I mean it was a good, newsy time on the courts beat. But now I wonder if something awful seeped in and took root as the 1980s recession kicked the s**t out of Oregon’s little mill towns.
ERIC MORTENSON Dec 16 || ABOUT HALF SHOT

That was Tammy Kay Justice in January 1985 arriving handcuffed and belly chained at a courtroom on the third floor of the Linn County Courthouse in Albany, Ore. She shot and killed her husband, Jimmy Baker, with a .357 Magnum revolver and wounded Jimmy’s girlfriend. Defense attorneys usually don’t want their clients to testify, but Tammy’s attorney, a wily old guy from the nearby college town of Corvallis, knew what he was doing when he put her on the stand. She cried and told the jury, “I loved my husband, I didn’t mean to kill him,” and the jurors melted at her sweet southern drawl. “Ah loved Jimmy,” she tolt them. Original photo by Stanford Smith, Albany Democrat-Herald.
I don’t know for certain if something mean took hold in Oregon when the timber industry collapsed, but a cluster of particularly stupid, pointless homicides popped up during my stretch on the courts beat at two newspapers. And I’m not even counting the infamous Diane Downs, who shot her children outside of Springfield. Nor the Freeman brothers, who nearly decapitated a female convenience store clerk, also in Springfield. Her kids found her body.
But yes, in Albany I covered a murder defendant whose last name was Justice. She was charged with murder but the jury melted, like I said up there in the caption. Instead, the jury convicted her of a reduced charge of first-degree manslaughter. Plus attempted murder for wounding the woman Jimmy left her for.
She shot Jimmy in the back, left him laying in the street and screamed, “I hate you! I hope you die!” before driving off in Jimmy’s pickup to the apartment he had taken to sharing with the other woman.
At the apartment, Justice fired the revolver twice more. The first shot missed but the second hit the woman in her upper back as she turned away. The round fractured her right shoulder blade, broke two ribs and punctured a lung, but she lived. The woman’s 4-year-old son witnessed the shooting. He’d be 44 now.
Tammy and Jimmy were from North Carolina. A couple of the local cops joked with me about how you better not mess around and make those southern belles mad. “They don’t put up with that!” one of the cops joked.
Tammy was southern polite the only time I spoke to her. It was at her arraignment in Circuit Court. A female deputy brought her down from the county’s crappy jail, which was on the top floor of the courthouse. I was sitting in the back row of the courtroom, near the door. At arraignments I liked to be where I could see everybody; during trials I’d sit up front so I could hear the testimony.
There wasn’t any security like there is today. The deputy brought her in the door at the back of the courtroom, holding Tammy by the crook of her left arm, and stood in the entry for a moment, looking where to sit. She gestured for Tammy to sit next to me, and the deputy slid in, too. Tammy was wearing green jail clothes. I looked at her.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning,” Tammy responded.
The jury convicted her of manslaughter instead of murder, finding that she’d killed Jimmy under “extreme emotional disturbance” rather than “intentionally,” which was the legal standard for murder. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison with a five year minimum for manslaughter and attempted murder. With credit for time served and good behavior, she was paroled in 1990, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections. Tammy was allowed to move to Florida, which monitored her parole until cutting her loose for good in 1992. She might be back in North Carolina now; I found a Tammy Kay Justice there who was about the right age, early 60s. I found a phone number but it didn’t go through.
Jimmy Baker’s parents flew out from Wilmington, N.C., to attend the trial. I interviewed them in their motel room after the verdict and took their picture. Mrs. Baker said Tammy was crazy, and controlled and smothered her son with “whining and crying and sex” when he tried multiple times to break up with her. “I’ve never seen such possession in all my life,” Mrs. Baker said.
Mr. Baker said he found himself getting short with people at work, Jimmy’s death was working on him so. He also said he was surprised how slovenly we were out in Oregon. Wearing T-shirts in the courtroom and the like.

Nancy and James Baker, whose son was killed by Tammy Justice. “It’s such a waste,” James Baker said. “For both of them, as far as that goes,” Nancy Baker said.
