The House on Murder Mountain

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Speaker 5 They call it Murder Mountain. So many lives lost.
So many of them young.

Speaker 7 He was the toe-headed kid that everybody loved.

Speaker 5 Her brother was murdered here. His daughter.

Speaker 3 How can you take three lives?

Speaker 5 For what? Police were certain they knew the answer to that question. Certain they had their killer.
Case closed.

Speaker 8 Absolutely.

Speaker 5 But then a strange thing happened. With the convicted killer locked away for life, the killing continued.

Speaker 9 She had told Dan before that he'd never leave that hill alive.

Speaker 5 The connection? One woman, the mysterious landlord of Murder Mountain. What do you now know about Bim La Boyd that you didn't know?

Speaker 11 Looks like she's not afraid to kill people.

Speaker 5 What really happened up on that hill?

Speaker 12 As the years go by, Bill Smith is rage.

Speaker 5 The house on Murder Mountain.

Speaker 5 High in the rolling hills of central Oregon, within sight of the state capitol, where the landscape is lined with endless acres of vineyards and miles of Christmas tree farms, sits an estate.

Speaker 3 I know what evil is. I've seen evil.
A place of of evil.

Speaker 5 It's a place where many lives have ended in mysterious ways. And what happened here in the space of 30 minutes is still unknown.

Speaker 7 There's got to be somebody out there that knows something

Speaker 7 that could take that doubt away.

Speaker 5 The story begins in the fall of 1998, just below that big house on the hill. A young man had just moved into a a mobile home.
26-year-old Jason Kinzer had been hired to be the property's caretaker.

Speaker 5 Kinzer's sisters, Vicki and Kathy.

Speaker 6 Jason, he was the toe-headed kid that everybody loved.

Speaker 7 I mean, he always was smiling.

Speaker 11 Made you laugh.

Speaker 11 Biggest smile.

Speaker 5 And living there with Jason Kinzer, his fiancé, Susan Osborne, who was saving money to attend a school to care for tigers and other large jungle cats. Susan's father, Thomas Osborne.

Speaker 14 She was going to take care of the house, I guess.

Speaker 3 And he was going to do odd jobs.

Speaker 5 You liked him. You approved of him.

Speaker 3 Jason was like a son.

Speaker 3 Everybody liked Jason.

Speaker 5 But on the afternoon of November 23, 1998, Osborne's phone rang. On the other end was a woman whom he would later learn was the owner of of that big house on the hill, a woman named Bim LaBoyd.

Speaker 3 Bim LaBoyd was screaming, they're dead, somebody shot them.

Speaker 5 Did you know who Bim LaBoyd was at that point?

Speaker 3 Not at all.

Speaker 5 How'd she have your phone number?

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 3 It's about two hours later, a detective came to the house and told us that

Speaker 8 what had happened.

Speaker 5 What that woman, the estate owner, had said, was sadly true. Inside the mobile home, Jason Kinzer lay dead on his kitchen floor.

Speaker 5 Under the trailer, the bodies of Susan Osborne and of a friend, 25-year-old Celesta Graves.

Speaker 5 Investigators believe Kinzer was killed first and that the women were then chased, cornered, and executed. Their killer working methodically to make sure he or she did not leave witnesses behind.

Speaker 7 I always think about those two girls underneath that trailer.

Speaker 14 And that's just wrong.

Speaker 5 And I think about my brother laying on the floor thinking through his mind, gosh, did I deserve this? You know, what was he thinking?

Speaker 15 How could I let it come to this?

Speaker 7 They didn't deserve that.

Speaker 5 They didn't deserve that.

Speaker 3 Even today, you know, I can still

Speaker 3 see my wife sitting across the table and just

Speaker 3 she's completely unglued.

Speaker 5 What did you think had happened out there?

Speaker 3 Somebody went nuts and killed three kids.

Speaker 3 Why?

Speaker 5 Don't know.

Speaker 5 Investigators for the Polk County Sheriff's Office had little to go on. A few spent shell casings near the bodies.
But no murder weapon or weapons. Believed to be.22-caliber pistols.

Speaker 5 and no witnesses beyond the estate owner, Bim Laboyd. She told detectives that at about 3.45 that afternoon, she'd looked out her window and seen smoke coming from the mobile home below.

