“This is the story of a group of people who have continually strived to find that elusive formula for ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ ”
—Debra Brooks, 2010
April 11, 1975, Blue River, Oregon: At the end of a remote logging road deep in the densely forested mountains of central Oregon, two men stand close, locked in tense conversation. One is Black, tall, and slim, with the high cheekbones and chiseled features of a leading man; the other is white, a stout detective with greasy hair combed to one side. Both men are armed. Around them, a loose circle of plain-faced, simply dressed women and a gaggle of children gather, watching. Two other women, slightly closer to the arguing men, also look on. One of them is fragile-looking and pale; she holds a rifle. The men’s disagreement intensifies to yelling. The detective grabs for the man with one hand and reaches for his gun with the other. A single shot rings out, followed by the thump of a body crumpling to the ground.
Three years earlier, it was probably raining when the car carrying Norman “Snake” Brooks and his group of more than a dozen mostly female companions broke down in rural Lane County, Oregon, just outside Eugene. It rains a lot in that part of the world. But weather was likely the least of their worries. Behind them were a burning barn, a mob of angry locals, and a sheriff whose office had “files full of information” on them—a story that had begun in Los Angeles and traveled as far north as Port Angeles, Washington, before doubling back to Eugene.
Brooks had walked away from his first marriage in his hometown of Austin, Texas, in 1968. In his previous life, he would later tell reporters, he’d earned his credentials from the “school of hard knocks,” passing through a phase of car theft, he claimed, before (or perhaps while) becoming a reverend in the Baptist church. Back then, he went by Saint. But when he arrived in L.A., he used Snake instead because, he said, “you never know what a Snake is gonna do.”
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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He knew what he wanted to do, though. What he sought was to live a life of purpose surrounded by a congregation, a community, to help him. In those days, it was easy to find like-minded visionaries, especially if you were charming and persuasive, which he was. The then-28-year-old Brooks gathered a small group of followers, and together they crafted a vision of a new, Christianity-based life of self-sufficiency and charitable works. They were chasing that vision when they broke down outside Eugene and decided to stick around.
The skyline of Eugene is dominated by two volcanic buttes: Spencer, to the south, rising some 2,000 feet, and Skinner, its miniature twin at 682 feet, to the north. The tranquil Willamette River, lined with parks and bike lanes, flows alongside the city. Fifty years ago, the tiny downtown that sat at the base of Skinner Butte was filled with newly constructed civic and office buildings in the unornamented concrete style of midcentury brutalism. Back then, the eastern portion of the city was characterized by the grassy quads and squat brick buildings of the University of Oregon, with its new football stadium just across the river. Past the campus stretched farmland and the modest houses of Springfield, Eugene’s conservative sister city, known for its dairies, chicken-processing plants, and lumber mills. Farther in the distance in all directions were Douglas fir–covered ridges—the foothills of the Cascade Range to the east and the Coast Range to the west. On a clear day, you could see the snow-covered peaks of the Three Sisters mountains.
Eugene today is in many ways still that wholesome college town, selling itself as TrackTown USA, a hotbed for world-class athletics. By the 1970s, though, its wholesome image had received a psychedelic makeover thanks, in large part, to Ken Kesey. The local writer rode an LSD-fueled rainbow to fame after his book One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest became a rallying cry for the cultural revolution. The small city transformed seemingly overnight into a counterculture happening, a gathering place where dropouts, Jesus freaks, runaways, artists, and activists came to hang out, smoke pot, network, and organize. This new far-out, come-as-you-are atmosphere conspired with the area’s low cost of living and abundant, cheap land; Lane County became a hot spot for radical back-to-the-landers, many of whom lived in communes that functioned as extended, integrated family units.
Brooks and company were one such intentional family unit. The roughly 15 women in the group ranged from teenagers to the 56-year-old Mommy Jeanne, a divorcée. They were runaways, rich girls, foster kids, businesswomen, college students, and young mothers, some from as far away as Missouri, many from California. Some had changed their names. One was pregnant. Many were deeply religious. Whatever their pasts, they had one important thing in common: They had all left something behind—controlling parents, abusive husbands, stifling social norms.
