News As part of our coverage of the Kyron Horman case, we went to Roseburg last month to talk to Ron Tarver, ex-husband of Terri Moulton Horman and the father of her oldest child, 16-year-old James. Tarver revealed then to WW the answers to questions many observers had been asking—when and why James had moved away from the Portland home he shared until recently with the Hormans. Tarver said ...   More

News Last night's announcement (PDF) from the parents of Kyron Horman confirmed our suspicion that DeDe Spicher lied about her identity when we visited her house earlier this month. Perhaps that's not surprising, since Kyron's parents accuse Spicher of "refusing to cooperate with law enforcement" and of providing Terri Moulton Horman with "support and advice that is not in the best interests of our ...   More

News Law-enforcement sources have compared the Kyron Horman case to that of Diane Downs, the Oregon woman who shot her three children in 1983. Ann Rule, the true-crime author who wrote the book on the Downs case, has already weighed in on Kyron's disappearance. And Oregonian columnist Anna Griffin wagers Rule is angling to write a book on the Kyron case as well. Turns out Griffin is right. ...   More

News As even his opponent predicted, Central Precinct Officer Daryl Turner today was elected president of the powerful Portland police union. Turner received 63 percent of the 675 votes cast, according to the Portland Police Association website. Sgt. Doug Justus received 37-percent support from the 900-member union. Turner will be sworn in this Friday, according to the union website. He'll complete ...   More

News While reporting this week's story about antiwar protester Joe Walsh's lawsuit against the city of Portland, we ran across a supremely entertaining gem related to another case against the city's cops. The exchange came while Greg Kafoury, a Portland lawyer well-known for suing the city's police, deposed Sgt. Kyle Nice (pictured above, courtesy KOIN) on April 9. Kafoury was deposing Nice that ...   More

News Investigators this morning faced more pointed questions than ever before in a public news conference about law enforcement's progress in the Kyron Horman case. Multnomah County Sheriff's Capt. Jason Gates denied the investigation has stalled after one reporter asked outright whether law enforcement has hit a wall. "The investigation is most certainly productive," Gates said. "It's just one ...   More

News In last week's story about the Al Gore investigation, we noted that Portland police took the unusual step of sending four cops to San Francisco to interview the former VP. Current and former detectives told us that number was unheard-of in their experience. As one law-enforcement official explained it, police may have used excessive resources this time because they'd already been burned on the ...   More

News The Oregon Secretary of State's Office has released its latest round of voter-registration tallies. And for Democrats headed into the November election, the news is not positive. Compared with a year ago, Dems lost a total of 43,002 voters statewide as of the end of June 2010—the most recent data available. That's a 4.7 percent loss over the 12-month period since June 2009. Republicans ...   More

News As the case of missing Kyron Horman enters its third month, folks in Central Washington are dealing with their own high-profile investigation in the murder of Wenatchee High School senior Mackenzie Cowell. Both cases are being conducted by multi-agency task forces that have released very little public information despite fervent interest in each investigation. Now, one big difference has emerged. ...   More

News U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) has announced he'll soon introduce bipartisan legislation to ban the sale of so-called "crush" videos showing small animals being tortured and killed by humans. Congress banned the sale of such videos in 1999, but the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that law in April, saying it was overly broad and impinged on free speech. Since then, the videos have been surfacing ...   More