velina Larson's bones had been autopsied,

there was no cause or manner of death really found.

Made me feel terrible.

And that's very difficult to prosecute.

The information that we got from Brian Larson

was that she was going to kind of call it quits

with this relationship with Cowboy Mike.

And we learned that right next

to where her body was found,

literally where you could look,

there was the storage locker

where she had kept her things in.

You know, it was difficult to imagine

exactly what might have occurred.

This one area that's very well-secured

with over a six-foot tall fence,

that's topped with razor wire.

So, to get someone over the top of that

would be very difficult.

Also, you know, there's cameras, you know,

people going in and out.

If someone's trying to carry out a body,

they're going to see that.

But there was certainly strong suspicion

that if, in fact, her death was a homicide,

that cowboy Mike would certainly be

the prime person of interest in this case.

I worked very hard following up.

I worked the case for years

and tried to keep track of Cowboy Mike.

But he was on the loose.

During that time, I became very concerned

that there were many more women

who were associated with Cowboy Mike.

My biggest concern was that he was

a potential serial killer.

In Yakima back then, people were wearing

cowboy boots, cowboy hats,

living the cowboy lifestyle.

I even had a couple of pairs of cowboy boots

and a couple of hats.

Most of the bars were cowboy bars.

Karaoke, Country Western was hot.

It was a good way to attract women.

It was a fun time.

We both like to go out and have fun

and dance or watch people.

Karen was like 15 when I was born.

- Mmm-hmm. - Yeah.

She's my baby sister.

I remember my sister called me

and asked me if I would like to come

and meet her at Susie's Saloon.

They were gonna be having some karaoke.

Always fun to watch people sing.

That night, there was quite a few people there.

It was pretty full.

When I got up to go walk to the bar,

I noticed a cowboy

sitting on another table behind us.

He had a cowboy hat and like a dress shirt.

He got up and said, "Well, my name is Mike."

And then so I'm like, "I'm Wendy."

And then he's like, "Could you come outside

and talk with me?"

And I told him, "No,

why would I go outside and talk to you?

I don't know you."

And I literally walked away from him.

And then Mike came and sat beside my sister.

When he came over to the table and sat with me,

he told me his name was Cowboy Mike

conversed with him, I guess.

I told my sister that he's bad news.

And I just like, "I'm out of here.

I'm leaving."

We went over to his table

where he was sitting with a girl,

drank my last drink, and then I left.

I drove home and parked my car.

I didn't see anybody following me or anything.

When I went to open my door and he was behind me,

he shoved my door all the way open,

came into my bedroom,

picked me up by my neck,

and, he strangled me in the bedroom.

The next morning, I woke up

and I was making her coffee

or something like that for her.

And then I'm, I could hear my mom yelling from the room.

I ran over there to go open the door

and I couldn't open the door.

When I finally got in there and seen her

kind of like laying on the floor next to the bed

with a blanket over her and she was just screaming

and crying like she couldn't breathe,

and, to me, it seemed like she thought

he was still on her.

And I just remember

she had marks all over her neck,

a complete handprint of fingerprints

and a big thumbprint.

My mom realized she had been raped

by the time we got to the hospital.

The doctors or someone at the hospital said

that she blacked out from lack of oxygen

when he was strangling her.

She's never been the same.

It was really scary for me as a kid.

You know, I was only 14.

I fear in the back of my head

that cowboy Mike would come after me.

This is where Karen Peterson lived.

Michael followed her into her apartment,

hit her in the back of the head,

choked her out till she was unconscious,

then he escaped through the bedroom window.

After talking to Karen and her sister, Wendy,

a few things that were odd,

didn't seem too worried about witnesses.

No regard for getting caught.

Must think he's smarter than everybody else.

Karen had been stripped naked

and she had been posed.

He probably posed her

thinking that he murdered her.

Karen came into the sheriff's department

to give a statement.

Yeah, I think she's just glad to be alive.

