Martha Browning Bryant was driving her green Volkswagen Beetle home along Cornell Road in Hillsboro, Oregon, early on October 9, 1992. She was forty-one, a nurse-midwife coming back from a delivery. A car pulled up behind her and someone opened fire, hitting her in the left shoulder and forcing her off the road onto the sidewalk. The gunman dragged her into his own car, drove about a third of a mile and shot her in the head, then left her in the middle of Northeast 231st Avenue. A passing motorist found her. She was flown by Life Flight to a hospital in Portland and pronounced dead at 6:50 in the morning.
The killing looked random, and it frightened the town. About a hundred and fifty tips came in within days. Police said they were looking for two men, possibly in a 1968 Oldsmobile 442 or a Chevrolet Chevelle damaged from ramming her car. Crime Stoppers raised a reward of $1,015, and a fund in her name began paying scholarships for midwifery students.
She was the second of four women Cesar Francesco Barone would be convicted of killing around Hillsboro and Portland between 1991 and 1993. The first was Margaret Helen Schmidt, sixty-one, strangled in her home in April 1991 by an intruder who took money and left. A social worker found her on April 19, and at the time robbery looked like the motive.
On December 30, 1992 Barone and Leonard Benjamin Darcell II, twenty-four, whom he knew from a nursing home in Forest Grove where both had worked, picked up Chantee Elise Woodman, twenty-three, at the Satyricon nightclub in downtown Portland. They held her, and Barone raped her. She fought him, and he shot her in the head. They left her body along the Sunset Highway. Darcell went to Seattle and turned himself in there on an unrelated parole violation.
On January 7, 1993 Barone broke into the Cornelius apartment of Betty Lou Williams, fifty-one, and sexually assaulted her. The strain of the attack brought on a heart attack, and she died during it. He also sexually assaulted three other women in the same years who survived.
Two more deaths were looked at after his arrest. His former wife, Kathi Scarbrough, asked for her mother to be exhumed: Joyce Marie Scarbrough, sixty-one, had been found dead in her Hillsboro home on February 4, 1993, with no autopsy, and Barone was suspected of having taken $3,000 from her bank account shortly before and spent it on gifts for a girlfriend. In May 1993 the Washington County medical examiner, Eugene Jacobus, called the cause of death inconclusive and found no sign of violence. Elizabeth Burtis Wasson, eighty-three, had been found murdered in her Hillsboro apartment on September 23, 1992. In February 2026, long after his death, investigators connected Barone to her killing through DNA.
He was born Adolph James Rode Jr. at Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, on December 4, 1960, and raised in Fort Lauderdale, where he was called Jimmy. He had an older brother and a sister. When he was four his mother left to live with another man, the parents divorced the next year, and he was brought up by his father and his father's new wife, Stella Hall. He was expelled from kindergarten. He skipped school to smoke marijuana, stole coins from neighbors' houses and kept snakes and alligators, and he later claimed that he once nursed a monkey back to health and then shut it in a closet with stray cats so that it would tear them apart. By his teens he was drinking heavily.
At fifteen he got into the house of a neighbor in her seventies, Alice Stock, threatened her with a knife and ordered her to undress. She refused, and he left. His first arrest came on December 15, 1977, for a string of burglaries. He was meant to serve three years and was let out early in December 1979, around the time his older brother died in a car crash. At about that time Stock, now seventy-three and a retired schoolteacher, was raped and murdered in her home in Fort Lauderdale. Rode was a suspect because of the earlier attack, but he was not charged.
Three months later he was arrested again for burglaries and possessing burglary tools, and his mother bailed him out for $200. In early 1980, by one account, he broke into his stepmother's home and tried to rape and strangle her, stopping when she cried out. On April 12, 1980 his grandmother, Mattie Marino, who was seventy, was choked and beaten with a rolling pin in her apartment and robbed of ten dollars. She said he had come to borrow a spool of white thread, kissed her cheek, and then attacked her, smiling the whole time. He was tried for attempted murder and she testified that she believed it was him, but his lawyer, Bruce Lincoln, persuaded the jury that an unrelated burglar might have done it and that a grandson was unlikely to, and he was acquitted. He was then convicted on the burglary charges and sent to Baker Correctional Institution.