In 1972, many women in America were still undereducated, underpaid, and underestimated. Roe v. Wade wouldn’t be decided until the following year. For the most part, they were often prohibited from renting an apartment, buying a car, or applying for a credit card without a man cosigning. This meant that Brooks’s followers needed him. Eugene, with its communes and counterculture, should have been a perfect fit for Brooks and his group, but idealism and free love had given way in the city to dangerous drug use, sex trafficking, and shootings. Holdups and bar brawls were common, as was rape. Brooks and the women had trouble finding a place to stay and wanted to avoid the constant threat of violence. They moved into an abandoned cabin on public forest land 20 minutes outside the city.
While Brooks may have steered clear of Eugene’s counterculture chaos, then–sheriff’s deputy Roy Dirks had built a career on it. Dirks had been a fixture in Lane County law enforcement for a decade. Now a detective in his 30s, he was popular among both cops and criminals, even if he ruffled feathers with his blend of rough-handed, gun-friendly tactics, hazy interpretations of the law, and heavy reliance on snitches and undercover agents. In his off-hours, he was a regular at bars and dance clubs, where he seemed to always have a different woman on his arm. He was known for an uncanny insider’s knowledge of local crime. Lane County sheriff David Burks described him as “the kind of guy who would accidentally fall into more things and solve them than a lot of police officers would after excessive investigation.”
History bears that out. The Register Guard, Eugene’s local paper, is full of stories about Dirks interrupting robberies in progress, chasing bad guys through backyards, and stumbling onto illicit affairs. In one famous instance, he beat an informant at a game of pool, hustling crucial details for an investigation. In an interview with Ethos magazine, deputy Bill Kennedy remembers the eerily robust nature of Dirks’s insider information: “Roy had a tip about some Quaaludes coming into the Eugene Airport. We got there. We opened up the suitcase and there they were.” Sometimes, Dirks’s politics seemed to cross into his work. In 1969, he’d been involved in a violent confrontation with local leaders of the Black Panther Party that had drawn public criticism, casting him as being hot under the collar and a “quick draw.” More recently, he had pistol-whipped a student before threatening demonstrators at gunpoint during an anti–Vietnam War rally. Don Mack, a reporter for the Register Guard, describes the altercation as Dirks coming to the aid of an undercover officer: “Suddenly, there’s a short guy, a stocky guy comes over to this group that’s surrounding him and pulls out a pistol and says, ‘Get back!’ He certainly didn’t hesitate to draw his weapon as quickly as possible.”
The winter of 1972 was one of the coldest on record. Drifts of snow formed across Eugene’s broad, tree-lined streets. Isolated and broke, the group sheltered inside their tiny cabin among the forest’s Douglas firs and Western cedars. Brooks and his followers subsisted on game he hunted and limited provisions from rare trips into town. With aid from others in the group, petite and quiet Belinda Lederer gave birth to a baby boy. He was one of at least three children fathered by Brooks with members of what they had come to affectionately call the Family.
When spring came, word of people trying to illegally homestead on public land made its way into town. Intrigued by stories of a Black man with multiple white wives and troubled by reports of several children with the group, authorities, including Dirks, organized a rescue party. With firefighters, police, a forensics team, and even a minister and a coroner in tow, it was less a rescue than a raid. They arrested Brooks for poaching and took the children from their mothers, placing them with social services.
It was the first of several contentious encounters between Dirks and Brooks that would occur over the next three years.
LIGHTER BROWN DARKER BROWN
The group took up residence in Eugene, and the women began the long, invasive process of proving their fitness as mothers and regaining custody of their children from the state. In the meantime, Brooks exhibited an entrepreneurial streak: He opened a chain of three 24-hour diners called Lighter Brown Darker Brown. After reuniting with their children, the Family also founded a church, the Children of the Valley of Life, insisting in tax-exemption filing documents that their lifestyle was “not a ‘game’ or a ‘trip’…not hypnotism or witchcraft…not a hippy or any other so called commune, but a social science in itself.” They had other ventures, too. Using Brooks’s black Chevy van, they started Brown Cheetah Rescue Unit, a rogue CB-radio highway rescue service, which searched for lost people, fixed stalled vehicles, and provided medical aid. They even produced their own children’s television show on the local public access channel. At one point, Eugene’s mayor, in need of minority-owned businesses to fulfill the requirements of a new citywide equity program, wrote to Brooks to encourage him to buy the city’s only roller rink. Brooks didn’t take him up on the offer.