Speaker 5 When she'd driven down the hill, she said, she'd put out a fire inside the trailer, a fire apparently set near the wood stove to consume the evidence of the killings.

Speaker 5 She found the bodies, and at 3.57 p.m., she called 911.

Speaker 5 Despite the lack of evidence, investigators soon discovered information they thought might help identify identify the killer.

Speaker 5 Jason Kinzer, the kid with the smile who was loved by everyone, turned out to be a small-time drug dealer, with police said plans of making it to the big time.

Speaker 5 He had two previous drug convictions and a new arrest just weeks before the murder.

Speaker 5 More importantly, Kinzer had been involved in a number of drug deals that went wrong, leading, police said, to threats against Jason Kinzer's life.

Speaker 8 There were people who told Jason at the time, this is dangerous.

Speaker 5 At the time of the murders, Eric Mason was an investigative reporter for a TV station in Portland. Three people were killed that day.
Right.

Speaker 5 But police thought at the time that Jason Kinzer was the primary victim. The two women were killed because they were witnesses.

Speaker 8 That's right. So I think when you start running through this list of names, Bushwhacker, Ductape Mike, Nazi Red.

Speaker 5 These are all drug dealers who were angry at Jason Kinzer?

Speaker 8 These were all people with stated motive to kill Jason Kinzer. And you have to ask yourself if one of those threats someone made good on.

Speaker 5 And at least one more of the victims had recently faced drug charges. Celesta Graves had been arrested for possession and then released from jail just days before her murder.
Her sister Jennifer.

Speaker 5 She was

Speaker 5 a loving, caring person.

Speaker 5 with a good soul. What was she up to when you last talked to her? Hanging out with the wrong people.

Speaker 5 doing the wrong things.

Speaker 5 For Susan Osborne's family as well, the fact that drugs may have played a role in her murder is part of a much larger mystery.

Speaker 5 And your daughter never mentioned anything to do with drugs or anybody even being angry at Jason or Jason having any enemies.

Speaker 3 She told Irene one time while they were sitting in the kitchen talking, which they did quite often,

Speaker 3 that she was scared, okay?

Speaker 3 I don't know why.

Speaker 3 And now she might have told her mom why,

Speaker 3 but she never told me.

Speaker 5 Although an arrest would soon come, it would also be clear to the families and to that reporter that there was evil yet to be revealed on Murder Mountain.

Speaker 5 And secrets revealed about the mysterious landlord of Murder Mountain.

Speaker 8 She was the person who told police, there isn't anybody that comes and goes off the property that I don't know about.

Speaker 5 But was she telling the truth?

Speaker 5 On a 30-acre Oregon estate in November 1998, the bodies of three murder victims, Celesta Graves, Susan Osborne, and Jason Kinzer were found in and underneath a mobile home.

Speaker 5 Stories of drug dealing and death threats swirled around the scene. Detectives believed Jason to be the target.
Susan and Celesta were simply heart-rending collateral damage.

Speaker 5 Susan's father, Tom Osborne. Why?

Speaker 3 Why does something like this happen? How can you take three lives? For what? What could make you so mad, so upset to take three lives of young people like that? No.

Speaker 5 And then just a little more than 24 hours after the bodies were found, Polk County Sheriff's investigators thought they had an answer and they would make an arrest.

Speaker 5 The suspect, 32-year-old Scott Cannon, a plumber who on the day of the murders was at the trailer providing an estimate for repairs. the father of one young son with another on the way.

Speaker 5 But he was also a pot and meth user, and his motive, investigators believed, was a drug deal that went sideways.

Speaker 8 They had a guy who was on drugs. He was in the meth world.

Speaker 5 Former investigative reporter Eric Mason.

Speaker 8 He looked like a good suspect. He knew drug dealers.

Speaker 5 He

Speaker 3 liked weapons.

Speaker 8 And when police showed up and started looking around his garage, what was in his garage looked pretty good to them.

Speaker 5 What police found was an extensive gun collection, no murder weapon, but hundreds of rounds of bullets and these homemade silencers. It was circumstantial, but it was enough.

Speaker 5 Scott Cannon was charged with three murders, if convicted, facing the death penalty.

Speaker 5 When his trial began at the Polk County, Oregon courthouse in January of 2000, the heart of the prosecution's case was the theory that Scott Cannon was the only person at the scene who could have committed the crime.

