‘Hush’ Episode 5: One Little Spot

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a time of rapidly evolving forensic science. Jurors at Jesse Johnson’s trial heard a lot about how forensic scientists at the Salem Police and Oregon State Police developed fingerprints of Johnson’s inside Harriet Thompson’s apartment.

But newly revealed documents and DNA testing show those scientists may have been more interested in convicting Johnson than finding a murderer.

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

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.

Two years after Jesse Johnson was put in jail and held on murder charges, a new television show took America by storm. CSI – which stands for Crime Scene Investigation – debuted in 2000. The writers of CSI took the typical police procedural and made heroes out of the lab techs who comb crime scenes for evidence.

[Excerpt from CSI]

Catherine Willows: What do you think?

Gil Grissom: I think we’re giving these guys too much credit. They’re experts at robbing banks, not experts at concealing evidence.

Sottile: It was an instant hit, and there were a bunch of spin-offs: CSI Miami, CSI New York, CSI: Cyber. And in some ways, the TV show made a lot of sense. American police departments were starting to bring DNA testing into their investigations. It was a recent, exciting advancement.

But the science was also just getting off the ground. Forensics weren’t nearly as precise as CSI made it seem. Television created a perception that police can put blood or a fingerprint into a computer, and it’ll spit out a name. Or that if a boot print is at a crime scene, scientists can tell without a doubt who it belongs to.

But that’s just fantasy.

We took a close look – a really close look – at the forensics surrounding Harriet Thompson’s murder, and we came to realize that word, fantasy, was a good way to describe how prosecutors used the forensic evidence at the heart of the Jesse Johnson case, too.

The more we dug in, the more we learned how little we actually knew about forensics in criminal cases, and how often prosecutors use this science to tell juries a specific story.

But for any fantasy story to work, you’ve got to suspend logic. When you take a logical look at the forensic evidence in this case, there’s so much that points away from Johnson as the killer. And that evidence has long been kept out of sight.

From Oregon Public Broadcasting, this is Hush. I’m Leah Sottile. This is episode five: One Little Spot.

Michael Brandon worked in criminal forensics at the Salem Police Department in 1998.

Brandon: I did 27 years with the city of Portland, and then I did 11 years eventually with the city of Salem.

Sottile: One day, Ryan reached him on the phone. He’s long retired, but still lives in Oregon. Brandon told him that Salem police had its own crime lab in the 1990s.

Brandon: Most major departments, they have so many crimes and so many things to process that the state crime lab was just overwhelmed.

Sottile: His office was essentially part and parcel with the detectives’ division.

Brandon: We worked basically in the same office, separated by a door. Basically, the crime lab was a little office just off of the detectives.

Sottile: That morning in March 1998, when police flooded into Harriet Thompson’s house on 12th and Shamrock, Michael Brandon and other forensic techs were right there with the detectives. The forensics staff collected tons of items, and several pieces of evidence ended up being key to the prosecution’s case.

The first type of evidence that’s important is what’s known as pattern-matching evidence – things like fingerprints and shoe prints. So that’s what we’re going to focus on first.

At the scene, there were two pairs of partial shoe prints that the lab techs noted: one that looked like sneakers and the other like boots – both in blood. And there were a few fingerprints: a $5 bill inside a wallet with a palm print on it, and a fingerprint on a 40-ounce glass bottle of Olde English.

Brandon: Forensics is very cut and dry. It’s right there. It’s physical evidence. It’s just, there isn’t much they can say.

Sottile: Michael Brandon’s job was to figure out whose prints those were. He concluded that both the print on the beer and the money belonged to Johnson. They were items that proved he had been in Thompson’s apartment, something he said he never denied. He told us as much when we interviewed him.

Johnson: They knew I had been there anyway because my fingerprints and stuff was there. I wasn’t denying I was ever there.

