‘Hush’ Episode 6: Two Strangers

Police and prosecutors have always insisted they thoroughly investigated Harriet Thompson’s murder, but some people who did not appear at Jesse Johnson’s trial have insisted for 25 years that they have information critical to the investigation.

A former state of Oregon employee who was at Thompson’s house the night she died said police knew who they wanted to convict, and would go to any length to make that happen.

And an eye witness who no one – police, prosecutors or defense attorneys – has ever seriously questioned is revealed.

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: In the hours before Harriet Thompson was murdered in her apartment in Salem, Oregon, she called several people. We found a list of those numbers she dialed in the police file – called all of them. Of course, none were good anymore. This all happened 25 years ago.

Ryan and I scoured phone books and city directories at the local library, but our search went nowhere. From reading the police files, we know that one person Thompson called was her drug dealer – a young guy named D’Loc. He went to her apartment several times that night to give her drugs, and he told the police he was taken to the house by a man named Fred Gustafson. These were some of the last people who saw her alive. So I tracked Gustafson down.

Gustafson: Hello?

Sottile: Hi, is this Fred?

Gustafson: It is.

Sottile: Gustafson still lives in Salem. That first call, I told him I was looking into what happened to Harriet Thompson back in 1998, and he knew exactly what I was talking about.

Gustafson: That’s how my name got into it, because I’d taken someone up there where she was murdered.

Sottile: I told Gustafson that Jesse Johnson, the man who had been convicted of killing Thompson and sentenced to death, was about to get a new trial when he was suddenly let out of jail.

Sottile: I’m just calling people to see if I can arrange interviews to try and understand that situation, but also just the culture in Salem at that time.

Gustafson: I’ll be open to it. I don’t know how good I’ll be at it. It’s a long time ago. My memory’s not all that great anymore, but you’re free to talk to me about it. I remember when she was murdered.

Sottile: When we started researching all those numbers Thompson called the night she died, we were looking for anyone who might say something new about this case – a witness or a piece of evidence that might have been overlooked. But this case is so old. People who know something about it are either dead, in poor health or very hard to find.

Gustafson was a kind of breakthrough, though. He told me what happened back then still bothers him. And he wasn’t the only person we’d soon find who had a lot more to say about Thompson’s murder.

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

This is Episode 6: Two Strangers.

We showed up at the Salem retirement home where Fred Gustafson lives, on a day when cream of chicken soup was on the menu. It’s a plain facility on a busy road, between a used car lot and a furniture warehouse. A lady at the front desk pointed us toward his room. We knocked, and Gustafson called us to come in. His room was dark – he keeps the blinds closed on sunny days.

Gustafson has a long white beard and a full head of hair. Wore a necklace of crystals. He was friendly enough, but when we asked him what he remembered about Harriet Thompson, his mood shifted.

Gustafson: I knew her. She lived right up near me. I was involved in that, transporting people up to her place that day that she was murdered. It’s just horrible memories from my life that I really don’t like going back on anymore. It’s not me anymore.

Sottile: What was going on in your life at that time that made it so different than it is now?

Gustafson: Drugs.

Sottile: Gustafson told us that at the worst of his addiction to crack cocaine, he was holding down a government job for the Oregon Department of Transportation. In his job, he saw a lot of horrible car accidents, and that took a toll.

Gustafson: It just messed my life up to where I couldn’t deal with things anymore. And I turned to drugs because, God, best I felt in a long time when some friend of my wife’s gave me something to try. I didn’t even know what it was, but God, it made me feel so good. I hadn’t felt so good in years.

Sottile: We were there to try to get a sense of the last hours of Thompson’s life. And as we talked, Gustafson kept pointing to a mess of papers. They were scattered on the carpet; it looked like he’d flung them onto the floor in anger.

Sottile: Did you get that stuff out because I called you about it or …

Gustafson: I don’t know why I had it. Someone sent it to me, but it was all my testimonies back then about the whole incident.

Sottile: Gustafson said that he’d brought D’Loc over to Thompson’s house a few times the night she was killed. We asked him what he remembered.

Gustafson: I’m not going to go back, and look through, and tell you anything. I read into that crap last night. I didn’t want to put it - I couldn’t stand to read on. It was bringing back too many horrible memories. My life was one screwed up life. I was messed up, bad.

