On March 20, 1998, police in Salem, Oregon, discovered the body of 28-year-old Harriet Thompson inside her apartment. Within a week, they arrested Jesse Johnson for murder. Johnson drifted west after a troubled childhood in Arkansas and a stint in prison there. In Salem, he was known around town as a homeless drug user. A random encounter with Thompson the week before she was killed changed Johnson’s life forever.
Today we’ll listen to the first episode of OPB’s new podcast “Hush.”
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. There is an expression that everyone is the hero of their own story. But what if someone started telling a story about you and you had no power to change it? In 1998, the state of Oregon began forming a narrative that Jesse Lee Johnson was a homeless drug addict, a thief and a murderer. But that was far from the whole story. When Johnson was sentenced to death, his case exposed the fuller story of Oregon, a lesser known one that people don’t always talk about.
Today, we’re bringing you the first episode of OPB’s new podcast, “Hush.” It’s an investigative podcast focused on the buried truth about critical stories in the Pacific Northwest. The first season focuses on Jesse Lee Johnson. Host Leah Sottile will take it from here.
Leah Sottile: Before we get started: This podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence. Keep that in mind in choosing when and where to listen.
In 1999, two Oregon detectives traveled to North Little Rock, Arkansas.
Detective: Do you have any problem with this conversation being recorded?
Johnson friend: No, sir.
Detective: Okay.
Sottile: The detectives came to Arkansas to speak with this man about a guy he grew up with in the projects of Little Rock. A guy named Jesse Johnson. They asked all kinds of questions ‒ what kind of kid was Jesse Johnson? Was he good in school?
A story stuck out to him about his old friend, and it’s almost like a scene from a movie like “Stand by Me.”
Johnson friend: We was on the railroad tracks and we was going to the Boy’s Club, and a friend of mine got his shoestring or something tangled in one of the spikes, and the train was coming and we were running. We had ran off and left him. We used to catch the train…
Sottile: A train was bearing down on this kid stuck on the tracks. Everyone left, but Johnson turned back.
Johnson friend: I was on one side and Jesse was on the other side, and my other friend, he had fell, and he was hollering. I didn’t hear him, and Jesse went back and pulled him out.
Sottile: People told that story for a long time: the day Jesse Johnson saved a kid’s life. The day Jesse Johnson was a hero.
I’ve heard a lot of stories about Johnson told by prosecutors and investigators from the state of Oregon. In those, he’s not a hero. He’s a villain.
Jesse Johnson: Hello, my name is Jesse Johnson and I’m 62 years old.
Sottile: Johnson’s the kind of person who has always had obstacles in front of him, and many of those play into those two stories people tell about him.
Johnson was born with intellectual disabilities as a result of his mom’s drinking. As a kid, he was kind and quiet. Sometimes other kids at school bullied him. Both of his parents struggled with substance abuse. When he was 16, his father was murdered. Later, his mother was killed, too.
People around the neighborhood noticed Johnson getting in more trouble, taking more rides in the back of a police car. People worried about what would happen to him, that he’d drift.
Johnson: From an early age, I always wanted to be grown.
Sottile: As a teenager, Johnson committed crimes, but not very well. Once he stole a parked car that was still running. The driver was talking to a police officer when it happened, so Johnson didn’t get very far. Another time, he took a woman’s lottery ticket and left her a joint and a note that said “have a nice day.”
In Arkansas, he bounced in and out of prison. When he got out in 1996, he went to California.
When I met Johnson, he wasn’t a young man anymore.
Sottile: So, tell me that story. How’d you end up in Oregon?
Johnson: Well, just traveling up the West Coast on the way to, I was going to visit Seattle and see the ocean. I haven’t seen the ocean yet. I haven’t been to the ocean.
Sottile: It’s been 26 years since he got to Oregon. He has a shaved head, a graying mustache, tired eyes. For all this time, he’s been living in Salem, Oregon, about an hour south of Portland.
Sottile: Why Salem? Why did you stay in Salem?
