On the first Saturday in September, Mindy and Craig Bush hosted a wedding ceremony in the sprawling back yard of their Aloha home. Mindy’s son, Tim Traut, and his wife had eloped three years ago, and after two COVID-19 winters, it was finally time to celebrate the union with their vaccinated friends.
The family set out a long table in the yard. On a tablecloth hand-crocheted by the bride’s grandmother, Mindy placed photographs of loved ones who wouldn’t be there.
An array of grandparents. Tim’s father, Mike, struck and killed by a New York subway train.
And, pictured in a field of tulips, Susi Larsen, Mindy’s younger sister, who was brutally raped and murdered 25 years ago, and buried on what would have been her wedding day in 1996.
Even as she planned the Labor Day weekend party, Mindy was preparing to testify in the late August re-trial of Billy Lee Oatney Jr., who was convicted of Susi’s murder in 1998 and spent 17 years on Oregon’s Death Row.
Back in 2015, Oregon’s Court of Appeals ordered a new trial in what may be the sloppiest, most conflicted capital case in state history. Mindy was subpoenaed to testify about Susi and the floating gold heart pendant she gave her sister in 1979.
Police found a floating gold heart, and Susi’s blood, in Oatney’s Tigard apartment a month after the murder.
Susi Larsen in 1994, wearing the the gold floating heart pendant
But a July 29 ruling by Washington County Circuit Judge Beth Roberts dramatically limited the testimony she would allow from Willford Nathaniel Johnston, the co-defendant in the aggravated murder case.
Johnston testified at the 1998 trial that both he and Oatney tied up and raped Larsen before Oatney tightened a plastic bag around her head. Johnston is serving a life sentence without possibility of parole.
Roberts ruled that if Oatney tries to pin the murder on Johnston in the retrial, the state can call Johnston as a witness. But if Oatney’s defense counsel, Rich Wolf, only suggests in his opening that Johnston committed the crime, it won’t “open the door” for prosecutors to put Johnston on the stand.
Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum has appealed Roberts’ ruling to the Oregon Supreme Court. The high court’s deliberations may delay Oatney’s retrial for months.
“We all know there’s a real good possibility he’ll get off, because so much of the evidence is being suppressed,” Mindy Bush says. “My very first instinct is fear. Because I got up during the sentencing phase and told him to his face that he could rot in hell.”
Two weeks after Larsen disappeared in August 1996, her naked, decomposed body was found wedged beneath a log in Champoeg State Park.
Oatney quickly became a suspect because Larsen told friends she was going to see him about the earrings he’d offered to make for her bridal party. When Johnston was arrested on a parole violation, Tualatin police were tipped off by the roommates’ phone conversations from jail that Oatney may have been involved in Larsen’s disappearance.
But neither roommate said all that much until October 23, 1996 when Scott Upham, the Washington County district attorney, interviewed Oatney and carelessly offered him immunity. “Anything you say during this interview … (and) any information that we derive from what you tell us,” Upham promised, “cannot ever be used against you.”
That offer was never put in writing. Upham did not note, as is customary, that the immunity proffer would be invalidated if Oatney did not tell the whole truth.
Oatney insisted that Johnston alone killed Larsen after Oatney left his apartment to drink and shoot pool at the Wichita Pub in Tualatin.
Billy Lee Oatney maintained his innocence in a 2006 letter to former Register Guard reporter Mark Baker
When detectives played the tape of that conversation to Johnston, according to court records, “Johnston’s face turned beet red, and he clenched and shook his fists.” Over the next two days, he set the record straight, telling the story that guaranteed him a true life sentence and put Oatney on Death Row.
The retrial? I’m surprised only that it took the Court of Appeals 17 years to find fault in Oatney’s conviction. Judge Timothy Sercombe argued, convincingly, that because Johnston’s angry rebuttal was a direct result of Oatney’s immunized statements, Johnston’s testimony should not have been allowed in the 1998 trial.
Rosenblum’s office and Bracken McKey, Washington County’s deputy district attorney, have no argument with that. As McKey told Roberts in a July 27 hearing, he knows he can’t use Johnston’s tainted testimony in Oatney’s retrial.
But McKey further argued that he can call Johnston as a witness in 2021 if “the defense opens the door to doing this by trying to push this (murder) on Willford Johnston … If that motivates him to say, ‘I want to tell you what really happened,’ he should have the ability to do that. That doesn’t violate the Court of Appeals decision and it doesn’t violate the immunity agreement of 1996.”
“Of course it does,” Roberts replied.
Until the Supreme Court weighs in, Mindy Bush will deal with the fear, the exhaustion and emotions she struggles to define. “Anger is definitely a part of it,” she says, “but that’s not what drives me. I don’t know what the word is. Frustration? Sadness?
“Sadness is the biggest one. Not having my sister in my life. That photo? Susi out in the tulip fields? That was so her.”
-- Steve Duin
stephen.b.duin@gmail.com
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September 18, 2021 at 09:08PM
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A bitter retrial in the murder of Susi Larsen: Steve Duin column - OregonLive
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