Sottile: Even though he’d told us to come talk to him, he didn’t really seem to want to rehash it now that we were there. He said that back in 1998, he’d drive drug dealers and sex workers around, and they’d pay him in crack.

Ryan Haas: Do you remember how you met D’Loc? Was he just around? Was he ...

Gustafson: I could have told you. It’s all in there in that paperwork.

Haas: If you’re tired of this paperwork, we would love to take it off your hands and read it.

Sottile: Gustafson said fine, we could take the papers and give them a read, but we had to bring them back. During our conversation, he kept telling us over and over that it was a bad time in his life – and he didn’t want to remember it.

Haas: Did you ever, I mean, would you …

Gustafson: No, I never killed anybody.

Haas: No, no.

Gustafson: No, I never did anybody harm. I always took people for rides to deliver stuff, and I’d get a kickback from it. That’s how my addiction worked.

Sottile: We picked up the pile of papers off the floor and told Gustafson we’d be back in a week.

Ryan and I scrambled to a nearby Starbucks and started passing pages back and forth. And, let me just say, what Gustafson let us borrow was shocking.

It was a transcript of a deposition he gave in 2013. That was when Johnson got a new set of attorneys and investigators looking into his case. They found Patricia Hubbard, and they also tracked down Gustafson. What he told them opened another window into this world of drugs in Salem in 1998.

Later, we tracked down the audio of this deposition and you hear a much younger Gustafson. He was being interviewed by an attorney.

James Lang: Did you know her name was Harriet Thompson or did you find out later?

Gustafson: No, that came later. Yeah.

Sottile: Gustafson said he knew Thompson for about a year when she was killed. They weren’t friends, just acquaintances. He told the attorneys about seeing Thompson the day before she died. Sometime that afternoon, he was driving D’Loc to meet another drug dealer named Pooh Bear.

Pooh Bear is an important person in all this. Remember back in the first episode, we talked about the time Harriet Thompson jumped out the window of a drug dealer’s apartment? Well, that was Pooh Bear’s place. And D’Loc – who Gustafson calls D’Lo – was connected to him, too.

Gustafson: D’Lo asked me to give him a ride, and when we hit the top of Hillendale, the street I lived on, and stopped at 12th Street, there was Sunny.

Lang: And that’s Ms. Thompson?

Gustafson: Yeah, Ms. Thompson. And that was the first time I’d seen her since, it’d been quite a while, a year maybe, something to that effect. And I just remember it shocked the heck out of me. She looked so clean-cut, and better than I’d ever seen her in my life.

Lang: Like she had not been using?

Gustafson: No, not at all. She looked sharp, she looked great.

Sottile: Gustafson said Thompson hopped in the car and they all went over to Pooh Bear’s. Afterward, he drove her and D’Loc back to her apartment. At Thompson’s place, Gustafson recalled meeting a guy who he believed was her new roommate. He was fuzzy on the details, even in 2013.

Lang: And could you describe this new roommate?

Gustafson: Black.

Lang: Male, female?

Gustafson: Male.

Sottile: This person was Jesse Johnson. This is the meeting that D’Loc would later detail to police before he looked at all those mugshots of Black men in Salem. Gustafson said they were only at Thompson’s place for a few minutes – just enough time for D’Loc to give her drugs.

Lang: Did you ever go back to Ms. Thompson’s apartment that day?

Gustafson: Two more times, I believe. I took D’Lo up and dropped him off.

Sottile: It wasn’t the last time Gustafson took D’Loc by Thompson’s place that day, but it was the last time he went inside. The other times he waited in the car.

Lang: So, you took him. Did you wait for him the second time or the third time?

Gustafson: I don’t think I did because that’s what concerned me about, that I may have taken the individual that murdered her.

Sottile: Gustafson said he remembered driving by Thompson’s place the next day, and it was surrounded by red crime scene tape and police cars. The news was saying she’d been found dead in her apartment. He got nervous. He had been there the day before. So he called his brother, asked him what he should do.

Gustafson: He said he knew of someone on the inside that he trusted, that he felt wouldn’t put me hung out to dry.