Sottile: But prosecutors at Johnson’s trial took that evidence further. They told the jury that Johnson lied about being at Thompson’s place, and these prints proved Johnson was involved in the murder, which is a stretch. You may remember Johnson said he had gone to Thompson’s place to make a drug deal the day before she died. And the prints really only prove he was there at some point. But there was one other fingerprint discussed at the trial that was critical to the prosecution’s case. In fact, when Ryan called up Michael Brandon, this was the one print all these years later that he remembered.

Brandon: I got his fingerprints in blood on a vase next to the poor lady’s body.

Sottile: Brandon said he found a fingerprint in blood on a vase next to Thompson’s body.

OK, the vase print. This is a huge, huge deal. At Johnson’s trial, detective Craig Stoelk took the stand and described the chaotic scene inside the apartment. It was clear that a struggle took place and Harriet Thompson fought like hell against her attacker.

Stoelk said – quote – “there was an end table next to the couch that had a vase on top of it with some dried plants. The table, and that vase, had been tipped over.”

Stoelk said Michael Brandon took a photo of that vase, and fingerprinted it.

On the stand Michael Brandon said he saw the vase, picked it up and put it on the kitchen counter. He said – quote – “I observed some red stains that appeared to me to be the swiping of blood from fingers.” And two to three inches away from those swipes, there was a fingerprint. Johnson’s fingerprint.

At the trial, Brandon never said that the print was in blood. It was near what Brandon assumed was blood. So even though Brandon’s memory is spotty now, this bloody vase with a print on it was clearly critical evidence, right?

Not exactly.

The first issue is the blood swipes on the vase. Brandon told the courtroom he didn’t swab the stuff he claimed was blood. It wasn’t his job, he said. He was the fingerprint guy, so he only lifted the fingerprint and logged it into evidence. He said it also wasn’t his job to photograph the vase.

What he chose to do was make a pen and paper sketch of this vase with the supposed fingerprint, like a line drawing. So, I just want to be extra clear here because this is a lot to follow. At the trial, both Stoelk and Brandon said that Johnson’s fingerprint was found near blood on a vase knocked over in the struggle.

We went looking for evidence of this vase and the print when we finally got the police files.

Sottile: I looked through everything that Judy Rhine collected, and it’s a ton of stuff, but there is no vase.

We dug through notes one Salem officer named Judy Rhine wrote as she collected evidence.

Sottile: She does collect a glass ashtray. She collects a bowl from the bedroom with a bunch of stuff in it. It just seems weird to me that she would be so meticulously gathering things from the bedroom where the murder did not occur, and not the items from the room where the murder did occur.

Haas: Yeah, I agree. When does the vase come in? It’s in the photos. It’s clearly not being intended to be photographed. It’s way in the background.

Sottile: Oh, you could see it?

We scrolled through the photos we got after our months of records requests. Other detectives took so many of the scene, but none of a knocked-over vase.

Eventually, we found one photo that had a house plant tipped over behind an end table in the background. We pieced together that this could have been the vase, but you can barely make it out. And there is no blood visible on it. It’s hard to figure out how a large potted plant could be mistaken for a vase, so we can’t even be sure this is the right item. It was hard to believe that this was a critical piece of evidence.

Haas: Where’s the blood? I didn’t see any blood on this vase.

Sottile: Right. I mean, if that’s the photo that’s trying to capture that there’s blood on this thing, it’s not really cutting it. Like, the fact that we’re having to even debate this, this should be a very clear photo of what this is, right?

Police did get detailed photos of blood elsewhere in the apartment. This vase also never went into evidence. The police collected tons of evidence, but not the supposedly bloody vase. The only documentation of it is Michael Brandon’s sketch, and the latent fingerprint he lifted, which wasn’t in blood.

At the trial, Johnson’s attorneys hammered on this point. If there was blood on this vase, why wasn’t it swabbed for DNA testing? If there was a fingerprint near streaks of blood, why wasn’t it photographed?

But on the stand, Brandon passed the buck. He said he thought someone else had taken a photo and it wasn’t his job to collect blood samples.

