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- [00:00]
Will James
Hey, this is Will James. So we set Lost Patients in our home, the Pacific Northwest, and I believe some of the most important, most telling stories about America unfold in this corner of the country. It's a land of extreme politics, extreme problems, extreme idealism. It can feel like everything good and bad about America exists here in a heightened state. And few people capture this aspect of the Pacific Northwest better than my friend Leah Sotilli. Leah is an investigative journalist and author. You may have come across her past podcast series, Bundyville or Burn Wild. I'm here today to tell you Leah's got a new podcast out with Oregon Public Broadcasting. It's called Hush, and it tells the story of Jesse Johnson, who spent 17 years on death row in Oregon while the the whole time insisting he was innocent. It's a story about murder, about drug culture in the late 90s, about why Oregon spent 17 years trying to kill Jesse and what happened when that case fell apart like lost patients. This is a story about how complex institutions can break down and what happens to people without any power trapped inside of them. So today, Lost Patience is bringing you the first episode of Hush. Here's Leah.
- [01:25]
Leah Sotilli
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.
- [01:41]
Jesse Johnson
Okay, do you have any problem with this conversation being recorded? No, sir.
- [01:45]
Leah Sotilli
Okay. 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.
- [02:07]
Jesse Johnson
We was on the railroad tracks, and we was going to the boys club, and a friend of mine got his. Was it shoestring or something? Tangled in one of the spikes, Right. And the train was coming, and we were running, and we had ran off and left him. We used to catch the train.
- [02:28]
Leah Sotilli
The train was bearing down on this kid stuck on the tracks. Everyone left, but Johnson turned back.
- [02:34]
Jesse Johnson
You know, I was on one side and Jesse was on the other side. And another friend, he had felt and he was hollering. I didn't hear him. And Jesse went back and Courtney out.
- [02:44]
Leah Sotilli
You know, 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.
- [03:05]
Harriet Thompson
Hello, my name is Jesse Johnson, and I'm 62 years old.
- [03:11]
Leah Sotilli
Johnson's the kind of person who's 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.
- [03:51]
Harriet Thompson
From an early age, I always wanted to be grown.
- [03:55]
Leah Sotilli
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. So tell me that story. How'd you end up in Oregon?
- [04:31]
Harriet Thompson
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. Haven't been to the Ocean.
- [04:44]
Leah Sotilli
It's been 26 years since he got to Oregon. He has a shaved head, graying mustache, tired eyes. For all this time, he's been living in Salem, Oregon, about an hour south of Portland. Why Salem? Why did you stay in Salem?
- [05:00]
Harriet Thompson
Well, I wasn't planning on staying in Salem. It was just. It was a different vibe, you know, for me, I couldn't do all the things that I was used to doing in Salem. I slowed down a lot. You know, it was more peaceful for me.
- [05:18]
Leah Sotilli
In Salem. He kept up his old habits. He'd break into cars and steal stuff. But 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.
- [05:35]
Harriet Thompson
It wasn't because not too many blacks. You can't really just move around. And, you know, the lifestyle I was living, you know, thugging, you couldn't do a lot of it. Here in Salem.
- [05:51]
Leah Sotilli
Johnson knew he'd stand out because he's 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.
- [06:31]
Harriet Thompson
I did five years and 10 months in county and then I was convicted of murder and aggravated robbery. Went to death row. 17 years.
- [06:48]
Leah Sotilli
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 change 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 1, the State of Oregon versus Jesse Lee Johnson. Hi, I'm Leah Satilli. This is episode one, Jesse. Salem is Oregon's state capital. 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 to get out of a first floor apartment 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.
- [09:38]
Etta Marshall
Sonny was very outgoing, and she. 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 like she would talk to you, like she's been knowing you all of your life.
- [09:54]
Leah Sotilli
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.
- [10:24]
Etta Marshall
I would always say her, sonny, you know what? Never is too late. I said, you know what? If you can't do it today, maybe you can do it tomorrow. Never is too late. That's what I always used to tell her all the time. Never, it's too late.
- [10:38]
Leah Sotilli
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.
- [11:05]
Etta Marshall
And like I said, Sunny is a good person. Yeah, Sunny will give you her last dollar in her pocket if you tell her you was 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 at the end.
- [11:24]
Leah Sotilli
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. 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. 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 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.
- [12:49]
Harriet Thompson
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 Sonny.
- [13:05]
Leah Sotilli
He knew Thompson as Sonny and told us he had only talked to her once before their conversation turned to drugs.
- [13:12]
Harriet Thompson
And then I asked her about buying some drugs. And she said that her dealer was coming from Portland later on that day.
