Diane Downs (The Oregonian)

BY DOUGLAS PERRY

Oregon's homicide rate is about half the national average, a trend that has stayed pretty steady for decades.

But the state continues to produce the kind of shocking murders that both shake Oregonians’ sense of place and rivet the attention of people across the country.

Over the years these high-profile crimes have ranged from the twisted acts of serial killers to racially-driven attacks to, just maybe, a “deep state” political assassination.

Below we take a look at 22 Oregon murder cases that helped define their times.

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Tourist boats at Chinese Massacre Cove (AP)

Hells Canyon massacre

In May 1887, a band of thieves ambushed Chinese-immigrant gold miners in remote Hells Canyon. They shot to death at least 34 miners, hacked up the bodies with axes and tossed the remains into the Snake River. The killers then absconded with the miners' gold.

"It was the most cold-blooded, cowardly treachery I have ever heard tell of on this coast," said Idaho judge Joseph K. Vincent, who was hired to investigate the murders.

The following year, a grand jury indicted six Wallowa County residents. Three of the accused disappeared and were never apprehended. Those who remained were acquitted at the end of a brief trial held in Enterprise, Oregon.

To head off a diplomatic furor, the U.S. Congress eventually paid $276,619.75 to the Chinese government “out of humane consideration and without reference to the question of liability.”

The killings, it was widely believed even at the time, weren’t about the gold.

"It was really a savage act of racial hatred," Oregon historian and author R. Gregory Nokes said in 2011.

The area where the murders occurred is now called Chinese Massacre Cove. A granite memorial there declares, “Site of the 1887 massacre of as many as 34 Chinese gold miners. No one was held accountable.”

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Creffield (Oregonian file/Oregon State Archive)

Holy-roller murder

The charismatic Edmund Creffield started his own church, the Brides of Christ, in 1903. The former Salvation Army worker announced that one of his female followers would be the mother of the reborn Christ, but that first "he needed to purify them by laying his hands on them" -- while they were naked, of course.

The German immigrant proved remarkably successful at recruiting members to his Corvallis-based "holy roller" church -- including married women. "Soon Creffield had a reputation for breaking up homes, and a flock consisting largely of women," wrote Offbeat Oregon History in 2011.

A state conviction for adultery made Creffield a target for traditional moralists. So the church leader moved to the coastal town of Waldport and declared that he was the reborn Christ himself.

But he couldn’t escape his reputation. In 1906, George Mitchell, the brother of church member Esther Mitchell, walked up behind Creffield on a Seattle street, put the barrel of a pistol against the back of the notorious religious man’s head and pulled the trigger. Creffield fell in a heap, instantly dead.

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The Oregonian

“I got my man and I am in jail here,” Mitchell reportedly said in a telegraph message sent from the police station.

Mitchell’s murder trial proved a sensation -- with most observers highly sympathetic to the defendant. “Creffield was a degenerate of the worst sort,” Portland’s district attorney wrote to the Seattle prosecutor. “He practiced unspeakable brutalities on ignorant and unsophisticated girls.”

Mitchell, like Creffield before him, appeared to enjoy the hero-worship. During the trial in Seattle, wrote Oregon historian Stewart Holbrook years later, the defendant “seemed the happiest person in the room.”

The jury quickly acquitted Mitchell, and he was “mobbed by friends and well-wishers” in the courtroom. But he wouldn’t get to celebrate for long. Two days later, as he waited at the King Street station for a train to Portland, his sister Esther strode up to him, pulled out a pearl-handled pistol and shot him. He died as the train arrived.

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Westfall in the late 1960s. (Oregonian file)

Westfall showdown

In 1912, Asa Carey, the hard-drinking marshal of tiny Westfall, lost his job to Jasper Westfall, scion to the town founder.

Angered, Carey decided to “shoot up” the main street and thereby prove that his successor was afraid to arrest him. When the new marshal confronted him, the drunken Carey threatened to kill Westfall.

