‘Hush’ Episode 8: A History of Violence

If Jesse Johnson did not kill Harriet Thompson, then who did? It’s a question police and prosecutors rarely - if ever - considered. We take a deep look at three men who all had connections to Thompson and violence in their pasts, including one man who told Salem police detectives in 1998 he “dreamed” of a murder eerily close in circumstances to the killing.

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Leah Sottile: Before we get started: This podcast contains graphic language, descriptions of violence and discussions of domestic violence, which might be disturbing. Please keep that in mind in choosing when and where to listen.

We had always hoped Marion County District Attorney Paige Clarkson or a member of her office would sit down for an interview to explain their views on Jesse Johnson’s case now that he is a free man.

We tried for months to make that interview happen.

But they declined.

So we sent the DA’s office a long list of questions to answer over email.

They declined to answer those, too.

Instead, they sent us a three-page statement articulating their take on the case. And let’s just say the prosecutors weren’t exactly receptive to the issues we uncovered in our reporting. They defended their position.

Crystal Ligori: “The state’s inability to prove a 26-year-old murder after a reversal does not mean Jesse Johnson is innocent.”

Sottile: This is OPB host Crystal Ligori reading from that statement.

Ligori: “Rather, it means he’s not guilty. Unbiased media coverage of this case would explain that difference and provide a full and accurate account of the evidence against Mr. Johnson.”

Sottile: Prosecutors repeated a lot of the same talking points you’ve already heard in this series.

Ligori: “Key witnesses, including the witness to Mr. Johnson’s confession that he ‘offed the bitch,” referring to Ms. Thompson, have died.”

Sottile: But they didn’t address that Shorty recanted and was far from a reliable witness. They said that blood DNA at the crime scene doesn’t disprove that Johnson committed the crime.

Ligori: “Ms. Thompson was an adult woman entitled to have people in her residence. The jury concluded that the other DNA and fingerprint evidence in Ms. Thompson’s residence was unrelated to her murder.”

Sottile: Overall, the district attorney’s statement clings tightly to the fact that the jury in 2004 believed the story they told at trial, so they must be right.

Ligori: “Does the state’s inability to prove a 26-year-old murder mean that Mr. Johnson did not kill Harriet Thompson? It does not.”

“This dismissal is not a concession that Mr. Johnson is innocent. Instead, he is legally not guilty of the crime of murder.”

Sottile: By issuing a statement, the Marion County DA was rejecting an opportunity to be transparent. We wanted them to have a fair chance to respond to our investigation, but now, all we can do is respond to their words here. And many of them are misleading at best.

Here’s an example:

Ligori: “At no time was the Marion County District Attorney’s office presented with evidence that investigators held a racial bias against Mr. Johnson or Ms. Thompson, who was also Black.”

Sottile: Prosecutors may or may not have had evidence of racial bias when Johnson was convicted, but they have such evidence now.

You heard us read the email prosecutors sent to Johnson’s defense attorneys when they dropped the charges. They said a Salem detective in 2023 warned them about an accusation of racial prejudice in Quackenbush’s past.

And, well, you heard him yourself in the last episode.

Quakenbush: I detained him and he goes off on this rant about how all the n**** need to kill all the white people, and I wish all the white people are on an island where we could kill. And n**** got to kill white people and just went on this huge rant about that. And so I responded back to him with his same language and two officers walked up. But because I said the word n**** and that’s all they ever heard, so then they reported me.

Sottile: So maybe the DA’s office didn’t have evidence at the time of the trial that any Salem police officers had said something specifically racist about Johnson – but it doesn’t take a law degree to recognize the bias going on.

Still, maybe the least credible point in this entire statement from prosecutors is this:

Ligori: “To date, no other suspect has been identified by any witnesses nor by any connection to physical evidence.”

Sottile: With all due respect, to believe that you’d have to want to believe there were never any other viable suspects. Because there were two sets of footprints in blood at the scene. There was the untested blood in spot 15. There was the semen. There were two eyewitness accounts of a white guy running from Harriet Thompson’s house. And there were more than a few claims that the police and forensic scientists deliberately focused on Johnson.

So prosecutors may claim there were no other credible suspects who could cast reasonable doubt on Johnson’s conviction – but there were.

In fact, there were at least three.

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

This is episode eight: A history of violence.

Bruce Donohue: Follow me over here. I’m going to show you something real quick. OK.

Sottile: Bruce Donohue knows a lot more about Salem’s drug scene than most people.

Donohue: You guys really should come to the mission and take a tour sometime.

Sottile: He works at the Union Gospel Mission - a Christian charity. Each day he loads up his van with coffee and snacks.

Donohue: I’ve got some granola bars here. I’ll take some of those out with me and you’ll see these protein bars here.

Sottile: And ventures out to encampments where people live outside. He offers food and Bibles to anyone who wants them.

Donohue: I was actually out of one of the camps out there on the Mission Street overpass yesterday. It’s about a dozen people living over there. A friend of mine that I’ve known for about 29 years, 30 years probably. He died out there about six months ago, right there underneath that overpass.

Sottile: Donohue does this outreach work now because he was once addicted, too.

