‘Hush’ Episode 4: Patti

Patricia Hubbard lived across the street from Harriet Thompson in 1998, and was the kind of neighbor who doesn’t miss much. She said the white house on Shamrock Drive was known as a “party house.”

The night of Thompson’s killing, Hubbard was smoking on her porch after a long shift at the local fruit cannery. When she heard screaming and saw a man come running from the home, she tried to tell the police what she saw. But Hubbard said officers rejected her help twice, including a shocking conversation that changed the course of the Jesse Johnson case.

Listen to all episodes of the “Hush” podcast here.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Leah Sottile: Before we get started, this podcast contains graphic language and descriptions of violence. Keep that in mind in choosing when and where to listen.

Sottile: I want to take you to the year 2013. Jesse Johnson had been behind bars for about 15 years, and continued to insist he was innocent, that he had been wrongly convicted of murdering Harriet Thompson. The Oregon Innocence Project took an interest in his case, and he cycled through a number of lawyers who filed appeals, asking the state to give him a new trial.

With those new attorneys came new defense investigators who dug into the most minute details of the case.

Eric Mason: The attorney is the new sheriff in town and you are the new detective in town.

Sottile: That’s Eric Mason.

Mason: And you’re looking for another person alternate to the defendant that might’ve done that.

Sottile: He was one of the new defense investigators working the case in 2013.

Mason: And so, in the Jesse Johnson case, it’s like solving a crime in Grand Central Station. Did the pimp do it? Did the junkie do it? Did the guy shining shoes over here do it?

Sottile: Mason and the other investigators set out to re-create what it would look like to be driving by the house on 12th and Shamrock around 6:00 a.m. and see a Black man emerge from the bushes. That’s what a helicopter pilot named John Shaw testified that he saw while driving along 12th Street on his way to work around an hour and a half after Thompson was killed.

Shaw was a star witness for the prosecution at Johnson’s trial. He couldn’t say for sure that he saw Johnson specifically that morning, but he told police he wasn’t used to seeing Black people in that neighborhood. And that was enough for the state.

The investigators reconstructed Shaw’s testimony, trying to see if it was possible to accurately identify someone while driving by in the early morning hours.

Mason: I think that in a town where there are very few people of color, anybody who is out of place at 6 in the morning walking along becomes this, oh, wow, we’ve got a Black person here.

Sottile: The prosecution put a white helicopter pilot from the National Guard on the stand, and positioned him as an arbiter of who stuck out in a neighborhood and who belonged. If someone stuck out, it made them suspicious. Maybe a murderer. But Shaw drove by an hour and a half after the murder happened.

Mason: So just following the timeline, you knew there was a problem with Jesse Johnson.

Sottile: There was a problem with Jesse Johnson because he had an alibi. At the time of the murder, he was living clear across town from Thompson, living with his girlfriend. They watched Waterworld on TV that night – the one with Kevin Costner, when he had gills. They taped it off TV and went to sleep. But at the trial, the jury never heard from Johnson’s girlfriend about this alibi. She kept the copy of the TV guide with the Waterworld listing. I have it, and I can tell you that night Waterworld aired on channel two at 9:00 p.m.

Anyway, in 2013, Eric Mason and other investigators canvassed the neighborhood around the Thompson house again, knocking on doors, asking people what they remembered.

Mason: And so I was getting some clues early on that, at least the canvas of the neighborhood where the murder took place, no one had really done a systematic approach – going at different times of the day, and going at night after people got home, and on the weekends.

Sottile: Mason didn’t live far from the murder scene, so he’d go by all the time, knock doors.

Mason: If you keep going and you keep working and you talk to neighbors and they begin to tell you, look, there was someone out there at that time of the morning having a smoke. I know there was, and that person was Patricia Hubbard.

Sottile: At the blue house across the way from Thompson’s driveway, Patricia Hubbard answered. And what Hubbard had to say would blow the Johnson case apart.

She said the police in Salem ignored what she tried to tell them about that night. They’d chosen to listen to the pilot who told them about a Black man. But they ignored the woman across the street who was outside when the murder happened, and who pointed toward someone else entirely.

From Oregon Public Broadcasting, this is Hush. I’m Leah Sottile.

