Dozens of visits. Weekly phone calls. Hundreds of dollars.

Timothy J. Mackley, suspected in the killing of an 89-year-old Portland woman whose body was found this week in the trunk of his car, developed a deep connection with another elderly woman years ago while incarcerated in eastern Oregon.

Their bond grew to a point where the woman's family got involved, putting an end to their communication. Then he sought to have an intimate relationship with her upon his release.

But they never saw each other after he was freed from the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution — in large part because of efforts by the woman's granddaughter, Judy Crow, and the fact that the woman moved into a nursing home.

Crow recounted Mackley's persistent pursuit of a relationship with the much-older woman, Billie Crampton, in a phone interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive early Friday. She previously spoke to KGW-TV and Portland police.

Crow said her grandmother, who died of natural causes at 95 in 2006, met Mackley at the Pendleton prison while she was volunteering there about 1990. Their relationship evolved over about a decade, Crow said, and she was eventually asked to stop her volunteerism because of her relationship with Mackley.

Crow said she thinks Mackley, who was convicted in 1989 of sodomy and sex abuse and sentenced to 20 years in prison, was grooming her grandmother for a relationship and as a source of money.

He was either attracted to — or interested in — elderly women like Crampton and her friends, Crow said.

Mackley, now 58, pleaded not guilty to murder Wednesday in the killing of Marcine Herinck, a great-grandmother who was a churchgoer and avid volunteer. Herinck's body was found Monday in the trunk of his car.

Crow, a 65-year-old West Linn woman, said the similarities between Herinck and her grandmother are uncanny.

"When I heard his name, I was just filled with emotion ... and then to see the victim, a churchgoing, sweet woman, just too familiar with my grandma," she said.

Crow said Mackley convinced her grandmother — a minister and businesswoman who owned a women's clothing store in La Grande for 35 years — that he had been wrongly convicted and had been abandoned by his family.

Crow said she thinks her grandmother bought the tale.

Crow estimated her grandmother visited Mackley dozens of times and talked to him on the phone weekly. Crow guessed that she gave him hundreds, if not thousands of dollars — doled out in small increments to finance his supposed prison needs.

Crow said that at the time, she didn't think Mackley was grooming her grandmother for abuse. But she said his correspondence with Crampton leading up to his release — detailed in letters that she's since destroyed — were graphic and referenced an intimate relationship.

Crampton was in her early 90s by then.

Crow said she was eventually successful in obtaining conservatorship and guardianship of her grandmother, granting her the ability to make decisions on Crampton's behalf and take control of her money. She also said she wrote to parole officials, detailing the situation, and believes they restrained Mackley from going to La Grande, where Crampton lived.

Mackley, she said, struck her as a dangerous person.

He's set to appear back in court Oct. 4.

— Jim Ryan

jryan@oregonian.com

503-221-8005; @Jimryan015