- [13:23]
Leah Sotilli
That afternoon, Thompson repeatedly paged another drug dealer. His name was Datrick Swofford. He went by the nickname D. Loke. 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 told the police. She knew what it was for.
- [13:50]
Etta Marshall
Yeah, she shouldn't have been doing the things that she was doing at the time. You know, I tried not to be a part of any of you. I didn't want anything to do with any of you. You know, I tried to tell her not to do those things. And she had a mind of her own.
- [14:05]
Leah Sotilli
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 guys 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. Loke. 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, but no one answered. He knocked again. Nothing. Finally, he used his key and went inside.
- [15:12]
Jesse Johnson
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.
- [15:26]
Leah Sotilli
He flipped on the lights.
- [15:28]
Jesse Johnson
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 setting upright in the dining room area.
- [15:40]
Leah Sotilli
On the linoleum floor, MTV was blaring on the tv. He walked deeper into the apartment toward the living room, thinking maybe Thompson hadn't heard him.
- [15:51]
Jesse Johnson
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.
- [16:02]
Leah Sotilli
In the front room area, 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.
- [16:25]
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.
- [16:33]
Leah Sotilli
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'd 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, 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 that to see if anyone heard anything. And of course, their first stop was to talk to the neighbors upstairs.
- [17:45]
Craig Stolk
The kids were in bed and John and I were just getting ready to turn in. So our room was down at one end and the kids were down by the other at the other end. But in the hallway, there was a door that led to the downstairs apartment.
- [18:02]
Leah Sotilli
That neighbor told the police that she and her boyfriend had actually gotten home pretty late after working a graveyard shift. They just put their six year old to bed.
- [18:12]
Craig Stolk
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.
- [18:19]
Leah Sotilli
The boyfriend thought he heard a scream of help, help.
- [18:22]
Craig Stolk
So we both got up to go check on her. And as we walked down the hallway, the sound, 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.
- [18:41]
Leah Sotilli
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 Hass and I tracked down Detective Alan Graham. He's retired now. Sounds pretty much the same as 98, 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.
- [19:28]
Alan Graham
So 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.
- [19:47]
Leah Sotilli
Graham looked for people who might have known Thompson, and that meant talking to a lot of people who were also drug users.
- [19:54]
Alan Graham
And so a lot of times those people are reluctant to talk to you because they don't want to get in trouble for, you know, being in possession of drugs or frequenting a prostitute and stuff like that. So, you know that you have to wade through all that business and then people that, you know, maybe they do frequent the house, but they don't want to tell you they did because then they're going to be presumably presumed, maybe suspect, even though if they were totally honest and just tell you everything, you could probably eliminate them, maybe, you know.
- [20:31]
Leah Sotilli
I mean, the information the police got was sparse and they didn't know what.
- [20:34]
Alan Graham
They could trust because that's, you know, we want the truth. I mean, that's what we're after.
- [20:41]
Leah Sotilli
And one thing they did learn Was about that time Thompson jumped out the window. They. 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 Stolk and a lanky redhead with a mustache named Mike Quakenbush. 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 rundown RVs. A lot of unhoused people were living in the giant strip mall parking lot. Quakenbush sat down and ordered a drink.
- [22:03]
Mike Quakenbush
No, I ate. I'll just have maybe an iced tea.
- [22:06]
Leah Sotilli
The 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.
- [22:38]
Mike Quakenbush
And as soon as I said that, he knew this was about murder because you could just see, because he sat back like this, because before he was all. And he sat back and he kind of. He looked around and still like, okay, he just played me.
- [22:51]
Leah Sotilli
After Silvera confessed to several murders, Quakenbush earned a reputation as an officer who cared about people at the fringes.
- [22:59]
Etta Marshall
And.
- [22:59]
Leah Sotilli
And true story, a Brit Iowa hobo festival knighted him for it.
- [23:05]
Mike Quakenbush
But anyway, so we went up to Brit and they gave me this little certificate that they'd printed up, and I was a honorary knight of the hobo roundtable, is what it said. It was kind of nice, you know, that they felt that somebody cared enough to. 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.
- [23:36]
Leah Sotilli
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.
- [23:47]
Mike Quakenbush
And 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.
- [24:03]
Leah Sotilli
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 Stolk started to assemble a theory that maybe Thompson was murdered for her jewelry. Around town, the police started busting into known drug houses as they tried to get information about who. Who would have done this. Thompson's drug dealer, deloak, had gone by her apartment several times the night she was killed.
- [24:56]
Mike Quakenbush
We arrested him. He had a warrant.