During closing arguments, Johnson’s attorneys called his drawing ‒ quote ‒ “a sketch that a third grader would do,” and I think that’s pretty accurate. I scrolled past Brandon’s drawing many, many times in the court records, thinking it was just a doodle on the files, before realizing: Wait, that’s the sketch? That’s supposed to be a blood-smeared vase?

When Ryan spoke to Brandon, time had preserved in his mind that this fingerprint was the most incriminating evidence against Johnson. The story of it had grown.

Brandon: I have no doubt that he killed her. The detectives Quackenbush, and the other detective involved in it were very good. The print was there, the print was photographed, it was taken, there’s no doubt about it.

Haas: So there was a photograph of the print? Because I saw you had drawn a sketch or something like that.

Brandon: Sure.

Haas: So there was a photo then, or there was just the sketch that you drew?

Brandon: Yeah, there’s a negative of it.

Sottile: This is another thing Brandon sounds certain of, but there is no photo or photo negative in the files. Without a photo, Johnson’s defense has insisted it’s hard to know if it was a circumstantial print, related to the crime, or if it existed at all.

Haas: The defense made a bunch of arguments around this drawing. I mean, was it common to draw evidence, or was that just something you did? I guess, why did you draw that?

Brandon: That’s just showing placement of where it is. The lift is on the back of the card in lift tape.

Haas: OK. OK.

Brandon: So, they’re looking at the drawing of it, but that’s just something you do at the crime scene is you draw where it is at so you have some recollection as to where the lift came from. And so defense attorneys, they’re blowing smoke. They’re paid liars for the most part, and everybody’s a bad guy except their client.

Sottile: Criminalist Michael Brandon was so sure of what he had found when Ryan talked to him, but people have notoriously bad memories. The print wasn’t in blood, and there wasn’t even a photo of it. We asked for it specifically.

So what does all this fingerprint evidence add up to? Assuming the prints are his, the bottle print and the $5 bill print shows Johnson knew Thompson.

In their closing arguments, prosecutors even called the fingerprints a ‒ quote ‒ “perfect example of circumstantial evidence.” And yeah, that isn’t wrong. By the time this case went to trial, no one was disputing Johnson had been in Thompson’s apartment. But the problem with circumstantial evidence is it doesn’t tell you when Johnson was there. Drinking a beer at someone’s apartment and exchanging money isn’t a crime, last I checked. If so, call me a criminal.

The shoeprints in blood, though. Now those are definitely part of this murder.

Like fingerprints, shoe prints are another type of pattern-matching evidence. And in this case, we know two different types of shoes stepped in blood inside Thompson’s apartment.

The first print, from a sneaker, was found in blood on the blade of the broken chef’s knife found on the floor at the crime scene. The same print was also on papers scattered on the floor, and in mud outside. No one has ever offered much of an explanation for that particular print or suggested it came from Johnson, so it’s just kind of a question mark.

The second print was in blood in the kitchen. It looked like a heavy tread you might find on a boot, and this was the print that prosecutors said belonged to Johnson.

In 2013, one of Johnson’s original attorneys, Lindsay Partridge, sat down for a deposition, and he said the boot print was a big problem for them at trial.

Partridge: It was important. Sure. Yeah.

Sottile: That’s Partridge answering questions being asked by Johnson’s new set of attorneys. Partridge believed the fingerprints put Johnson inside Thompson’s apartment.

Mike Charlton: Well, that really was the defense that you wanted to present on his behalf.

Sottile: This guy talking, this is Johnson’s new attorney, laying out what he understood to be Partridge’s theory.

Charlton: You wanted to present to the jury that Jesse had come to the scene after she was killed, and had not been party to the murder.

Partridge: We certainly discussed with Jesse, hey, based on our review of the evidence, this looks like a likely scenario that could have occurred. And if this is what’s occurred, we believe it’s going to be your best shot at trial. And he was adamant he wasn’t there. He didn’t do it. And that was the end of the story.