Mrs. Baker told me Jimmy got Tammy pregnant early on. Mrs. Baker said she told her son, “If that girl is pregnant with your child, you owe her marriage.” But Jimmy was afraid the baby would have something wrong with it, because Tammy was crazy and Tammy’s mom was mentally ill, too. So Mrs. Baker paid for Tammy to have an abortion.
It was a grim case, of course, but nutty, too, as were several others that popped up in Linn County that winter. One homicide, outside a tavern in a little town called Crabtree, actually began inside with an argument over which was better, Fords or Chevys.
The shooter interrupted two other guys who were talking about Fords, wanting to talk about his Chevy pickup. The eventual victim told him to shut up, and keep his Chevys down at that end of the bar. One thing led to another and the second guy, a big man and a prominent farmer in the county, smacked the first a couple times. The guy left, went to his nearby rented room and came back with a .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulders. He fired a shot in the air outside the tavern, then stepped inside, held the rifle at waist level and said “Don’t ever hit me again.” He backed out the door, but the other guy charged him and got shot three times for his trouble. He was pronounced D.O.A. at the hospital in Albany.
So, Fords or Chevys. I always tell people that was probably the most classic Oregon crime I covered in my 37 years of journalism in this state. A friend reminded me of another one, though, that might rival it: A Springfield woman conspired with a couple young guys who wired a blasting cap and stick of dynamite to the ignition system of her husband’s car. When he got off work at the mill the next morning and started his car, he blew himself up in the plant parking lot.
I was the cops and courts reporter at The Springfield News when that happened, and when I heard it on the scanner I jumped in my 1972 Datsun pickup and went screaming east down Main Street to the mill. As I parked and began hustling to the parking lot, an unmarked sedan busted up beside me and two Springfield police detectives jumped out. They wore jackets and ties in those day, and they hustled toward the parking lot, too. I knew them both well, and apparently had zipped past them on the way out. The bespectacled detective who jumped out of the passenger side, Mike Wisdom, known to everybody as Wizard, was red-faced about that.
“Eric!” he sputtered as they hustled past me, “Do you know what the speed limit is on Main Street?”
“70?” I guessed, probably with a smart-ass grin. I think it was 40.
Wizard didn’t pursue the speeding thing, of course. He and the rest of the detectives quickly realized they had a homicide on their hands; it wasn’t some accident or mechanical failure that caused the man’s car to explode like that. But the whole thing makes a funny story that I tell my kids. And Wizard was a great guy, the kind of guy you’d want to be a cop. Intelligent and quietly good-humored, with a steely sense of right and wrong.
So many great stories jumped out for me to cover in those early cops and courts days. I covered both beats and a bunch of other stuff from 1980-83 at the beloved, tri-weekly Springfield News, now defunct, as they say. Then I moved 40 miles north up the Willamette Valley, and up the newspaper chain ladder a bit, to the daily Democrat-Herald in Albany under the great editor Hasso Hering.
Hasso hired me to cover county government, but after a bit I suggested maybe I should cover the courts, too, because they were in the same building, the Linn County Courthouse, and I was over there all the time anyway. Truthfully, though, I knew the worn-out old guy covering courts was missing great stories and it was driving me crazy. So I kind of Bigfooted the beat away from him, which I’m not necessarily proud of, but damn.
It was during that time — Fall 1984 through Winter 1985 — that a cluster of particularly messed up homicides paraded through Linn County’s justice system. I don’t have any proof, of course, but it sure seems the recession of the early 1980s set loose something mean when it gutted Oregon’s timber and farm towns. There was Tammy Justice case, like I said, and the deadly argument over Fords and Chevys.
One lady went off to a Halloween party and left her 6-year-old and 2-year-old daughters alone. They died in a fire while she was gone drinking. A man claimed he’d been knocked out by a laser beam and didn’t remember beating a woman with a Crescent wrench and strangling her. Another guy stabbed a woman to death, inflicting what the cops called “sexual slashings.” There were other routine shootings, as well.