In truth, Brooks wasn’t the high-rolling entrepreneur he pretended to be. Rather, funding for these ventures came from Beverly Daugherty and her college-age daughter, Maureen, who had both joined the Family. Beverly was the ex-wife of a respected local physician and had suddenly filed for divorce and liquidated several marital assets. That such a well-regarded member of the community would join what she would later describe as a “beautiful” and welcoming “intentional family” was considered scandalous. Even more salacious was her daughter’s descent from wholesome, beehive-wearing Strawberry Festival court member to sister wife to her own mother.
Heads turned and tongues wagged. Local men openly speculated about Brooks’s apparent sexual prowess and ability to cast a spell over these women. If Maureen Daugherty, a swim team member, who also served on the student council, wasn’t safe from the cultural revolution, no one’s daughter was. And the Lighter Brown Darker Brown restaurants, with their young, often busty waitresses, big servings, cash-only service, and low prices, created what local reporter Jim Frake called a “mystery surrounding the family’s business dealings.” Soon, the entire operation was suspected of being a criminal enterprise, maybe a front for drugs or prostitution.
Why the scrutiny of this group as opposed to many others like it? It likely had to do with Brooks—or, rather, people’s attitudes toward him. In 1972, the effects of Oregon’s long history as a Black exclusion state could still be felt. In Eugene, “K-K-K” was painted in large white letters on the flank of Skinner Butte and overlooked downtown during the 1920s. Long after the KKK went underground in the 1930s, the city upheld racist practices, most notably in its rejection of Black visitors. Local hotels excluded Black travelers, including Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, even after state law prohibited the practice. In the face of this, Brooks just kept smiling and insisted he was simply trying to feed the needy, keep kids straight, and pass on a message of love and unity because, he said, “you’re not white and I’m not black. You’re lighter brown and I’m darker brown.”
Then, on New Year’s Day 1974, the Register Guard published a photo of Brooks and proclaimed him one of the “Newsmakers” of the year. Brooks had everyone’s attention.
CATS AND SNAKES
At first glance, Brooks and Dirks couldn’t have been more different. Brooks was muscular and lean, with defined features and a broad smile. He dressed sharply, in slim-fit, wide-bottomed pants, turtlenecks pulled tight over his chest, and a slick brown leather jacket that gave him an air of cool. Dirks, meanwhile, was round-faced, with a thick mustache and greased hair that came to a curl at the center of his forehead. He looked sweaty even in his police headshot. Yet they were both charismatic, shared a love of pool and women, and had matching propensities for late nights.
And during this time, they both prospered: Brooks, with the Family and its businesses; Dirks, with his criminal justice career. Dirks had spent what his partners called “endless days and nights” on stakeouts for a major case. It paid off with a big bust, and the guys started calling him Columbo. At home, though, it wasn’t all triumph. He got divorced three times and took custody of two of his kids. With that responsibility and his detective’s schedule, he had to hire full-time help. Still, his children adored him, later remembering him as a present and doting father.
The authorities, including Dirks, kept tabs on the Children of the Valley of Life. But when Brooks reported that someone kept breaking into his diners, the cops didn’t act. To force their hand, Brooks held a press conference, where he claimed that one of the restaurants had been robbed of $2 million stored in a floor safe. Brooks blamed the theft on unnamed enemies who had threatened his life. He declared that if the police didn’t do something about it, he’d burn the restaurants down. When questioned by reporters about a possible motive for the intimidation, he replied, “Why does anybody want to get rid of something they can’t understand? Stupidity, fear, jealousy, and greed.”
The press conference only generated more gossip. After rumors surfaced of topless waitresses, child neglect, drug trafficking, and horses being stabled in walk-in refrigerators, the police, with Dirks present, raided one of the restaurants, where the Family was said to be living. This time, the women fought back, taunting the officers and refusing to cooperate before violently assaulting them as they decided whether to remove the children to temporary protective services. No evidence of drugs or child abuse was found during the raid.
By March 1974, public opinion had turned against the group. Business at the Lighter Brown Darker Brown restaurants all but ceased, and they were soon shuttered. The police, including Dirks, continued to harass Brooks and his followers, who were now out of money. Frustrated, the group retreated a few miles away, to Lorane, and moved into an abandoned miner’s cave in the forest. The women spent the spring enlarging the cave more than 50 feet into the hillside and carving elaborate sculptures of cats, snakes, and a seven-foot-high deified Brooks into the walls.