Speaker 5 Two witnesses, who it turns out were making a drug delivery that day, testified that as they arrived shortly after 3.30 p.m., Cannon met them outside the mobile home and acted strangely, discouraged the two from going inside, and then followed them off the property in his van.

Speaker 5 Then the prosecution's star witness sealed the deal. Remember the estate owner, Bim LaBoyd? She said that right after Cannon's van left, she saw smoke coming from the trailer.

Speaker 5 She'd gone down, put out the fire, discovered Jason Kinzer's body, and then at 3.57 dialed 911.

Speaker 8 She was the person who told police, there isn't anybody that comes and goes off the property that I don't know about.

Speaker 8 So when she sees the van, she tells police, and that eventually led to Scott Cannon.

Speaker 5 And finally, prosecutors had high-caliber science linking Cannon to the murders. It seemed as foolproof as DNA.

Speaker 5 An expert in an obscure methodology called Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis told jurors that bullets found in Scott Cannon's garage were chemically indistinguishable from lead in the slugs found in the murder victims.

Speaker 5 The chance that they didn't match was one in 64 million.

Speaker 8 The bullet lead analysis showed the match of the the lead found at the scene with the lead found at his house in a box.

Speaker 5 Case closed.

Speaker 8 Absolutely.

Speaker 5 Scott Cannon was in disbelief. No murder weapon, no eyewitnesses.
But there he was, a self-described recreational drug user on trial for his life.

Speaker 5 When it came time for his defense, Cannon simply said that all the people in the mobile home had been alive when he finished his work that day.

Speaker 5 He described a Hispanic-looking man who he said had been at the trailer and who might have been the real killer. The prosecution's case was almost entirely circumstantial.

Speaker 5 But before Cannon knew it, the jury was back with word on his fate.

Speaker 5 What'd you think when you heard the word guilty?

Speaker 3 I was satisfied. And I felt that justice had been done.

Speaker 5 Scott Cannon avoided the death penalty. What he got was life in prison without parole.

Speaker 7 I've always felt that for those three kids, the person that had committed the murders murders was at least suffering, not as much as they did, but at least suffering enough by being kept away from his family and his life.

Speaker 5 There was no doubt. Jurors believed Scott Cannon was a merciless killer.
But what remained a mystery was his motive.

Speaker 5 Prosecutors never offered any real explanation for the crime, and the families were left to wonder.

Speaker 5 Is it hard to not really understand what happened?

Speaker 14 That's probably the hardest part.

Speaker 7 It's like you can send your son off to war and he gets killed in war and you know why. You can drive down the road and a drunk driver can kill your child and you know why.

Speaker 7 But for these three kids,

Speaker 7 they just, they weren't doing anything.

Speaker 5 And it was for what?

Speaker 5 The trial was over. The case closed.
But the story wasn't over. It would soon become clear that those three deaths on this property were just the beginning as the killing continued on Murder Mountain.

Speaker 5 And this time, the killer was Bim LaBoyd, the estate owner and a key witness against Scott Cannon. What do you now know about Bim La Boyd that you didn't know at your trial?

Speaker 11 Looks like she's not afraid to kill people.

Speaker 5 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 5 Nearly four years after the murders on the mountain outside Salem, Oregon, Scott Cannon was serving three consecutive sentences of life without parole at the state penitentiary.

Speaker 5 When again, gunfire erupted on this property and another man lay dead.

Speaker 5 The victim? Again, a caretaker who lived in that very same trailer where the three were gunned down below that big house on the hill. The suspect? This time the estate owner herself, Bim LeBoyd.

Speaker 5 That local investigative reporter, Eric Mason, was now covering a new murder case, the case of Bim LeBoyd.

Speaker 8 All of a sudden, at 5909 Orchard Heights Road, the same address, there's this shooting.

Speaker 5 Bim Laboyd had gone from witness in one murder to suspect in another.

Speaker 5 Who was Bim LeBoyd? And what was the story behind this latest killing on the estate? The reporter began digging. Here's what he

Speaker 5 Bimla Boyd was then 46 years old, born in Fiji, a single mother of three who'd come to America two decades before, a devout Jehovah's Witness who was three times divorced.

Speaker 5 After the murders in 1998, Boyd had hired a new caretaker, Dan Spencer. He'd moved into the same mobile home where the killings had occurred.