In yet another case, four guys in their 20s lured a 43-year-old man out of a Lebanon tavern one night by promising him sex with a woman friend of theirs. Instead, they beat him up, took his cash — he’d gotten an insurance settlement, or something — and tossed him off a bridge into the South Santiam River, where of course he drowned, it being January in Western Oregon.
After their trials, one of the defendants sent me a handwritten letter from prison saying he was suing me for $10 million, or something like that. He was mad because I’d pointed out in a news story that he was offered a deal to plead guilty to a reduced charge of robbery in return for testifying against the others, but instead he stubbornly went to trial and was convicted of murder, which carried a life sentence.
The worst of those winter criminals, though, was this guy: William Wallace Wilson.

William Wallace Wilson, then 45, was not somebody you ever wanted to encounter, anywhere. I always wondered if his parents named him after William Wallace, the Scottish rebel — “Braveheart” — who fought the English and was executed in 1305. That might be giving them more historical credit than they deserve.
The short version is that Wilson decided to kill somebody in the Linn County Jail so he could serve his time in Oregon, where the prison system was considered relatively easy, rather than be sent back to a penitentiary in California or Texas.
At that point, in November 1984, Wilson was a lifer in the making. He’d served time for burglary in Texas, and killed a woman in California in 1979. He jumped parole in California and was arrested in Albany for car theft. While in the Linn County Jail, Wilson bragged to other prisoners that he’d known murderer Charlie Manson when they were both at California’s Vacaville medical facility for prisoners.
Wilson figured he’d be extradited back to California or even to Texas, and didn’t want to go to either one. Oregon’s prison system was considered a softer place to do your time. Wilson was stewing on that in the Linn County Jail when the cops brought in an 18-year-old kid to serve a 30-day sentence for Driving While Suspended.
The jail was old, crappy and crowded, with not enough room to properly segregate inmates. The deputies shrugged and put Allen Hiebert in the same cell as Wilson, who had killed someone previously, another guy who was awaiting trial on an unrelated murder, and a fourth guy who stayed out of it.
On Nov. 25, Allen Hiebert stepped out of a shower and Wilson jumped him from behind. Wilson strangled Hiebert with a towel, then dragged his body to the shower and tied the towel to a shower rod. Then he smoked a cigarette.
After that, Wilson just wanted to plead guilty and head off to the easy life at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. The district attorney’s office and Wilson’s court-appointed defense attorney didn’t move quickly enough for Wilson’s liking, however. Among other things, he was examined by three different psychiatrists, two of whom said he knew what he was doing; the third said he had periods of mental illness.
In May 1985, six months after the killing, Wilson stood in Circuit Court and told a judge, “This has gone far enough.”
“No representation is needed,” he told the judge. “All I plan on doing is pleading guilty.”
He got his wish. Still, at Wilson’s sentencing hearing in June, the judge made sure all the T’s were crossed and the I’s were dotted. He asked Wilson what he’d done that qualified as aggravated murder.
“Killed another inmate while being incarcerated,” Wilson answered. He struggled to pronounce the victim’s name, calling him “Highbert, Hiebert, Allen.”
The judge, whose last name was Goode, called the strangling “as heinous, cruel and calculating a murder as I can imagine.” He sentenced Wilson to life in prison.
Wilson died at the state pen up in Salem on Nov. 28, 2013, according to the Corrections Department. He would have been 73. I doubt anyone cared. I never did find out much about Allen Hiebert, the 18-year-old that Wilson strangled. My stories from that time just listed him as a transient. His family filed a wrongful death suit against the county but I don’t know how it turned out. I think I moved on to my next job by then.
But something mean surely took root in those little mill towns during that time. I hope it died out like William Wallace Wilson did, but I don’t know.
Eric Mortenson is a Pacific Northwest writer who worked 37 wondrous years as a reporter at Oregon newspapers. I write about Oregon, family, journalism, politics, pets, bad golf, gardening, cooking and running.
George Custer lives in Oakridge with his wife Sayre. George is a former smokejumper from his hometown of Cave Junction, a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. and ran a construction company in Southern California. George assumed the volunteer duties as the Editor of the Highway 58 Herald in 2022. He loves riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, building all things wood, and playing drums on the weekends in his office.