Karen met the wrong cowboy at the wrong time,

going through the wrong place.

Just talk about bad luck.

I feel that she was honestly

very lucky that she was alive.

That night, she had angels or something

looking over her because she obviously came through.

The mystery was, who was her attacker?

Cowboy Mike didn't have any connections to Yakima.

He tried to kill for no reason.

He didn't rob anybody.

He didn't take their money, didn't take their car.

It was just out of pleasure

of trying to hurt somebody.

It's like a puzzle. And it was a complete mystery

why anybody would do this to her.

I was assigned to the Detective Division

at the Lacey Police Department

at the time.

It was a little after 8:00 at night

and I got a call from my sergeant,

the homicide of Lori Jones

at an apartment complex not far from my house.

Lori was a very hardworking, loving mother.

What happened was that her daughter

had been gone for a couple of days

to spend 4th of July weekend with friends.

She came back,

then that's when her mom's body was discovered.

When I first walked into the apartment,

we pretty much documented everything, took photos,

and then meticulously moved our way through.

And the last place that we checked

was the bedroom where her body was found.

You could not see the body

without lifting up the bed skirt.

When I lifted it up, um, the body was right there

and I was not ready for that.

So, it was... It was a little,

you know, sort of it takes your breath away

for just a moment.

She's completely naked with

a pillow case partially covering her face.

She did not go down without, you know,

a pretty significant struggle.

Considerable bruising and some,

you know, blood in her hair.

So certainly things that would trigger me

to believe that there was some type of struggle.

When the bed was taken apart,

there were no sheets, no blankets, no anything.

All of those things were in the washing machine,

potentially erasing DNA evidence from the bedding.

It took us a while to find her purse.

It was, um, hidden

underneath some clothing

in the corner of the closet.

We went through that.

We found her ID, her credit cards,

and we found a receipt

from a, um, a bar.

We contacted the bartender.

We showed him a picture of Lori.

He recognized her

and he told me that she had met up

with a male

with some swagger,

and he was wearing a cowboy hat,

cowboy boots.

And the bartender remembered that his name was Mike.

At the apartment, he did a good job

cleaning up,

but he didn't do a perfect job

because we had damage to the blinds

in the daughter's room.

It turned out that he left behind

a fingerprint on those blinds.

It was a very exciting moment

because within a few days,

that person was identified as Michael Braae.

Michael Braae had a history of violence,

domestic violence, rapes.

So I knew that we were dealing

with somebody that was very dangerous.

I worked homicides before,

but it's not like this case.

I went back and, you know, started doing

a little deeper dive into his world.

Digging more into his life, thinking,

"Okay. Where might he go?"

What I found was that he was involved

in a relationship with Marchelle Morgan.

Marchelle and Michael Braae

had, um, had an on-again,

off-again relationship for a couple of years.

So I believe that that's who he,

uh, ran to after, um, after killing Lori Jones.

Marchelle and, uh, Mike,

kind of, had a scam system going

where they'd go into bars and he'd hit up women

and she'd hit up men and, kind of,

try to get some free drinks and stuff like that.

They'd act like they were brother and sister.

When we were investigating Karen Peterson,

a few people called in

and told us that they had seen him that night

at Susie's Saloon near Yakima.

He went into the bar with Marchelle.

Karen and her sister were in the bar

drinking, and, uh, Mike came over

and started flirting with Wendy.

And, uh, then Karen started flirting with Mike.

They said they kind of blew him off.

Marchelle and, uh, Michael were last seen

going to the parking lot, they're seen arguing,

got in their vehicle and left.

And the next thing we end up finding out

was Marchelle was, uh, shot

and dumped out on the road.

Coming up, we have where Marchelle was found.

It was pretty isolated.

Marchelle Morgan was lying on this side of the fence.

She was still alive,

but she had been shot in the head.

It was another attempted murder.