Johnson: Well, I wasn’t planning on staying in Salem. It was a different vibe for me. I couldn’t do all the things that I was used to doing in Salem. I slowed down a lot. It was more peaceful for me.
Sottile: In Salem, he kept up his old habits. He’d break into cars and steal stuff. The older Johnson got, the more the lifestyle wore on him. He was in his late 30s when, one day, he had this thought: Maybe in this small city, I can stay out of trouble.
Johnson: Because not too many Blacks, you can’t really just move around and the lifestyle that I was living ‒ thugging ‒ couldn’t do a lot of it here in Salem.
Sottile: Johnson knew he’d stand out because he is Black. Oregon is still very white. In the year 2000, just 1% of Salem’s population was Black. It was the result of racist policies that have been handed down through the generations since the state’s founding, and Oregon’s whiteness is an important factor that shaped Johnson’s time in Salem.
By Johnson’s logic, if he stood out, it would keep him on an honest path. He wanted people to see him, and if they saw him, he had to be good. Johnson wanted to be seen and, well, Salem saw him.
Johnson: I did five years and 10 months in county. And then I was convicted of murder and aggravated robbery. Went to death row for 17 years.
Sottile: When the state of Oregon put Jesse Johnson on death row, they told their own story. This wasn’t the person who would save someone’s life from an oncoming train. In their story, Johnson is a cold-blooded killer and a drug addict. He was someone who would do anything ‒ anything ‒ to get his next fix.
Johnson lost control of his own story after a chance encounter ‒ an encounter that caused him to not only be seen in Salem, but to be examined and scrutinized for the next 25 years, for people who never met Johnson to decide who he really was.
From Oregon Public Broadcasting this is Hush, season one: The State of Oregon vs. Jesse Lee Johnson. I’m Leah Sottile. This is episode one: Jesse.
Salem is Oregon’s state capitol, and that’s pretty much what the small city is known for: politics, policies, government jobs.
If you ask some people in Salem, they’ll say this place has changed a lot since the 1990s. People say this used to be a nice place. They point to the tents off the freeway. They point to people doing drugs. They say Oregon’s capital, and the state as a whole, has just lost its shine. Poverty and addiction make people uncomfortable. For a long time, this part of Salem was less visible, but it was still there.
Here’s an example: It was January 1998. A 28-year-old Black woman jumped through a glass window of a first-floor apartment building on a gravelly road in South Salem. Police got a call. The woman jumped out the window to get away from a well-known drug dealer.
Her name was Harriet Laverne Thompson. She grew up in the Salem area. Sometimes she went by her middle name: Laverne. Even still, other people called her by her nickname, Sunny. In this show, you’ll hear us refer to her as Thompson, as to not add to the confusion.
This jump out the window came at a moment in Thompson’s life when she was struggling to get clean from her addiction to crack cocaine. She was a couple weeks out from her 28th birthday. She had five children, though she didn’t have custody of any of them, and she’d been cycling in and out of rehab programs.
Etta Marshall knew Thompson back then. She told me she remembers when they met. She instantly liked her.
Marshall: Sunny was very outgoing and, I mean, she just loved to talk. She loved to talk to people. It’s like she never met a stranger. She would walk in the room and she’d meet you and she would talk to you. She would talk to you like she’d been knowing you all of your life.
Sottile: They knew each other because of the drug scene. But then, Etta started to clean up, and when she’d run into her old friend around town, Thompson would confess that she was struggling to get sober and stay sober.
While we’ve been reporting on this story, we’ve come to understand there was a generosity among Salem’s drug users that might surprise some people. People letting friends crash on their floor or couch until they could get on their feet. Lending people money. Thompson gave people a hand where she could, too.
Marshall: I would always say to her, Sunny, you know what? It is never too late. I said, you know what? If you can’t do it today, maybe you can do it tomorrow. Never too late. That’s what I always used to tell her all the time, never too late.
Sottile: Etta says that addiction made Thompson really vulnerable. She depended on shady people, like that sketchy drug dealer, to feed her drug habit. She was the kind of woman who could handle herself. But still, feeding an addiction sometimes meant putting herself in compromising situations.