Lang: Now, you say your brother knew someone on the inside. Was that a police officer?

Gustafson: Yeah, it was Quackenbush.

Sottile: Catch that? Gustafson said his brother knew a guy he could trust at Salem P.D. – Detective Mike Quakenbush. It’s “quake-en-bush,” by the way. I asked him.

Lang: Did you tell him about D’Lo, and taking him?

Gustafson: Yes, I did.

Lang: Did you give any description, do you recall, of the roommate?

Gustafson: Just that he was Black. I couldn’t describe him, other than wearing a cap or something. I thought he had a baseball cap on.

Sottile: Gustafson said he met with Quakenbush and his partner several times. He couldn’t remember the other detective’s name – just described him as, “shorter, heavyset, glasses, balding.”

They sat down shortly after Thompson’s murder, and Gustafson told them about taking D’Loc to her house. The detectives asked Gustafson to take a look at a photo throwdown – basically, a lineup of mugshots.

They asked …

Gustafson: Do you recognize the individual that was sitting on the couch when I was over there the night that Sunny was murdered?

Sottile: It was pretty clear to Gustafson that they’d spoken to D’Loc, and he’d told Quakenbush about the guy they’d met that day at Thompson’s apartment – this supposed roommate. In the upper left corner was a photo of Jesse Johnson

Gustafson: I said I can’t identify him. I don’t see him.

Lang: What was their response?

Gustafson: Well, are you sure? And then that was pretty much it.

Sottile: Gustafson didn’t really recognize anyone, and he thought that was it. But he said not long after, the detectives wanted to meet a second time, and show him the photos again. Were any of these people Thompson’s supposed roommate?

Gustafson: The second time I saw ‘em, I just told ‘em, no, I can’t ID them.

Sottile: Of the photos shown, Gustafson wasn’t sure any of them were the person he had seen. Again, he thought that was it, but then the detectives came back a third time. They showed him the same photos.

Lang: OK, tell me what happened the third time.

Gustafson: The third time both detectives were there and they were saying that, well, D’Lo’s identified one of these as the one that was there. I said, well, I can’t. I can’t do what I can’t do. I can’t say something if I don’t, you know. And not Quakenbush, but the other detective said, “Well, D’Lo’s already identified the individual as this guy.”

Lang: OK. Did he point at a particular …

Gustafson: 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: Gustafson said Quakenbush’s partner pointed to a photo of a Black man and told him it would be “financially advantageous” to pick that guy’s photo. This was the guy D’Loc said he saw.

Gustafson said it was pretty commonly known that Salem police had paid informants in the drug scene. Some were making a thousand dollars off good information they gave to the police. It’s not really news that Salem P.D. used paid informants. It’s kind of standard, right? We’ve all seen “The Wire.” But there’s a difference between what paid informants do and what Gustafson is describing. He’s saying they were offering money for him to specifically pick out Johnson.

Gustafson: I was just totally flabbergasted by it. I couldn’t believe he said it. And I told him, I said, “No, I can’t do that, because I can’t recognize him as the individual. I will not do that.” It just was against my morals and my ethics to do something like that. And to this day, and since then, I stand on what I did was the right moral thing to do.

Lang: What was their attitude towards you in terms of, did they seem upset with you or?

Gustafson: I think the guy that wanted me to do it was upset with me, yes. And I told him I just can’t go there. And he was upset with me, yeah. Quackenbush wasn’t so much, but this other joker was.

Lang: Did you ever have any conversations with either Quakenbush or his partner about what evidence they had against this person?

Gustafson: Yeah, I did. They were telling me that he had this jewelry, and he was trying to sell it and pawn it, or trade it, but that doesn’t mean anything in my world.

Lang: And why is that?

Gustafson: Because quite often jewelry was used as money for drugs if you didn’t have money. Most often you never got your item back, either, because it was more valuable than what the dollar value was. So, it’s not uncommon for someone to have Sunny’s jewelry. It just isn’t.

Sottile: Gustafson was not called as a witness at Johnson’s trial, and he would later say that he would have told Johnson’s original attorneys about his encounter with the detectives - if they had asked him.

When we came back to Fred Gustafson’s place to give him back his papers, we found him on the back patio smoking cigarettes with some ladies.