She must have been trying to get away

'cause she crawled through the barbed wire fence

to get on the other side, try to save herself.

I went to Memorial Hospital

to see if I could talk to Marchelle.

The doctor who was working on her told me that, uh,

she was intubated,

had a tube in there breathing for her,

so she wasn't able to talk at all.

He never came back into the bar

after shooting Marchelle.

I think he arrived

just when Karen was leaving.

Felt bad for her, you know?

So, I was lucky

he didn't shoot me in the head

like he did to her.

That's when I was contacted

by Detective Reinhold.

She advised me, uh,

how their victim had been found stripped naked

and she had been strangled.

She had been, um, posed.

It's the same MO

to, uh, what happened

to Karen Peterson.

With all the evidence we got, we knew

that the two were connected.

I knew within a single week,

he had killed Lori Jones

and tried to kill two other women.

I knew it wasn't going to end.

And until we were able to get him in custody,

there were gonna be others.

You know, in the beginning,

we thought, okay,

it's Velina Larson.

She's the focus,

but there's all these women.

The common denominator is that they were last seen

with Michael Braae.

We knew that he liked to go to bars that had bands.

He'd sometimes take his own guitar,

sometimes he'd borrow a guitar.

He liked to go to places that had karaoke.

So I put together this task force

of detectives and then sent them out.

We, sort of, identified all the bars

that, sort of, fit into that profile

where they had music, where they had karaoke.

We put out a bulletin

with Michael's picture and description.

They hit all the different places

I thought that Mike might be at.

I hit the seedier motels

in town, the different taverns and bars,

see if they recognized him.

I couldn't find him anywhere.

Wanted across state lines, Cowboy Mike Braae

is on the run from police,

wanted for multiple rapes and murders.

He is considered armed and extremely dangerous.

I was born and raised around here,

Lewis County, pretty much all my life.

I was just a typical 25-year-old.

Single, I liked to drink and have fun, you know?

I was having a garage sale,

and this truck pulled in the driveway.

And this cowboy popped out.

He had a jean jacket on and wore a hat

and, um, had cowboy boots.

He, uh, come up and just

started talking with us like he knew everybody.

He asked if he could put a horse saddle

into the garage sale to try to sell.

And then he went and got his guitar

and played, you know, a couple songs.

I've always kind of been attracted to cowboys

and then singing on top of that, you know,

who doesn't want someone to sing to them,

you know, kind of thing.

We decided to go down to the little bar

and have a couple of drinks.

We just continued drinking.

And, you know, he's a ladies man, obviously.

He knew what to say and do, you know,

he did all that right.

Maybe a couple kisses is what we did.

And then, you know, back to my house.

In the morning, we'd made coffee

and I had the newspaper sitting on my kitchen table.

And it had his picture.

And I'm thinking, "Oh, man,

the cops were looking for him."

And he's watching me do this.

I was... I was scared.

I got up and kind of backed up to the sink.

All I could say is, "You got to go,

you know, you can't be...

You got to go."

When he left, I grabbed his license plate number

and I wrote it down.

The more I learned about it,

the more scared I was.

He had every opportunity with me being alone.

I'm just... I'm lucky. I don't...

I don't know what to say.

We got a call from Brenda Keen.

I was very frank with her and said,

"You are very lucky."

The problem was that we knew he was, sort of, this

wandering cowboy kind of guy,

and so he could be anywhere.

Mike was a psychopath

and a clear danger to society and the public.

So full of himself,

so, um, much of the mentality

"Nobody can touch me.

When I'm Cowboy Mike."

He thinks he can get out of any jam.

He can get out of... He can run away from the law.

He can escape because he's done it before.

He was gonna try to go down in a blaze of glory.

In my mind, he had nothing to lose

because he knew we were after him

for attempted murder, for a homicide.

Sheriff's Dispatch. This is Gina,

how can I help you?

Our dispatcher gets us on the radio

and is explaining to us, "Hey,

Cowboy Mike has been spotted at Exit 13.