This is Episode 4: Patti

On an early summer day in June 2013, Patricia Hubbard was sworn in by a court reporter.

Mike Charlton: Good morning, Ms. Hubbard. How are you?

Patricia Hubbard: Good morning.

Sottile: The guy asking her questions was one of Johnson’s attorneys at the time. Attorneys from the state were there, too, and would also get a chance to ask Hubbard questions.

Charlton: I’m going to take you back to March the 20th, 1998. That was the day that Harriet Thompson, whom you knew, I believe, as Sunny, was killed. Do you remember that day?

Hubbard: Yep.

Charlton: Okay. Did you know Harriet Thompson?

Hubbard: I knew who she was, but we were not friends or acquaintances. I just knew who she was.

Charlton: What name did you know her as? Did you know her as Harriet or did you know her by her nickname, Sunny?

Hubbard: Yes, I was introduced to her as her name was Sunny.

Sottile: One thing that’s important to know about Hubbard is that by 2013, she had been struggling for a decade with a painful terminal illness called necrotizing fasciitis. Basically, it’s a deadly flesh-eating disease. This came up a lot during this deposition. Both sets of attorneys wanted to understand how her medication, and a lot of pain, might have affected her memory.

Some of Hubbard’s recollections of 1998 were fuzzy, but her memory of the night Thompson was murdered was clear.

Charlton: When you walked out of your house, did you see the front of Sunny’s house or did you see the back of Sunny’s house?

Hubbard: The back and the big doors on the garage.

Charlton: Was there a parking area behind Sunny’s home?

Hubbard: Yes, there was no parking in front of her home.

Charlton: Okay. So anybody that visited Sunny’s home, would they use the back?

Hubbard: They had to. There was a fence in the front.

Sottile: Hubbard said that anyone coming to Thompson’s house had to park in the driveway on Shamrock. 12th is a busy street with no parking.

Hubbard: Twenty-four hours a day, there was someone coming and going all the time.

Sottile: Even before Thompson and her roommate lived in the house, Hubbard said it was a party house. You get the sense from this interview that Hubbard was one of those kinds of neighbors who doesn’t miss much. She took note of the kinds of cars that came to Thompson’s house. A rusty green pickup. Sometimes there was a loud guy with scraggly hair who pulled up in a black Ford Econoline van.

Hubbard: I said, night and day it was, you never knew when you were going to hear something, and if you did hear something it was everybody in the neighborhood, oh, it’s just that house over there. They’re partying again.

Sottile: As much as noise from Thompson’s house was a fixture of the neighborhood, so was Hubbard sitting on her front porch. Back in March 1998, she worked as the inventory control manager at a nearby cannery, and she worked weird hours.

Hubbard: I would come and go all hours of the night. And when I’d get home, sometimes I’d grab me a sandwich, sometimes I’d grab me a pop, and sit out on my front porch with the same seat that’s still out in front of the house today, and have a cigarette and just unwind. It was all different times of days and nights.

Sottile: On March 20th, Hubbard said she got home from work between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning

Hubbard: I had grabbed a pop and probably a sandwich or a bag of popcorn or something, and went out and sat down and just relaxed on the front porch. And then there was all kinds of traffic going in and out and then things just -- the one black van pulled in and everything kind of escalated from there.

Sottile: Just pause for a minute on this scene. Here’s Hubbard sitting in the dark on her front porch. The same porch we saw on our drive through the neighborhood. Looks right down Thompson’s driveway. She’s got a drink in one hand, a smoke in the other. And when she takes a drag, the glowing end of her cigarette is the only light in the dark. She watches as this black van pulls up. She’s seen it before. White guy gets out, goes into Thompson’s house.

Charlton: And had you seen this white man before?

Hubbard: Many, many times.

Charlton: Can you give us a general description of what he looked like?

Hubbard: Filthy, tall, slender, long, darkish brown hair. His hair didn’t look like it had been cut. It was just on all different lengths and frayed and everything in the back.

Charlton: He pulled into the backyard or back driveway?

Hubbard: Yes.

Charlton: Was there anyone with him?

Hubbard: No, not that morning.

Charlton: How long was he at Sunny’s house?