Speaker 5 Family members say Boyd and Spencer soon became more than friends. But Boyd family and neighbors say threatened Spencer when he said he wanted to leave.
Here's what one neighbor had to say.

Speaker 9 She had told Dan before that he'd never leave that hill alive.

Speaker 5 And Dan Spencer did not. Bimla Boyd admitted shooting Spencer, but claimed she'd caught him sexually abusing her teenage daughter.
In the end, Boyd cut a deal.

Speaker 5 pleading guilty to manslaughter and agreeing to serve nearly seven years in prison.

Speaker 5 And in a prison just 10 miles away from the scene of the murders, the news of Bim Laboyd's conviction was more than surprising.

Speaker 11 My Selly came down there and said, hey man, you're on the news. And I said, yeah, what's up? And he said, now that gal that testified against you killed somebody.

Speaker 5 This is Scott Cannon. You can imagine his surprise when he heard the news that the woman who'd been the star witness against him was now a convicted killer herself.

Speaker 5 What do you now know about Bim LeBoyd that you didn't know at your trial?

Speaker 11 Looks like she's not afraid to kill people.

Speaker 5 But would the latest death on what became known as Murder Mountain make any difference in Cannon's case?

Speaker 5 When we met him in April 2009, he'd been behind bars for more than a decade, losing every appeal he had ever filed.

Speaker 5 And he was still claiming that he did not kill Jason Kinzer, Susan Osborne, and Celesta Graves.

Speaker 5 What do you most want people to know?

Speaker 11 Wrong guy's in prison.

Speaker 5 Are you a killer?

Speaker 11 I'm not a killer.

Speaker 5 It's hard to say that, isn't it?

Speaker 11 It's easy to say I'm not a killer.

Speaker 11 It's hard to be asked it over and over and over.

Speaker 5 And while Cannon had been languishing in the state pen, his family had stood by him. His girlfriend Sarah, the mother of his two children.
Scott says he told you to move on. Yeah, I want to move on.

Speaker 5 I want Scott. I want him home.
Son Matthias was nearly nine when he saw his father arrested at gunpoint.

Speaker 12 As the years go by, you know, it fills me with this

Speaker 12 rage that, you know, penetrates nearly every single

Speaker 12 factor of my life. There's an injustice that happened here.

Speaker 5 Scott Cannon's version of the events of that deadly day has never changed.

Speaker 5 He said that when he went out to the trailer to make some estimates on plumbing repairs, he saw that unidentified Hispanic-looking man inside the trailer and heard him arguing with another man, presumably Jason Kinzer.

Speaker 5 Cannon says he told one of the women what repairs were needed. And then he says, Susan Osborne said the words that still haunt him.

Speaker 11 Susan came out and said, maybe you better go. I have no doubt in my mind she saved my life.

Speaker 5 When you left the trailer, was everyone there still alive?

Speaker 11 Best of my knowledge, they were, sure. Hadn't heard shots.

Speaker 11 You could still hear bumping and thumping on the inside, raising in voices. It sounded like two men.

Speaker 5 So, Cannon says he turned to leave the mobile home. The time? Shortly after 3.30 p.m., he says.
About the time those two men who were making a drug delivery arrived.

Speaker 5 Remember, they testified that Cannon met them outside the trailer, acting strangely, discouraged them from going inside, and then followed them off the property in his van.

Speaker 5 The implication being the reason you didn't want them to go inside was that you'd already killed everyone on the trailer.

Speaker 11 That seems to be the state's theory. Yeah, I basically gave them their alibi.

Speaker 15 I said they left before I did.

Speaker 5 And that alone

Speaker 11 puts them in the clear.

Speaker 5 Cannon did that, he says, because he thought there was trouble inside, not because he was trying to hide something.

Speaker 5 But if neither Scott Cannon nor the drug delivery man committed the murders, then who did? The arrest and conviction of Bim La Boyd raised suspicions with that local investigative reporter.

Speaker 5 After all, if Boyd could kill a man in cold blood, was she really the reliable witness she had seemed to be when she took the stand against Scott Cannon?

Speaker 5 At trial, she seemed to be just a witness who was telling the truth, doing her duty.

Speaker 8 I think if everyone in 2000 could have had a crystal ball and said, you know, later on, Bim LeBoyd is going to take an SKS assault rifle and shoot the next person that lived in the trailer.