Etta says she remembers Thompson as so much more than a drug user. She was a mother, and a daughter, and just a really fun person to be around.
Marshall: And like I said, Sunny was a good person. Sunny would give you her last dollar in her pocket if you tell her you were hungry. That’s the type of person Sunny was. She was just a good person. She made her bad choices, but you know, we all have. She made her bad choices and it cost her in the end.
Sottile: A couple of weeks after she jumped through that window in mid-February 1998, Thompson moved into an apartment with a woman she met in rehab. It was a white house on the corner of 12th and Shamrock Street, divided into two apartments, next door to an elementary school. It seemed like a good situation ‒ a safe place for her to get back on her feet. She moved into the ground-level apartment, and hung up photos of her kids and a church calendar. She brought her tapes with her ‒ Christian music ‒ and some pulpy crime novels. Her mom started helping her out with the rent.
It’s important to know that even though Thompson’s house had a 12th Street address, it was on the corner. So her driveway and her front door were only visible on Shamrock.
Thompson was back in a drug treatment program, and pretty quickly she had the apartment to herself. Her roommate got moved out. Things seemed to be settling down. One day, her ex brought over her oldest kids for a sleepover.
We don’t know the exact details of March 19, 1998. But this is the day that Harriet Thompson’s path crossed with Jesse Johnson’s. Through records, it’s obvious that her addiction got the best of her again. She relapsed.
Johnson: I met Harriet with another female, and that was the first two Black females that I had seen in Salem. And I got Harriet’s information as Sunny.
Sottile: He knew Thompson as Sunny, and told us he had only talked to her once before their conversation turned to drugs.
Johnson: I asked her about buying some drugs, and she said that her dealer was coming from Portland later on that day.
Sottile: That afternoon, Thompson repeatedly paged another drug dealer. His name was Datrick Swafford. He went by the nickname D’Loc.
In fact, Thompson made a bunch of calls that day, trying to get her hands on some drugs. She missed a counseling session at her drug treatment program. One person she called was her aunt. Thompson wanted to borrow 10 bucks, and her aunt knew what she wanted to use it for.
Thompson’s aunt: She shouldn’t have been doing the things that she was doing at the time. I tried not to be a part of any of it. I didn’t want anything to do with any of it. I tried to tell her not to do those things and she had a mind of her own.
Sottile: Around 9 o’clock that night, she was across town. Thompson didn’t have a car, and generally walked or took the bus around Salem. She showed up at the door of some guy she knew. Thompson had some crack, and asked if they’d smoke with her so she didn’t have to do it alone. They said sure. Afterward, one of the guys offered to drive her home. He dropped her off in her driveway, watched her walk toward her house, and left.
Back home, she kept calling people. Thompson called the guys she smoked with so many times, they unplugged the phone. She called her aunt again. She called her best friend. She paged the drug dealer, D’Loc, and he stopped by her apartment again to give her more drugs. She was spiraling.
At 10:45 the next morning, Thompson’s landlord was knocking on her front door, there to let in some inspectors from the local housing authority. No one answered. He knocked again. Nothing. Finally he used his key and went inside.
Landlord: I called to see if Laverne was there. I could hear a TV or a radio playing in some other part of the house. Nobody answered. The lights were off. It was dark inside.
Sottile: He flipped on the lights.
Landlord: When I turned that light on, I could see to my left, what looked like a lot of paint on the floor and a toilet plunger sitting upright in the dining room area on the linoleum floor.
Sottile: MTV was blaring on the TV. He walked deeper into the apartment toward the living room, thinking maybe Thompson hadn’t heard him.
Landlord: As I stepped far enough ahead to see around the wall into the front room area, I could see a body, or an individual, lying on their back on the floor in the front room area.
Sottile: Harriet Thompson lay dead on the living room floor. There was blood around her body, dripped down the hallway and into the bathroom. Her landlord backed out of the apartment, ran back down the driveway, banged on a neighbor’s door, and called 911. Officers from the Salem Police Department quickly arrived.
