Q&A
When somebody finds a body...
Heidi and Tom Juza just wanted to plant a new lawn, not dig up a murder mystery in their backyard.

BY NIGEL JAQUISS
njaquiss@week.com

Eleven years ago last week, on Valentine's Day, a young man named Lawrence Morley disappeared. Last fall, Heidi Juza and her husband, Tom, found him. The couple was seeding the back lawn at a hilltop home they had bought in Wilsonville. The setting could hardly have been more bucolic: sheep grazed in an adjacent pasture, Douglas firs whispered in the background, and the Juzas' three young sons scampered underfoot, enjoying the spectacular setting of the family's six-acre spread. As twilight approached, Juza, 37, walking behind her husband's tractor with a bucket of grass seed, found a bone that the tractor had unearthed. A fan of detective fiction, particularly Patricia Cornwell's novels about forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, Juza thought the bone looked human.

After 15 years of importing espresso machines, the Juzas thought they'd found their dream home, a place to shield their sons from the sometimes-unpleasant realities of metropolitan living. But the bone Juza found belonged to a man who once lived in their house and was almost certainly murdered in or near the dwelling.

WW caught up with Heidi last week, a day after the 11th anniversary of the disappearance of the man whose body she found.

Willamette Week: This is a beautiful place. How did you find it?

Heidi Juza: We saw an ad in the paper, for sale by owner, and we called the lady and she described where it was. We were in Tualatin, really close, so we buzzed over here. When we drove up and saw the beautiful big old trees we just were like, 'This is it. We don't even care what the house is like.'

Are you farmers or horse people?

We have horses, yeah. I just sold a couple about a month ago and I'm down to two; I have two very high-maintenance ones.

So you bought the place in '97?

Yeah, we bought it in '97 and fixed up the house over the summer and rented it out for two years. We're actually going to be tearing down the house this summer and building a new house.

Tell me about finding the body.

Well, I don't remember the exact day. I think it was the 1st of October, and we had been told that was the best weekend to plant grass seed. So we decided to till up this whole back area. So my husband was on the tractor and I was following along behind with the bucket and there was all kinds of debris coming up. I mean, this was an old farm, so you have bits of nails and old horseshoes and hammerheads and all kinds of stuff.

Did you find anything good? An arrowhead...?

Not then. But in the past I've found some very interesting things. I found some glass jars of what my neighbor next door, who's been here his whole life, said was opium, which were buried by Chinese immigrants who used to grow hops on this property. They were a white sort of milky liquid in these really thick prescription bottle jars from the turn of the century.

What did you do with them?

I threw them out because that was kind of a whole weird thing. I guess the previous owner had also dug up some of this opium stuff at the top of the property. So it's kind of strange. I'm really getting to the point where I'm afraid to plant anything because every time I put a shovel in the ground something strange pops up.

Okay. Back to the body. You were following behind the tractor...

Yeah, we had a subsoiler behind the tractor, which is like a harrow with long tines that digs in and gets the roots. I was following behind the tractor and, uh, this bone was sticking out of the ground, and the earth was really wet and fresh and fluffy, and I leaned down and picked up this bone, and it was the arm bone from wrist to elbow.

Was it obviously a bone?

The minute I picked it up I thought, "This is a human arm!" I mean it was just weird. It was long, it had the knobs on each end and it was exactly like my bone here would be.

Was there any flesh on it?

No, it was just kind of a yellowish-brownish color, and I ran and flagged my husband down. because he was in front of me, and I said, 'Look at this, look at this!' And he just said, 'Oh, it's probably some buried deer or something. Just leave it. We've got to hurry up, it's gonna be dark in an hour.'

What was his rush?

This was Sunday and he had work the next day and we wanted to get this done. But was really intrigued by it, so I went back over where I found the bone and when he made another pass around with the tractor, some plastic pulled up...

Clear plastic?

It was white plastic. And I bent down and looked and another bone exactly like this one popped up. By then my son had come over with a friend, and they were like, 'Oh, cool, Mom, can we take these to show and tell?" So they were looking at the bones and I was kind of digging around trying to pull the plastic out and when I was pulling up on the plastic, part of a navy blue sweatshirt sleeve pulled up.

Did you begin to feel...

I just got the creeps in a big way, and I yelled at my husband to get off the tractor and said 'There's a dead body under here!,' and he just thought I was nuts. He said, 'Would you just forget the bones and get this finished? I don't have all day.' And I said, 'There is something under here.' And he said, 'I'll prove to you there's no body under there; go get me a shovel.' So I got him a shovel and said, 'Dig right about here, 'cause that's about where the head would be.'

What happened?

First push in the ground with the shovel, he pops up the skull. Just like a mystery movie. I mean, oop! There it goes!

What was your reaction?

We just looked at each other and he said, 'Is that a skull?' And I said, 'Yeah, that's a skull,' and I immediately told the boys to get in the house because I didn't want them trying to take it out. And then my husband said, 'Well, this is an old farm, maybe it's just somebody's old grandma or something. I said, 'I don't think grandmas are buried in navy blue sweatshirts and wrapped in plastic.'

It sounds like your husband didn't really want to be...