Donohue: He and I used to hang out in some of the same dope houses and run the same streets and stuff, and he just never quit.

Sottile: Part of the reason we came here was because of who Donohue hung out with back in 1998.

Donohue: There is kind of an under culture of drug dealers, liars, robbers and thieves and stuff. And if you’re not acquainted or into that, you might miss it.

Maybe I’m going to give you this because it’ll give you some perspective on myself

Sottile: He showed us his old mugshot. His face is unshaven, chin tilted up, a little defiant.

Donohue: I do believe it, because that was my 43rd mugshot in this county.

That’s a familiar look right there. But that was my last mugshot.

For some reason on this trip, in the backseat of the police car wearing handcuffs – they took that picture of that very day – I found myself talking to God and I was like, ‘God, I’m done.’ And it’s like the most meaningful conversation I ever had in my life.

Sottile: Donohue shows that mugshot to anyone who will look at it.

He said it proves that anyone can turn their life around. Back then, people called him Bandana Bruce. He’d steal from anyone. He told us that one time he carted a safe full of stolen guns behind his bicycle as he rolled through Salem.

Now, he’s handing out coffee and has an office across the street from police headquarters. A miracle, he says.

We wanted to talk to Donohue because he was one of the many people police interviewed about Harriet Thompson’s murder.

Donohue: I had actually bought some jewelry with some methamphetamine and later on when I found out it came from a homicide, I immediately shed it.

Sottile; Jesse Johnson sold him some of that jewelry as he tried to get drugs. The police later informed Donohue that it came from Thompson.

Donohue: I was looking at some forgery charges, and some other charges at different times during all those years. They said, “Hey, if you want to work out something on these charges you got, all we want you to do is help us with some information for us on this other thing.” Do you follow what I’m saying? Yeah.

Ryan Haas: Who said – I mean, that was like Quakenbush and Stoelk, the detectives that worked this case who said that?

Donohue: Yeah, some of those guys. Yeah.They actually DNA tested me and stuff like that. They were trying to track down, they were looking, trying to find out who did it. You know what I’m saying?

Sottile: Donohue believes what the police told him: that Johnson killed Thompson for her jewelry.

Even though his life is completely different now, it seems like Donohue is still a little mad at Johnson, because that jewelry made the police suspicious of him. And he didn’t know all we had learned about how the police handled this investigation.

So we asked him about other people who were around that drug scene and knew Thompson.

Sottile: Did you ever know a guy named Pooh Bear?

Donohue: I’ve encountered Pooh Bear.

Sottile: Do you remember what you encountered with him?

Donohue: Man, that’s a lot of stuff. I remember he had some involvement with the drive-by shooting just a few blocks north here. That was so many years ago. That’s ridiculous. But other times, more recently, actually, not really recently, but in the last five years probably I encountered – I believe I encountered him in one of the homeless camps up there behind Walmart.

Sottile: Back in the first episode of this show, we told you about the time Harriet Thompson smashed through a drug dealer’s window, afraid for her life.

That drug dealer was Pooh Bear. He hasn’t been charged with a crime in this case, so we’re just going to refer to him by this nickname.

Court records gave a clearer indication of why Thompson was so afraid of him. A police report from that incident noted that she might have stolen money from Pooh Bear.

Other records we found show Pooh Bear was involved in serious crimes. In 1990, he was convicted of stabbing a guy in the stomach, and served time for it.

In 1993, he was arrested after shooting a teenager in the parking lot of a gas station.

And he has a particularly noticeable record of violence against women. In 2001, he violated a restraining order against a woman when he left a note on her door that said she, “hadn’t seen him flip out - yet.”

Another time, he slammed a pair of bicycle handlebars across a woman’s face. Later, he violated a stalking order.

I reached some of these women, but they said were too terrified to talk knowing that Pooh Bear is still around Salem somewhere. Last year, Ryan and I started knocking on doors looking for him after he didn’t return our social media messages or emails.

Sottile: Hi.

Haas: Hi. We are looking for (redacted). Does he live here?

Lady: Does he have a flat back, dark blue car?

Sottile: I don’t know what kind of car he drives. He’s like maybe a kind of a shorter Black guy. Does that ring a bell?

Lady: I don’t know.

Sottile: We looked all over Salem for him, but had no luck.

Newspaper archives shed a little bit more light though.

One time, there was a photo of Pooh Bear that ran alongside an article about gang violence.

In the picture, he was actually photographed punching someone. I can’t remember any time I’ve seen something like that on a front page.

We asked other people about Pooh Bear, too, like Fred Gustafson — the guy who saw Thompson the day before she died – who later claimed that police offered him money to pick Jesse Johnson out from a lineup.

Fred Gustafson: Pooh Bear, yeah. He was a bad dude. Pooh Bear was a bad dude.

Haas: What do you mean?

Gustafson: He’d kill you. Not a problem at all, taking you out.

Sottile: Gustafson said one reason he didn’t want to rehash that time in his life was because he was still afraid of Pooh Bear.

Salem police took interest in Pooh Bear briefly in 1998.

