Serial Killer: 'None Ever Got Away'

(CBS/AP)  Looking back, Johnny Norman remembers Robert Charles Browne as a tough kid from a hard-luck family who had a quick mind and a bad temper.

Now, the kid Norman once taught in gym class in Coushatta, La., could turn out to be one of the nation's most prolific killers.

Browne, who is already serving a life sentence for killing a teenager, entered a Colorado Springs courtroom Thursday and pleaded guilty to killing another teenager, one of 48 additional people he claims to have killed dating back to 1970.

"He was a loner, but not somebody you'd expect to do this," Norman, now sheriff in Red River Parish, La., said in a telephone interview. "He did have a hot temper. In a pickup basketball game, somebody fouled him or hit him, he'd fly off the handle."

Investigators so far have been able to corroborate Browne's detailed claims in six more slayings, three in Louisiana, two in Texas and one in Arkansas, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said.

"It's possible he's exaggerating, but I don't think you can conduct business assuming he's exaggerating," Maketa said.

CBS News correspondent Jennifer Miller reports that Browne had details of the crimes that no one else could have had.

If Browne's claims prove true, he would be one of the most prolific killers in U.S. history. Gary Ridgway, Seattle's Green River Killer who in 2003 became the nation's deadliest convicted serial killer, admitted to 48 murders but once said he killed as many as 71 women, according to interview transcripts.

Browne's public defender, Bill Schoewe, did not return a call.

A 44-page affidavit paints a picture of a killer who met his victims, sometimes men but mostly women, in everyday situations: a motel bar, an apartment complex, even a convenience store where he worked.

In one case, Browne allegedly used ether to knock out a drunken woman he was seducing and then "used an ice pick on her." In another, authorities said he used ant killer to subdue a woman he later stabbed repeatedly with a screwdriver.

Authorities said Browne grew up the youngest of nine children in the northern Louisiana town of Coushatta, about 40 miles southeast of Shreveport. Norman, the sheriff, said the Browne family ran a dairy in the 1960s and had hard times. "He came from a tough family," he said.

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