Sottile: Partridge believed that Jesse Johnson really had been at the scene of Thompson’s murder. That maybe he walked in after she was dead. He told Johnson that would be a good thing to tell the jury. But Johnson refused. He said it just wasn’t true. He was not there that night.

It was like Partridge didn’t really trust Johnson, and we know now from talking to Johnson, he didn’t really trust his attorneys either.

Partridge: We didn’t know whether it was because that’s just the way Jesse is, doesn’t like to talk to people; whether it was because he’s an African-American from Arkansas and we were three white guys from the Northwest, that he just didn’t feel like he could trust us.

Sottile: When Johnson’s conviction was eventually overturned, the appeals court said it was mostly because Partridge and Johnson’s other defense attorney did a poor job at trial.

Partridge declined our interview request. He’s a judge now in Marion County. Still a part of that system.

Among the mistakes he and his co-counsel made were that they never knocked on Patricia Hubbard’s door. A member of the defense team recorded country music over a critical tape of Shorty recanting his “offed the bitch” statement. Partridge didn’t even disclose he had a perceived conflict of interest. It turned out he had represented Harriet Thompson on a petty theft charge in 1990. And this issue over Johnson’s boots was a notable failure by the defense .

Detectives Stoelk and Quakenbush arrested Johnson seven days after the murder. And according to their notes, they seized all of his clothes, a pair of sneakers, and a pair of boots. We talked to defense investigator James Comstock about these boots. He was how I first heard about the Johnson case.

Comstock: They saw him sitting across from them, and they noticed his boot soles, and they thought, huh, those look like the footprints that are at the scene, which they’re not wrong. They do look like them, and they seized the boots, but they seized the boots illegally.

Sottile: Stoelk and Quakenbush arrested Johnson at 10 a.m. on March 27, 1998. They took his clothes and all his belongings and put them into evidence at 1:15 p.m. that day. About a half hour later, Detective Stoelk got a warrant from a judge for what they’d already taken.

Stoelk and Quakenbush took those boots without a warrant. This is called a warrantless seizure, a violation of Johnson’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Comstock: What this led to was about six years of the issue of the boots running up and down the appellate courts, where there were rulings on whether they could or could not be in. Those were appealed, they got sent back, they were appealed again. And it’s very uncommon that a case where an arrest is made would take this long to go to trial, and primarily, to my understanding, the reason this took so long was because of the fight about the boots.

Sottile: Johnson was arrested in 1998, but he didn’t go to trial until 2004. So he sat in jail for six years, all because of these boots.

Ultimately, a judge found that Stoelk and Quakenbush not only seized the boots illegally, they also lied on the stand about it. They insisted under oath they had the warrant, but that just wasn’t true. The judge admonished the detectives, and said, ‒ quote ‒ “police conduct in this case must be discouraged in the strongest possible terms.”

That illegal seizure of the boots was a huge point of contention when the trial finally happened. Johnson’s attorneys could have kept any discussion of them from the jury, but they didn’t because as you heard Partridge say, Johnson’s defense team kind of thought he had been at the murder scene, even though he insisted he had not.

Ultimately, sitting in jail for six years amounted to nothing. The judge allowed the jury to hear about the bootprints, but not about Stoelk and Quakenbush’s illegal seizure.

Sottile: So, if I were to see the footprint and Jesse’s shoe, would it be clear to me that it is not the same?

Comstock: No. No.

Sottile: Interesting.

Comstock: You’d look at it and you’d think that looks like it might match. But I don’t even think you have to be particularly an expert, but if you’re an expert, and you look for notches and cuts and imperfections, they’re not there.

Sottile: Prosecutors implied the prints could have only come from Johnson because his boots were a similar size, and Comstock said, to a lay person, the boots and the print look like a match.

But from a forensic standpoint there are a couple reasons why the intense focus on the boots falls apart. The first is because the boot prints at the crime scene were in blood, but the Oregon state crime lab never found blood on Johnson’s boots.