About a week after Thompson was murdered, Detective Craig Stoelk raided Pooh Bear’s place, and hauled him and a man named Victor Valenzuela into the station for interviews. Valenzuela is dead, so we’re using his real name.

There are no recordings of those interviews. I know. You’re so shocked.

Stoelk did take a photograph of Valenzuela’s hand because he noticed he had a big straight cut right across his middle and ring fingers.

That photo is in the police files. It’s a shot of his hand, with a big cut. But if you look closer, on the table in the background of the photo, very clearly, you can see a mugshot of Jesse Johnson.

Whoever killed Thompson attacked her viciously with two knives – the broken chef’s knife and the steak knife. The doctor who performed her autopsy said she had defensive wounds on her body from fighting back.

So was the cut on Valenzuela’s hand an indication he was involved?

The story Pooh Bear and Valenzuela separately gave Stoelk was that they had been moving furniture, and Valenzuela sliced his hand in the process

But since those interviews with Valenzuela and Pooh Bear weren’t recorded, we don’t know why Stoelk was also showing them Johnson’s mugshot.

It seemed like even when the police were looking at other people in this case, things always led back to Johnson.

Both Valenzuela and Pooh Bear were DNA tested. and neither was a match for DNA found at the crime scene.

Both denied any involvement in the murder.

Pooh Bear had a violent criminal history — much more so than Jesse Johnson. And Pooh bear and Thompson had a tense relationship. She was afraid of him — so much so, that she jumped out a window to get away from him. But then, when she relapsed not long before her death, she was around him again.

Neither Pooh Bear or Valenzuela’s DNA was found at the scene.

But there is one person we know for sure whose DNA was at the crime scene.

The person whose DNA was found inside the murder victim.

Sottile: DNA evidence may offer the best chance of solving Harriet Thompson’s murder at this point.

We’ve told you about spot 15 – the blood on the sink where the killers cleaned up – and how it didn’t belong to either Johnson or Thompson.

But one piece of DNA we haven’t spent any time talking about is the semen medical examiners found during Thompson’s autopsy.

At that time, the lab wasn’t able to figure out who that DNA belonged to. And so — kind of like the sneaker print in blood found at the scene, and spot 15 — the semen was just kind of a question mark.

But in 2015, that semen was tested again. and that time, it got a hit.

It belonged to a man we’re going to call “Gary.”

Det. Anton:So this is Detective Anton with the Salem Police Department. I’m at the Fort Vannoy Market and Deli in, are we in Merlin or Grants Pass?

Gary: It’s Grants Pass.

Det. Anton: OK. Grants Pass, Oregon.

Sottile: In 2016, two detectives from the Salem police drove several hours south, to Grants Pass, Oregon to meet with Gary. By then, Stoelk and Quakenbush were long retired, and the Johnson files were in new hands.

The detectives knew Gary’s DNA was found inside Thompson, but they didn’t approach this conversation like they were talking to a murder suspect.

Det. Anton: So you’re not under arrest, you don’t have to talk to me. If you become uncomfortable with the conversation, just tell me and we’ll stop or whatever.

Sottile:The detectives asked Gary a bunch of questions. When did he live in Salem? He said 1998, he lived there with his ex-wife.

Photographs of Gary from that time show he had a black mustache and sometimes wore a cowboy hat. He drove a green pickup.

The detectives asked if he did drugs back then. He said yeah, marijuana. Nothing else.

They showed him a photo of Harriet Thompson.

Det. Anton: Do you remember this woman?

Gary: I can’t say that I do. No idea who that is. And to be honest with you, when it comes to the colored folks, the only one I knew was the one that i worked with.

Sottile: Gary told the officers he worked at a place called Deluxe Ice Cream back in the late 1990s. It was a local ice cream manufacturer in downtown Salem.

Gary said he didn’t know many Black people in Salem, and he claimed that during that time in his life, he was trying to clean up.

The police asked Gary if he used crack cocaine, but he denied ever touching the drug.

Finally, the detectives told him why they were there.

Det. Anton: So, according to the criminalist report, we recovered DNA from inside her vagina.

Gary: Really?

Det. Anton: Yeah. and that matched yours.

Gary: How?

Det. Anton: I don’t know. So let me.

Gary: What the heck?

Det. Anton: Yeah, before we get too wound up on that.

Gary: That’s crazy.

Sottile: As you can hear, Gary seemed pretty surprised by this news.

The police asked him if they could get a DNA swab from him for their records — and Gary asked if he should get a lawyer.

Gary: Should we stop and get a lawyer?

Det. Anton: Well that’s…

Gary: What’s this all about? What’s the exact nature of the..?

Det. Anton: So, she’s a victim of a homicide.

Gary: A homicide. Oh my God.

Det. Anton: Yeah.

Sottile: Gary consented to the DNA swab, and the police detectives never asked if he had any involvement in Thompson’s murder.

Det. Anton: So did you, again, not get too personal, did you ever use prostitutes back then? Did you ever go out to Portland Road?

Gary: I have. I did. This lady could have been one of ‘em that I picked up, but I don’t remember.

Sottile: The detectives asked if he’d ever picked up prostitutes in those days. They knew Thompson sometimes exchanged sex for drugs.