“Finally, when Carey made a pass for his gun,” The Oregonian reported, “the marshal fired at him and missed.”

Carey responded by unleashing three shots, killing Westfall. Soon thereafter, Carey was arrested and put on trial for murder.

“The courtroom was crowded to the doors, and many stood in the hallway to hear the closing argument of the prosecution and of counsel for the defense,” The Oregonian wrote. The trial, with its tantalizing narrative about two lawmen pitted against one another, made headlines around the state, introducing many Oregonians to the little Malheur County burgh.

The jury convicted Carey, and deputies trundled the cussing former marshal from the courtroom.

The town of Westfall would never again receive such widespread attention. By the 1960s, it had become a ghost town, with only two remaining residents.

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Willamette River (The Oregonian)

Portland's torso murder

The body parts, wrapped in newspaper and tied up in burlap sacks, started showing up in the Willamette River in April of 1946. The sacks bobbed to shore between Portland and Oregon City over several months. They contained the remains of a middle-aged woman.

The victim’s head, The Oregonian wrote, was swaddled in a page from the Oct. 1, 1944, edition of the paper and “another page with a date of September 16 -- no year -- which adds more confusion to the date of death.” The skull had been fractured.

Comparisons were instantly made to Cleveland's infamous Torso Murders, which had fascinated and horrified people across the country in the 1930s and remained unsolved, despite the fact that famous gangbuster Eliot Ness led the case.

Could the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” Portlanders wondered, have made it all the way to the Rose City?

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Throughout 1946 and beyond, the mystery dominated conversation in the city’s watering holes, drawing rooms and hair salons.

As rumors about the body parts swirled, a Newberg resident boasted that he knew "all about the torso murder case." But when Portland police took him seriously and hustled him into the station at 5th and Taylor, he insisted, "I just wanted the publicity."

The man was released, soon to be replaced by other attention seekers.

Local and state law enforcement spent years pursuing the case, but the victim was never identified and no one was ever charged.

J.D. Chandler and Theresa Griffin Kennedy, authors of the 2016 book "Murder and Scandal in Prohibition Portland," speculate that local beauty Anna Schrader might have been the victim. They point out that Schrader, whose extramarital affair with a powerful Portland police lieutenant made headlines and rocked the police department in 1929, disappeared at the same time the body parts began washing ashore -- and that she had recently threatened to restart the old scandal.

There’s also this: During that spring and summer of 1946, a classified ad ran repeatedly in The Oregonian that read, “Anyone who knows the whereabouts of Ann Schrader please write N472 Oregonian.”

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Gladys Broadhurst (The Oregonian)

Gladys and her cowboy

In October 1946, a 23-year-old ranch hand named Alvin Lee Williams used a wrench to attack his boss, the wealthy Jordan Valley rancher and chiropractor Willis Broadhurst. Williams then finished his victim with a shotgun blast.

Why did the young cowboy commit murder? He insisted that Broadhurst’s wife Gladys, with whom he was having an affair, put him up to it.

The revelations at Gladys Broadhurst’s trial in Malheur County were so shocking that her defense attorney, Patrick Gallagher, called the courtroom atmosphere “supercharged.” Jurors learned that the 40-year-old Gladys, typically described by reporters as “comely,” had been married seven times, was addicted to sleeping pills and, with the adultery, had “lapsed back into a moral vacuum.”

Gallagher argued that Gladys had broken off the affair with Williams and that, while drunk on whisky, the ranch hand had killed the 51-year-old chiropractor “to get back to her again.”

“There was no deal to kill the doctor until he drank the whisky,” Gallagher said in court. “Then he was the boy with the Buffalo Bill whiskers, the boy with the buckaroo complex, the boy who had slept with the boss’s wife.”

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The defense attorney accused Williams of giving perjured testimony in an attempt to “walk around the gas chamber.”

The trial raged for 16 days, with Gallagher, according to one news account, waging “a brilliant battle on [his client’s] behalf.”

