Detectives from the Salem Police Department examine evidence outside Harriet Thompson's home on March 20, 1998. Jesse Johnson was convicted and sentenced to death for Thompson's murder in 2004.
Documents obtained via public records request / OPB
William Elmer Cross had 21 separate mugshots taken by police in Monroe County, Florida, from 1998 until 2008. Most were for petty crimes, but several were because of more serious felonies, like battery.
In 1998, just before he arrived in Key West — the seat of Monroe County — Salem police investigated Cross as a potential suspect in the murder of Harriet Thompson. That happened even as police held Jesse Johnson, who would eventually receive a death sentence for the crime.
Salem police records of the Thompson murder show that detectives focused, at times, on Cross as a potential suspect because he had dated Thompson and because two people in the local drug scene told them he had bragged about killing a Black woman.
Around town, many people knew Cross by his nickname, Machine Gun Bill. While his criminal record doesn’t reflect any weapons arrests, one man who knew him told OPB that Cross had a penchant for violence. “He was always talking shit about killing people and shooting guns,” Robert Naylor, a Salem resident, said in an interview.
In April 1998, Detective Mike Quakenbush interviewed Cross about the Thompson murder. But the investigator’s questions mostly focused on Johnson, who had already been arrested for the crime. Cross said he knew Johnson because they had both been homeless in Salem and slept under the same bridge, and he denied ever hearing Johnson talk about killing anyone.
A week later, on April 8, Quakenbush questioned Cross further after he saw him walking near the intersection of 13th and Hines. During that interaction, Cross told Quakenbush about a dream he had that involved the killing of a Black woman, and described his vision in grisly detail. The details of his dream closely resembled the Thompson murder, mimicking particulars about the victim “gurgling” in her last moments that were unknown to the public.
Quakenbush wrote a report about the dream — a report he didn’t file until three months later — and said that a warrant should be obtained in order to further question Cross and to solicit “Grand Jury testimony regard his statements about being involved in killing a female, as well as his ‘dream’ involving the stabbing death of a female.”
But when the detectives went looking for Cross again, he seemed to have disappeared.
Months later, in December 1998, Cross resurfaced. He was across the country when marine patrol officers in Key West pulled him over for drunkenly driving a boat. Police also suspected Cross had been involved in the beating of a man and woman there with a pipe and a chair. When they ran his name, an outstanding warrant came up for him in Salem, Oregon.
Stoelk and Quakenbush requested for the police in Florida to swab Cross’s cheek for DNA testing and also put in orders to extradite him back to Oregon — which Cross fought until at least June 1999, according to records. DNA technology used by the Oregon State Lab at that time did not match Cross to DNA material found at the scene.
By the year 2000, Cross was back in Salem, housed in the Marion County Jail, and police were questioning community members again about him. When Cross was eventually released from custody, he called a woman named Malia. They’d dated in the past, and now he asked her to pick him up.
In a recent interview with OPB, Malia recalled asking Cross why he had been in jail.
“I said, ‘What’d you do? What happened?’ I go, ‘Did you kill somebody?’” she recalled. “He didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no, but he said, I will be protected from whatever he did.” She said Cross did not elaborate on what that meant.
Court filings show that Cross was struggling by the year 2000 with anger management and substance abuse issues. After he was convicted of assaulting a woman, a Marion County judge ordered him to undergo mental health treatment and take anger management classes, as well as take medication. But he failed to do so. In the next two years, he continued to violate his parole and committed at least two other assaults in the process.
In 2008, Monroe County, Florida, police found his body floating in a ditch. A medical examiner found he had alcohol in his system, and declared he had drowned.
Listen to all episodes of the “Hush” podcast here.