Hubbard: Until after the screaming stopped, and he come out the back door and didn’t even hit the steps, just flew off the steps and took off running.

Sottile: Hubbard hears a fight, and the white guy goes running out the door – not toward his van, but toward the bushes, toward the school parking lot.

Charlton: Did you later see anyone else come out of the house?

Hubbard: There was a Black man come walking down the driveway later.

Charlton: Do you remember when this occurred?

Hubbard: How long after?

Charlton: Yes, I’m sorry.

Hubbard: Ten or 15 minutes.

Sottile: Ten, fifteen minutes after the white guy ran out, she saw a Black guy come walking down the driveway, in no hurry. Hubbard didn’t see him arrive, only leave. But given the usual amount of noise that came from Thompson’s house, none of this really fazed her. Hubbard finished her smoke, went inside, and got in bed.

Around 11 o’clock in the morning, she was back at the cannery, and she got a call. There was a commotion outside her house. Police tape. Cops everywhere. Her son – who was 12 at the time – was home alone.

That call came in about an hour after Thompson’s landlord discovered her body and called 911. So, Hubbard clocked out and rushed home.

Charlton: When you got home and the police were there across the street, did you go talk to any of the police officers?

Hubbard: Yes, I did. I went directly across the street. He was parked right there, and I walked over to him and I told him I thought I might have some information that might help them.

And he said it’s a known drug house and we knew we were going to have a murder here eventually. We don’t need any of your help, you just go back and sit down…or go back to your place.

Sottile: Hubbard was put off by the man’s comment, to say the least. She saw that black van pull up, the white guy run out, the Black guy walk down the driveway. How could none of that be relevant? But what could she do? She went back to her porch.

She said in the days afterward, she was outside when a man approached her at her mailbox. Handed her a business card.

Hubbard: There was a gentleman that came to my home that identified himself as a detective, I believe.

Charlton: And what did you tell him?

Hubbard: I started telling him what I saw, and he stopped me and he said, that won’t be necessary. And do you want me to say what I was told?

Charlton: Yes.

Hubbard: He said that won’t be necessary. He said a n**** got murdered and a n**** going to pay for it.

Sottile: Hubbard described this man as a detective. A ‒ quote ‒ short, bald-headed man with beady eyes.

What she said that day in her deposition is disturbing. First, here was an eyewitness who was outside when the murder happened, claiming police ignored potentially useful information. And second, it suggests the police who worked on this case pushed forward with a Black suspect despite information pointing to the killer potentially being white. When we asked the defense investigator Eric Mason about it, he said what Hubbard told him when they knocked on her door didn’t seem completely out of left field.

Mason: She just volunteered that. And there were other people that other investigators had talked to who insinuated similar things. And so, we just accepted that that was what 1998 was all about.

Sottile: For him, it wasn’t entirely surprising. He sees the justice system from the inside.

Mason: When I first started this, I thought, oh, that’s long ago. I mean, justice is blind here in Oregon. Oh, no, it’s not. I can guarantee you after watching up close how some Black people are treated in the criminal justice system, it’s still got some problems.

Sottile: There is no mention of Hubbard in the police files, and Johnson’s original defense team never indicated that they’d spoken to her.

As a part of any criminal trial, the defense can put up their own witnesses. And Johnson’s attorneys didn’t call Hubbard to the stand because they didn’t know about her.

Hubbard was potentially an eyewitness to this crime, and yet she never appeared in court during Johnson’s trial. And when an appeals court reviewed Johnson’s case, they said this was one of several things that proved his original lawyers didn’t properly represent him.

Instead detectives and Marion County prosecutors placed a ton of emphasis on the helicopter pilot who said he saw a Black guy walking out of the bushes after 6:00 a.m., even though that would have been more than an hour and a half after the murder.

We wouldn’t call either of the detectives on this case short, but only one was bald. We wondered if Hubbard had spoken to detective Craig Stoelk. So… I called him again to see if he’d changed his mind about talking.

Sottile: Hi, Craig. It’s Leah Sottile, the reporter from Oregon Public Broadcasting again. How are you doing?

Craig Stoelk: Oh, I’m fine. I hoped you wouldn’t call back. You know, I actually thought about it for quite a while, and talked to a couple of my friends and I just don’t think I want to participate.