But Gallagher’s efforts weren’t enough. The jury convicted Gladys Broadhurst of first-degree murder and recommended life imprisonment at the Oregon State Penitentiary. (Williams was separately convicted of second-degree murder “on his own plea.”)

Wrote The Oregonian: “The unanimous verdict [against Broadhurst] ... seemed to stun the pretty defendant, who walked into the courtroom confidently in the same two-piece black dress and small, veil-like headpiece she had worn during the trial.”

The newspaper noted that the state had “never sentenced a woman to death.”

Gladys Broadhurst was paroled in 1956, Williams the following year.

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Virginia Harington (Oregonian file)

The Harington bedroom battle

It could have been a scene from the musical “Chicago,” except set 2,000 miles to the west. Lane County lumber-mill owner Gene Harington was found in bed on Jan. 28, 1947, with two .38-caliber bullets in his head. The 23-year-old Virginia Harington, sporting a blank look, claimed that her husband had threatened her with the gun. She said she had wrestled it away from him and ultimately shot him in self-defense.

The evidence did not appear to support her version of events. The police officers who were first on the scene would testify that “the bed clothes around [Gene] Harington’s body were not mussed as they should have been in the event of a scuffle.” And the gun was fired twice, from more than 2 feet away, with the bullets ending up embedded in Gene Harington’s pillow. The prosecution argued that he had been shot while he was sleeping.

Lane County District Attorney Ed Luckey “asserted that one bullet passed through the slain man’s right eyelid, proving he was asleep.”

The reason for the shooting: Virginia allegedly thought her husband had been out with another woman. Gene had been -- his secretary -- but he’d told Virginia it was entirely innocent, that they were simply working late. While at one of his properties with his secretary at 3 a.m. on the morning of the shooting, the 33-year-old businessman had argued with Virginia on the phone, and at one point sighed: “You have a drawer full of guns.”

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Finally, he turned the phone over to the mill’s night watchman, telling him to set her straight. “She thinks I’m with a woman,” he told the guard.

“Spectators continued to jam the Lane county circuit courtroom,” The Oregonian reported during the trial. Locals had a hard time believing the respected Gene Harington was a violent drunk who punched and kicked his wife, as the defense insisted. But they also couldn’t believe that his pretty young wife -- the mother of two infants -- would shoot him down in cold blood.

Just like in “Chicago,” a play inspired by Illinois’ “beauty-proof” all-male juries of the 1920s, jurors ended up giving the killer the benefit of the doubt. On March 15, just six weeks after the shooting, Virginia Harington was acquitted.

“When the jury’s verdict was read at 1:40 p.m., Mrs. Harington’s only reaction was a single audible sob,” The Oregonian reported. “Later, however, amid congratulating friends, she broke down and cried.”

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Leland (The Oregonian)

St. Johns murder

“Slender, sullen-faced” Morris Leland started getting into trouble while in his teens. Police picked him up for robbery, stealing cars and sexual assault, and he finally landed in the state hospital.

“It would have been better if they had kept me in the hospital and not turned me loose,” Leland said in 1953. “That’s what I would do if I was running the place.”

But he had been turned loose, and in 1949 he kidnapped Thelma Taylor, a 15-year-old Roosevelt High School student, and kept her hidden in a wooded area on the banks of the Willamette River near the St. Johns Bridge. She screamed when Leland attempted to rape her, and so the 22-year-old drifter stabbed and bludgeoned her to death.

Four days later police arrested Leland for driving a stolen car, and while at the local jail he told a guard he wanted to speak with a detective about a murder.

“Whose murder?” he was asked.

“One I did,” Leland responded.

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At the scene of the crime, officers found what appeared to be a quarter-inch piece of Taylor’s skull before they came upon the body. Portland’s chief of detectives called the killing “the most brutal murder I’ve ever heard of.”

Taylor’s distraught parents said their daughter was “a quiet girl who had never been out with boys.” Detectives found on her body a billfold that included her Sunday-school attendance record and employment cards for farm work she had done.