Alan Graham: Test, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. My name is Alan Graham. I’m a detective with the Salem police department. It is Friday, March 20th.
Sottile: Detective Alan Graham and other officers closed off the scene with red caution tape, and tried to get a sense of what happened during the night inside Thompson’s apartment.
She had been stabbed dozens of times. On the floor, that toilet plunger the landlord saw was covered in blood, not paint. Nearby, there was a broken chef’s knife with no handle. On the blade, there appeared to be a shoe pattern in blood, like someone wearing sneakers stepped on the knife and broke it.
On the way to the bathroom, there appeared to be another shoe print ‒ a kind of lug pattern, like from a pair of work boots.
In the bathroom, police found the handle of the chef’s knife stuffed in the toilet, alongside a smaller steak knife, like someone actually thought they could flush knives. All through the bathroom, there were all these drops of blood, which made investigators think that the killer, or the killers, tried to clean up. Deputies fanned out across the neighborhood to see if anyone heard anything. And, of course, their first stop was to talk to the neighbors upstairs.
Upstairs neighbor: The kids were in bed and John and I were just getting ready to turn in. Our room was down at one end and the kids were down at the other end. But in the hallway there was a door that led to the downstairs apartment.
Sottile: That neighbor told the police that she and her boyfriend had actually gotten home pretty late after working a graveyard shift. They had just put their 6-year-old to bed.
Upstairs neighbor: We were just getting ready to go to sleep and I heard what sounded like screaming or crying, and I thought it was my daughter.
Sottile: The boyfriend thought he heard a scream of “help help!”
Upstairs neighbor: We both got up to go check on her, and as we walked down the hallway the noises stopped. So we peeked in on the kids anyway ‒ all three of them ‒ just to make sure that they were still sleeping, and they were, and then we figured that maybe the sound was coming from downstairs.
Sottile: When they didn’t hear anything more, they just shrugged and went back to bed.
As the police started talking to people, they began to understand that Thompson’s apartment had a lot of foot traffic ‒ a lot of people coming and going. The Salem police officers went door-to-door on Shamrock asking questions. But the police didn’t really get any useful information. It seemed clear that Thompson had been killed in the night when most people had been sleeping.
Producer Ryan Haas and I tracked down detective Alan Graham. He’s retired now. Sounds pretty much the same as 1998. Maybe a little older. Still a cop, though. We met up with him in a coffee shop, and he asked us to show ID before he started talking. We wanted to hear about the early hours of a murder investigation, and what he was looking for.
Graham: It’s important to talk to people right away to get whatever they may have heard, seen, or not. And then to get a little bit of history on the house itself and the people that live there, if the neighbors know. And unfortunately, most neighbors don’t know who their neighbors are.
Sottile: Graham looked for people who might have known Thompson, and that meant talking to a lot of people who were also drug users.
Graham: A lot of times those people are reluctant to talk to you because they don’t want to get in trouble for being in possession of drugs or frequenting a prostitute and stuff like that. So you have to wade through all that business. And then people that, maybe they do frequent the house, but they don’t want to tell you they did because then they’re going to be presumed maybe a suspect. Even though, if they were totally honest and just tell you everything, you could probably eliminate them. Maybe, you know…
Sottile: The information the police got was sparse, and they didn’t know what they could trust.
Graham: Because we want the truth. I mean, that’s what we’re after.
Sottile: One thing they did learn was about that time Thompson jumped out the window. They heard she’d stolen from the drug dealer who lived there. Police also learned that Thompson sometimes traded sex for drugs. When medical examiners performed an autopsy, they found that there was semen inside her body ‒ a potential source of DNA.
Meanwhile at the apartment, lab technicians from the Salem police and the Oregon State Police started to collect forensic evidence.
Pretty quickly Graham had to get back to work on cases he already had, and so Salem police assigned the Thompson case to two of the department’s most well-known homicide detectives: a bald guy with glasses named Craig Stoelk, and a lanky redhead with a mustache named Mike Quakenbush.