Det. Anton: Would you remember if you picked up a Black female as opposed to a white female?

Gary: I think I did once.

Sottile: He described picking up a Black woman who was hitchhiking one night, and taking her to have sex in a K-mart parking lot. That lot is about a mile away from the apartment that Thompson randomly showed up at the night of her death, asking the guys if they’d do drugs with her.

Beyond this, the interview with Gary didn’t really go anywhere. After some cajoling, he admitted he’d paid a woman for sex.

And to be honest, even though it’s wild his DNA was inside Thompson’s body, there’s a chance it’s circumstantial. Another red herring. It could mean, simply, they had sex the day she died, and that’s it.

But we also know from our own reporting that Gary misled these detectives. It happened when they asked him about fights he had with his ex-wife back in the 90s.

Det. Anton: How many times did you have police contact as a result of that? I just found one.

Gary: Oh, with the wife and I?

Det. Anton: Yeah, the police were called and they kind of sorted it out.

Gary: I think they only came out to the house once.

Det. Anton: OK, is that when you got hit in the head with the…

Gary: Oh when she cut me in the arm?

Det. Anton: Well, I thought I read that you got hit..

Gary: Oh no, they came out a couple times. They’ve been out a couple times then, because the last time they came out was when she hit me over the head with the back of the lid, the tank on the toilet.

Det. Johnson: I bet that hurt.

Gary: Yeah, it did.

Det. Johnson: Those are pretty hard.

Gary: I couldn’t believe they arrested me instead of her.

Sottile: Gary said police came to his house once or twice when his wife called 911 during domestic disputes. One time, his wife hit him in the head with the lid from a toilet tank.

The detectives chuckled and said, “I bet that hurt.”

But this is a pretty glossed-over picture of how violent Gary really was.

In 1990, he was arrested for robbery and assault after he beat a guy up and stole jewelry from him. A couple years later, he hit a guy in the face with a rifle.

Records we obtained from Salem police show at least seven times police came to his home for domestic violence involving his ex-wife.

We tried reaching out to Gary. We left him all kinds of messages. We even mailed him a letter and had several relatives let him know we wanted to talk, but he never replied.

So we reached out to his ex-wife. The one listed in all those police reports.

We’re going to refer to her as Claire. She was pretty clear with us, all these years after their divorce, she is still terrified of Gary.

At her house, with all her pet birds and dogs around her, she told us that they met around 1996 at an Alcoholics Anonymous campout.

Claire: I’d seen him before, but never met him. And he goes, “If you want, I’ll ride home with you.” Very helpful, very nice. And thought he was a great guy. And then we got married and it was great at the beginning, and then things changed.

Sottile: Once the red flags started coming, they kept coming. At first Gary seemed so sweet and kind, but then he showed another side of his personality.

Claire: He would hit me, yell at me, threaten to kill me. “Yeah, I’m going to kill you and nobody’s going to care. You’re going to be dead and I’m going to kill your children,” and “Bitch, just shut your fucking face.” I mean, it was awful. I was scared.

Sottile: But Claire stayed. She was caring for her kids while going to school and working for the state of Oregon as a child welfare worker.

Claire: I could see the signs of abuse. I mean, I am very trained in it. I understand domestic violence. I understood the families being broken up. I mean, all of it. I mean, I understand it and I was living in it. I mean, I started noticing him doing drugs, marijuana, selling marijuana. One time, I witnessed him doing cocaine at a Superbowl party

Sottile: What Claire is saying indicates another possible lie from Gary to those detectives. He told them he didn’t use cocaine, but Claire and another person we spoke to told us he would frequently use hard drugs.

Claire told us about one time in late September 2001 when she was woken up by Gary, who was on a drunken rampage. He had flipped over a table.

Claire: So he is just flipping everything and throwing things, yelling, and, “I work my ass off and I come home and look at this goddamn place. You’re a piece of shit.” And oh my God, I am crying. So, I grabbed a knife and I told him, I said, “get the fuck out of here now.”

Sottile: As the fight continued, Claire said she dropped the knife, ran into her bedroom, opened the window, jumped out, and sprinted to her car. All the while, she said, Gary was chasing her. She was afraid for her life.

Claire: I get into the car, lock it. And he jumps on the hood of my car, and I have the phone in my hand, and I said, “ I’m calling 911.”

Sottile: When the police arrived, they found Gary out in the toolshed.

Claire: The officers told me that when they went into the shed, he was breaking the knives.

Sottile: He was breaking knives.

The police report from Claire and Gary’s fight confirms an officer did find him breaking knives – which is a pretty weird thing to do. And remember, at the murder scene, the police found a broken knife that someone had stepped on and snapped.

But that didn’t come up when Salem police went to interview Gary in 2016.

Lynne Morgan: I mean, it was a total softball interview.

Sottile: Here’s Lynne Morgan, Jesse Johnson’s attorney.

Morgan: It was like, “You didn’t kill her, did you?” “No, I did not.”

I mean, it would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.

Sottile: Despite all of this – the semen, the history of violence – Lynne said she isn’t certain Gary is the person who killed Thompson.