Leland, who would die in Oregon’s gas chamber in 1953, told police he had to kill Taylor “because she was a good girl and might tell.”

Last year, author Colin Dickey published “Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places,” which explores the belief among some St. Johns locals that Taylor’s screams can still be heard in Cathedral Park, carried on the wind from the spot where she died.

“People still have memories of Thelma Taylor -- including her sister, whom I interviewed for the book,” Dickey told The Oregonian. “And that changes the way we might otherwise approach any stories of her ghost haunting Portland.”

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Payne (The Oregonian)

The mild-mannered killer

Forty-eight-year-old Frank Oliver Payne killed Hercules Butler, a Portland grocer, during a robbery on January 9, 1951. Later that same day he robbed a gas station.

Payne’s police record went back to 1920, when he was arrested for robbery and assault in Portland. He escaped from the Oregon State Penitentiary in 1921 and was free for more than a year before being apprehended.

After being released from the Oregon State pen in 1923, Payne became a forger in California and landed in San Quentin State Prison. In the 1930s and early ’40s, he was convicted of robbery and assault in Wyoming, Nevada and Washington state.

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The bespectacled career criminal’s mild-mannered demeanor and articulateness fascinated Portland court observers during his 1951 murder trial. The courtroom was packed every day.

Payne claimed “temporary insanity” caused him to kill Butler. “I have no more actual knowledge of the death of Mr. Butler than you have,” he told a reporter.

The jury didn’t buy it, and quickly convicted him.

Two years later, Payne spoke to a reporter a week before he was scheduled to die in Oregon’s gas chamber.

“I’ll be dead next Friday and I’ll be glad of it,” he said. “I hope the people of Oregon appreciate it.”

Payne was put to death by the state in January 1953, two hours after the ultimate sentence was carried out on Morris Leland in the same facility.

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Diane Hank (Oregonian file)

The Fong trials

A road crew outside Washougal found 16-year-old Diane Hank’s body on February 27, 1954, six weeks after she’d gone missing. The Lincoln High School student was wrapped in two blankets that had been tied up with rope. Her bra had been pushed off her breasts. She had pin curls in her hair.

Shocked Portlanders demanded justice, and the Multnomah County district attorney quickly homed in on the obvious suspects. On the night she died, Hank had babysat for a known Portland drug dealer and his wife, Wayne and Sherry Fong.

Police pushed hard to get confessions, including conscripting a "trusted friend" of Sherry's to drug her and take her to a motel. "I remember nothing about the ride except that occasionally I could see neon lights flash by," Sherry later said.

She didn't confess, but murder charges soon landed anyway.

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Kenneth Martin, Diane Hank's boyfriend, testifies in court. (The Oregonian)

Prosecutors spent the next four years on multiple sensational trials involving the Fongs. The murder cases led to salacious newspaper stories that Oregon readers greedily consumed, stories about the Fongs’ taboo interracial marriage, about the young soldier who loved (and, suggested a defense attorney, might have killed) Hank, about the violent drug syndicate that ruled Portland’s Chinatown.

"[Hank] was killed because she knew too much about the Fongs' business and was popping off," a deputy district attorney insisted at one point.

But convictions proved difficult to nail down. The problem: The evidence pointed to Hank dying from an accidental drug overdose -- and the Fongs discovering her body and, in a panic, dumping her in Washington state.

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Sherry Fong and her attorney. (The Oregonian)

Ultimately, the Fongs were freed. (Wayne received a directed verdict, Sherry had her conviction overturned by the Oregon Supreme Court.)

Prosecutors did not give up, however. In 1958, they sent Wayne to prison on heroin-dealing charges.

More: 1954 death of teenage babysitter led to an enduring Portland mystery.

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Peyton's blood-spattered car. (The Oregonian)

The Peyton-Allan murders

Larry Peyton and his girlfriend Beverly Allan headed to Lloyd Center at around 9 p.m. on Nov. 26, 1960.