Sottile: Okay. Yeah, and I mean, I get why. I just think that… I was also thinking about what you said last time, talking about how this has taken such a toll on you and you feel like it’s been cast all the wrong way, and I don’t know that that’s going to get corrected if you don’t talk, and so…

Stoelk: Well, that’s easy for you to say, but you sent me into a spiral of depression for a few days after I talked to you, and I just don’t. I mean, I’m being serious about that and I don’t care to go back through any of that part of my life anymore.

Sottile: The first time I called Stoelk and told him we were working on a project on the Johnson case, he brought up how upset he was over the reporting he’d seen on it. He said he spent his career working on really terrible cases for the Salem police. I found an article from 2004 where he said working child abuse cases for so long had shattered his sense of normalcy.

When Johnson was granted a new trial, news outlets reported that Patricia Hubbard heard the police say a Black man would go down for the crime.

Stoelk: It was an ugly business, and to have to put up with the cheap shots about people saying you’re a racist or that you’re somehow some blight on society that picks on people. I mean, people have no idea what that job is like.

Sottile: Stoelk said he wasn’t going to talk. He said the really horrible things he saw in his career stuck with him. And so revisiting any of it… he just couldn’t do it.

Stoelk: I don’t think there’s anything that ever comes out of my mouth that would change that view of the people that want to have that narrative.

Sottile: We spoke to people who know Stoelk and they said he was a solid detective. Ethical. We even asked another detective — hey, does a short bald-guy with beady eyes ring a bell? And they said no. Doesn’t describe Stoelk or any of the other detectives from that time.

And we started to wonder if solving who the beady-eyed, bald-headed man was kind of distraction from the real story anyway. Hubbard was trying to tell the detectives she’d seen people at Thompson’s the night she was killed, and the Oregon Court of Appeals cited Hubbard’s story as one reason to throw out Johnson’s conviction, and give him a new trial.

No news outlets have spoken to her about the people she saw that night. So Ryan and I decided to go straight to the source.

One day, I gave Patricia Hubbard a call, and sure enough, she picked up the phone. She was sleeping. My call woke her up.

Sottile: I’m a journalist and I’m working on a project on the Jesse Johnson case. Obviously you heard he got out the other day.

Hubbard: Yes. Twenty some years we fought over that.

Sottile: Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, I don’t know if you’d be open, but my colleague and I would love to come down and interview you about all of that next week. Do you have any time?

Hubbard: Time doesn’t mean anything to me. I can’t do anything anymore. I just sit in my chair. I’m crippled, so I can’t move or walk or anything, so it doesn’t really matter when or anything.

Sottile: Hubbard was living in the country about a half hour outside of Salem on the farm she grew up on. Four days after I reached her, we packed up our gear and drove out for the interview. We wanted to know about the people she saw, because during her deposition, attorneys showed her pictures of Jesse Johnson, but she didn’t recognize him.

Today, she lives in a green house down a long gravel driveway, off a winding country road. Old cars sat around the property. There’s a spot where they burn trash. When we pulled up, we could see a woman standing at the door waiting for us, holding her dog’s collar. It was Hubbard’s caregiver, Tawna Miller. We got out, said hi, and before we could unload all our gear, she told us we’d better come inside. We sat down on the couch in the living room and she explained that Hubbard wasn’t there.

Tawna Miller: She just was complaining of not feeling right for three days. She sat down in her chair and cried and cried, and I called the paramedics and he came out and checked her out and said she looked the best I’ve ever seen her look. And then the next day she just kept crying. She couldn’t communicate.

Sottile: But it was just that quick?

Miller: That quick. You don’t just go downhill that quick. They said she didn’t have a stroke or nothing. So… just her organs are shutting down.

Sottile: I’d spoken to Hubbard on the phone just a few days before. And now she was in the hospital and she might not make it.

Sottile: So last week we got word that Jesse Johnson had been released from jail, or from prison. He’d been there for 25 years. So tell us how she heard the news, how she reacted.

Miller: I don’t know how she… I’m not sure who it was. Somebody called her and she just was ecstatic. I mean, she wanted to throw a huge party here just with us, and she hasn’t even talked to him yet, but she was extremely excited. You couldn’t have asked for any more excitement in a person.