Sottile: Remember how you said, “I bet you’re going to read these and have more questions.” We do.

Gustafson: Those were such horrible times.

Sottile: I can’t say he was excited to see us, but he agreed to answer some more questions. So we followed him back to his room, and I asked him about his reaction to the detectives offering him money to pick the guy they pointed at in the photo throwdown.

Sottile: You sounded pretty fired up about that, in that you were like, that’s not how I operate. So tell us a little bit. Could you tell us that story when he showed you?

Gustafson: I wouldn’t play along with what he offered me money for. No way. I wouldn’t do it. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t that kind of person. I mean, I had my morals, even though I got messed up with a bunch of bad people, I still had my morals and I would stick to ‘em.

Haas: What did you think when he said that to you?

Gustafson: That blew me frigging away. I was so upset, man. I could not believe that they did that, to try to get me to point out someone that I didn’t think was the … no, I don’t even know the guy.

Haas: A lot of people feel like a police officer is someone you can trust. You think that …

Gustafson: … they’re going to be above that kind of shit. I’m sorry to cuss, but …

Haas: That’s OK.

Sottile: You’re fine.

Gustafson: That was just so out of line with what I believed law enforcement should be doing, but they’re trying to set it up to get someone nailed.

Sottile: He didn’t think D’Loc killed Thompson, said he didn’t strike him as the killing type. He told the police he had no clue who killed her. D’Loc also didn’t know.

I reached D’Loc on the phone one day. He said he didn’t want to sit down for an interview, said that when the police arrested him around the time of Thompson’s murder, and charged him for drug possession, it ruined his life. It took a long time for him to get things back on track. And he won’t ever go back to Salem.

Gustafson didn’t understand what proof they had that the man they saw at her apartment was the killer. What Gustafson said amounts to us as another allegation of racism on the part of the Salem police.

The first was from Patricia Hubbard – the neighbor who lived across the street. She said detectives waved away the information she had about a white man running away from the scene. She said, someone with the department said in no uncertain terms, a Black person had been killed and a Black person would go down for it.

And here, Gustafson was saying police only had eyes for one person – Jesse Johnson – and they were willing to pay people to imply he was involved. Hubbard and Gustafson don’t know each other, and neither had obvious beef with the local police.

Johnson’s attorneys knew they had found something meaningful when they located Gustafson. He’s a former state employee whose life had gone off the rails because of his addiction – and yet, he still said he wasn’t willing to take what amounted to a bribe.

Attorney Lynne Morgan wanted to put him in front of a jury if prosecutors took Johnson back to trial.

Lynne Morgan: His whole story, I just thought Fred was going to be such a great witness.

Sottile: She said to her, it was clear evidence that Salem police led a biased murder investigation.

Morgan: They really lean on him pretty hard. And ultimately, Fred says – and I don’t have any reason to not believe him, considering everything in this case – that they tell him it would be to his financial advantage if he picked Jesse.

Sottile: The problem with Gustafson, though, is he just has a hard time remembering things now in his older age. We have his testimony, but when we talked to him, he would repeat how bad that time in his life was and how much he didn’t want to remember it.

But another person was eager to talk about that time. And, in fact, no one had ever seriously interviewed her before I called.

Sottile: I was going through all the police files on it, and I noticed your name, or what I imagine is your maiden name, and that you had called and said that you were a newspaper carrier at the time. Do you remember this?

Janelle Osborne: Yes, I do. I do remember that. I was parked in a parking lot and I saw somebody leave the area. I clearly remember that night.

Sottile: When Ryan and I dug into the Salem police’s files, we scoured hundreds of pages. We checked every fact we could find against court records and interviews we had already done. We noticed that in Detective Mike Quakenbush’s early reports on the Thompson murder, he discussed the calls that came into the department offering tips. He talked about the pilot, John Shaw, calling.

Remember: John Shaw was the guy who said he’d seen a Black man coming out of the bushes near the house on 12th and Shamrock around 6 a.m. that morning.

After he called, Quakenbush drove to the murder scene again, specifically to meet with Shaw. In his report, Quakenbush wrote, “Mr Shaw indicated he has excellent vision, as he is a pilot.” As we’ve told you, Shaw was treated like a star eyewitness. They made sure the jury knew he was a helicopter pilot with the Army National Guard – essentially, someone who could be trusted.