The group settled into their makeshift home in the forest. Brooks’s celebrity, the press conference, the mothers and their children, and the public insinuations that cops were lazy or crooked had an impact. Brooks was stopped for minor traffic violations and arrested for possession of a weapon and for failing to appear on a misdemeanor marijuana charge. Eventually, news of the Family’s cave reached Dirks, and again the group was raided and displaced to the Eugene area. The children were temporarily removed to protective services. One of the officers participating in the raid on the cave noted that someone in the Family had a real talent for sculpting.
Despite all this, Brooks continued to engage the authorities with friendly banter, especially Dirks, who had liked to frequent the restaurants on his late nights. “Roy was an intelligent man,” Brooks would later say, “and I consider myself intelligent enough to squabble with him same as I would do anyone.” Even so, around town, Dirks took up boasting about his role in removing the children from the group.
In early April 1975, word spread that Hole in the Wall, a house near the tiny town of Blue River, was under surveillance by the feds. Days later, the body of 23-year-old Charlie Powers was found floating in the nearby reservoir. Many locals suspected that Powers hadn’t drowned—that he had overdosed, and then his buddies had panicked and dumped his body into the reservoir. Dirks was put on the case, but it’s unclear whether his network of informants supplied him with this knowledge. “Everybody up there knew what was going on,” Val Brooks, a longtime resident (no relation to Snake), says of Powers’s death. “They all knew about the overdose. But nobody said anything.”
After enduring years of threats from locals, the Children of the Valley of Life decided to seek safety in the vast forests outside town. That they happened to choose Blue River Reservoir was seemingly a coincidence. The group—18 women, six children, and Brooks—piled themselves and their scant belongings into the Brown Cheetah van, but on the way to the reservoir, they were run off the road by angry, probably drunk “red necks,” as Brooks would later refer to them, and blew out a tire. With three good tires, they pressed on, urging the van deeper into the forest. They made camp that night in the snowy hills at the end of a logging road adjacent to Blue River Reservoir.
On the afternoon of April 11, 1975, just one day after the Family had fled those angry locals and been run off the road, Dirks set out on the 50-mile drive to the reservoir, working the Powers case. He told the dispatch officer that he planned to speak with the folks living at Hole in the Wall and in the surrounding area.
OFFICER DOWN
When word came in the next morning from Dirks’s housekeeper that he hadn’t returned home the previous night, the sheriff’s office launched a search party. Later that day, after an extensive air-and-ground search, deputies located his patrol vehicle far down an unpaved, single-track logging road in a steep-sided valley. Nearby was the Brown Cheetah van, one tire flattened. Then, under branches, they found Dirks’s body, his radio and gun missing from his belt. He had been shot once and was dead. They radioed it in. Officer down.
All hell broke loose. Law enforcement officials from every available agency combed the forest looking for Brooks. Officers from the Forest Service acted as guides, helping the responders navigate brutally steep terrain in winter conditions. Many of them had rushed from the city in suits and dress shoes and were now up to their ankles in snow. In Eugene, several Black men were detained without cause, which would later lead to a lawsuit against a sheriff’s deputy.
Convinced they would be shot on sight if they were found with Dirks’s body, the Family members split into two groups and fled. One group, including Brooks, walked and hitchhiked with the children; the others eventually made it as far as Sisters, nearly 60 miles away, where they were arrested at a logger’s home.
After several days, authorities found Brooks and the remainder of his group. Ron Ridings, an officer involved in the search, described the events in a 2019 interview: “We patrolled all the highways in Blue River and one of our deputies caught them coming out of the brush, milepost 23 up near the river. And, of course, they surrendered.”
The officers took Brooks into custody, laying him face down on the icy road with a shotgun to the back of his head until backup arrived. Many of the men in the search party were surprised when Brooks made it to the station in Eugene still alive. “Heavens knows,” said Ridings, “they should have been hung. Cop killer does it with me.” Still, his description of Brooks was positive. “I always thought he was extra quiet, [a] really nice guy. In a way he seemed sort of shy.”
Snake Brooks was charged with the murder of Roy Dirks. All 18 women in the Family were held in separate jails spread across the state. Later, one testified to being thrown against a wall and having her blouse torn during an early interrogation, while others said they had been shown false confessions purportedly made by Brooks. Their first public defender was forced to step down after the district attorney alleged a conflict of interest involving his proposed representation of all the women.
