LONGVIEW — When Steven Pete received a letter last month with a return address from an Idaho prison, he dumped it into a pile of junk mail without so much as glancing at it.
He didn’t learn until later that it was a link to a convicted killer and a suspect in the disappearance of a Wahkiakum County woman.
“A couple of weeks later, I was getting ready for a poker game, so I had to clean the house,” said Pete, 27, of Longview. “So, I was ripping open letter after letter in the junk mail and then I noticed the one from the Idaho Department of Corrections.”
The letter, addressed to a woman at Pete’s Seventh Avenue address, was from Michael Braae convicted murderer and rapist, who’s been dubbed “Cowboy Mike.”
“I called my cousin and read the letter to him, and when I got to the end, he said, ‘Dude, that’s the Cowboy Killer,’ ” said Pete, who was unfamiliar with the convict.
Police say Braae, 49, is a suspect in the disappearance or deaths of several women in Washington and Oregon since 1997, including Susan Ault, a Rosburg resident missing since June 2001. Braae was driving her pickup at the time of his arrest in July 2001 after a chase that ended when he jumped off a bridge into the Snake River in Idaho.
In the March 4 letter, Braae asks about the woman’s husband, “Charlie” and how much time he has left to serve in his prison sentence. “I am in the unique position to bring about an early release for an individual of my choosing …” Braae wrote.
He wrote he’s “bombarded with requests for interviews by all the big news agencies,” and included a copy of a November letter from California-based Indigo Films about a documentary series for the Discovery Channel about life on the run.
“This one I am currently engaged in negotiating the terms and conditions not for the series mentioned in the letter, but for a program focused entirely on the events leading up to and surrounding my arrest and prosecution,” Braae wrote. “I want to take advantage of my position and leverage some lucky individual out of incarceration early.”
He claimed to be in “possession of something that the authorities in Washington have been trying to obtain for several years, and I guarantee you, they’d do almost anything … or make such an exchange as I’ve alluded to, if they could get they’re (sic) hands on it … in a heartbeat.”
Joel Heaps, office manager at Indigo Films, said his company did send a letter to Braae, along with “lots of letters to other people.”
“We’ve moved on with production,” Heaps said Wednesday. “I’m not sure if he responded back or not, but we’re not talking with him right now.”
Braae’s letter appeared not to have been inspected before it left the Idaho Maximum Security Institution in Boise, where he’s serving a sentence for aggravated assault and eluding police officers. When his release is up in August 2012, he’ll begin serving a 48-year sentence in Washington for a July 2008 conviction for raping and killing a Lacey woman.
“We read the letters on an as-needed basis,” said Jeff Ray, public information officer for the Idaho prison system.
Ray couldn’t verify whether a letter from Braae went out of the prison last month. Ray said he couldn’t, for security reasons, comment on whether Braae’s letters would be inspected because he is a high-profile inmate.
When a reporter told him the gist of Braae’s letter, Ray said, “It sounds like the sort of inmate correspondence that is fairly common — claims of information if something will be done on behalf of the inmate.”
Wahkiakum County sheriff’s Detective Mike Balch, lead investigator in the Ault case, said he believes Braae had another motive for writing the letter.
“It’s a great way to get some publicity,” Balch said Wednesday. “Now the person who wrote it will get perhaps what he wanted. I wish Mr. Pete never would have told the media.”
Balch doesn’t dispute that the letter could have been written by Braae, and he’s taking it very seriously, he said, but he wonders whether it really was intended for the woman it is addressed to.
“I think (Braae) could have picked the address randomly and hope somebody would respond,” Balch said. “He got his wish.”
A representative of APR, which manages the property Pete lives in, said there was no record of the woman ever renting that house since it acquired the property in 1992.
As for Pete, he said he reread the letter many times trying to read between the lines. “Is there some sort of information hidden in the letter?” he asked.
Pete said he’ll leave the speculation and intrigue to the authorities.
“It made good conversation when we were playing poker,” he said.
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