Speaker 8 I think there might have been a different level of trust in her testimony, certainly.

Speaker 5 But the reporter was about to take on a new role and uncover new evidence about Bim LeBoyd on the day of the murders and maybe even learn the identity of that mystery man from inside the mobile home.

Speaker 5 A young man who seemed to know a lot about what happened in that trailer.

Speaker 8 He told his girlfriend, you should have seen the look on those girls' faces when they were shot, suggesting pretty clearly that he was there.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 5 When the house on Murder Mountain continues.

Speaker 5 In 2005, Eric Mason left TV News for a new line of work.

Speaker 5 The investigative reporter

Speaker 5 became a private investigator. And in 2008, the newly minted private eye walked into the Oregon State Penitentiary, where at the visitor's desk, he recognized an inmate named Scott Cannon.

Speaker 8 He said, you know, I tried to find you. I've been looking for you.
I knew you were a good investigator.

Speaker 8 Would you take on my case? And I said, absolutely.

Speaker 15 I didn't hesitate at all.

Speaker 5 You covered the story as a journalist.

Speaker 8 Correct.

Speaker 5 And now you're investigating it as a private eye.

Speaker 5 Is Scott Cannon a killer?

Speaker 8 I don't think so. I have confidence that Scott Cannon did not do this crime.

Speaker 5 Mason joined forces with Mark Geiger, an attorney in charge of Cannon's appeal.

Speaker 14 I think when you look at the evidence, it becomes almost one of those cases in which you can't imagine how he could have done it because there's so many other people who could have done it.

Speaker 5 And yet he was charged and convicted.

Speaker 15 That's correct.

Speaker 5 Because, what, the state has some vendetta against him?

Speaker 14 It appears to me that they locked onto Mr. Cannon and they just wouldn't let go.
And they just ignored other evidence that was just very overwhelming, pointing to a whole cast of other characters.

Speaker 5 But if Scott Cannon didn't kill the three victims, then who did? That unknown Hispanic-looking man whom Cannon claimed was inside the mobile home? Estate owner turned convicted killer Bim LeBoyd?

Speaker 5 Or someone else?

Speaker 5 First, Mason, the reporter turned private eye, revisited the scene of of the murder. He found a woman who lived at the bottom of the road leading to the house on the hill.

Speaker 5 We were standing at the bottom of the hill down here.

Speaker 5 Irene Morrow told the private eye that on the day of the murders in 1998, Bim La Boyd did not stay on the property the entire afternoon, as Boyd had told detectives.

Speaker 5 At one point, she drove down the driveway in such a hurry that she almost ran over Morrow's husband, who had gone out to get the mail.

Speaker 24 When she saw us, she was visibly shaken. I mean, she didn't expect to see anybody.

Speaker 5 And she took off real fast. I mean, real fast.

Speaker 24 I was standing right here when she came home, and it was almost as fast.

Speaker 5 The time? The witness says about 3.55 p.m.

Speaker 5 Now remember, just two minutes later, Bim LeBoyd was on the phone to 911. reporting the murders at 3.57 p.m.

Speaker 5 What do you think Bim LeBoyd was doing when Irene Morrow saw her leave the property before 4 o'clock and then come back before she made that 911 call?

Speaker 8 I don't know, but I think it certainly would have impeached her testimony about the events of that day.

Speaker 8 And had you been able to impeach Bim LeBoyd in 1998, Scott Cannon, I don't think, would be sitting in prison right now.

Speaker 5 And there's one more thing that doesn't add up. Bim LeBoyd told the 911 operator that when she found Jason Kinzer, he was alive and gasping for air.

Speaker 5 The problem with that is that the autopsy found Kinzer lived less than a minute after being shot. So Bim LeBoyd almost certainly had to be present when that fatal shot was fired.

Speaker 14 She either saw it or she took part in the shooting, because you can't be there that close there to and not see something.

Speaker 5 And Boyd apparently did see something. The evidence? A letter.
obtained by Dateline in Bim LaBoyd's own handwriting, according to her own family and a handwriting expert.

Speaker 5 Written five years after the murders, the letter reads, quote, I was an eyewitness to a triple homicide at gunpoint.

Speaker 5 A drug deal went wrong, and I happened to be the only one to witness the whole ordeal, end quote.

Speaker 5 To Cannon's defense team, Bimla Boyd, a convicted killer herself, should now be viewed as a viable suspect in these three homicides as well. But she was not the only one.