Sottile: We met retired Salem police detective Mike Quakenbush at a diner in Salem on a typically rainy winter day. The parking lot was filled with tents and run-down RVs. A lot of unhoused people were living in the giant strip mall parking lot. Quakenbush sat down and ordered a drink.
Haas: Yeah, I wasn’t sure if you wanted food or…
Quakenbush: No, I have eaten. I’ll just have maybe an iced tea, OK?
Sottile: He’s older. The red hair is gray now, and his mustache covers his entire mouth. He wore a flannel with a Harley-Davidson t-shirt underneath.
Quakenbush established himself as a star detective in 1996 when he pieced together that a serial killer named Robert Silvera murdered people who rode freight trains. Quakenbush was friendly with Silvera at first. They talked for days. And then he surprised Silvera with all the evidence he had.
Quakenbush: As soon as they said that, he knew this was about murder. You could just see because he sat back like this. Because before he was, and he sat back and he looked around and stuff like, OK, he just played me.
Sottile: After Silvera confessed to several murders, Quakenbush earned a reputation as an officer who cared about people at the fringes. And ‒ true story ‒ a Britt, Iowa hobo festival knighted him for it.
Quakenbush: So we went up to Britt, and they gave me this little certificate that they’d printed up, and I was an honorary knight of the hobo round table. It was kind of nice that they felt that somebody cared enough to really look into people like them that are living on that fringe of society and that, by and large, most people don’t care about.
Sottile: Quakenbush remembers that Harriet Thompson’s murder was a tough case. The best witnesses they had – the upstairs neighbors – didn’t even peek out the window to see what happened, or call the police.
Quakenbush: The part that really aggravated me was the boobs that lived upstairs. They heard all this. They even talked about hearing her gurgle, and did not a goddamn thing. Probably could have saved her life if they’d have called the police.
Sottile: Without an eyewitness account, the detectives had to dig for a lead. It’s pretty clear from records that in the small city’s drug scene, the rumor mill kicked into gear right away. There was a lot of finger pointing. A lot of “he-said/she-saids” being thrown around.
The Salem drug scene ran on its own kind of economy, where all kinds of things could act as currency. If someone didn’t have cash, that wasn’t a deal-breaker. People were willing to trade all kinds of things for drugs, and one thing lots of people threw around was jewelry.
Quakenbush and Stoelk started to assemble a theory that maybe Thompson was murdered for her jewelry. Around town, the police start busting into known drug houses as they try to get information about who would have done this. Thompson’s drug dealer, D’Loc, had gone by her apartment several times the night she was killed.
Quakenbush: We arrested him. He had a warrant, I think.
Sottile: D’Loc had crack cocaine on him when he was arrested. But he told Stoelk and Quakenbush that he didn’t have anything to do with Thompson’s killing. He did give the detectives a sense of how frantic she was that night. She called him again and again. She didn’t have any money, but he said he gave her drugs anyway.
Quakenbush: He knew he was going to prison, but he was really cooperative because he knew Harriet.
Sottile: D’Loc said he’d been to Thompson’s apartment a few times in the week before she died, and on one of those earlier visits, he met someone else there.
Quakenbush: He remembered the guy was a Black male, and didn’t know his name or really anything about him. So what I did was, I took him in. We had a station in our department where we could access photos from Marion County.
Sottile: Quakenbush had D’Loc look at all the mugshots for Black men in the department database at that time ‒ more than 1,400 photos ‒ and D’Loc picked out eight from the bunch as a possible match for the guy he’d seen at Thompson’s apartment. Five of those photos were the same man ‒ a person named Jesse Johnson.
It’s clear that at this point in their investigation, the detectives started to focus exclusively on Jesse Johnson.
Meanwhile, the local newspaper had reported that a woman had been murdered in the white house on the corner of 12th and Shamrock, and told people to call the police station with tips. So in those days after the murder, calls started to come in.
One was from a helicopter pilot with the National Guard. He told the police that he was driving to work, passing by on 12th street around 6:00 am, and noticed a Black man walking out of the bushes near 12th and Shamrock. And it caught his attention because, as he put it, “I just had not noticed any Black individuals in that neighborhood.” The detectives started talking to drug users in town and suddenly everyone was nodding. Yep, that’s Jesse Johnson.