Did he abuse his ex-wife? Reports show that, yeah, he did. But Thompson’s murder was on a whole other level of violence.

Morgan: It’s a very, very specific kind of murder. It’s basically a torture murder, and you don’t see those very often. It’s pretty unusual, and it’s a very specific kind of person that kills women that way.

Sottile: There was one other person we could tell had caught the eye of the police, from looking at their files.

Someone who was hanging around Jesse Johnson in 1998. Someone who had his own history of extreme violence.

William Elmer Cross drowned in 2008, so we’re using his real name. Some people around Salem called him Machine Gun Bill. I can only assume why that would have been.

Bill Cross looked kind of like the unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, before he went into the woods. He had really blue eyes and an unkempt beard.

As far as we can tell, Bill Cross had been around Salem since at least the 1970s. In 1975, when he was 19, he was arrested for shoplifting. and from there, his crimes got bigger and bigger.

He was arrested on myriad assault and harassment charges, and multiple DUIs.

The month after detectives Stoelk and Quakenbush had arrested Johnson across town, they swept up Bill Cross for questioning. And — hallelujah — they recorded the conversation they had with him on April 1st.

Quakenbush: This is Detective Quakenbush. With me in the interview room is Mr. William Cross. Mr. Cross, I’d like you to understand that the statement you’re about to give me is being recorded. Do you understand that?

Bill Cross: Yes,I do.

Quakenbush: You are under arrest for a probation violation warrant, but that’s the only thing. You haven’t been arrested on any new charges. Do you understand that?

Cross: Oh, yeah. I didn’t report.

Sottile: In the month after Thompson’s murder, the police spoke to Cross more than once.

And, I just have to say, one of those interactions was positively bizarre.

In a report, Quakenbush wrote that he’d heard from his partner, Detective Stoelk, that Cross had made statements about killing a woman. So Quakenbush went looking for Cross. On April 8th, he found him walking around Salem.

All I have are Quackenbush’s notes from that interaction.

Here’s OPB reporter Conrad Wilson again, reading from that report:

Conrad Wiison: “I asked Cross about those statements and he indicated he had made them, however, he was just kind of kidding around and bragging to his friends about … Cross then related to me that he did have a dream, however, about a man that held a woman down by her hair and used a double-edged knife to stab and kill her.”

Sottile: Quakenbush went on to describe the dream — and be warned, it’s grizzly.

Wilson: “In Cross’ dream, he stated he could see she was cut in the throat area and could see this woman’s windpipe. Cross also states in his dream, he was aware that a neighbor of the victim gurgling for approximately three minutes before the victim died.

In Cross’ dream, he stated he had a clear enough picture of the suspect that he could identify the suspect down to his white shoes. Cross, however, declined to provide a description of the suspect he saw in his dream when he saw this woman getting killed.”

Sottile: This report is so weird because it matches details of this murder scene so closely — and I can’t think of any other instance in my career when I’ve seen someone confide in a police officer about their dreams.

Either way, Quakenbush didn’t file his report about the Bill Cross dream sequence until three months later. But when he did, he said they should question him more and bring him before a grand jury to evaluate his “dream”, which he puts in quotes.

A grand jury doesn’t do dream interpretation, but they do decide if someone should face charges. But there’s no indication formal charges were filed against Cross in this case. And there’s a chance the grand jury he was referring to could have been related to bringing charges against Johnson. It’s unclear.

Back in the interview room, with the tape running, Quakenbush asked Cross nothing about the dream. But he did ask all about – you guessed it – Jesse Johnson.

Quakenbush: As a result of living here in Salem, have you had an association or met a Black man by the name of Jesse Johnson?

Cross: Yes.

Quakenbush: About how long ago do you think you met him?

Cross: It’d be before November. It was last summer. We were under the bridge all summer.

Sottile: Cross and Johnson had been homeless and slept under the same bridge back in 1997, and Johnson confirmed for us that they did know each other. Quakenbush asked Cross a lot of questions about jewelry Johnson might have had. He talked about some silver rings, some earrings.

Quakenbush: At any time since you’ve known Jesse, did he ever tell you about having any involvement in killing anyone?

Cross: No.

Quakenbush: Did he ever tell you that any jewelry or property that he had that he was trying to get rid of came from a dead person?

Cross: No.

Quakenbush: OK. Maybe not that he’s telling you, “oh, I killed somebody,” but just that, “hey, this came from a dead person.”

Cross: No.

Quakenbush: Nothing like that?

Cross: No.

Quakenbush: Did he ever tell you that he knew a Black lady by the name of Sunny?

Cross: No, but I knew Sunny. I just didn’t know Jesse knew Sunny.

Quakenbush: Does Jesse know Sunny?

Cross: I know he knows her now because my Big Momma told me.

Quakenbush: Were you any part of killing this woman, Sunny?

Cross: Oh no.

Quakenbush: No. And do you know, has anyone told you anything about who killed her?

Cross: No.

Quakenbush: OK. So what you’re telling me is that you have no idea who killed her?

Cross: Nobody.