The next day Peyton’s body was discovered in his car in Forest Park. He’d been stabbed 23 times and his skull was smashed in. The Ford coupe’s window sported a bullet hole.

Allan’s purse and coat were in the car, but she was gone.

Hundreds of volunteers turned out, day after day, to search for the missing 19-year-old. They didn’t find her. Finally, in January 1961, a highway crew 30 miles outside Portland came upon Allan’s body. Investigators determined that she had been raped and strangled.

The search for whomever killed the two college students became an obsession of both local law enforcement and the average citizen following the police's efforts through the newspapers. The Eugene Register-Guard would call the slayings "probably the most talked-about and written-about double-murder in Portland's history."

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Edwards and his wife in 1962. (AP)

Nearly a decade later, friends Eddie Jorgensen and Robert Brom were convicted of the murders. They were sentenced to life in prison.

But Jorgensen received parole after just three years and Brom after seven.

"What does that tell you?" former Oregonian and Portland Tribune columnist Phil Stanford said in 2010. "The most sensational double murder, and they let [Jorgensen] out on parole after three years? Nobody thought they did it."

Stanford, author of "The Peyton-Allan Files," suspects a career criminal named Edward Wayne Edwards was the real killer.

Some amateur sleuths believe Peyton and Allan were victims of the infamous California serial killer known as the Zodiac.

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Jerome Brudos (AP)

The Long Tom River Murders

Jerome Brudos became known as “The Lust Killer” and “The Shoe Fetish Slayer.”

When in his 20s, the married electronics technician began breaking into homes in the Salem area to steal women's underwear and shoes. Then he began sexually assaulting and killing women (not always in that order), sometimes keeping the bodies for days before disposing of them in the Long Tom River. He tied auto parts to the corpses to weigh them down.

In 1969, Brudos pleaded guilty to three murders.

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The distinctive knot Brudos used to weigh down the bodies of his victims. (The Oregonian)

Shortly after Brudos’ guilty plea, his wife Ralphene was tried as an accomplice to her husband’s murders.

Did she know the horrible things he was doing? Maybe not -- though she may have really wanted to not know. The Seattle Times pointed out that he "forbade her from visiting the garage; she had to call him on the intercom when she wanted something from the freezer."

“He has to be sick,” she said of her husband after his convictions. “I don’t think any person in his right mind could do the things he did and not be sick. I don’t have the ability to know the extent of his sickness, but I know he is ill.”

In October of 1969 a jury acquitted Ralphene of first-degree murder charges.

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Ralphene Brudos (The Oregonian)

The 25-year-old housewife and mother expressed amazement that people had filled the courtroom every day of her trial.

“Why would they sit there day after day?” she wondered. “I can see one day, maybe, to see what I looked like -- there hadn’t been any pictures of me [in the newspapers] before then -- but I couldn’t sit and watch something like that.”

When seeking the reversal of his convictions in 1970, Jerry Brudos claimed Ralphene “convinced me to sign the confessions” to protect her and their two children.

Ralphene divorced Brudos, changed her name and left the state with their children.

Jerome Brudos died in 2006 at the Oregon State Penitentiary.

The Brudos case was featured on the fictional Netflix TV series "Mindhunter," with actor Happy Anderson playing Brudos.

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Rogers, at right (The Oregonian)

Molalla Forest Killer

Dayton Leroy Rogers has been called "Oregon's most prolific serial killer."

(More prolific serial killers, such as Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway, have Oregon crime connections but primarily operated outside the state.)

Rogers was convicted of murder in 1989 and sentenced to death, but the Oregon Supreme Court overturned the death sentence.

Prosecutor Scott Healy described Rogers as a “sexual sadist.”

Rogers paid prostitutes for bondage sessions, then tied them up and tortured them. Investigators found seven of his victims in a forest outside Molalla. "Some of the women had their feet cut off and one was gutted and mutilated," The Oregonian reported.

