Two years after the high profile disappearance of teenager Heather Church, a homeless man draws the attention of law enforcement to what appears to be a human skull in a field. Dental records show it to belong to the missing girl, who appeared to have been kidnapped from her own home by an abductor who forced entry through a window and obligingly left a fingerprint.
Although it takes a while for the connection to be made, the print belongs to Robert Charles Browne, who is an unusual character, to put it mildly. He is the youngest of nine, a former serviceman, and has been married no fewer than five times, quite an achievement for a man not yet forty-five.
All his former wives speak ill of him, and as they build a case against him for the Church murder, detectives notice a number of unsolved murders of women wherever he rests his head.
Although the only real evidence against him is the print he left at the Church home, Browne's attorney approaches the authorities with a plea deal: her client will plead guilty to the murder of Heather Church in return for the death penalty being taken off the table. The authorities are happy with this because it will enable them to collate evidence against him for other murders.
Browne is duly convicted, and this is where it gets silly; he begins writing letters claiming to have committed a total of forty-eight murders across the country, giving hints and pieces of evidence in sundry cases. It remains to be seen if he was trying to work his ticket to somewhere more comfortable, like a place with rubber rooms, but has this information been collated from the public domain, or?
Eventually, investigators arrive at an unsuspected murder, a young mother who had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Brown calmly confesses to taking her back to his place, having sex with her, then strangling her for no apparent reason, chopping up her body, and dumping it in the garbage. He pleads guilty to the murder of this young woman which was committed eight years before the Church murder. The one good thing to come out of this is that this victim's daughter, a baby at the time, had grown up believing her father had murdered her mother, something the police had also entertained. The two are reunited, and Browne lives happily ever after in his fantasy world. Or maybe it is only part fantasy?