Comstock: His clothes didn’t get cleaned as regularly as they might, and particularly his boots. So, his boots, they’re dirty. They are a homeless person’s boots. They have not been cleaned ever. You can tell. We had them sent in. There is not a single spot of blood on those boots.

Sottile: The other reason the boots weren’t a match is because of those notches and cuts that Comstock mentioned. Prosecutors implied Johnson committed murder because his boots had a similar design and size to these bloody footprints, but what they didn’t tell the jury is that matching shoe prints is a lot more complicated than that.

Janis Puracal: There’s a shoe print at a crime scene, and law enforcement is trying to match that print to the sole of a particular person’s shoe.

Sottile: This is Janis Puracal. She’s a lawyer who runs the Forensic Justice Project in Oregon. It’s a legal firm that focuses on the role forensic science plays in wrongful conviction cases.

Puracal: What law enforcement will do is compare that pattern from the crime scene to the pattern on the person’s shoe and say, aha, these match. It came from this person. It is another one of those notoriously unreliable forensic methods.

Sottile: She’s worked on Johnson’s case to highlight problems she saw in the forensic evidence. That includes the boot prints. She said, think about how many Nikes are out there, or Adidas sneakers? Literally millions. So many people wear the same brands and sizes of shoes.

Puracal said the way footprints are presented at trials is deceptive.

Puracal: You’re creating an inference that it could have only come from this person who has this particular shoe, when you really don’t know the answer to that question of who else could it have come from as well? How many other times would we see the exact same pattern?

Sottile: If forensic scientists really wanted to match Jesse Johnson’s boots to the prints at the scene, they would need to look for any unique cuts or markings in the sole of his boots, and then match those to the prints at the scene.

Puracal told us that pattern-matching, in general, is iffy science. Many experts have even said it’s unclear if fingerprints are a reliable piece of evidence because of human error.

Puracal: There’s all this research coming out that’s telling us this is not reliable enough to put in front of the jurors.

Sottile: She said forensics comes down to what scientists can observe and know, and not what they are simply guessing at. And Puracal said there’s too much speculation that happened in Johnson’s case, like with criminalist Michael Brandon and the non-existent bloody fingerprint.

Puracal: We’ve got this criminalist whose entire job it is to find evidence, and yet he’s just going to guess at what things are to fit his narrative.

Sottile: What we learned when we dug into the forensics of this case was that the evidence that fit that narrative is just a fraction of what police collected.

And the evidence the jury didn’t hear about points to someone else entirely. And a system full of bias.

Given all the issues around the fingerprints and boot prints in the Johnson case, it wasn’t exactly clear to us why prosecutors relied on them so heavily at his trial.

Puracal says the answer might come back to where we started this episode.

Puracal: There’s definitely been what is termed the “CSI effect.”

Sottile: The “CSI effect” is basically the ways Hollywood has changed how the general public thinks about criminal investigations. A 2008 estimate by the National Institute of Justice found that at least 70 million Americans had watched some version of CSI at that point.

Puracal: One way in which it comes out is that jurors tend to believe that the science is real. They tend to believe what they see on TV is exactly how it works in real life, and that’s just not true. This stuff is not as simple as on CSI, where they throw something into a box and it spits out the perpetrator. That’s just not how forensics works.

Sottile: Puracal told us this misperception can warp how jurors view criminal cases. They might be inclined to believe any forensic evidence is good evidence. It also puts pressure on law enforcement.

Puracal: Another part of the “CSI effect” is that jurors tend to demand those forensics. So they come to expect that when they’re watching a case, there’s going to be some form of forensics.

Sottile: Prosecutors we spoke to said they know jurors expect to see forensics at trial. They may also know it can sway jurors, even if the evidence doesn’t really say much.

Ryan and I dug up some documents that showed that pressure was a part of the Johnson case from the earliest days of the investigation. In internal documents from the Oregon state crime lab, we found a memo from a forensic scientist named Dick Klocko who outlined very clearly what he was looking for at the murder scene.