He escaped on July 9, 1982, was caught the next day and had a year added. At Cross City Correctional Institution he was cited for battery on an officer, and he was moved to Florida State Prison at Starke, where Ted Bundy was on death row. Accounts of their contact differ: some say they shared a cell, others that Rode was housed next to Bundy twice, for about two months and then for twelve days. He boasted about it to other prisoners for years. An investigator on the Oregon case later suspected he had asked Bundy how to avoid being caught, and suggested Bundy had given him a singles newspaper through which he met the woman he married, Kathi Scarbrough.
After his release in 1987 he began calling himself Cesar Francesco Barone, because he admired Italian gangsters; whether he changed the name legally is unclear. He moved to the Northwest, and in late 1988 he enlisted in the Army, telling recruiters he had studied for two years at Indian River State College. After basic training at Fort Benning he reached Fort Lewis, Washington on June 22, 1989, as a member of B Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, and in December the battalion went into Panama to overthrow the Noriega government. He was discharged in 1990 after exposing himself to a female officer.
He settled in Hillsboro, working now and then as a cabinetmaker and for a time as a nursing assistant in Forest Grove. Kathi Scarbrough divorced him in 1992, citing irreconcilable differences. By then he had already begun killing.
He was arrested on February 27, 1993 for the murder of Martha Bryant. Shell casings from her shooting matched those from Chantee Woodman's, DNA identified blood found in his car as Bryant's, and a print from a Reebok sneaker he owned matched one left in Margaret Schmidt's house.
Darcell was charged with him in the Woodman killing. Barone was brought in to testify at Darcell's trial and refused to take the stand. Darcell was convicted of felony kidnapping and sentenced to twenty years; some accounts describe the conviction as felony murder. In January 1994 Florida said it would charge Barone with Alice Stock's murder, citing the similarities and his reported boasting to cellmates, and that April, after he was convicted and sentenced on the burglary and rape charges, Oregon indicted him for Schmidt. The sentence on those charges is reported as forty years and elsewhere as forty-four, on fourteen counts of burglary, theft, attempted sodomy and rape.
The court ordered separate trials, Bryant first. Jury selection began in October 1994, and the prosecution said it would seek death. His lawyer tried to discredit the cellmates who testified against him by pointing to details they had wrong. In January 1995 a jury of seven women and five men convicted him of aggravated murder, kidnapping and attempted rape; accounts put the ninety minutes of deliberation on the verdict and on the penalty respectively. He was sentenced to death on January 31, 1995, and became the eighteenth man on Oregon's death row.
The second trial, the first in Oregon under a 1991 law allowing murder cases to be consolidated, opened on November 6, 1995 and covered Schmidt, Woodman and Williams together. The jury returned five counts of aggravated felony murder, two of felony murder and one of murder as a lesser included offense, and on December 6 he received two more death sentences, for Woodman and Schmidt, and eighty-nine years for Betty Lou Williams. The Williams count was felony murder rather than aggravated murder because her heart gave out as the assault began, so the death happened in the course of a felony without the intent the higher charge requires.
He was rude and strange in court. He claimed descent from Italian nobility, told the all-white jury it was prejudiced against him because he had Black ancestors, put a small sign reading "Kangaroo Court" on the defense table, and asked for help persuading one of the women he had assaulted not to testify because, he said, she did not know how to stop talking.
The Oregon Supreme Court affirmed the Bryant conviction and sentence on December 10, 1998, while opponents of the death penalty protested outside, and upheld the other two death sentences in July 1999; the United States Supreme Court declined to take the case. Florida indicted him for Alice Stock in January 1996 and he was extradited to answer the charge. He said he had nothing to do with it and looked forward to an acquittal, and at first chose to represent himself, then asked for a lawyer. Most of his own relatives told reporters they believed he had done it. In 2000 the charge was dropped for lack of strong evidence and because he already faced execution in Oregon.
He died at the Oregon State Penitentiary at Salem on December 24, 2009, aged forty-nine, never having admitted any crime beyond those he was convicted of, with three death sentences outstanding and none carried out. Oregon has executed nobody since 1997. On December 14, 2022 the governor, Kate Brown, commuted every death sentence in the state to life without parole and ordered the execution chamber dismantled. Barone had been dead for thirteen years.