Two officers from the Salem Police Department responded to an emergency medical aid call at Harriet Lavern Thompson’s apartment just before 11 a.m. on March 20, 1998.
The apartment’s landlord, Michael Griffith, had entered the home that morning through a door to the garage, calling out to Thompson as he prepared for a housing inspection. After finding the apartment dark, Griffith walked down the hallway and found Thompson’s body in the living room.
A floor plan of the apartment where someone killed Harriet Thompson in March 1998. This floor plan, included as part of court documents, shows where key pieces of evidence were located in the home.
Document obtained via court records / OPB
As the above floor plan of the apartment shows, a plunger with blood on it was found near a broken knife blade without a handle. Both were located in a dining area just beyond the kitchen. At Jesse Johnson’s criminal trial, Marion County deputy district attorney Darin Tweedt told jurors during his opening statement that most of the violent struggle between Thompson and her attacker took place in this dining area.
The fight continued through the apartment and ended in the living room, where detectives found significant amounts of blood on the couch and the floor.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys theorized that after the murder, the attacker or attackers then walked down the hallway, through the utility room with the washer and dryer, and into the bathroom. Inside that bathroom, the attacker put the handle of the broken chef’s knife and a smaller serrated knife into the toilet. The attacker left blood, much of it Harriet Thompson’s, in that bathroom as they tried to clean up.
“You’ll hear testimony that investigators seized from the bathroom a green sweatshirt covered with the victim’s blood and that it appeared, by virtue of how this sweatshirt was arranged, that someone had tried to wipe the blood off their hands,” Tweedt told jurors in 1998.
Prosecutors insisted that Johnson had been in Thompson’s apartment that March night.
“There is only one answer as to why all of this evidence points directly to the defendant, Jesse Johnson,” Tweedt said as he finished outlining his case, “and that is because Jesse Johnson killed Harriet Thompson.”
Jurors ultimately believed that evidence. They convicted Johnson of murder and aggravated robbery on March 18, 2004.
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