Cesar Francesco Barone was convicted of killing four women in and around Hillsboro, Oregon, between April 1991 and January 1993. Two of them, Martha Bryant and Chantee Woodman, were shot. Margaret Schmidt was smothered in her home. Betty Lou Williams died of a heart attack while he sexually assaulted her. A Washington County jury sentenced him to death for Bryant's murder in January 1995, and a second jury, hearing the other three cases together later that year, returned more death verdicts. The Oregon Supreme Court upheld both judgments. He died at the Oregon State Penitentiary on December 24, 2009, at 49, still on death row and still appealing.
He had arrived in Oregon with another name and a long Florida record. He was born Adolph James Rode and grew up in Fort Lauderdale, where police in the 1990s named him as the man responsible for the 1979 killing of a retired schoolteacher, Alice Stock. In February 2026, long after his death, Washington County prosecutors and the Hillsboro police announced that DNA had linked him to a fifth Oregon killing, that of 82-year-old Elizabeth Wasson in 1992. Neither of those deaths was ever tried.
Family and friends called him Jimmy. A 1995 report by the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, printed in The Seattle Times, traced his troubles to early childhood: as a small boy he stole from his nursery school, was expelled from kindergarten and fought with other children. As a teenager he broke into houses, used drugs and attacked elderly women, and he went to prison. Police said he once tried to strangle his stepmother. A county investigator told the reporters there was no evidence that his parents had abused him. "I guess some people would just call him a bad seed," the investigator said.
At 15 he attacked a neighbor, Alice Stock, at knifepoint in an attempted sexual assault, according to the same report, and he spent two months in a juvenile facility. Stock was a retired schoolteacher.
On November 29, 1979, about 15 days after Rode was released from prison, Alice Stock, then 73, was killed in Fort Lauderdale. Police said she had been strangled, and they named Rode as the man responsible. He was a suspect at the time, but he was not charged.
By February 1995 Fort Lauderdale and Broward County investigators were tracking him in Oregon, and Florida prosecutors were planning to try him for her murder. A Broward Sheriff's Office lieutenant, Tony Fantigrassi, said he hoped Barone would talk freely. The 1995 article ended by noting that so far he was not talking. How the Florida case ended was not reported; the killing remains one he was accused of, not one he was convicted of.
About six months after Alice Stock's death, Rode was arrested on a charge of attacking his 70-year-old grandmother and robbing her. She identified him as her attacker, but a jury acquitted him, the 1995 report said. KGW, the Portland television station, gave a similar account in 2009: arrested at 19 for robbing his grandmother and trying to strangle her, he was acquitted of the assault and strangulation charges but served prison time for burglaries.
He went to prison in 1981 on an unrelated burglary conviction. After a brief escape and an assault on a guard, he was moved to the state prison at Starke, where he was housed near Ted Bundy on two occasions. Mike O'Connell, a homicide detective with the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon, said Barone "thought it was really neat" and bragged to other inmates about knowing Bundy. Mike Walley, a Fort Lauderdale homicide detective, believed Barone might have learned from Bundy how to avoid detection. That was the detective's opinion, and no court made any finding about it.
After his release Rode moved to the Northwest and legally changed his name to Cesar Francesco Barone, the 1995 report said. He joined the Army and served with a Ranger unit in Panama in 1989, during the United States invasion that removed Manuel Noriega. He was accused of exposing himself to a female officer, and after the Army learned his real name and his record, he was discharged in 1990. KGW reported that he moved to Hillsboro, Oregon, in 1990 and began killing women there a year later.
He married in these years; his former wife later testified at his trial that he owned a nine-millimeter pistol. By 1993 he shared a house with another man, according to the evidence described by the Oregon Supreme Court.
Margaret Schmidt was an elderly woman who lived by herself in Hillsboro. On the night of April 18, 1991, Barone entered her home and smothered her, as the Oregon Supreme Court later summarized the evidence. She was found the next day. Her age is given as 61 by KGW and as 65 by KPTV.
Her killing remained unsolved for nearly two years. It was later joined with the Woodman and Williams cases for trial, and the jury's verdict in her death came in that second trial.
Elizabeth Wasson was 82 and lived in Hillsboro. She was the widow of a pastor and was known in her neighborhood as the Avon Lady, the Washington County District Attorney's Office said, and she was beloved by friends and family. A Hillsboro police detective, Megan Townsend, told KPTV that Wasson was deeply involved in her church community, and that shortly before she was killed she had been babysitting her two-year-old granddaughter. She was found murdered in her home on September 23, 1992.