In July 1975, Brooks’s trial got underway, but the prosecution’s case began to fall apart. Forensic evidence showed that the fatal shot had been fired from the Winchester rifle used by a 25-year-old former Catholic novitiate: Belinda Lederer, mother to at least one of Brooks’s children. During his interrogation, Brooks had explained that he hadn’t shot Dirks during the argument because he didn’t believe Dirks was going to shoot him. But he said, “He (Dirks) knows that these girls have had things against them before and because he had messed with them before and knew they were easily triggered.… You don’t fool with a woman; you don’t know what a woman’s going to do.”
The prosecutors refused to believe that Dirks’s murder might have been motivated by a woman’s fear for the safety of Brooks, of herself and the other women, and, above all, of their children. Lederer testified that she had been aware of Dirks’s reputation as a quick draw. If Brooks was shot, what would happen to the Family? How would they live? Worse, every encounter with the police put her and the other mothers in danger of losing their children to the state. Trauma might have been another reason. Many of the women came from troubled homes. Lederer had been the victim of sexual violence prior to joining the Family. Aggressive, armed men of any kind, even the police, especially the police, could have triggered a defensive response.
Nonetheless, the prosecution claimed that Brooks, much like Charles Manson, was a manipulative sociopath who exercised sexualized mind control over the women and that he had directed the Family to lure Dirks to his death. Francesca Moravcsik, a juror, remembers law enforcement being fascinated by Brooks’s sexuality. “The police looked at it from their point of view that there was one man and a whole bunch of women. So the man was like King of the Hill, was running everything, and they may have had sort of fantasies of how wonderful it would be to be in this situation.”
In court, prosecutor Maurice Merten argued, “It was not accidental. It was not justified. Roy Dirks was a dead man when he got out of that car and Brooks is responsible for his death, no matter who pulled the trigger.”
Defense lawyer Ken Morrow countered by casting Brooks as a community activist and a well-intentioned pastor who had risen from humble beginnings. Morrow claimed that Brooks had been targeted because of his race and his alternative lifestyle and asserted that the group had suffered harassment and threats from law enforcement and Dirks in particular. The lawyer argued that the shooting had resulted from that intimidation and that the group were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. “The prior relationship between the deceased and the defendant Brooks and/or defendant Lederer is an issue in this case,” Morrow said. “The deceased participated in and partially precipitated all of the raids, searches, seizures, hearings, and investigations.” The argument opened up Dirks’s actions—his tactics, alleged biases, off-duty activities—and motivation for being up in Blue River to scrutiny.
Today, many questions remain unanswered. What did Dirks know about the possible drugs at Hole in the Wall and in Blue River in general? How was he paying for a full-time housekeeper on a civil servant’s salary? What was the truth behind his “uncanny” knowledge of local crime? Morrow’s explanation of Dirks’s killing focused on the dynamics between the two men—the argument being that it was simply a matter of the casual tension between the church leader and the detective coming to a head. But no one has ever been able to explain why Dirks headed past Hole in the Wall into the forest or how he managed to stumble on Snake Brooks and the Children of the Valley of Life that day. And if, as Morrow contended, Dirks had precipitated the raids on and investigations into the Family, how he did so was never revealed. Neither was Dirks’s connection, if any, to the drug trafficking and/or the federal investigation in the area. Maybe ambition played a role. It’s possible that Dirks was just hoping to break into federal-level law enforcement by tying the Powers case to the impending drug bust. Whatever the answers, the drugs seem central to the events of that day. “Ten years later, I was in the Mohawk Tavern, and two men at the bar were talking about working the case,” Val Brooks remembers. “They made it sound like Dirks was there for the [drug] bust.”
How, or why, Snake Brooks may have been involved is anybody’s guess. But it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that his downfall involved Dirks. While harassment was alleged, Morrow’s defense strategy forced the prosecution to admit that Dirks had, at the very least, investigated Brooks and, by extension, the women on multiple occasions. And juror Moravcsik recalls that it didn’t seem, as the prosecution asserted, that the women in the group were under Brooks’s control. “They were single mothers. And this was a place for them to have a community.… He was just sort of the token male head of the community.… He did not project a very dominant personality.”
Unable to prove that Brooks had ordered Lederer to shoot Dirks, the prosecution was forced to drop the murder charges. Instead, Brooks was found guilty of hindering prosecution for his initial refusal to cooperate with authorities, for giving false evidence when questioned, and for fleeing the scene of the shooting. He was sentenced to five years in prison.