Speaker 5 Because as they began trying to identify the Hispanic-looking man whom Cannon had always claimed was at the mobile home the day of the murders, look what they found in the dusty court file.

Speaker 5 A photo array, or throwdown as it's called, made by Polk County detectives in the hours after the murder, like a police lineup with photos. In it, only dark-haired, Hispanic-looking men.

Speaker 5 Mason, the reporter turned private eye, took the photo array to prison and showed it to convicted killer Scott Cannon.

Speaker 8 Ten years after this crime, I walk into the Oregon State Penitentiary and I said, if

Speaker 8 the person that was there at the trailer that day that you saw is in this throwdown, I want you to point at him. And he pointed at Tom McMahon without hesitation.

Speaker 5 Thomas McMahon isn't actually Hispanic, but it's possible one might mistake him. At the time, he was well known in the local drug world, and he knew murder victim Jason Kinzard.

Speaker 5 So did that unidentified Hispanic-looking man finally have a name?

Speaker 11 It clicked.

Speaker 5 You told police

Speaker 5 in 1998 that there was a Hispanic guy in the trailer when you got there. Yeah.

Speaker 5 You didn't see a picture of McMahon until 2009? Yep. And that was the guy.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 But how had Polk County Sheriff's detectives known to put Tom McMahon's picture in a photo array to begin with?

Speaker 5 It turns out that when murder victim Jason Kinzer had been arrested for selling methamphetamine six weeks before he was killed, guess who was arrested along with him? Tom McMahon.

Speaker 5 The PI also learned about a phone call McMahon made right after the murders.

Speaker 8 He called his girlfriend in the hours after this shooting and told her details that no one else could have known.

Speaker 8 He told his girlfriend, you should have seen the look on those girls' faces when they were shot, suggesting pretty clearly that he was there.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 5 A story backed up by an affidavit from the girlfriend who said at the time of the murders, McMahon's behavior became increasingly erratic and paranoid.

Speaker 5 And also by a one-time cellmate who says McMahon told him he'd shot the three execution style.

Speaker 5 That cellmate told Polk County investigators about McMahon's admission, and they wrote a report in 1999 before Scott Cannon ever went to trial.

Speaker 14 That report was never discovered to the defense team, which is a huge constitutional issue.

Speaker 5 But police heard about it.

Speaker 14 Yeah, we got it from a police report.

Speaker 5 It's hard to believe the police would not disclose someone else essentially admitting to the shootings.

Speaker 14 It is.

Speaker 5 But for some mysterious reason, Tom McMahon was never pursued further as a murder suspect or called as a a witness at Cannon's trial.

Speaker 5 Dateline tried to find out why, but the Polk County Sheriff and District Attorney declined to answer any of our questions regarding McMahon.

Speaker 8 No one can prove why Tom McMahon ended up just sort of falling off the end of the earth there.

Speaker 5 But police knew about him.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 5 With new suspects, new witnesses, new evidence and information, Scott Cannon was about to get an extraordinary chance for a new trial for the freedom that he says should belong to him.

Speaker 5 Coming up, would Scott Cannon get that chance? Not everyone thought he should. You think the right man's in jail? Yeah.

Speaker 5 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 5 The Marion County Courthouse, Salem, Oregon, summer 2009.

Speaker 5 Scott Cannon, in prison for nearly 11 years for a triple murder, had a court date, a hearing on all the points raised in his appeal, a hearing that could end with him getting a new trial or being sent back to prison for life.

Speaker 5 You think you'll ever get out of here?

Speaker 11 I'm confident I'm going to get out of here.

Speaker 11 I really am.

Speaker 11 Too many things have happened to go my way at this point to

Speaker 15 slow it up.

Speaker 5 You think Scott Cannon's going to walk out of prison a free man like this is some kind of movie?

Speaker 14 I do.

Speaker 14 I don't even think we're going to have a trial. I think this case is that good.

Speaker 5 But Cannon's son Matthias, who'd grown from a boy of nine who witnessed his father's arrest into a teenager filled with rage, wasn't so sure.

Speaker 12 You get kind of jaded to things, I guess.

Speaker 12 After a while, you know, we'll leave it when I see it, but, you know, that sounds good.

Speaker 5 You You know, just

Speaker 12 cautious optimism, I guess.

