Born in June 1933, Charles Brown was the oldest of seven children in a Bedford, Indiana, family. He quit school after eighth grade, entering a "forced" marriage at age sixteen. The union produced four children, despite Brown's contention that he and his wife "never got along." Divorce was frequently discussed, but never pursued. Brown sought a temporary respite in the army, finding work upon discharge, but he was soon convicted of forging a check, sentenced to a prison term of two to fourteen years. In fact, he only served one year before parole, but soon violated the terms of his conditional release, "skipping from one state to another, dodging the law," until he wound up in Minneapolis, during February 1961. There, he met 20-year-old Charles Edwin Kelly, and the pair embarked upon a brief career in crime.

On February 17, Brown committed his first armed robbery, looting a dairy store in North Minneapolis. He was "too drunk to remember" the robbery of a gas station on February 18, during which an attendant was shot, but police later found keys to the station in Brown's possession. On February 20, he robbed a bar in Minneapolis and shot the bartender dead when he tried to escape.

That afternoon, Brown and Kelly took a cab to neighboring St. Paul, and there embarked by bus for Omaha. They met a female traveling companion in Nebraska, but immediately "got into a little trouble" and departed, on February 22, for Council Bluffs, Iowa.

After supper that evening, Brown and Kelly went looking for cars to steal. Their first choice was parked in a nearby residential area, and Brown drew a pistol, shooting its owner dead at the wheel. Unable to start the engine, they walked on, accosting a shopper in the parking lot of a supermarket, a block from the last murder scene. Abducting their final victim , Brown drove him several blocks from the store, then shot him to death when the man tried to leap from the car.

Swiftly arrested, Brown and Kelly confessed freely, the trigger man taking perverse pride in his "achievements." At his trial, in September 1961, Charles Brown was convicted of double homicide in Council Bluffs and sentenced to hang.