Town note
Named at the suggestion of Edward Cornell, a member of the surveying party platting the town site, who said they should call it Oak Grove after the grove of oak trees where they were sitting for lunch.
about 0:05:12The story
Oak Grove, Oregon is a Portland suburb in Clackamas County, about twenty minutes from the city.
Smith was twenty-five and a mother of two. She worked the streets of Portland to make ends meet and also used the name Gypsy Rosalind Costello. She knew him as Steve the Gambler, from Nevada, sometimes Las Vegas and sometimes Reno.
Charles Gates, a wheelchair user since a construction accident five years earlier, was on his way into the Denny's for his late-night hot chocolate when he heard a woman screaming. He wheeled towards the sound and found a naked woman lying in the car park covered in blood, with a man kneeling over her. The man got up and ran. Gates hauled himself half out of his chair, saw that her throat had been cut and that she had stab wounds all over her torso, could find no pulse or breathing, and began CPR while shouting for someone to call 911. The truck drove over the pavement and landscaping and escaped. Burgio chased it at a hundred miles an hour through Milwaukie and Gladstone, then pulled over when he ran low on fuel, but he had the plate, Oregon CYW 194, and called it in.
Smith had eleven stab wounds, eight to the front and three to the back, and her throat had been cut so deeply that her trachea was almost severed. She was pronounced dead at 3.47 a.m. A blood-covered knife was found near the car park.
His parents were zealous Seventh-day Adventists who adopted four more children and moved the family several times a year, sometimes four times a year, so that the children were never in one school for a whole year. Ortis beat the children savagely and without explanation, and preached that a sex demon lived inside them. At fifteen he was sent to the Upper Columbia Academy in Spangle, Washington.
On 17 July 1972 he married Julie, a sixteen-year-old Lutheran his parents despised. On 25 August, five weeks later, he took a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker he had picked up into the woods near Eugene and stabbed her repeatedly in the abdomen, saying he could not trust her any more. Then he apologised and proposed to her, and took her to hospital, where the staff called the police.
In February 1975 he met Sherry Miller, a naive and very religious young woman from a close family he admired, and married her on 25 October 1975. While on bail in February 1976 he held two high school girls at knife point and raped one of them.
By 1987 he was running a small engine repair shop in Woodburn, still married to Sherry, with a son born in 1986, and was considered a reliable, polite, churchgoing man. Only the long hours and the mileage on his truck were odd. On 7 July 1987 a thirty-one-year-old woman, Heather Brown, jumped from his pickup at sixty miles an hour on a logging road after he told her he wanted to tie someone up and have sex with them; she suffered a concussion and abrasions.
After the Smith killing the police found him at his shop, smelling of drink, with a bloody bandaged right hand. He said he had cut it on a hacksaw; the hospital doctor later said the wounds were clean knife wounds. His truck was still warm, there was blood throughout it, Jennifer's fingerprint was on the passenger door handle, and there were knife cuts on the dashboard and ceiling. A magnet raked through the ashes produced bra clasps from fifteen different bras, metal shoe parts matching Jennifer's missing shoe, coloured glass, rhinestones and star-shaped grommets.
On 31 August 1987 a bow hunter named Everett Banyard, who had hunted the area for decades, found a body under dried ferns in the Molalla Forest, deep in the mountains off Highway 211. On 1 September the search found five bodies in various states of decomposition, all naked and all with knife wounds. Three had feet sawn off at the ankle and others had saw marks on the thigh bones. A German shepherd cadaver dog named Cult found a fourth body, a reserve officer found a fifth, and on the sixth day of a nine-day search by about two hundred people two detectives on a cigarette break found another. Seven bodies were recovered in all.
The dead were Cynthia Diane Devore, twenty-one; Riatha Gaia Giles, sixteen; Lisa Marie Mock, twenty-three; Christine Lotus Adams, thirty-five; Maureen Ann Hodges, twenty-six; Nandis 'Noni' Cervantes, from Tempe, Arizona; and an unidentified young woman later named as Tonya Jree Johnston, eighteen. A knife with human tissue on it was the same brand as the one dumped near the Denny's. In his shop were a hacksaw, a shoe shank and eyelets from Jennifer's other tennis shoe, and star-shaped studs later identified as coming from Christine Adams's jeans.
In 2013 the seventh victim was identified by DNA.
He still says he acted in self-defence in the Smith case and that the forest victims provoked him, and he has never said how many more bodies there are.