Detective Craig Stoelk: Jesse, do you know his last name?
Donald Blocker: I don’t know his last name.
Detective Craig Stoelk: Is he a white or Black?
Blocker: Black.
Individual #1: I didn’t know what she bought. I thought Jesse gave her some earrings.
Individual #2: Two guy’s rings, and then the rest girl’s, and then he had a girl’s bracelet, men’s, and a gold watch.
Individual #3: Yes. he put ‘em on me that afternoon, because I couldn’t get ‘em through the holes in my ears.
Detective Craig Stoelk: Okay. When you say he, Jesse put ‘em on?
Individual #3: Jesse put ‘em on me.
Sottile: No one seemed to know him, but everyone seemed eager to imply that he could have killed Thompson. And here is where we make a long story very, very, very short: Jesse Johnson, six years later, would be convicted of murdering Harriet Thompson, and sentenced to death for it. I’m sure you have questions. Believe me, we did too. And we’re going to get into all the details of this case over the course of this show.
At his sentencing, Johnson told the court. “I’m innocent. I didn’t kill Harriet, nor did I rob her.” But no one believed him. Not the police, not the prosecutors, not the jury, not the judge. Just before signing his death warrant, Judge Jamese Rhoades told Johnson: “I don’t believe I’ve ever had a defendant before me where there has been less basis for hope for his future redemption.” And so he went off to death row. The Salem police had solved the crime. Thompson’s family was told that the killer was behind bars.
I’ve spent a lot of my career as an investigative journalist, and that work often leads me to courtrooms, where I’ve reported on criminal cases. In the spring of 2018, I heard about Jesse Johnson’s case from a private investigator named James Comstock.
James Comstock: When people hear that I’m a private investigator, they get this idea that I’m following people around in trench coats, cheating spouses and stuff. And certainly there are elements of that that kind of come up, but that’s very different from the kind of work that a defense investigator does. Defense investigators are hired by defense attorneys who are working to defend people who are accused of crimes.
Sottile: I knew Comstock from other cases I’d written about. One day, we got together at a coffee shop in Portland, and he told me about the first case he ever worked as an investigator ‒ the Jesse Johnson case.
Sottile: I feel like when you and I first sat down to talk about this, you said, “I’ve been trying to prove for eight years how Jesse Johnson is guilty, and I can’t figure it out.”
Comstock: Yep. So, let me talk about that. Even though I believe in Jesse’s innocence, my job is to try to find out how he could be found guilty, and find the bad facts. A terrible investigator will go in with a Pollyanna view and just try to find good things about their client. That’s fraught. That’s a very big problem. So yes, even if we believe in our client’s innocence, we have to try to prove their guilt because we want to see what the DA will do.
And you’re right, I have said that to a lot of people, and that is absolutely true. I turned over stones like crazy in this case, trying to find, where is it? Where’s the smoking gun? Where’s the thing that makes Jesse guilty? I couldn’t find it. And that is wonderful and terrifying. The most scary thing in the world is an innocent client. A client who’s guilty, but maybe overcharged, maybe the sentence isn’t right. We do our best. We try to make justice happen, but the person is often even admitting to have done the thing. When you have a proper innocent client, it’s different.
Sottile: When Comstock first told me this story of his supposedly innocent client, I was skeptical. But in 2021 – 23 years after Johnson went to prison – the Oregon Court of Appeals added weight to what Comstock was saying. They said Johnson’s original attorneys were so ineffective, he deserved a new trial. That was extraordinary. But it didn’t mean he was free.
The district attorney’s office offered Johnson a deal to get out in 2021. He just had to plead no contest to Thompson’s murder. Meaning, he had to admit he killed her. Johnson refused, and insisted he was innocent. So there he sat in the Marion County jail – not guilty of a crime – but not exactly free either. Prosecutors said if he wouldn’t admit guilt, they’d take him to trial – again.