Said one woman who escaped from him: “The more fear I showed, the more aggressive he got.”

In 2015, during a resentencing trial, Rogers apologized for his murder spree.

“The enormity of my crimes makes the word 'sorry' all but inadequate and would seem like an insult to even say it,” he said. “But I still need to say it whether it is received or not. I am sorry. So very sorry."

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The Oregonian

The I-5 Killer

Randy Woodfield was a good-looking, well-liked Portland State football player, chosen in the 14th round of the 1974 NFL draft by the Green Bay Packers.

He was also a remorseless rapist and murderer who cruised up and down California and Oregon in his gold Volkswagen Bug. He made his victims lie face-down so he could shoot them in the backs of their heads.

When Woodfield was arrested in 1981, The Oregonian wrote that friends and former teammates “remembered [him] as a ‘well-mannered, nice, polite gentleman,’ a ‘very religious’ member of the Portland State University Campus Crusade for Christ and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.”

Woodfield was convicted of murder. He has been definitively linked to at least seven murders, but police believe he likely killed many more.

"He didn't feel or demonstrate any remorse for any of the cases," former Marion County district attorney Chris Van Dyke told The Oregonian in 2012. "He was probably the coldest, most detached defendant I've ever seen."

Now 67, Woodfield is incarcerated at Oregon State Penitentiary.

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'The shaggy-haired stranger'

Twenty-seven-year-old mail carrier Diane Downs showed up at a Springfield, Oregon, hospital on May 19, 1983, with a gunshot wound in her arm. She claimed to be the victim of a carjacking, and insisted that the “shaggy-haired stranger” had shot her three children. Seven-year-old Cheryl died from her wounds, while her siblings Danny and Christie were seriously injured.

The evidence did not match the young mother’s story, and she was arrested.

The case riveted Oregon and the rest of the country, leading to a best-selling nonfiction book by Ann Rule as well as a TV-movie starring Farrah Fawcett. Downs was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The killer seemed to thrive on publicity. “She sees a camera and her whole world brightens,” Rule said of Downs.

Randy Woodfield, the “I-5 Killer,” reportedly began writing to Downs shortly after her arrest. Rumors soon circulated, fueled by Downs, that they were going to marry.

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Downs (The Oregonian)

Downs received a renewed burst of attention when she escaped from Salem’s Oregon Women’s Correctional Center in 1987, sparking a nationwide manhunt. She was recaptured 10 days later, not far from the prison.

"The last thing her ego needs is another interview," a guard at the correctional center told an Associated Press reporter.

Downs was pregnant during her six-week trial in 1984. Rebecca Babcock was born shortly after her mother’s conviction, and more than 20 years later she wrote to Downs in prison. The response proved disturbing.

"On 12 pages torn from a legal pad," a 2010 article in Glamour magazine related, "Diane scrawled stories about a secret man – 'someone very powerful has been watching over you all your life for me' -- and how she was in jail so she'd be safe from the real killer."

Downs remains behind bars.

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A Portland rally featuring a portrait of Seraw. (The Oregonian)

Portland neo-Nazis

Twenty-seven-year-old Ethiopian immigrant and graduate student Mulugeta Seraw was returning home from a night out with friends when three neo-Nazis spotted him. It was November 13, 1988.

The racist thugs -- Kyle Brewster, Kenneth Mieske and Steven Strasser -- set upon Seraw at the corner of Pine Street and Southeast 31st Avenue in Portland. One of them bludgeoned the Ethiopian man to death with a baseball bat.

Mieske would insist that the murder was sparked by road rage, but race clearly was the key factor. At the time, Portland was known as the "skinhead capital of the country." White supremacists believed the Rose City was their city.

The three men killed Seraw, Oregonian reporter Bryan Denson wrote 10 years after the murder, "[b]ecause he was in the way. Because he was different. Because he was black."

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Metzger at his trial. (The Oregonian)

Brewster, Mieske and Strasser all pleaded guilty to attacking Seraw and received sentences ranging from nine years to life.