But here’s the thing: In Quakenbush’s own notes, he talks about another person who called in with a tip. A person who saw the same request for information about Thompson’s murder. This person did not testify at the trial. In fact, this person’s name has never been brought up by anyone. Not the prosecution, not the defense, not the police.

Her name is Janelle Osborne. She was Janelle Tomason back in 1998. In Quakenbush’s April 1998 report, he wrote that she …

Conrad Wilson: “ ... called the police department after seeing the article in the Statesman Journal newspaper regarding the death of Thompson.”

Sottile: This is OPB reporter Conrad Wilson reading the report for us.

Wilson: “Tomason told me she delivered newspapers, and was out doing her deliveries in the vicinity of the victim’s residence.”

Sottile: Janelle told the police that …

Wilson: “ ... between 3:30 and 4 a.m. on March 20, 1998, she observed a white male adult walking north on 12th Street near the gravel parking area to Morningside school. Tomason described the individual as a white male adult, approximately 25 into their early 30s in age.”

Sottile: Janelle described the clothing the guy was wearing, and that he had long scraggly hair and was unshaven. But there’s nothing else about her in the police files.

Which is weird, because she said she was outside the house right around when the murder happened. This parking lot she mentioned – we had been there before, back when we were first reporting around 12th and Shamrock, looking like creeps.

Haas: So we’re in this parking lot that is at grade with the street, and it’s like 12th Street is kind of on a hill here, right? Like we are going uphill.

Sottile: Which makes it even more interesting, because I think Patricia Hubbard’s view from the back of the house is actually the best view of Harriet’s apartment, unless somebody was sitting in this parking lot.

Turns out, somebody was in this parking lot – Janelle. We didn’t know that when we first started.

Janelle doesn’t live in Salem anymore. But after I called her, one day she offered to drive a couple of hours to meet us at the elementary school parking lot next to Thompson’s house. Her husband and their grandson came along. They were wearing matching camouflage Cabela’s gear. It was pretty cute.

Osborne’s husband: We’ve been together for a little over five years and she had never told me about this. And she gets this message from you she was like, ‘oh my God, I had put that out of my head.’

Sottile: It was a chilly winter day. The wind was blowing as traffic whizzed past us. And Janelle said being back here after all these years – it was a lot.

Osborne: So I started to panic when I saw the streetlight up here right now. I was telling my husband, I’m starting to get a little bit of anxiety about this. And I am angry that the police never contacted me after it. Nothing. I never heard anything from any judge, no lawyers, no anything.

Sottile: We asked her to take us through what she remembered from that night back in March 1998. Back then, Janelle was 18. She was a young mother. Each morning, between 2 and 4 a.m., she went and picked up her papers at a nearby distribution center, and then she came here.

This makes me feel like a dinosaur to say this, but I will anyway: For those of you born after the downfall of print media, let me just say here that, the way it used to be was that daily newspapers were printed at night. That way newspaper carriers could pick them up and have them delivered by morning. Newspapers were like a slower Twitter. You just had to go outside to pick up your tweets.

Osborne: I would leave the distribution center and find a parking lot, and I would just usually roll. Well, this area here was my first route. I mean, I always rolled my papers here, but sometimes I would be here at two o’clock in the morning, other times I would be here at 4:30.

Sottile: It was dark, and she was quietly rolling her papers. She wanted to finish up so she could get back home before her kids woke up.

Sottile: So, where were you? Show us exactly where you were.

Osborne: OK. So, right now, this is totally different. It was not paved. This area was gravel.

Sottile: She said the parking lot used to be up higher than it is now. So, from Thompson’s house, it would have been a pretty steep uphill slope. Now, it’s more gradual.

As she sat there, a man came running from the direction of Thompson’s house.

Osborne: And then I was like, wait a second. That’s really weird for somebody to be running at 3:30, 4 o’clock in the morning. And the person ran this way.

Sottile: So they ran right past you?