Sottile: Hubbard had spent a decade of her life advocating for Jesse Johnson, even though they’d never even met. Never even spoken. Tawna said when the news came out that Johnson had been released from prison, Hubbard was on top of the world. And then, her body just shut down.

As we sat there, none of us really knowing what to say, Tawna told us a story. A couple years back, Hubbard had gone to the hospital, and had been put under anesthesia, and when she woke up, the first thing she said was “Jesse.”

Miller: I believe there’s a reason for everything. So yeah, I was like, it’s been heavy on your heart, obviously. I said, you got to stay with it long enough, because not just her life that she’d be losing, it’d be his too.

Sottile: Ryan and I arrived so eager, and we left just… stunned. It seemed like Hubbard was a lost key in this case, a way to unlock this whole thing further. She was the only potential eye witness anyone knew about.

Well, you just drive and I guess, when we get to Dallas, we’ll just take a minute.

Ryan Haas: Yeah, man. I mean, I just feel fucking terrible for her. I don’t know if she understood how crucial she was. I mean, I think she understood she was important, and wanted him to get out, but did she really understand that she was the main reason?

It’s not like she just gave a statement in this case, and moved on with her life, you know what I mean? It’s like she was emotionally invested in what happened to Jesse and just… I don’t know, when someone sees an injustice and feels extremely compelled to correct that injustice, it’s just amazing to me the lengths that she went to in this or just wanted to see this through. I mean, she didn’t know Jesse from Adam, you know?

Sottile: No, she didn’t know him at all, and they’ve never even spoken.

Haas: That’s what fucking kills me. It’s like, I don’t know. She never even got to talk to him.

Sottile: Yeah.

Haas: It’s tragic.

Sottile: Around the time we went to see Hubbard, I started talking on the phone more often with Jesse Johnson, and he was happy – a man discovering his own life again.

Johnson: Hello?

Sottile: Hey, Jesse. It’s Leah, the reporter. How are you?

Johnson: Hello. How are you doing?

Sottile: Good. I was just calling to check in on you and see how things are going today.

Johnson: Oh yeah. Everything is fine. Everything is good.

Sottile: I was going to say, boy, I can’t imagine how your head must be spinning right now.

Johnson: Yes, it is, but it’s a wonderful spin.

Sottile: He was getting used to eating more. Everyone was taking him out, telling him to order anything he wanted. Get the lobster, they said – but usually he just ordered soup. He said he didn’t feel tempted to use drugs again, felt like that was what landed him in so much trouble in the first place.

For pretty obvious reasons, Johnson decided he was done with the state of Oregon. He wanted to go to Sacramento, where he had family. And so one of his attorneys, Rich Wolf, said all right, I’ll drive you to California. Along the way, let’s go see the ocean. So finally, after 25 years in Oregon, he saw it.

I called Johnson a lot those first few weeks he was out of jail, and it was clear that he was making an effort to move on. To put it behind him. At one point I even asked him, you seem fine, are you still okay with us investigating what happened to you? And he said, yeah ‒ quote ‒ “in fact, I like it.” He wanted to understand what happened better, but from a distance.

Johnson: Hello?

Sottile: Hey, Jesse, it’s Leah up in Portland. How are you?

Johnson: All right, how are you doing?

Sottile: Pretty good. I was just calling to see how California is.

Johnson: I’m in Arkansas.

Sottile: Oh, no way. What are you doing? Tell me about that.

Johnson: I just came down.

Sottile: Did you drive, or how’d you get there?

Johnson: Nah, bus.

Sottile: He said one day he decided he’d go back home to Arkansas. So he got on a bus and just left. He said he took a bus from Sacramento to Texarkana, Texas. Then walked to Texarkana, Arkansas.

Sottile: You literally just walked?

Johnson: Yeah, you walk across the street. The lines separate Texarkana, Texas and Texarkana, Arkansas.

Sottile: After 25 years behind bars, he didn’t want anyone to tell him where to go, who to be, what he can and can’t do. And he figured back home in Arkansas, he could be himself.

Sottile: Correct me if I’m wrong, but is it weird to just have total independence now?

Johnson: Oh yeah. Oh yes.

Sottile: Like, in what ways?