“THAT CRAZINESS”
At Brooks’s trial, the prosecutors had argued that he was ultimately responsible for Dirks’s murder. They contended that the Family had lured Dirks into the woods under false pretenses, despite Dirks’s claim that he was heading to the area to investigate the Powers death. There, they argued, Lederer, under Brooks’s control and without her own motivations, shot Dirks in cold blood.
In the second trial, Lederer’s attorney, seeking to put forth a self-protection defense, argued that how the women had been treated by Dirks, other police, and locals mattered greatly. According to testimony, the Family members became paranoid after being run off the road and blowing a tire, which they would later claim was shot out. At camp, they were so on edge that Lederer and another woman took a rifle and walked down the road to stand guard. Those fears were seemingly realized when Dirks pulled up in such a remote location and got out of his police car.
That time, Dirks didn’t engage in his usual banter. According to the women, he was aggressive, and Brooks told him to “quit fuck’n with me.” While this was happening, one of the women, Nedra Byington, slipped behind the wheel of Dirks’s vehicle. The other women moved in closer, surrounding the two men and effectively hemming Dirks in.
Brooks said something that angered Dirks just as the detective heard Byington killing the engine of his car. Dirks yelled at her to stop. Then Dirks went for Brooks, shoving him with one hand and going for his own holster with the other.
Lederer raised the rifle and fired, hitting Dirks in the head.
Lederer’s attorney, Jack Gardner, with the help of psychiatrists, framed her actions as instinctive. “I was frightened,” she testified when asked about the moment she raised the gun. “I wasn’t thinking about raising the rifle. I just did it.” She was, her lawyer contended, a woman protecting her partner and fearful of losing her child. The other members of the Family corroborated her story, strengthening the idea that Lederer’s actions had been protective. Brooks, too, had supported that characterization, describing her as “independent, strong-willed and couldn’t be pushed around.” On the stand, Lederer did not act like someone under mind control. She broke down in tears, saying, “I didn’t mean to kill him.”
The prosecutors disagreed. A kill shot to the head? It was, they argued, difficult if not impossible to achieve without intent.
The jury sided with the defense, finding Lederer guilty of manslaughter, not murder. She received the maximum 10-year sentence.
After Brooks’s conviction, the remaining Family members moved to Salem to be near the state prison where he was incarcerated. When he was denied parole in 1977, several of the women held a vigil outside the governor’s office for 30 days, which renewed comparisons to the Manson family. While awaiting his release, the Family moved to Hawaii, where they purchased a large property. When he was able to join them, they set to work, digging a series of channels, caves, and pools into the land, the beginning of what would become the new Family business: fishponds. In a 2010 Facebook post, Brooks recalled leaving prison, where he’d been sent for “things that could not be avoided.” He wrote, “I caught a plane, came to Maui, got driven home, and said ‘Thank you God.’ I didn’t have to endure any more of that craziness that went on in that time period.”
In Hawaii, Brooks and the Family continued to fight entanglements with the law over alleged crimes and child custody issues. Meanwhile, back on the mainland, Dirks’s children won a wrongful death lawsuit in 1979 against Brooks and were granted a $1.2 million judgment, which they have spent decades trying, unsuccessfully, to collect. Belinda Lederer, no longer a member of the Family, became an artist. Snake Brooks passed away in 2016. Several of the early members of the Children of the Valley of Life were still with him at that time.
Dirks is remembered as a hero. A portion of Oregon’s Fallen Officer Memorial Highway is dedicated to him. The official narrative of his death on the Officer Down Memorial Page states that Dirks was shot and killed by a copycat mimicking the famous serial killer Charles Manson. It does not mention Lederer, or the challenges and fears faced by nontraditional women in the 1970s.
Five years ago, Lane County district attorney Pat Horton, who oversaw the prosecution of Brooks, finally offered a different explanation: “The reason why they left Lorane, one of the reasons why they shut down Lighter Brown Darker Brown, why they were hiding, these women would not, did not want to give up these children.”•
Ruby McConnell is a writer and geologist who writes about the intersection of the natural world and human experience. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed outdoor series A Woman’s Guide to the Wild and A Girl’s Guide to the Wild and its companion activity book for young adventurers, and Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of a Life, which was a finalist for the 2021 Oregon Book Awards. She lives and writes in the heart of Oregon country. You can almost always find her in the woods. She's on Twitter at @RubyGoneWild.