He wrote ‒ quote ‒ “suspect believed to be Johnson. Need to tie him to scene.” Further down the form, Klocko wrote ‒ quote ‒ “hoping to find suspect blood on items belonging in apartment.”

This hoping and needing expressed on scientific lab reports, its a huge issue to Puracal.

Puracal: Before they ever even get to testing, they’re saying they know that Jesse Johnson is the suspect. A lab shouldn’t be hoping to find anything, but the lab has a hope to find something that’s going to connect Mr. Johnson to the crime scene, and they’re writing that down in their notes.

Sottile: We reached out to Klocko to understand his notes, but he didn’t return our calls.

The state lab also declined our request for an interview.

Puracal: The state lab is under the Oregon State Police umbrella. They share the same budget, they share the same structure. And what we have a lot in these cases is that kind of cognitive bias happening. There’s motivational bias.

Sottile: These documents we found show that scientists paid by the state aren’t neutral, according to Puracal.

Puracal: The lab is finding out what the prosecution’s theory is, what the defense theory is, and then they are directing the testing and reporting those results to serve the prosecution and rebut the defense. That’s not science, that’s not independent, that’s not justice. That is a tool for the prosecution.

Sottile: Forensic scientists being too close to police and prosecutors is a nationwide problem. In Houston, Texas, it led to so many exonerations, the state separated the crime lab and made it truly independent.

In Oregon, every police department relies to some extent on the state police crime lab to help them process evidence in major crimes. Puracal said the system needs reform across the country to break this relationship between the police and forensic scientists. Without some kind of neutrality, she said, you end up with lab workers who want to see certain outcomes, hoping to find evidence even if it isn’t there.

That was apparent when Ryan spoke to Michael Brandon. Even after he explained to him the problems we saw with the fingerprints and other evidence in this case, Brandon is still certain Johnson killed Thompson.

Brandon: Why they’re not prosecuting him again is beyond me. It must be just a liberal D.A. who doesn’t want to bother with it. He deserves to be tried. He deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life.

Sottile: After this conversation, Ryan went back to Brandon to ask some follow-up questions, but Brandon told him he didn’t want to talk anymore and to never contact him again.

These problems with the evidence the jury saw doesn’t mean the forensics in this case are useless. There was a lot of blood at the Thompson crime scene, and police tested more than a dozen people in those early days of the investigation to see if they could find a match. They tested Thompson’s old roommate. Her drug dealer. The guys she smoked crack with the night she died. None of them were a match for the blood at the scene.

And, of course, they tested Jesse Johnson. He also wasn’t a match for blood at the murder scene.

Sottile: And are there any other pieces of DNA that you think could indicate who this mystery killer is, or anything else that you all have thought about?

Puracal: The samples that we’re really looking at are the ones that leave a trail from the location where she was found into the bathroom. Because the theory was always, including from law enforcement, that the perpetrator went into the bathroom and washed up, and that’s why Spot 15 on the sink ends up there.

Sottile: Spot 15.

There was so much blood around Harriet Thompson’s body, and down the hallway toward the bathroom, there were all these little drips of blood. Spot 15 is this tiny little spot on the white porcelain sink in the bathroom. Unlike the vase fingerprint, there are two photos of it. In those pictures, a police officer wearing rubber gloves points to a faint spot of blood on the edge of Thompson’s bathroom sink. It looks like it’s been diluted with water. A coppery ring with a translucent center.

We asked Johnson’s lawyer, Lynne Morgan, about Spot 15.

Sottile: Let’s talk about Spot 15, as it’s called, right?

Morgan: Yes. Our favorite piece of evidence.

Sottile: Why is it your favorite?

Morgan: It is a piece of evidence that the state crime lab tested for DNA, both Sunny Thompson and Jesse Johnson were excluded. So whoever that DNA belongs to is probably the person that killed her.

Sottile: Prosecutors and defense attorneys all agree that when Thompson was killed in her living room, the killer or killers walked back down the hallway and into the bathroom, where they washed their hands in the sink.