Johnson: Well, basically, every way you can think of. You can get up and do what you want to do, when you want to do it, how you want to do it. Once something gets kind of overwhelming, I’m like, fuck it, let it go until later on or something like that. I don’t let nothing really worry me too much.

Sottile: Johnson is not weighed down by what happened to him. A few months later, he was happy to be making a new life for himself. Every day felt new.

On the day Johnson got out of jail, you might remember Ryan and I dorking out over the fact that the Salem police files would be public now.

Sottile: A lot is gonna get answered for us, so that’s a good thing.

Haas: Leah, we can get the whole police file now.

Sottile: I know. Can we get it today?

Haas: We might be able to. I bet I can call them tomorrow and say, hey, this case is closed. Can I have this thing?

Sottile: Sweet naive children. How little we knew.

It took three months and thousands of dollars to get the murder investigation files. But finally, one day in November, I was standing in an airport when Ryan texted me. We got the files.

Haas: Hello.

Sottile: Hi, how are you?

Haas: All right. I’m a little tired, but…

Sottile: Yeah. right. Would you say you woke up at 3:00 a.m.?

Haas: I just woke up at 3:30 a.m., and was like, I can’t sleep, and then I look at my email, and it’s like, Salem Police Department sent you records. I was like, yeah!

Sottile: We furiously made a timeline of the police investigation: everyone they spoke to, who their suspects were, how they came down on Johnson being the guy who did this. We saw mentions of jewelry – so much jewelry. All this jewelry changing hands in Salem, that the police were trying to keep track of. But so much wasn’t in the files.

We realized there weren’t any audio or video interviews either. The records folks said – oh yeah, forgot to tell you. There are eight CDs waiting for you at the police station. We drove to Salem to get them, brought them back. But then – well, here’s Ryan again…

Haas: Okay, so I am here at my house. I am trying to get some audio from CDs that the Salem Police Department gave me.

Sottile: The CDs weren’t working, even though Salem Police insisted they worked just fine for them.

Haas: I’ve had two IT people, a sound engineer, an archivist, myself and Leah all attempt to play these CDs and cannot get them to work. Salem insists they do work, and one solution that is kind of the end of the line for us is attempting to play these in a CD player. So I managed to fetch an old CD player out of the basement at OPB, because it is 2023 and who has a CD player?

Sottile: Lots of people have CD players, Ryan. But you see his point.

Haas: So here we go. Let’s give this a try. Okay, disc is going in.

Sottile: Nothing happens. The reason why we’re telling you about these CDs is because these are public records. Public. They were not free. It took a ton of annoying phone calls to get them, and ultimately they were blank.

Haas: Okay, that is the CD there, nine seconds of dead air.

Sottile: Through this charade of absurdity to obtain public records, one thing we could definitively see was that the police files contained no mention whatsoever of Patricia Hubbard.

The closest thing to contact with her that we could find was that about an hour after Thompson’s body was discovered, an officer from Salem P.D. knocked on her door – and all the other doors on Shamrock. The officer wrote the person who answered at her house “did not know anything about the deceased or her residence.”

By Hubbard’s telling she was at work then, and her son – who was 12 – was home alone. So, this left us wondering: Did the Salem police talk to her kid, and then never follow up again?

Months had passed from the day we had showed up at Hubbard’s door hoping to interview her. We thought we had missed a chance to let her tell her story.

Thirty years might not feel like a long time, but at times digging into this case has felt like handling old yellowing pieces of brittle paper. Handle it too rough, and it just turns to dust. So much of the evidence is old, so many people who spoke to the police are dead.

One day, I decided to call Hubbard’s phone. If anyone picked up, at least we could hear what happened to her. And, Patricia Hubbard answered. I was shocked. She said, I was wondering when you were gonna call. When do you wanna come talk to me? We didn’t waste any time.

In the back bedroom of that old green house, Hubbard lives in a big bed. She watches crime shows on TV, and is surrounded by photos of her grandkids.

Haas: Hey, Patti.

Hubbard: Hi. How are you?

Haas: Good, how are you?

Hubbard: I am in an extreme amount of pain right now.

Haas: Oh, I’m sorry.