He didn't really think this would happen. But I'm the avid mystery reader. So he said, 'Well, what should we do?' And I said, 'I'm going to go down and get the police.' I didn't want to call 911 because it's not an emergency, so I just drove down to the end of the street where the sheriff's office is and started banging on the little glass door until this deputy comes out. He looked at me, and I'm all dirty and just a mess and he said, 'Can I help you, ma'am?' I said, 'Yeah, I live right up the street and my husband and I just uncovered what I believe to be is a dead body. Would you come up and help us?' He just looked at me, like is this some kind of prank or what?

But he came up?

Yeah. And he secured the area with the tape and all that.

So at this point you had the two arm bones, the plastic, some blue sweatshirt and a skull. Did you see anything else from where you were?

No, because it was buried in the dirt.

Were you curious at that point, like maybe you should dig up some more or...

No, I was just...yeah, I guess we were a little bit curious, but...I can't really describe the feeling. It's kind of surreal. It would have been one thing had we been excavating for a foundation and found something 6 feet under, but you knew there was an element of foul play involved when you see that plastic.

That night when you went to bed, did you feel a little bit frightened?

Yeah, kind of. The police had a 24-hour surveillance here, and they had a deputy on guard. He actually came and had dinner with us the first night and talked to the boys about what was out there. I didn't really feel scared, I just wanted answers, you know: who it was, and why. And then all of the sudden I had this really strange feeling of mistrust of all of my neighbors, and I thought, What if it was him, or her? I didn't know who I could trust.

How long had the people who sold you the home had it?

I' m not sure. I think they'd had it from the '70s sometime.

Is there a suspect in this case at this point?

The police haven't said anything about any suspects, but the location of the body is so obvious. If I were to live in this home and drive up my driveway and one day all of a sudden I see a big dirt mound in the backyard...I mean, wouldn't you think that's a little suspicious?

Does that make you think that somebody who lived here in the past 10 years is a suspect?

It makes me think that the people that lived here when he lived here are suspects.

Was he living here when he went missing?

Yes.

Was he living by himself?

No, he was not on the lease. He had a roommate.

How did you learn all this?

The police, upon finding the body, brought a file to the scene with his picture and said to us, 'This is who we think this skeleton belongs to.' So they already had a sort of a profile of what was going on. And sure enough, when they finally had the DNA results back, it is him.

I guess there's a lot here that I don't know, but if somebody disappeared and 10 years later is found 60 yards from his house, it strikes me that people didn't look very hard for him.

When he was reported missing in '90, the police didn't really take it too seriously. They thought, you know, he's in his twenties, he's single, he's got this kind of flashy lifestyle, he likes to go to Hawaii, he likes to drive around in fast cars and boats and...

The implication being...

The implication being that, 'Hey, he just left the country. He's just gone, he's not missing, he just took off and is having fun.'

Did you watch them when they excavated the body?

We weren't allowed to go inside the crime scene tape. So you couldn't really get a good look.

Have you dug around there since?

I found some things that I reported to the sheriff's department.

Can you say what they are?

Yeah, I found a woman's gold shell necklace that was broken in two. It was very close to the body and lots of rubbish in the ground. I think they had started a burn pile over the body because there were door hinges and doorknobs. Maybe they had thrown a lot of junk and debris over it to conceal it.

So you said you like to read mysteries?

Yes.

Which authors?

I like Patricia Cornwell and Sue Grafton.

Now, Cornwell is a forensic pathologist. Have you been trying to think about this case and what may have happened?

Yes! I do. I try to play detective. I do it in my mind; I don't take any steps. But what was really interesting was a couple of weeks ago, a car followed me up my driveway and this woman parked behind me. I thought she was lost and looking for directions and I went over and she rolled her window down and said, 'Are you Heidi Juza?' I said, 'Yes, I am,' and she said, 'I'm Deanna. I'm Larry Morley's birth mother from California.'

What did you say?

I said, 'Oh gosh, wow!' I didn't really know what to say, so she got out of her car and I invited her in. She was with her cousin from Scappoose, and we sat here and talked about him. She had come up from California, cause that was the day of his memorial service.

Did she want to see the site where you found him?

Uh-huh. She was trying really hard to be strong. I really feel very sorry for her. She gave this infant up at three days old, and she'd been searching for him since they opened up the adoption records.

So she'd never seen him since he was three days old?

No. And she'd held onto his baby blanket. She had kept that after they took the infant away.

Have you gone back and tried to find out about him? You seem to know a little about his lifestyle.

I know from the previous landlord that they think they were involved in growing some marijuana on the property and that could have been another reason for this. I'd really like to know what happened because I can't help but think that it may have happened in this house.

You said you're gonna tear this house down. Is that part of the reason?

Actually we've planned to build since we bought the property, but we were going to keep this house as a guest house. But I have now decided just to completely tear it down.

Because you don't feel...

I don't know. It really bothers me to think that a violent death occurred in this house.

Does it give you the creeps living here?

The only time I really get the creeps now is at night walking up to my barn. I used to enjoy tucking the horses in for the night. We don't have any exterior lighting right now, and even with a flashlight I just really get the willies walking by the site.

Do you think about it every day?

Not every day. Certain things will trigger it.

So how has this changed your life, if it has?

I guess it sort of brings a reality to the mystery fiction. I've always kind of led a sheltered life, I guess. Even though I didn't actually see a bloody, violent death occur, here's the aftermath of it.