Spot 15 is DNA that belongs to someone who isn’t Thompson and isn’t Johnson. It seems to indicate that person had been cut in the fight and was bleeding, and because water was mixed with the fresh blood, it was likely left on the sink during the cleanup right after the murder. And it isn’t the only piece of DNA that points away from Johnson.

Morgan: The lab that we’re working with has Spot 15, and then they also have some hairs. There’s some clumps of hairs that were found underneath Ms. Thompson’s bra kind of stuck in blood, from which she’s been excluded and Jesse’s been excluded. And so one of the things we want to know is that the DNA from the hairs match the DNA in the sink.

Sottile: There is also the semen that was inside Thompson when she died. That wasn’t Johnson’s either. Lynne Morgan said these are just the DNA items that we know about at this point.

Morgan: So, the bathroom opens up to the living room, but then off to the side is kind of a utility room that goes out the back door, and there’s a spot of blood on that floor that I would really like to see who that belongs to.

Sottile: In one 2022 email, a deputy D.A. named Matt Kemmy called the Johnson case the bane of his existence. We asked him to clarify what he meant by that, but he declined to answer us. But when you look at the evidence, we wondered if Kemmy might be talking about the forensics, because the DNA that is actually related to the crime points away from Johnson as the killer, and all prosecutors have to rely on is circumstantial evidence like fingerprints.

Still, the state of Oregon has worked for decades to tell a story that Johnson is the only credible suspect, and in order to do that, the state had to steer the jury away from the blood, hair and semen. They characterized them as unimportant.

Even though the state of Oregon has never acknowledged any other suspects in this case, they have quietly tried to figure out whose blood was on that sink. Records we obtained show that in 2015, the Oregon crime lab ran the DNA of two people against a federal database and compared it to Spot 15. The lab won’t tell us who those people are, or whether either is a match, but we can see from the records that at least one of the people reviewed is white.

Johnson’s defense attorneys have requested several times for the state to retest DNA in this case – including Spot 15 – and the state, for the most part, has resisted those efforts.

Morgan: But you would think that the state would want to know, right? They would want to know who killed her, who has gotten away with it all these years. And Spot 15, I think could tell us.

Sottile: As of this recording, we do not know who Spot 15 came from. Johnson’s lawyers have filed a motion with the court asking for new DNA testing, and saying it’s time for the Oregon State Crime Lab to ‒ quote ‒ “either put up or shut up.”

As DNA testing technology has improved, Oregon has checked Johnson’s DNA against the evidence in this case again, and each time he wasn’t a match for any DNA found at the scene. His blood isn’t at the crime scene. His hairs weren’t caught under Harriet Thompson’s bra strap, and it wasn’t his semen that was found.

A bunch of people were tested at the start of the Salem police investigation. But Jesse Johnson is the only person who has been tested multiple times, again and again, through the past 25 years, and his DNA has never been a match.

When Marion County prosecutors took this case before the jury in 2004, they gave a partial view of the evidence. The jewelry. All the fingerprints. Thompson’s name in his address book. They showed the jury evidence that proved Johnson met Thompson.

They leaned hard on that circumstantial evidence to imply Johnson was involved. It was a story fit for a television drama. But Puracal said the full picture is more complicated.

Puracal: What the forensics tell me, at least the objective forensics that we’ve been able to develop, tells me that he’s not involved. We’ve got him excluded from all of these samples. So that tells me, OK, there’s some objective evidence there that somebody else did this.

Sottile: To the defense, Spot 15 proves Johnson is innocent, and we tracked down people who said police and prosecutors never seriously considered anyone else. They told us the detectives wanted Johnson, and only Johnson, and that they’d do whatever it took to convict him.

Fred Gustafson: Both detectives were there. He pointed at the corner, upper left person on the sheet, and he said it would be financially advantageous to you if you would also identify him, and it blew me out of the water.

Sottile: That’s next time.