Barone was a suspect at the time, but detectives could not link him directly to her death, and the case went unsolved for more than three decades. Detectives in the 1990s had collected evidence that the science of the day could not test. In 2023 Townsend reexamined the case and sent physical evidence from the scene to the Oregon State Police Forensic Laboratory. Technicians found male DNA that, in the words of the district attorney's release, "forensically linked Mr. Barone to Mrs. Wasson's murder." Prosecutors and police announced the result on February 10, 2026.
KPTV reported that the method in the Wasson killing matched Barone's. Murray Rau, a former Washington County Sheriff's Office detective, recalled a final interview with Barone in the prison infirmary, when Barone looked frail. Rau said investigators told him they knew about his medical condition and would not charge him. Barone did not confess. Because he died before any charge was filed, the Wasson killing has never been tried, and it is attributed to him by police and prosecutors. Her family, the district attorney's office said, expressed relief that the case was closed and asked for privacy.
Martha Bryant was 41 and worked as a nurse-midwife. Early on October 9, 1992, she was driving home from work at Tuality Hospital in Hillsboro; The Seattle Times reported that she had just delivered a baby. Shortly after 3 a.m. a 911 caller reported shots fired on the outskirts of the city. Officers found her car empty at the roadside and, moments later, found Bryant nearby. She had been shot and died hours later without regaining consciousness.
At trial the state argued that Barone forced her car off the road, attacked her and shot her; one count charged attempted rape. A woman testified that two days before the killing a man had watched her in the hospital parking lot and that a white-topped car had followed her on the same road; the Oregon Supreme Court held that her account was relevant to planning and intent.
At the penalty phase the defense offered testimony from a longtime friend who had also been her lawyer, and a recorded statement from her husband describing the couple's views, to show that Bryant had been strongly opposed to the death penalty. The trial court excluded the evidence as irrelevant to the questions the jury had to answer, and the Oregon Supreme Court agreed.
Chantee Woodman was 23. Around midnight on December 29, 1992, Barone and Leonard Darcell gave a ride to a woman in downtown Portland; she later testified that Barone pulled a handgun and threatened to kill her. She survived. The next day, December 30, Woodman accepted a ride from the two men in downtown Portland. They beat and sexually assaulted her and left her beside Highway 26. Barone then went back, struck her with the butt of a pistol and shot her in the head, according to the Oregon Supreme Court's summary of the evidence. A highway worker found her body later that day.
Darcell was convicted of felony murder for his part in Woodman's death, and that conviction was upheld on appeal before Barone's second trial. KGW reported that a former girlfriend of Barone's, a neighbor of Woodman's, also gave investigators a tip; she said later she had no idea he was a killer.
On January 6, 1993, Barone was drinking with Betty Lou Williams at her apartment. He attacked her, and she suffered a heart attack and died. She was found the next day. The Oregon Supreme Court gave her age as 63; KGW and KPTV gave it as 51.
KGW reported that Barone left his gun in her apartment, and that investigators concluded it was the gun he had used to kill Chantee Woodman eight days earlier.
In February 1993 Barone was arrested at a tavern in Forest Grove, Oregon, on charges unrelated to the killings. An officer found a Toyota key on his key ring. He had denied owning a car in the tavern parking lot, and later evidence linked the Toyota both to him and to a weapon used in the Bryant murder, the Oregon Supreme Court said.
About six months after Bryant's death, police concluded that Barone was probably her killer. A nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol was seized from the house where he lived, and a firearms expert linked it to shots that struck Bryant's car. His former wife testified that he owned such a gun, and a woman testified that she had seen him with a nine-millimeter pistol weeks after the murder. The man who shared the house told the jury that after police took the pistol, Barone told him to burn the house down, saying there was something in it that could link him to a murder.
Four state experts testified about DNA tests that linked Barone to the crime. The tests, of the kinds known as PCR and RFLP, were run on blood samples; the Oregon Supreme Court rejected his argument that the DNA evidence should have been struck. A jail inmate, who acted as an informant, testified about conversations with Barone in jail. The 1995 report in The Seattle Times said jailhouse informants reported that he had bragged about the murders.
Investigations into the Woodman, Williams and Schmidt deaths led police to conclude that he was responsible for those as well, and he was charged in all three.