- [24:58]
Leah Sotilli
I think D Lock had crack cocaine on him when he was arrested. But he told Stolk 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.
- [25:19]
Mike Quakenbush
Amazingly, you know, he knew he was going to prison. But he was really cooperative because he.
- [25:23]
Leah Sotilli
Knew Harriet Deluc had 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.
- [25:33]
Mike Quakenbush
And so he just. He remembered the guy was a black male. He 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.
- [25:51]
Leah Sotilli
Quakenbush had D Log look at all the mugshots for Blackman in the department database at that time, more than 1400 photos. And D log picked out 8 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. And so in those days after the murder calls Started to come in. One was from a helicopter pilot with the National Guard. He told police that he was driving to work, passing by on 12th street around 6am and noticed a black man walking out of the bushes near 12th and Shamrock. And it caught his attention because, as he put it, quote, 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.
- [27:10]
Alan Graham
Jesse, do you know his last name?
- [27:12]
Jesse Johnson
I don't know his last name. Is he a white or black? Black. I didn't know that she bought. I thought Jesse gave her some earrings.
- [27:19]
Leah Sotilli
Two guys rings and the rest girls. And then he had a gold bracelet. Men and of Gold's wife. He put them on me that afternoon.
- [27:29]
Craig Stolk
Cause I couldn't get him through the.
- [27:31]
Leah Sotilli
Holes in my ears.
- [27:32]
Alan Graham
Okay, when you say he, Jesse put them on.
- [27:34]
Craig Stolk
Yes, he put them on me.
- [27:35]
Leah Sotilli
Okay.
- [27:35]
Alan Graham
And that was the golden.
- [27:36]
Leah Sotilli
No one seemed to know him, but everyone seemed eager to imply that he could have killed Thompson. And here's 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 a 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 Jamiece Rhodes 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. 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.
- [29:09]
James Comstock
And so when people hear that I'm a private investigator, they get this idea that I'm, you know, following people around, trench coat, 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.
- [29:23]
Leah Sotilli
Okay.
- [29:23]
James Comstock
Defense investigators are hired by defense attorneys who are working to defend people who are accused of crimes.
- [29:30]
Leah Sotilli
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. 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. Yep.
- [29:52]
James Comstock
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.
- [30:54]
Leah Sotilli
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 talked to producer Ryan Hass 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 September 6, 2023, James Comstock called Ryan, then me, then Ryan. Ben.
- [32:42]
Etta Marshall
Hey, Leah. Hey.
- [32:44]
Leah Sotilli
How's it going?
- [32:45]
Etta Marshall
Oh, it is quite a day.
- [32:47]
Leah Sotilli
Yeah, Not. Not what I was expecting.
- [32:51]
Etta Marshall
No, us either. We were. I thought maybe they would blink after the hearing, but they blinked before.
- [32:56]
Leah Sotilli
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. Okay, so we're recording. So we're driving on our way to Salem. What's going on? 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.
- [33:29]
Alan Graham
Right.
- [33:29]
Leah Sotilli
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? Maybe this is preemptive. I'm sure you have a lot of things going through your head. I mean, what was the first question you want to ask Jesse? God, I don't know. I was just thinking, like, I've got an hour and five minutes until we get there. And I'm like, okay, we got to out figure, figure out what we want to talk to him about. Like, I mean, what do you even ask a guy? I mean, that's the thing. Is it even. They're gonna let him out with no money. He has no family here. He's a, you know, former longtime drug user. He has a lot of hurdles in his way. I just am like. Like, it feels wrong to be like, sir, are you excited? Like, we realized this was essentially a closed case. And that means 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.
- [34:43]
Harriet Thompson
I mean, it's a good thing, Leah.
- [34:44]
Leah Sotilli
We can get the whole police file now. I know. Can we get it today? We might be able to be like, hi, I bet I can call them tomorrow and say, like, hey, this case is clear. Can I have this now? Yeah, right? Yeah. 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. Lynn Morgan, Rich Wolf, and Spencer Todd. All the lawyers were smiling ear to ear as we followed them into an echoing white brick hallway in the jail. Lynn stepped up to his speaker, pushed a button, and said she was there to collect Jesse Johnson. Sounds good.
- [35:47]
Etta Marshall
He'll be right up.
- [35:48]
Leah Sotilli
Thanks.
- [35:50]
Etta Marshall
There's someone named Richard there.
- [35:52]
Leah Sotilli
Yes, Richard Wolfe is also here. Yeah. Yep, perfect.
- [35:57]
Etta Marshall
He'll be right out.
- [35:58]
Leah Sotilli
All right.