Sottile: Nine months later, in December 1998, the detectives went looking for Cross again, but they couldn’t find him.

Eventually, he turned up in Key West, Florida — just about as far as you could be from Salem. Florida police arrested him for drunkenly driving a boat.

The Salem police had the cops in Key West swab Cross’ cheek for DNA and send it back to be analyzed, but it didn’t match to DNA found at the murder scene.

Two years later, in the year 2000, Stoelk and Quakenbush were still conducting interviews about Cross. They spoke to a woman Cross had choked while screaming, “Die bitch. Die.”

They also talked to a guy named Robert Naylor, who was around the drug scene then. Naylor told his parole officer Cross may have been involved in killing a Black woman.

About seven months into reporting this story, it felt like Ryan and I had knocked on just about every door in Salem. And one day, we were out looking for Robert Naylor.

Sottile: OK. Let’s go see Robert naylor.

Sottile: The house was surrounded by cars in various states of repair. There were boxes on the porch filled with empty bottles. A seat pulled from a van. Ryan had gotten ahold of Naylor’s brother, and so we knew this was where he lived, but he hadn’t called us back.

Sottile: Because generally you’ve got a pickup though, right?

Haas: No, I got a pickup once and I left two voicemails.

Sottile: The place was silent, and our knuckles were getting worn out knocking on all these damn doors. So we headed back to the car to make a plan.

We were about to drive away when we saw a couple of guys come out of the house where we’d just knocked, so we hopped out again and ran over.

Man: Hello, how are you?

Sottile: Good. How are you doing? We’re looking for Robert.

Man: Robert?

Sottile: Robert Naylor.

Man: Wait a minute, I’ll go check.

Sottile: Thank you.

Sottile: He went into the house and came back out a couple of minutes later.

Man: He said he’d be out in a minute.

Sottile: Oh, cool. Who’s this?

Haas: Hi buddy.

Sottile: Within a few minutes, a very sweet pitbull, Robert Naylor, and about five other people came streaming out of the house. They’d all been inside when we knocked. Maybe if Ryan knocked less like a cop, more people would come to the door.

Anyway, Naylor was wearing a tucked-in, white T-shirt with his church’s name and logo on it. He had long hair and a beard.

Naylor: Hi.

Haas: Hi, Robert.

Sottile: Hi, Robert. I’m Leah Sottile. This is Ryan Haas, we’re journalists from Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Naylor: OK

Sottile: I think maybe Ryan’s been..

Haas: Yeah, I left some messages. I don’t know if you got ‘em.

Naylor: I think so.

Haas: OK. OK. We were just hoping to ask you some questions. We were working on a story, and we came across your name and we were wondering if you might remember anything about a guy named Jesse Johnson.

Naylor: Um hm.

Sottile: Oh, you do?

Naylor. Yeah. My girlfriend’s here, too. Yeah, Stacy Satter.

Haas: Oh, Stacy’s here?

Naylor: Yeah.

Sottile: Oh my goodness. Are you serious?

Naylor: Yeah.

Sottile: Oh, can we talk to you both then?

Haas: OK.

Sottile: That’s amazing.

Sottile: We had looked all over town for Stacy Satter. She was the person who was with Shorty and Johnson when they were trying to exchange the jewelry for drugs. And she said Johnson never confessed to a murder. Basically, she said, Shorty was lying.

Months of searching and we couldn’t find her anywhere and then, just when we stopped looking for her, there she was.

She came out of the house with Naylor, wearing a dress over corduroy pants and a sweater, a crystal earring dangling from one ear. They both sat down on the van seat on their front porch.

Sottile: We’re with Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Satter: Stacy.

Sottile: Yeah. Nice to meet you.

Satter: You too.

Sottile: You’re kind of a celebrity to us because we’ve been looking at this Jesse Johnson case. What do you remember from that?

Satter: Oh, I remember it all. I’ve told it plenty of times. I don’t know. I’d probably do better to answer questions than go over the whole thing.

Sottile: Yeah, so we’re looking back. Jesse obviously was in prison for 25 years, so you heard he got out, right?

Satter: Yes, I know he got out.

Sottile: Right. OK, and he always said, i didn’t do it, and…

Satter: Which is what I always said.

Sottile: Right, right. I think early on in the case there was this whole thing the police got really fixated on, which was something about you and Donald Blocker, who I think went by Shorty.

Satter: The mystery really began when they proceeded with the court case because I found out later – because I knew he was lying about saying Jesse had admitted to it because the three of us were there.

I was trying to say this is not true to begin with in front of the judge. And the attorney, just the entirety of my legal advice was, “Shut up and do whatever they tell you and you’ll be OK.”

Sottile: This all went down so long ago, but Satter talked about it like it just happened.

Satter: Don Blocker was a convicted felon, and he changed his story three times before court convened the first time. So I didn’t really understand why they were, his word was the whole entirety of the prosecution pretty much because, but they tricked me.

Sottile: Satter said police and prosecutors leaned on her to testify at Johnson’s trial.

Haas: Yeah, I could tell from when we were reading the trial transcript, it really didn’t seem like you wanted to be there and you felt like you were forced to be there and stuff.