Two years later, in the summer of 2023, hearings for Johnson’s new trial were about to start. I’d talked to producer Ryan Haas over the years about this case, and that summer, we decided to officially start looking into it. We cleared our schedules for a lot of time in court. If Johnson really had been wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, it would say a lot about Oregon’s criminal justice system. So, we started reporting. We made records requests, read the original transcript of Johnson’s trial, and made arrangements to interview him behind bars.
But that interview didn’t happen. A few days before we could talk to him – on Sept. 6, 2023 – James Comstock called Ryan, then me, then Ryan. Then –
Comstock: Hey, Leah.
Sottile: Hey. How’s it going?
Comstock: Oh, it is quite a day.
Sottile: Yeah, not what I was expecting.
Comstock: No, us either. I thought maybe they would blink after the hearing, but they blinked before.
Sottile: Comstock had called to tell us that something extraordinary had happened. He said Jesse Johnson was going to walk out of jail in an hour and a half. 25 years in prison and now…
Haas: Okay, so we’re recording. So, we’re driving on our way to Salem. What’s going on?
Sottile: Jesse Johnson is being freed today from the Marion County jail, so we are driving furiously to make sure that we get there on time.
The story had suddenly changed. It wasn’t about which version of Jesse Johnson is true ‒ the hero or the killer. Now the question was … why? Why had this man spent decades in prison, and what does it mean for the state of Oregon to just let him go?
Haas: I’m sure you have a lot of things going through your head. I mean, what was the first question you wanted to ask Jesse?
Sottile: God, I don’t know. I was just thinking, I’ve got an hour and five minutes until we get there, and I’m like, okay, we got to figure out what we want to talk to him about. What do you even ask a guy that just got out of jail?
Haas: That’s the thing. Is it even…
Sottile: They’re going to let him out with no money. He has no family here. He’s a former longtime drug user. He has a lot of hurdles in his way. I just am like… It feels wrong to be like, so, are you excited?
We realized this was essentially a closed case. The entire thing would be available to us to request and understand from the inside-out. Investigative files are something you can’t get while a case is still open.
Haas: Leah, we can get the whole police file now.
Sottile: I know. Can we get it today?
Haas: We might be able to. I can call them tomorrow and say, hey, this case is closed. Can I have this thing?
Sottile: We beat Johnson’s legal team to the jail, so we stood around in the parking lot, awkwardly. There were some other cars, people waiting for their loved ones to come out. After a few minutes, I got a little nervous that Johnson was just going to walk out of jail and we’d be the only people there to see him. Like, what do you say? “Hello, you don’t know me, but I know all about you.”
Thankfully, Johnson’s lawyers pulled up. There was James Comstock – the investigator you heard from earlier ‒ and there were three attorneys: Lynne Morgan, Rich Wolf and Spencer Todd. All of the lawyers were smiling ear-to-ear as we followed them into an echoing white brick hallway in the jail. Lynne stepped up to a speaker, pushed a button, and said she was there to collect Jesse Johnson.
Jail clerk: Sounds good. He’ll be right out. Is there someone named Richard there?
Lynne Morgan: Yes, Richard Wolf is also here.
Richard Wolf: I’m here. Yep.
Clerk: Perfect. He’ll be right out.
Morgan: Apparently, I don’t have the same kind of gravitas.
Sottile: None of them woke up that day thinking Johnson was getting out. Comstock was at a federal prison, meeting with a client. Spencer was in court. Lynne and Rich were getting ready for Johnson’s hearings, which were planned for just a few days from now.
Morgan: I was reviewing all the motions, and making notes. I mean, I thought they would dismiss at some point, but I thought they’d make us run right up to trial.
Sottile: That afternoon, her phone rang. Johnson was getting out.
Clerk: You guys want to step outside? He’ll be outside in just a moment.
Wolf: All right. Thank you.
Sottile: And then… there he was.
Wolf: Look at this guy. Who is this guy here, sneaking out the side door?
Sottile: Jesse Johnson walked out the side door. He was wearing a light gray sweatsuit.