- [35:59]
Craig Stolk
Apparently, I don't have the same kind of gravitas.
- [36:01]
Leah Sotilli
Well, he called. 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. Lynn and Rich were getting ready for Johnson's hearings, which were planned for just a few days from now.
- [36:18]
Craig Stolk
I was rereading all the motions and making notes, and, I mean, I thought they would dismiss at some point, but I thought they'd make us run right up to trial.
- [36:28]
Leah Sotilli
That afternoon, her phone rang. Johnson was getting out.
- [36:32]
Etta Marshall
If you guys want to step outside.
- [36:33]
Leah Sotilli
He'Ll be outside in just a moment. Okay, thanks. All right. Thank you. Thank you. And then there he was.
- [36:44]
Mike Quakenbush
Look at this guy.
- [36:45]
Leah Sotilli
Who is this guy here sneaking out the side door? Jesse Johnson walked out the side door. He was wearing a light gray sweatsuit.
- [36:56]
Harriet Thompson
Freedom out of the field, brother.
- [36:58]
Leah Sotilli
Oh, yeah.
- [36:58]
Harriet Thompson
Oh, yeah.
- [37:00]
Leah Sotilli
Yay. So great. 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. Thing to do. Well, you want to pull a car up here? I'll pull up. We got you enough room you can.
- [37:38]
James Comstock
Change into, but we'll get.
- [37:39]
Alan Graham
We'll get.
- [37:40]
James Comstock
We'll get away from these nice people.
- [37:43]
Leah Sotilli
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. Thank you for being great. Take care of yourself, man. All right.
- [37:57]
Jesse Johnson
Be good. Thank you.
- [37:58]
Leah Sotilli
See ya. That surprised Spencer. You're wondering at home how rare it is for a deputy to shake a.
- [38:05]
Jesse Johnson
Guy'S hand when he's walking out the door.
- [38:07]
Leah Sotilli
Not common. Not common. I step forward and introduce myself. Hi, I'm Leah. I'm a reporter with Oregon Public Broadcasting. And this is Ryan.
- [38:16]
James Comstock
These are the people we told you about.
- [38:18]
Leah Sotilli
Yeah, we've been looking at your case for a long time. Great to meet you. All right, for now. We were here to see what happened and a man's first hours of freedom. Comstock took the lead.
- [38:30]
James 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 gonna take you up to, but we thought you might like to go to eat first.
- [38:37]
Leah Sotilli
Okay.
- [38:37]
James Comstock
So if you wanna ride with Rich.
- [38:39]
Leah Sotilli
I'll haul these guys 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. 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 seems 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 request 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 would happen 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?
- [40:59]
Jesse Johnson
Said that he offed the bitch.
- [41:01]
Leah Sotilli
He offed her.
- [41:02]
Jesse Johnson
He offed her.
- [41:03]
Harriet Thompson
He said, the Lord, the white lie that I tell gonna get your black ass sent to prison.
- [41:08]
Craig Stolk
Every one of these citizens, every single.
- [41:11]
Leah Sotilli
One of them had an agenda against the police.
- [41:14]
Alan Graham
When I first started this, I thought, oh, that's long ago, you know?
- [41:19]
Leah Sotilli
I mean, justice is blind here in Oregon.
- [41:21]
Jesse Johnson
Oh, no, it's not.
- [41:23]
James Comstock
It gets darker and darker and darker and darker.
- [41:25]
Mike Quakenbush
Why did you lie to the police?
- [41:27]
Leah Sotilli
Okay, how long was he at Sonny's house and until after the screaming stop. That's this season on Hush. Hush is reported, written and produced by me, Leah Satilli and Ryan Hass. Music by Joe Preston with contributions from Ryan Hass. Anna Griffin is our editor. Stephen Kray mixed this episode and Naleen Silva was our audio engineer. Our show art is by Dana Ryerson. Additional art and marketing guidance from van Cooley, Jennifer McCormick and Christina Wentzgraf. Tony Schick fact checked this episode. Legal review was by Rebecca Morris. We had public records assistance from John Bile, Bella Sogaard, and Nora Broeker. Thanks to Sage Van Wing, Jen Chavez, Conrad Wilson, and Emily Kurotinkuk for helping shape this series. Michelle Oko, a law professor at Lewis and Clark Law School, provided consultation on this show. Thanks to all the members who make podcasts at OPD possible. If you'd like to go deeper on this episode, check out the documents we've put online@opb.org Hush. You can also email us with tips for Future reporting@hushopb.org and if you're enjoying this podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Or just tell a friend. It helps the show grow and is a great way to support our work.