We're at the Black Canyon Truck Stop.

A, uh, worker here

at the restaurant was bringing trash out

to the... to the dumpsters out here.

And he recognized out in this area

a vehicle that he'd seen on attempt to locate.

He recognized that vehicle.

He called the police.

That's the guy.

The police came and surrounded him,

started calling out commands to him.

He failed to comply with their orders.

He put his vehicle in drive and took off out of here.

Standing by.

I'll be

Every cop's nightmare

is getting involved in a pursuit

where somebody else can be hurt.

You can see a gun come out of the vehicle.

And you can hear the trooper saying,

"Shots fired, shots fired."

Shots fired.

We're gonna chase this guy. We're gonna get him in custody

no matter what it takes.

Shots fired.

Law enforcement had deployed spike strips

that had flattened at least one of his tires.

Because he had flat tires, he couldn't go any farther,

he stopped his vehicle right here

in the middle of the trip.

He got out of the vehicle

and jumped into the Snake River.

He was obviously very, uh, desperate to get away.

As he's drifting down the river,

the Oregon State Police puts a boat in the water

in hopes to eventually apprehend him.

Once we got in the boat,

we could see his head, his shoulders.

He was kind of trying to dog paddle

a little bit to stay above the water.

Looking at Cowboy Mike and I'm yelling,

"You're under arrest.

Swim to the boat or I'm gonna unleash

my police dog at you. He will bite you.

Do you understand me?"

Police dog, his name was Bosco.

Started swimming towards Cowboy Mike.

Mike reached up with two hands

and pulled Bosco right down.

I was mad. I was upset

because he tried to drown my dog.

Bosco came back up, shook his head,

turned, and latches onto his shoulder.

I just reeled him into the boat

as fast as I could.

I cuffed him up, I said, "You're under arrest.

I told you that once, Cowboy Mike."

He goes, "I'm not Cowboy Mike."

"You're Cowboy Mike.

You're under arrest."

When they sent me a picture of him in custody,

it was just such a huge relief knowing

that there wouldn't be any more rape and murders.

Shortly after deputies arrested him,

I told him that, uh, I just want him to know

that Marchelle hadn't died

and then Karen Peterson was still alive

and, uh, his eyes got real big.

He was, uh, surprised.

So, that made me feel a little bit better.

That they'd caught him,

I was relieved

and I was also thinking, "Man, I'm glad they caught him

before I did," you know?

Because, no telling what I would have done

if I'd ever ran into that man, you know?

Cowboy Mike Braae

had a very delusional image of himself.

He was kind of a loser

that lived in a trailer,

and yet he had this internal personal image of himself

as this great cowboy western star

that could talk himself out of anything,

or he could get himself out of any type of trouble.

He took the stand in his own defense.

Sat in the chair, very confident

and relaxed and showing all of this,

um, type of arrogance.

Cowboy Mike dug a big hole for himself

with his evidence, with his testimony,

and I am certain that he said more

on the witness stand than he wanted to.

And then he was found guilty. Yes.

When all counts were guilty,

I was teary-eyed

because it had finally come to an end.

Lori Jones,

she was a brave and fearless woman.

She fought Michael Braae,

which allowed us to collect some vital evidence

that led to his conviction.

She certainly helped solve,

um, you know, her own murder.

Clearly, Cowboy Mike Braae

is a psychopath.

He's clearly a person

that thinks he is above the law.

And I don't know that anything will ever change for him.

Karen had some issues after her strangulation.

She just had a... had a breakdown

so now she has permanent brain damage.

They were not able to proceed

with those charges

because Marchelle Morgan

was unable to communicate effectively

because of her brain injury from the shot.

I was very relieved that he was convicted of a murder.

There's all these women associated with Michael Braae

that, you know, are either missing or deceased.

I certainly believe there are more victims.

But we have no idea who they are.