Osborne: They ran right by me. but as he was coming up, he turned and he looked at me. And I made sure to keep eye contact with him because I was like, I’m a woman. I’m by myself. I have my own small children at home. I need to make sure I get home. So I looked at him, and I kept watching him until I couldn’t turn my head anymore. Then when I couldn’t turn my head anymore, I looked in my side view mirror to make sure he kept going, and I had locked my doors. I know he heard my doors lock.

He kept on going. So I was like, that just felt really weird. He looked scared. Like, he looked scared when he saw me and he just kind of had this deer in the headlight look.

Sottile: If you had to physically describe him.

Osborne: He was a white man. He was very rough, scruffy-looking. To me, he had the look of, maybe he had been either homeless or he had been on drugs.

Sottile: Let me interrupt here with two points. The first is that this description of a scraggly-looking white man is pretty much exactly what Patricia Hubbard said she saw that night sitting on her porch – a guy with long, unkempt hair running out of Thompson’s house and up along 12th Street, straight past the elementary school parking lot.

The other thing I think is worth noting is how different Janelle’s description of this encounter is from what was in Quakenbush’s report. His report says Janelle saw a man walking past her car. But both she and Hubbard said this guy was running.

Osborne: On the news, they had said that there had been a person that was murdered, and I was like, oh my God, I was right there. I was like, no, I’m not going to do that over there anymore. I called my supervisor and I was like, ‘hey, you need to get somebody else because I do not feel safe in that area anymore, because the person who did this saw me.’ I’m not sure how good of a look he got at me, but I got a good look at him.

Sottile: We showed Janelle a picture of Jesse Johnson, and asked if there was any chance this was who she saw that night.

Osborne: That is not the person. That is not.

Sottile: That’s the guy who went to prison for 25 years.

Osborne: Yeah. No, that’s not the guy.

Sottile: These were photos that we knew had been shown to Patricia Hubbard during her deposition. After we showed Janelle that picture of Johnson, we scrolled through pictures on my phone of white men who were questioned during this investigation.

Osborne: Nope. Nope. No. That kind of looks like him.

Haas: He looks similar or?

Osborne: No, no. The way, it’s his eyes. It’s his eyes. That look right there is what I had looking at me.

Sottile: Even though she said this guy wasn’t an exact match for the man she saw, this person she picked out is the same person Patricia Hubbard noticed as she scrolled through these photos a decade earlier. At the time, Hubbard wrote “without beard/facial hair this could be the man that ran from the house.”

We stood there and talked to Janelle for a little while. She didn’t know Hubbard, and hadn’t heard that someone else had told the police they’d also seen a scruffy looking white man run from the scene. She didn’t know Fred Gustafson either, who said the police offered him money to pick out Johnson from the lineup.

She hadn’t thought about that day in 1998, and had no idea that Jesse Johnson had been convicted of killing Harriet Thompson until I called her. After she called her tip into the Salem police station, she thought she’d done her part. The case left her mind. She didn’t follow the news of the trial, six years later.

But knowing all this now, she said what happened to Johnson really bothered her.

Osborne: If you talk to the guy, let him know I believe him. I know it was not him. It’s so sad that somebody just lost 25 years of their life for something that they didn’t do, and for something that the police didn’t investigate very well.

Sottile: When we sat down with Detective Mike Quakenbush at the diner in Salem, we had a lot we wanted to ask him about. We wanted to talk about the “offed the bitch” statement that Shorty made, and how he recanted that later, said Stoelk and Quakenbush coerced him to say it.

We wanted to talk about Patricia Hubbard and Janelle Osborne saying they saw a white guy running from the scene right around the time of the murder. We wanted to talk about the fingerprint on the vase, which we couldn’t be sure was even real. We wanted to understand why it appears the detectives didn’t record any of the times they interrogated Johnson.

But, perhaps more than anything, we wanted Quakenbush to explain to us why all these different people with no connection whatsoever were telling us the same story. That the police ignored them. That Quakenbush and Stoelk failed to consider white suspects so they could charge a Black man.

And next time, that’s exactly what we do.

Sottile: One of the detectives on this case pointed to Jesse Johnson’s photo in a photo lineup and said, a thousand dollars if you pick him.

Quakenbush: I don’t know about that.

Sottile: Neither do I.

Quakenbush: If somebody did, that would be totally inappropriate. That’s the whole reason you have a photo lineup.