Hush

Jesse Johnson is free, but what has changed in Oregon? Experts who have closely examined the state’s racist history say very little. A close look at a murder on a train in the 1940s, a lynching in Southern Oregon, and the state’s last executions in the late-90s reveals a straight line to Johnson’s plight. The architect of Oregon’s death penalty says it’s time for the state to chart a new path.

If Jesse Johnson did not kill Harriet Thompson, then who did? It’s a question police and prosecutors rarely - if ever - considered. We take a deep look at three men who all had connections to Thompson and violence in their pasts, including one man who told Salem police detectives in 1998 he “dreamed” of a murder eerily close in circumstances to the killing.

Police and prosecutors have always insisted they thoroughly investigated Harriet Thompson’s murder, but some people who did not appear at Jesse Johnson’s trial have insisted for 25 years that they have information that raises new questions. A former state of Oregon employee who was at Thompson’s house the night she died said police only ever wanted to charge Johnson for the murder. And an eye witness who no one – police, prosecutors or defense attorneys – have ever seriously questioned is revealed.

Patricia Hubbard lived across the street from Harriet Thompson in 1998, and was the kind of neighbor who doesn’t miss much. She said the white house on Shamrock Drive was known as a “party house.” The night of Thompson’s killing, Hubbard was smoking on her porch after a long shift at the local fruit cannery. When she heard screaming and saw a man come running from the home, she tried to tell the police what she saw. But Hubbard said officers rejected her help twice, including a shocking conversation that changed the course of the Jesse Johnson case.

After spending six years awaiting trial, a jury in Salem convicted Jesse Johnson in 2004. Prosecutors relied on an alleged confession to the murder of Harriet Thompson that Johnson made to a fellow drug user named Donald “Shorty” Blocker. But the jury did not hear the full story. If they had, they may have had doubts about the police investigators at the heart of the Johnson case: Detectives Craig Stoelk and Mike Quakenbush.

In the first season, we look at the case of Jesse Lee Johnson, a Black man who lived for 17 years on Oregon’s death row for a crime he says he didn’t commit, and we try to understand why the state tried for so long to kill him.