The Southern Poverty Law Center also brought a wrongful-death suit against California-based White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger, insisting Metzger’s hateful message had inspired the killers.

The jury concluded that Metzger and the White Aryan Resistance had indeed incited the murder. Seraw's estate was awarded $12.5 million, but Metzger remained defiant.

“The movement will not be stopped in the puny town of Portland,” he said in response to the verdict. “We’re too deep. We’re embedded now ... Stopping Tom Metzger is not going to change what’s going to happen to this country.”

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Francke (Oregonian file)

Michael Francke

On Jan. 18, 1989, a security guard found state prison director Michael Francke sprawled on the pavement outside the corrections department’s headquarters in Salem. Francke had been stabbed to death.

Two years later, petty thief Frank Gable was convicted of the crime -- but was it really just a robbery gone wrong?

Some people who’ve followed the case believe powerful, shadowy players in Oregon politics ordered Francke’s assassination because the prisons chief had been determined to root out corruption in state government.

The suspicions of larger forces at play led to a 1995 movie about the case, "Without Evidence," which starred Angelina Jolie.

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Gable (Oregonian file)

The movie only fueled interest among amateur sleuths.

"It might just be the biggest mystery in Oregon politics. ... There are all kinds of swirling conspiracy theories, counter-theories, allegations and missing details," the BlueOregon blog wrote in 2005.

Gable, still in prison, maintains his innocence and continues a legal fight for a new trial. His lawyers have insisted that witness testimony used to convict Gable came from abusive police tactics, especially in the use of polygraph exams.

Polygraph expert David Raskin has said witnesses were “intensely interrogated, pressured, coerced and frightened by the angry and sometimes violent behavior of the interrogators.”

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Dodd (Oregonian file)

'I must be executed'

Westley Allan Dodd became a nationwide symbol of “pure evil” when he was arrested in 1989. The Washington state native confessed to torturing, raping and killing three boys.

"The killer's capture heightened the frenzy around the cases and it became clear Dodd had an insatiable appetite for the attention," Vancouver's The Columbian wrote.

"His case removed many illusions in this state about legal and psychiatric treatment of violent sex offenders," The New York Times' Timothy Egan wrote from Seattle in 1992.

Egan continued:

“When Mr. Dodd was arrested in the fall of 1989, he confessed to stabbing 11-year-old Cole Neer, and his brother William, 10, and to hanging a 4-year-old boy, Lee Iseli, after repeatedly raping him. The initial shock was replaced by public outrage over the fact that Mr. Dodd had a long history of sexually assaulting children, but had never spent more than four months in jail at any one time.”

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The Oregonian

Psychiatrists and social workers struggled to figure out why the unrepentant Dodd turned out the way he did. One of the killer’s siblings, Katherine Dodd Cox, described their early years succinctly in a court document:

"We were never beaten. We had food and clothes. But there was just no family, no love."

Dodd lived for a while in Portland, where he kidnapped one of his victims. After his capture, he insisted that the state had no choice but to kill him.

“I must be executed before I have an opportunity to escape or kill someone else,” he said in a court brief. “If I do escape, I promise you I will kill and rape again, and I will enjoy every minute of it.”

The 31-year-old killer was put to death by hanging in 1993.

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The Oregonian

Kip Kinkel

The 15-year-old Springfield boy killed his parents on the morning of May 20, 1998, then went to school, where he shot to death two students and wounded 25 others.

Kinkel later said that after murdering his parents, he wanted to commit suicide. "I held my glock to my head and I wanted to kill myself, but I couldn't," he said. "I don't know why."

He started shooting at Thurston High School, he said, because “I had to. I had no other choice.”

Kinkel pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 112 years in prison. He’s incarcerated at the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem.

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Longo at his trial (The Oregonian)

True story

Christian Longo and his family suddenly decamped from their Ohio home in December of 2001 and headed west.