Before either murder trial, Barone was convicted in Oregon in 1994 of burglary and sexual assault charges involving older women, The Seattle Times reported. The women survived. One of them was scheduled to testify at the Bryant penalty phase that he had broken into her home and sexually assaulted her. The Washington County District Attorney's Office said in 2026 that, besides the four women he was convicted of murdering, he had sexually assaulted and strangled three other women who survived.
The Bryant case was tried first, in Washington County Circuit Court in Hillsboro before Judge Michael McElligott. The prosecution sought death. The four counts of aggravated murder charged him with killing her intentionally in the course of a kidnapping, killing her to conceal his identity as the kidnapper, killing her in the course of an attempted rape, and killing her to conceal his identity as the rapist.
During jury selection the defense challenged several prospective jurors, including one who held strong views in favor of the death penalty; the trial court kept them after they said they would follow the law, and the Oregon Supreme Court found no abuse of discretion. The defense later complained that a prosecution question implied he had been charged with other murders. The trial judge and the lawyers all knew that he had been, the Supreme Court noted, but it found the question innocent enough that no mistrial was needed.
In December 1994 the jury found Barone guilty on all four counts of aggravated murder after deliberating less than two hours, The Seattle Times reported on December 14. He was 34.
At the penalty phase the state put on evidence of his other crimes, including crimes for which he had been charged or convicted and three incidents that had not led to convictions, to show that he would remain a danger. The same jury returned a death sentence. The 1995 Sun-Sentinel report gave the sentencing date as January 30, 1995. KGW reported that he was admitted to death row on January 31, 1995. Detective O'Connell said he had "never indicated any remorse whatsoever." Oregon then had 18 people on death row and had not executed anyone since 1962.
The other three killings were tried together. Barone asked for separate trials and for a change of venue, arguing that publicity about the Bryant case made a fair trial in Washington County impossible; jury questionnaires showed that most of the pool knew something about him. The court denied both requests. He moved on July 27, 1995, to disqualify the judge; the motion was denied on September 19 as untimely. Jury selection took place in October, and the trial began on November 6, 1995. It lasted 12 days.
Leonard Darcell testified for the state. Barone argued that Darcell could still refuse to testify, but the Oregon Supreme Court later held that Darcell's right against self-incrimination had ended once his own conviction was final. The woman threatened at gunpoint on December 29 testified that the gun resembled the one the state said had killed Woodman. The informant from the Bryant case testified again. On November 9, 1995, during the trial, Barone wrote to a fellow inmate asking for help with that informant, who, he wrote, "doesn't want to be coming back here to testify." The courts read the letter as an attempt to stop the informant from testifying and as evidence of consciousness of guilt.
The court did not swear in the jury as soon as it was chosen, as Oregon's rules require. After the first verdicts, the judge swore the jurors and had them deliberate again, and they returned the same verdicts. The jury convicted him of five counts of aggravated felony murder and two counts of felony murder; on one aggravated murder count it found him guilty of the lesser included offense of murder. The judge also gave the jury a faulty instruction on felony murder, then corrected it.
At the penalty phase another inmate testified that Barone had called the Green River Killer "just a punk," a remark the court said showed that he measured his crimes against those of other murderers. The jury imposed death. KGW later summarized his commitment record as six counts of aggravated murder, two counts of murder, five sex abuse and rape charges and eight counts of burglary, and said he carried three death sentences for the deaths of the four women. Under Oregon law a death sentence can be sought only for aggravated murder.
The Oregon Supreme Court reviews death sentences automatically and directly. In the Bryant case, argued on September 15, 1998, Barone's public defenders and Barone himself, in a brief of his own, raised challenges to jury selection, to the admission of evidence, to the DNA testimony and to the death penalty itself. On December 10, 1998, the court, in an opinion by Justice Gillette, rejected them all and affirmed the conviction and sentence.
On July 29, 1999, in an opinion by Justice Riggs, the court affirmed the second judgment. It found that the trial court had erred in not swearing the jury promptly but that the error did not require a new trial, because the jurors' sworn answers and the redeliberation removed any prejudice. It upheld the joint trial, the refusal to move the case and the admission of Darcell's testimony and the letter.
At his death he was nearing the halfway point of the post-conviction appeals that follow direct review, KGW reported.