Wolf: Freedom. How’s it feel, brother?
Morgan: Yay!
Johnson: Oh yeah.
Todd: So great to see you, man.
Morgan: So great.
Sottile: He was smiling, looking down at the ground, a little sheepish that there were all these people waiting to hug him. Alongside him, a jail deputy was pushing a cart that contained everything he owned: three cardboard filing boxes. His lawyers all rushed around him like nervous new parents trying to figure out the right thing to do.
Todd: If you want to pull the car up.
Wolf: I’ll pull up. I’ll pull up.
Comstock: We’ve brought some clothes for you to change into, but we’ll get, we’ll get away from these nice people.
Sottile: The officer who walked him out hung around for a second, said the prisoners erupted in applause at Johnson’s release. And then, he offered Johnson a handshake.
Officer: Thank you for being great. Take care of yourself, man, all right? Be good.
Sottile: That surprised Spencer.
Spencer Todd: If you’re wondering at home how rare it is for a deputy to shake a guy’s hand when he’s walking out the door – not common. Not common.
Sottile: I stepped forward and introduced myself.
Sottile: Hi. I’m Leah. I’m a reporter with Oregon Public Broadcasting, and this is Ryan.
Comstock: These are the people we told you about.
Sottile: We’ve been looking at your case for a long time. Great to meet you.
Sottile: For now, we were here to see what happen in a man’s first hours of freedom. Comstock took the lead.
Comstock: I have a whole bunch of clothes for you to start with. We’ve got you set up for a hotel that we’re going to take you up to, but we thought you might like to go to eat first. Do you want to ride with Rich?
Sottile: On the freeway, driving back up toward Portland, Ryan and I rode in a kind of stunned silence. Right there in the truck ahead of us there was a newly freed man, and the world was just … normal. Traffic backed up, people got on and off the freeway.
It felt like one of those moments in life when something extraordinary happens, and it feels like this tiny betrayal when the whole world doesn’t stop and notice people’s personal seismic shifts. A death. A birth. A tragedy. A victory. The world keeps turning, immune to us. A man walked free from prison. There was no parade. No party. Not even any TV cameras.
On the drive to the restaurant, Ryan and I realized we were unwilling to let this moment pass without scrutiny. Because the state of Oregon tried for nearly three decades to kill this man ‒ to execute him ‒ and then they just opened the door and let him go. Quietly. Silently, even. All that quiet is what seemed so strange. The district attorney’s office said, they couldn’t realistically take Johnson to trial again. Too many key witnesses were dead.
When we started reporting this story, I had no idea if Jesse Johnson was innocent or guilty. But the prosecution dropping this case after 25 years made us wonder how strong was this case in the first place?
We can’t tell you more about Harriet Thompson than what you’ve heard in this episode. Her family declined our requests to participate in this project, and it makes sense. I can’t imagine the trauma of losing a loved one, and thinking the state had put her killer behind bars, only for that to all change.
But you have to understand Thompson’s death in order to understand what happened to Jesse Johnson.
Because, as we reported, we came to wonder if Jesse Johnson could be called a victim, too. A victim of the state. If he was just going to be released, why did Oregon try for so long to kill him?
Donald ‘Shorty’ Blocker: Said he that offed the bitch.
Det. Craig Stoelk: He offed her?
Blocker: He offed her.
Jesse Johnson: He said, the little white lie that I tell is gonna get your Black ass sent to prison.
Kim Barnett: Every one of these citizens, every single one of them had an agenda against the police.
Eric Mason: When I first started this I thought, Oh, that’s long ago. Justice is blind here. Oh no. No, it’s not.
Bruce Donohue: It gets darker and darker and darker.
Det. Mike Quakenbush: Why did you lie to the police, okay?
Attorney: How long was he in Sunny’s house?
Patricia Hubbard: Until the screaming stopped.
Sottile: That’s this season on “Hush.”
Miller: That was Leah Sottile, with episode one of OPB’s new podcast, “Hush.” The final episode of the podcast drops tomorrow. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts and while you’re at it, you can find our show there as well.
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