Alighting in Oregon, the 27-year-old strangled his wife and their 2-year-old daughter, loaded them into suitcases and dumped them in a marina in Waldport. He then tied rock-filled pillowcases to the legs of his two other young children and threw them, alive, off a bridge. They both died.

Why would a man commit such atrocities? It seems he couldn’t take it when his wife discovered that his business was failing.

"I think, honestly and truly, the most important thing to Chris was his image and money," his sister-in-law Penny Dupuie said in 2015.

The discovery of the four bodies in Waldport launched a massive manhunt for Longo, landing him on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

By then the killer was in Mexico, where he took on the identity of disgraced journalist Michael Finkel.

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James Franco in "True Story"

He apparently could offer a spot-on impression of the former New York Times reporter. “He did a better job being Mike Finkel than I do being Mike Finkel," Finkel would later say.

But soon Longo was caught and returned to Oregon. A jury convicted him of murder in 2004, and he is now on death row at the Oregon State Penitentiary.

James Franco played him in the 2015 movie "True Story," based on the book by none other than the real Michael Finkel.

"It was an incredibly odd story," Finkel said of Longo's descent into murder. "Creepy. Uncomfortable. Chris Longo may be a monster, but I'd say if you turn away and ignore someone like Chris you might miss something. If we look him in the eye we might learn something."

Dupuie, however, says Longo doesn’t deserve the attention that the book and movie have brought him, the attention he craves.

“The only remorse Chris has shown is over what this did to his own life,” she said. “I don’t believe he has any remorse for killing his children.”

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Pedersen

Holly Ann Grigsby and David 'Joey' Pedersen

The two young white supremacists killed four people, including Pedersen’s father and stepmother, during a three-state rampage in 2011 designed to spark a “revolution.”

They committed one of the murders in Oregon.

Three years after the crimes, Grigsby said she regretted that the murders had done harm to the racist ideology she and Pedersen support. "My actions have further damaged the reputation of a movement [that's] misunderstood," she said.

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Grigsby

She and Pedersen pleaded guilty to various charges and were each sentenced to life in prison.

Pedersen offered no regrets at all during his sentencing.

"I can only laugh sardonically that I sit here, being sentenced for crimes for which the United States government has accused me," he said.

He added: “I offer no excuses because none are needed.”

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The Oregonian

Umpqua Community College shooting

Chris Harper-Mercer burst into a classroom at the Roseburg college on Oct. 1, 2015, and immediately opened fire.

Before the 26-year-old finally turned his gun on himself, he had killed eight students and a professor.

In a six-page letter he left behind, Harper-Mercer complained of "no job, no life, no successes," before adding that with his final act his "success in Hell is assured."

After an 18-month investigation into the mass shooting, the Douglas County Sheriff's Office announced that, with the shooter dead, no charges would be filed against anyone.

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Christian (The Oregonian)

MAX train killings

In May 2017, local extremist Jeremy Christian allegedly stabbed to death Rick Best and Myrddin Namkai-Meche on a Portland MAX train when they and another rider tried to protect two teenage girls from him.

Best was a 53-year-old Army veteran, Namkai-Meche a 23-year-old recent Reed College graduate. The other victim, 21-year-old Micah David-Cole Fletcher, suffered neck wounds in the attack.

During his arraignment, Christian yelled out, "Free speech or die. Get out if you don't like free speech ... You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism."

He would later tell a psychologist that he was "on auto-pilot" during the attack.

In a press release for a January 2018 segment, the iconic CBS news magazine "60 Minutes" claimed that the deadly attack on the light-rail system was one of two recent events that have "disrupt[ed] Portland's calm vibe," turning the Rose City into an "edgier," scarier town. (The other was the election of Donald Trump as president, which set off "Antifa" demonstrations in the city.)

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Ward Weaver (The Oregonian)

More

Oregon has had more than its share of shocking murders. We had to end this list somewhere, but others -- such as the Richard Marquette, Ward Weaver and Freeman-Jackson cases -- also rocked the state and the rest of the nation.