Sottile: When we got there she was feeling terrible. She was still really sick, and even though we came looking for answers, it was clear what she wanted most was to talk to Jesse Johnson. So we called him up.

Sottile: Hey, I’ve got Patricia Hubbard here to talk to you. I’m going to hand the phone over to her so she can hear you.

Johnson: All right.

Hubbard: Hi Jesse. I go by Patti.

Johnson: Hey, how are you doing?

Hubbard: I am doing okay. It is wonderful, so absolutely wonderful to hear your voice.

Johnson: All right. It’s wonderful to hear yours, too.

Hubbard: Does it feel good to be back out of jail?

Johnson: Oh yes.

Hubbard: I’m sure it does. Well, you ever get up here to Oregon, you make sure you come and see me, OK.

Johnson: Alright.

Hubbard: If you’ll send me your address, we can write letters and email and stuff, too.

Johnson: Alright.

Hubbard: Nobody’s keeping us from talking now, huh?

Johnson: [Laughs.] Yeah.

Sottile: Their conversation was short. They didn’t have much to say. It’s not like they know each other, and Johnson is a man of few words anyway. They’re just connected by this one thing. A thing Johnson had recently traveled thousands of miles to put behind him.

But in some ways, it seemed like this was the biggest thing that had happened for Hubbard. And so for a couple of hours, we sat at the foot of her bed and talked about what the Johnson case meant to her, what her dog in this fight had been all these years.

She said when Eric Mason knocked on her door all those years ago, it reignited her interest in the case. She had seen other cases where people had been wrongly convicted, and she wanted to help.

Hubbard: I started following, and I thought, I seen that and I seen other things. I thought, you know, this man – I didn’t even know Jesse’s name at the time. This man’s not the only one that’s like this. There’s lots of people out there that need our help.

Sottile: But you also get the sense from talking to Hubbard that she saw herself as a kind of one-woman neighborhood watch. And when she saw something that night, and the police wouldn’t listen to her, it just kind of pissed her off. Betrayed her sense of justice.

She said after Johnson was released she was so happy, but now, laying there in her bed, she felt like maybe she didn’t have anything more to live for. That fighting for Johnson’s innocence kept her alive.

Hubbard: I just hope he uses what he’s got and what God’s given him to use, and don’t get back into drugs. Don’t do anything stupid, Jesse. We fought this long and this hard. Don’t be stupid now. It’s just, it’s too much.

Sottile: Hubbard wants it all to mean something.

Hubbard: Today, I’m really glad he’s out. I’m proud of him. I don’t think it will ever, ever leave my mind. Did I make a mistake? To this day, I’m going to say no. I don’t believe that I made a mistake. I just hope that I didn’t make a mistake, and cause a problem where that he really did do it and I was the one in the wrong. In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe it, but there’s that little, teeny, tiny ‒ I think all of us that have a heart would wonder about. I was so glad today to talk to him and hear his voice.

Sottile: Those words stuck with us for a while. We came to talk to Hubbard to find answers about the police, and Thompson’s killer. But Hubbard is so ill. It all happened so long ago. But… I think her twinge of uncertainty is what makes her so believable.

She had no reason to make this story up. We went through court records, and there’s no serious charges against her, so there’s no obvious grudge against the police. She even told us how much she wanted to be a police officer before she got into cannery work. So you either believe Hubbard, or you believe police wouldn’t say something like she claimed.

Former police officers we talked to said they couldn’t imagine one of their own saying something racist. But a judge certainly believed it was possible when Johnson was granted a new trial. From what we had of the police investigation, you can see that this case hinged on more than just the pilot John Shaw’s eyewitness testimony, and Thompson’s drug dealer saying he saw Johnson at her house. It was about more than jewelry.

Forensic evidence played a big, big role in this case, and in the late 1990s, with the emergence of dramatized TV shows like CSI, things like fingerprints and blood spatter were becoming a huge deal in the minds of juries. And the forensics in the Thompson case? Let’s just say, they’re a doozy.

Michael Brandon: I’ve got his fingerprints in blood on a vase.

James Comstock: We had them sent in. There is not a single spot of blood on those boots.

Janis Puracal: You’ve got labs that are set up to serve the police and the prosecution. They’re not there for the science.

Sottile: That’s next time.