Skip to main contentLife outside Oregon has been a bitch recently for retired Multnomah County Judge Dorothy Baker and former Miss Oregon 1989 Lynette Boggs.
Boggs was indicted June 4 on two counts of perjury and two counts of filing false or forged documents in Nevada, according to local press accounts. And Baker spent the night last week in an Alaska jail, charged with domestic violence.
On June 12, Alaska police arrived at Baker's 4,500-square-foot log cabin 90 miles southwest of Anchorage. There, police said they found the 62-year-old ex-Multnomah County judge looking like "she was not taking care of herself hygienically," with dirt caked under her nails, seeming "somewhat paranoid."
Baker ("Judge Dread," WW, July 10, 2002) retired into the wilds (her telephone message informs callers that she is chasing a bear from her yard) of Alaska after years of championing a controversial program in Multnomah County targeting repeat DUII offenders.
Her 32-year-old son-in-law, Caleb Rapp, accused the 5-foot-7, 165-pound Baker of trying to push him down a flight of stairs. Rapp lived with Baker's daughter Allison in the log cabin's basement.
"I heard that there was some friction," one of Baker's neighbors, Grant Johnson, told WW. "The son-in-law had helped her with the house, but he got tired of doing it."
Perhaps best known in Portland for dragging a drunken-driving probationer from a bar in 2002, Baker was taken in last week by police and placed overnight in the Wildwood Correctional Facility in nearby Kenai. Baker, who was released the next day on her own recognizance, did not return WW's calls.
Meanwhile, back down in the lower 48, Boggs had her own problems. The four counts in her indictment last week carry a collective penalty, if she is convicted, of 18 years in prison and $30,000 in fines.
Boggs, 42, was a rising Republican star, first as a Las Vegas city councilmember, then as a Clark County (Nev.) commissioner before losing her seat in 2006. Investigators caught Boggs wearing a pink bathrobe, on tape at a residence outside her own district during her re-election campaign last year.
A winner of the swimsuit competition during the 1989 Miss Oregon pageant, Boggs is a member of the board of directors for the Miss America Organization.
A spokeswoman for the Miss America Organization referred calls to Boggs' attorney, who declined to comment on the case. Boggs, also released on her own recognizance, could not be reached for comment.
WWeek 2015