Satter: Oh yeah, I was. I totally was.

Naylor: It didn’t felt, she was forced. They took her to jail twice.

Sottile: Were you guys together?

Naylor: Off and on.

Satter: I was forced, yeah. Yeah, I was forced completely

Sottile: She said at the trial, the DA put her up on the stand, and she just told the jury what was true. Yes, she walked with Shorty and Johnson to try to sell some of the jewelry in 1998. But, no, Johnson never said he killed someone to get it.

Satter told us that prosecutors showed her pieces of jewelry while she was on the stand. But it wasn’t the jewelry she remembered helping Johnson sell for drugs.

We asked if Satter knew Thompson. She said no, not at all. Naylor was quiet but then he piped up.

Sottile: Oh, interesting.

Haas: Had you met her?

Naylor: Nuh uh. I know a person that was – the one that I think that ended up killing her was a guy named Machine Gun Bill.

Haas: Oh. Yeah, we had heard about Bill Cross.

Naylor: That’s who killed her. He had hooked up with her before in the past, is what I had heard.

Satter: oh, that used to be his girlfriend, yeah. That did used to be his girlfriend.

Sottile: Did you guys ever know him?

Naylor: Oh yeah, we knew Machine Gun Bill.

Sottile: I know he’s not alive. What was he like?

Naylor: He was crazy.

Sottile: In what way?

Naylor: He was always talking shit about killing people and shooting guns.

Sottile: Naylor said that after all these years, he still thinks Bill Cross was the killer. And Naylor’s stuck to this story for 25 years.

Naylor: I knew Jesse had nothing to do with it. But if you look at all the testimony, you can see how they made lies and ended up convicting him.

Sottile: We really wanted to know if Bill Cross ever told anyone he killed Thompson.

One weekend, I was making some calls, because yes, I’m an extremely cool person who works on the weekends. I got in touch with a woman who dated Cross, and when I told her what we were working on, she said we should come out to her place.

Her name is Melia, and she lives in the little town of Dallas, Oregon — actually not too far from where Patricia Hubbard lives. She said she met a Cross through a friend. She thought he was good looking, a little rough around the edges.

Melia: He was charismatic. The most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen. You just looked into those eyes and just kind of fell in love with him.

Sottile: She said they were together for about five years.

Melia: Oh, he was always violent with me. I was a single mom on my own when I first met him, and I had my own place. And it’s like, “No, come on, let’s go and let’s go to California.”

Sottile: At one point, Bill, Melia and their baby daughter moved south.

Melia: I had no idea what to expect, and i thought, “OK, we’re going to have some furniture and we’re going to have a nice house and a home.” But no, there was nothing but gun shooting and stuff like that.

It was a scary situation. We had no furniture. We were just sitting on bare floors and stuff like that with a mattress.

Sottile: She told Cross she didn’t feel safe, and she mentioned she was thinking of going back up to Oregon.

Melia: He came home and he was high. It was scary because he goes, he put a gun to my head and stuff like that, and said, “You’re never taking my daughter away from me.”

Sottile: Melia said that she was terrified for her life, and for her daughter’s. But then she said the Cross kind of snapped out of it. They came back to Oregon.

He would be really kind, then super violent and cruel. Anything could make him fly off the handle. And then, suddenly, he’d disappear for a while. They were together for several more years until Melia finally moved out.

Sometime around 2000, she got word that Cross was in the Marion County jail, and when it came time for him to get out, he called her to pick him up.

Melia: I picked him up and I said, “What’d you do? What happened?” I go, “Did you kill somebody?”

He didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no, but he said, I will be protected from whatever he did. So, I don’t know.

Sottile: OK. Did you think it was possible that Bill was involved?

Melia: Yeah, but did he do it? I dunno.

Sottile: Melia had spoken to people involved in the Johnson case before, but it had been years. And we were clear with her that we didn’t know if Bill Cross was actually involved, only the Salem police had taken a look at him.

We sat there for a while talking, trying to understand who Cross was, and get a sense from her — someone who loved him and had been victimized by him — what might have been possible.

Melia: But during that time, something happened. I think we had the van there at that time.

Sottile: You had the what?

Melia: Van. black van.

Sottile: Melia just dropped this on us. She said Cross drove a van. A black van.

Remember what Patricia Hubbard said she saw the night of Thompson’s murder?

Hubbard: 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: In Hubbard’s telling, a black van pulled up to the scene, a white man got out, and went into Thompson’s house. And then there was screaming, and that same guy came running out of the house, toward Morningside Elementary.

Janelle, the newspaper carrier, saw a guy too. Said he was running, and she said remembered the look in his eyes.

Later we showed some pictures of Cross to Janelle and she said she didn’t think that was who she saw. It had been dark that night, and now it was so long ago.

But from Melia’s perspective, it’s absolutely possible that Bill Cross could have killed someone.

Before we left Melia’s house she went over to a big cabinet in her living room, and pulled out a tall purple glass bottle with a stopper in the top, and a strand of seashells wrapped around it. She plunked it on the table and said, meet Bill.

Sottile: You have his ashes?