Speaker 5 Family members of the three murder victims were in disbelief that they would soon find themselves back in a courtroom more than a decade after the killings, which they thought had been solved.

Speaker 5 You think the right man's in jail? Yeah.

Speaker 5 But apparently,

Speaker 3 there's people who don't think that way, so. It's a wait and see thing.

Speaker 5 You don't believe it? No.

Speaker 5 But Cannon's defense team believed they had the evidence. They'd found new witnesses pointing to new suspects.

Speaker 5 There were now serious questions about the story told by the key prosecution witness, Bim Laboyd, who was later convicted of manslaughter for gunning down and killing another man on that very same property.

Speaker 5 And then there was what prosecutors had called the scientific evidence. proving, they said, that Scott Cannon was the killer.

Speaker 5 Remember, the jury in Cannon's trial heard heard from an expert in comparative bullet lead analysis.

Speaker 5 The expert testified that the chances of the bullets in Cannon's garage containing the same lead as the bullets found in the victims' bodies was one in 64 million, as good as DNA, or so it seemed back then.

Speaker 5 The problem now is that comparative bullet lead analysis has been completely discredited by none other than the FBI.

Speaker 14 The FBI declared that they were not going to use comparative bullet lead analysis anymore because it's bad evidence, junk science, essentially.

Speaker 5 Suddenly, the weight of evidence in the case was shifting in favor of Scott Cannon's innocence.

Speaker 5 And just before Cannon's hearing was scheduled to be held, Oregon's Attorney General threw in the towel, agreeing that Cannon deserved a new trial.

Speaker 5 Scott Cannon's attorney and investigator delivered the news and the paperwork to Cannon at the penitentiary.

Speaker 5 But while the defense team celebrated, what the victims' families had feared was now coming true.

Speaker 27 He just totally screwed up.

Speaker 25 You rely on the justice and

Speaker 5 our cops and all that and what went wrong here.

Speaker 27 On one hand, I want to feel, you know, happy for Scott because if he's not supposed to be in there, he's not supposed to be in there. But

Speaker 27 We've got 11 years now. We've got to start all over and we don't even know if anybody's going to help us.

Speaker 7 We're the families and we care about what happened. Is anybody else going to care now?

Speaker 5 Oregon's Attorney General declined Dateline's request for an on-camera interview about the decision.

Speaker 5 And on September 1st, 2009, a judge signed the order vacating Scott Cannon's conviction. He was not yet free.
Prosecutors were still convinced he was a triple murderer.

Speaker 5 They intended to take him back to trial.

Speaker 5 But the Scott Cannon story had one more giant twist that was still to come.

Speaker 5 Coming up, the families of the victims get a phone call they'll never forget. Made me sick, truly made me sick.

Speaker 5 When the house on Murder Mountain continues

Speaker 5 In September 2009, Scott Cannon left the Oregon State Penitentiary.

Speaker 5 He traveled less than 20 miles across the Willamette River to the small town of Dallas, Oregon, where nearly a decade before he'd been tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Speaker 5 But when he returned to a courtroom, It was clear that authorities in Polk County were intent on trying him once again on those three murder counts.

Speaker 5 It appeared Cannon could sit in the county jail for months, maybe years, waiting for that new trial. But the defense wondered, so much had changed over the past decade.

Speaker 5 What evidence could prosecutors even use at trial this time?

Speaker 8 I just don't think you have anything that links Scott Cannon to the scene anymore.

Speaker 5 After all, the comparative bullet lead analysis the jury had found so compelling in the first trial was no longer considered reliable.

Speaker 5 The prosecution's chief witness, Ben Laboyd, was now a convicted killer herself, which could make her less credible to a jury.

Speaker 5 And the defense had turned up new witnesses pointing to plausible new suspects, like Tom McMahon, the suspected drug-dealing partner of murder victim Jason Kinzer.

Speaker 5 McMahon's picture had turned up in a police photo array just hours after the murder. And at least two witnesses now said McMahon had admitted to the killings

Speaker 8 so mark and i go in front of the district attorney of pole county and for a couple of hours make the case that they shouldn't prosecute scott cannon over again the problem is he hadn't been there when this prosecution happened all he knew was that this was back on his plate did you think they had something else that you didn't know about we turned over every rock so we couldn't imagine what it would be but yeah you do start to think man is there something that we don't know about that we missed something

Speaker 5 but it turns out it wasn't the defense that had missed something.