Barone died at 12:20 p.m. on December 24, 2009, at the Oregon State Penitentiary. He was 49 and had been on death row for nearly 15 years. The Department of Corrections said he died of natural causes and declined to give details, citing state law protecting inmates' medical information. A spokeswoman, Michelle Dodson, said his death had been expected and that he had been hospitalized for some time. He never confessed to the Wasson killing.
None of his death sentences was carried out. Oregon has executed two people since its modern death penalty laws were approved in 1984: Douglas Franklin Wright in 1996 and Harry Charles Moore in 1997, the Department of Corrections says. On December 13, 2022, Governor Kate Brown commuted the sentences of the 17 people then on Oregon's death row to life without parole and ordered the execution chamber dismantled.
Barone's case kept Washington County investigators busy long after his trials. Rau told KPTV in 2026 that the aim was to find answers for families. "These cases are never over," he said. Allison Brown, the county's chief deputy district attorney, recalled that women in the area had feared for their safety before he was caught, and said that many residents still remembered that time. The county's cold case unit, set up in 2020 with federal funding and the Sheriff's Office, was also using DNA in other unsolved cases, KPTV reported. "With every cold case solved, we are sending a message to victims and their families that they are not forgotten," District Attorney Kevin Barton said.
Proven by final jury verdicts: the deaths of Martha Bryant, Chantee Woodman, Margaret Schmidt and Betty Lou Williams, as aggravated murder, aggravated felony murder and felony murder; and, in 1994, burglary and sexual assault charges involving older women who survived.
Attributed by police and prosecutors, never tried: the killing of Elizabeth Wasson in 1992. The link rests on a DNA result from evidence tested after 2023. He did not confess.
Accused, outcome not reported: the 1979 killing of Alice Stock in Fort Lauderdale. Florida police named him and prosecutors planned to try him as of 1995. No trial or verdict was reported.
Acquitted: the 1980 attack on his grandmother.
Opinion only: a Florida detective's belief that he learned from Ted Bundy how to avoid detection.
Details that vary between accounts: Margaret Schmidt's age (61 or 65); Betty Lou Williams's age (63 in the court record, 51 in news reports); the date of the Bryant death sentence (January 30, 1995, in a 1995 report; January 31, 1995, for admission to death row); and the year of the attack on his grandmother.
Childhood: grows up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as Adolph James Rode.
Age 15: attacks a neighbor, Alice Stock, at knifepoint; two months in a juvenile facility.
November 29, 1979: Alice Stock, 73, is killed in Fort Lauderdale about 15 days after his release from prison; he is a suspect but is not charged.
About six months later: arrested for an attack on his grandmother; acquitted.
1981: goes to prison for burglary; after an escape and an assault on a guard, held at Starke near Ted Bundy.
Later: released; moves to the Northwest; changes his name to Cesar Francesco Barone; joins the Army.
1989: serves with a Ranger unit in Panama.
1990: discharged; moves to Hillsboro, Oregon.
April 18, 1991: Margaret Schmidt is killed in Hillsboro.
September 23, 1992: Elizabeth Wasson, 82, is found murdered in her Hillsboro home.
October 9, 1992: Martha Bryant, 41, is shot in Hillsboro and dies hours later.
December 29, 1992: a woman given a ride by Barone and Leonard Darcell is threatened with a handgun.
December 30, 1992: Chantee Woodman, 23, is killed; her body is found beside Highway 26.
January 6, 1993: Betty Lou Williams dies in her apartment.
February 1993: Barone is arrested at a Forest Grove tavern on unrelated charges.
1994: convicted of burglary and sexual assault charges in Oregon.
December 1994: convicted of the aggravated murder of Martha Bryant.
January 30 or 31, 1995: sentenced to death; admitted to death row.
February 1995: Florida prosecutors plan to try him for the Stock killing.
November 6, 1995: second trial opens on the Woodman, Schmidt and Williams cases; the jury convicts him and returns death verdicts.
December 10, 1998: Oregon Supreme Court affirms the Bryant conviction and sentence.
July 29, 1999: Oregon Supreme Court affirms the second judgment.
December 24, 2009: dies at the Oregon State Penitentiary, aged 49.
December 13, 2022: Governor Kate Brown commutes Oregon's remaining death sentences.
2023: Hillsboro detective reexamines the Wasson case and sends evidence for DNA testing.
February 10, 2026: prosecutors announce a DNA link between Barone and the Wasson killing.