Melia: Yeah. He goes, no matter what you do, Melia, flush me down the toilet!

Haas: That’s what he said he wanted done with his remains?

Melia: Yeah.

Sottile: These three guys – Pooh Bear, Gary and Bill Cross – we can’t say for certain any of them were involved in Harriet Thompson’s death. But each of them presents details that raise questions: the black van, the broken knives, their combined history of violence against women.

When we spoke to Janis Puracal from the Forensic Justice Project, she said DNA testing may be the best way to find Thompson’s killer after all these years. The process has gotten way better since 1998.

Puracal: As DNA advanced, and they did the more advanced testing, they compared it to Jesse whereas they didn’t go back and exclude some of these other folks. As DNA methods advance, you get more and more information and then we find out how we were doing things wrong in the past. So I never close the door entirely.

Sottile: So even though all of the people we’ve mentioned in this episode — and lots of other people — were tested back in the early days of the case, Puracal said she wouldn’t necessarily exclude them as potential suspects today. DNA testing has improved since 1998. And while you still can’t test cremains — like Bill Cross’ ashes — his relatives and children could be tested, if they were willing.

We know about how violent these men were in part because Claire and Melia survived to tell us. But there’s still a lot we don’t know. Like what Harriet Thompson was going through, or who else was around who might have been violent, or if these three men posed the most risk. The violent man she was afraid of, like Pooh Bear; the violent man she took a risk on and slept with to feed her addiction, like Gary; or the violent guy she dated who bragged about killing women, like Bill Cross.

What we do know is that police talked to all three of these men quietly, even as the Marion County district attorney said, we have only ever had one suspect: Jesse Johnson.

Here’s the problem with trying to figure out today who killed Thompson. It’s been 26 years.

Even if we sat in front of her killer now, would we actually know it? If Johnson didn’t do it, whoever did has successfully kept this secret for decades. The killer could be one of these people we discussed in this episode, or none of them. We just can’t know.

And without new evidence like DNA testing, the truth may stay hidden away. Because, despite what the Marion County DA said in their statement, justice isn’t lost after decades. It’s lost at the beginning. It’s lost in an investigation when bias, or mistakes, or plain laziness puts detectives and prosecutors on the wrong path.

Johnny Lake – the educator and writer who talked to us about the police killing of Salvador Hernandez – said he’s seen Salem police go down that path so many times.

Lake: My first day in Salem, I got pulled over. I had an afro. It was the biggest afro you’d ever seen. And they pulled me over, asked me, get out of the car. I’m 68 years old yesterday. I came to Oregon when I was 19. Is anything different for a Black person like me driving up and down the street in the community where I’ve lived my whole life? I still get pulled over by police.

Sottile: When detective Mike Quakenbush told us he didn’t talk to Janelle, the newspaper carrier, because looking through photos of white men would have taken too long, but a Black person was easier to hone in on, it’s symptomatic of the bigger problems in Oregon’s criminal justice system. Who gets believed, and who doesn’t. Who gets treated as a suspect, and who doesn’t.

That’s not history, or a case in the 90s we should all forget because it’s over now. That’s Oregon.

Lake: This is a white community. Oregon is a white state, and it’s not skin color white. It’s attitude white. White people have to be innocent. At the end of the day, white people have to be innocent no matter what has happened.

Sottile: Lake said police, prosecutors and many people in Salem don’t want to reckon with racial injustice. It’s easier to pretend these issues don’t exist, to say, only Jesse Johnson could have killed Harriet Thompson.

Lake: Because it’s a confluence of politics, a confluence of business, a confluence of history, everything. I think Salem is a combination of some of the worst issues, and a community of people of color who I think have been oppressed so long that they have gotten used to it.

Sottile: In their statement, the District Attorney’s office said the only reason they dropped the case against Johnson was because they couldn’t prove his guilt anymore beyond a reasonable doubt. Time had degraded the evidence.

But there is more doubt now – after decades – because it’s easier to see the truth of the case, if you want to.

These other potential suspects have only come out over time and that’s where the doubt is coming from.

In their statement, the DA’s office also offered its condolences to Thompson’s family.

Ligori: “Our hearts go out to Ms. Thompson’s parents, her five children, as well as the extended family she never had the chance to meet. The family simply wants this tortured ordeal to end. According to Paige Clarkson, Marion County district attorney, “Failing to secure ultimate justice for Ms. Thompson’s family will forever be a disappointment to me.”

Sottile: We can’t help but ask – who has the power to make the ordeal end?

The DA and the police could push for DNA testing that’s never been developed. They could seriously question living suspects instead of leaning on the questionable “offed the bitch” story as their best evidence.

But that would take work.

And it would take a willingness to admit something went wrong in this case. And that for years, one man sat in a cell waiting to be killed by the state of Oregon.

Next time, on the final episode of this season of Hush, we talk to people who say the time has come for Oregonians themselves to face the role they played in trying so hard to kill Jesse Johnson.

Taylor Stewart: Who our society believes deserves death for a wrong committed simply transitioned from lynching to the death penalty.

Frank Thompson: Too many people lean forward and listen to me and go, what’s it like to kill somebody?