Speaker 5 As prosecutors announced they were reviewing boxes of physical evidence left over from the first trial, there was a bombshell waiting to hit the headlines.

Speaker 5 In December 2009, just three months after Cannon's new trial was ordered, the victims' families received phone calls from prosecutors. Calls they will not forget.

Speaker 14 It hit you as a blow.

Speaker 19 It was like, oh no, now where do we go from here?

Speaker 24 It made me sick.

Speaker 5 Truly made me sick.

Speaker 5 What sickened the families and caught nearly everyone by surprise was this. Prosecutors had discovered that key exhibits were gone.

Speaker 5 Vital physical evidence had been lost or maybe even destroyed, perhaps as far back as 2005. Exactly why, like so much else in this case, remains a mystery.
But there's no mystery about this.

Speaker 5 Without that new evidence, there could be no new trial.

Speaker 5 And just before Christmas 2009, more than 11 years after Scott Cannon's arrest, would come a scene that few outside his family and staunchest supporters thought they would ever witness.

Speaker 5 Scott Cannon was a free man.

Speaker 5 Waiting there, his son Matthias, who'd seen his father arrested at gunpoint and who was now at age 20, a man himself.

Speaker 5 And the defense attorney and that reporter turned private eye, who in Cannon's mind had made all the difference.

Speaker 11 After you've had your whole life taken away from you, to have it dropped back in your lap is, I mean, it's,

Speaker 11 wow. You know, it's,

Speaker 11 I don't want to be cliche, but you know, you stop and you smell the flowers and they smell real good.

Speaker 15 The cup's half full. The cup is definitely half full.

Speaker 8 It's overflowing.

Speaker 5 You're a remarkably forgiving guy.

Speaker 11 I was angry. I was hateful for a long time and that just,

Speaker 11 I think that's what made my hair gray and the wrinkles and

Speaker 11 it physically eats you up inside to be that way. Why waste time on that?

Speaker 5 You seem like you're in a much better place

Speaker 12 than the last time we talked. I'm getting there, yeah.
Like the whole

Speaker 12 reality of it, you know, hasn't quite sunk in for whatever reason.

Speaker 12 I'm on Dream Street, you know.

Speaker 5 You know that the headline on the story put forward by prosecutors is, guilty man gets away with murder because we accidentally lost the evidence.

Speaker 11 That's a nice spin they're putting on it, but the reality is, you know, my conviction was overturned based upon faulty evidence and prosecutorial misconduct.

Speaker 11 I had to actually have my conviction overturned before I ever got to the point where they could say, oops, we lost our evidence.

Speaker 5 But you can only imagine the emotions on the other side, the families of the victims.

Speaker 3 I'm sorry, something's wrong there. Something's definitely wrong.

Speaker 3 The Attorney General?

Speaker 3 Where is he?

Speaker 3 Why isn't he investigating this?

Speaker 5 I don't have the answer to that because the Attorney General wouldn't talk to us.

Speaker 3 That's why I say there's no answers.

Speaker 3 None whatsoever.

Speaker 5 You know that no matter how this goes, that right now,

Speaker 5 somebody's getting away with murder.

Speaker 5 Yep.

Speaker 3 Had to be somebody that was on that mountain.

Speaker 5 So the story ends with many wondering, what now?

Speaker 5 Polk County authorities, who refused our requests for interviews, say the triple murder is once again an open investigation. But the sheriff tells us nothing's been done on the case for years.

Speaker 5 The Office of Oregon's Attorney General, to this day, asserts that Scott Scott Cannon is the killer.

Speaker 5 And they had nothing to add when we asked for comment.

Speaker 28 The defendant is still the main and the only suspect in the murders of these three people.

Speaker 5 Bim LaBoyd is out of prison after serving nearly seven years for manslaughter. She also did not respond to our repeated requests for interviews.

Speaker 5 And neither did Tom McMahon, who's now out of prison in Texas after serving time on drug charges.

Speaker 5 Scott Cannon is in his 50s now and living outside a prison cell and with his family

Speaker 5 for the first time since 1998. Nice.
That same system that put him in a cage also set him free.

Speaker 11 Had a life, had it taken away, and had it given back. It's just

Speaker 11 indescribable.

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