Hearing: Victim's Sister-in-Law Testifies About Killing of Elderly California Woman

By WILLIAM B.TREML

NEWS STAFF REPORTER 

A 24-year-old escaped convict from Michigan, his right foot imprisoned in a plaster cast, hobbles around his closely-guarded jail cell in California, awaiting the next turn of the slow-grinding wheels of justice.

David E. Brown, still a suspect in the 1982 rape-slaying of a 91-year-old Ypsilanti woman, is charged with the beating death in San Bernardino last October of an elderly woman and assaults on her sister and brother. California police say Brown beat to death 93-year-old Mary Saul and inflicted serious injuries on her sister, Anna, 87, and brother, Matthew, 91.

Brown has been a suspect for months in the murder on Jan. 8,1982 of 91-year-old Florence Bell in the home at 36 S. Summit Street that she had occupied for more than 60 years. At the time of the homicide Brown was being sought after escaping from a Southern Michigan Prison guard who had taken him from the Jackson institution to the University of Michigan’s Neuropsychiatric Clinic. The Grand Rapids native had been serving two prison terms for the robbery and beating of elderly women in Kent County.

AFTER HE WAS arrested by San Bernardino police

last October, Brown told authorities he fled to California from Michigan in February, 1982. That was about a month after the Bell murder.

Currently the Michigan man is in the midst of a pretrial hearing before San Bernardino Municipal Judge John Kennedy on charges of capital murder, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and residential burglary. In the first segment of that examination, Michael Abernathy, San Bernardino assistant district attorney, called Anna Saul, who testified that a black man burst into the home she shared with her sister and brother on the night of Oct. 4,'beat them with his fists and a metal curtain rod and looted the dwelling. She told the court Brown “looked like” the murderer.

The hearing is to continue Jan. 26 when defense attorney Brian Gibson is scheduled to take testimony from several medical experts.

Two days after Brown was apprehended, he attempted to escape from a hospital room where he was confined by jumping out a third story window.

He broke his right heel and suffered other injuries in the 25-foot fall.

THE MURDERS of Florence Bell, Margorie Upson, another elderly Ypsilanti woman and Louise Koeb-nick, an Ann Arbor resident, remain unsolved. All three slayings occurred in 1982.