Peaceful Couple Killed in Home Break-In

Karen and Rick Brown fell in love at East Carolina. They shared a love of politics and pets, and by the mid-90s, settled down in rural southwest Chatham County. It was peaceful and pretty out in the woods and they liked being left alone.

They grew marijuana, a really high quality strain of the drug that sells for more than triple what the typical variety would get on the street.

Rick’s family says that it wasn’t just about the pot for him and it certainly wasn’t about the money – it was about nature, individual liberty and peaceful protest. Live and let live, his sister, Diane Anders, said, summing up her brother’s philosophy.

She was hurt when Rick stopped calling as much, and laments the distance that grew between him and the rest of the family in the years before he died.

“I couldn’t understand why. Why he wanted, why he and Karen wanted to do something that pushed his family away. I think he didn’t want us to know the extent,” Diane said. “I wish I could have told him stronger, more, that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.”

Rick and Karen were convicted of manufacturing and selling marijuana in 1995 and got a suspended sentence, but other than that, managed to stay out of trouble. It was then that Rick’s relationship with his family began to deteriorate, but he always stayed in close contact with his mother. She remains too distraught about what happened to publicly discuss her son’s murder.

Eugene Brown remembers the last time he saw his son. It was a chance encounter at the State Fair around 2000 – it was good to see him but the interaction was much-changed from the spirited debates they had in Rick’s adolescence and early adulthood.

Rick was always a good student, and decided after high school to attend Bob Jones University, a strict Christian college in South Carolina. He quit after a year, and eventually enrolled at East Carolina, where he went on to pursue a post-graduate degree in political science. He met Karen, who also did post-graduate work in English.

“I can see him now pacing in front of a class lecturing and literally looking into the minds of students,” Eugene said. “He had the ability to make you think about things you normally wouldn’t think about, or in a different way. That includes me, many times.”
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Rick and Karen’s peace was permanently disturbed on April 19, 2005. They spent the day at a Blues Festival in Greenville and returned home to their killer. The couple was found a week later by Karen’s sister, Rhonda Barham.

Karen and Rhonda were close and would talk on the phone at least a few times a week. After days went by without any word from Karen, Rhonda and her husband stopped by on April 23 and found the bodies.

It looked like a break in – a window was broken out, their bedroom was ransacked and a safe laid in the driveway busted open and empty, save a couple of handwritten notes and $20. The killer didn’t appear to have touched the marijuana, which news reports at the time said was worth more than $500,000.

Both Rick and Karen’s family struggled in the beginning with the fact that drugs quickly became the focus of the double homicide. It’s sensationalism at its worst and may have been incidental to the murder, they say, and more importantly, portrayed Rick and Karen as bad people. Simply put, Rhonda said, “It diminished their deaths.”

Chatham County deputies are convinced Karen and Rick knew their killer, and also say that violence was the last thing the couple would have expected, especially from their tight-knit circle of friends.

“Is growing marijuana illegal? Absolutely. But did Mr. and Mrs. Brown deserve to die for that or be murdered for that? Absolutely not,” said Sgt. Joe Birchett, the lead investigator in the case. “I want everyone that they dealt with to understand that this isn’t about the marijuana being illegal or not illegal or being right or wrong. Our main focus is to solve the homicides and to bring some closure to this case for the victim’s families.”