Portland Man Homer Lee Jackson Arrested in 1980s Deaths of Three Women and a Girl
Cold case detectives said new forensic testing tied Jackson, 55, to four killings from 1983 to 1987. His confession was later thrown out and murder never proved.
Published
For more than thirty years the four deaths had sat in Portland's files with no name attached to them. Angela Anderson was 14. A potential homebuyer walking through a vacant house that was up for sale found her body in an upstairs bedroom in 1983. A Portland Police Bureau release said she had lived a troubled life and was in a foster home, and that her friends believed she had become a victim of sex trafficking shortly before she died. Essie Jackson, 23, and Tonja Harry, 19, were also killed in 1983. Latanga Watts, 29, died in 1987. Their bodies were found in a park, on a street and near the Columbia Slough.
On Thursday, October 15, 2015, officers arrested Homer Lee Jackson, 55, at his home in Portland. A grand jury indicted him on twelve counts of aggravated murder in the four deaths, and on Friday, October 16, cold case detectives told the Portland television station FOX 12 how they had found him. About eighteen months earlier the Cold Case Unit had started working with forensic investigators to pick out physical evidence that could be tested with new technology. That testing linked Jackson to the killings. "Once we got that forensic link," Detective Jim Lawrence said, "we started to realize we were actually dealing with somebody that was probably committing several crimes that were very similar."
Detectives said Jackson had found the women on a commercial strip in northeast Portland where sex traffickers forced them to walk the streets. According to The Oregonian, Essie Jackson, Harry and Watts had been choked or strangled; how Angela died was not clear. Homer Jackson's record ran back to the 1980s, with convictions for criminal mischief and burglary and, in 2006, for discharging a firearm in the city. A neighbor, Beverly Jones, said he kept to himself and would sometimes come down to talk when the street had barbecues. "He seemed like a good person," she said.
"We're most happy for the victims' families, definitely," Detective Meredith Hopper said. "Just to be able to give them that closure and be able to give them answers after 30-plus years of questions." Jackson was due to be arraigned the following Monday.
The case did not end in a murder conviction. Jackson was questioned over two days after his arrest, and a judge threw out what detectives said was a confession, finding that improper tactics had been used. In 2018 the Oregon Supreme Court upheld that ruling, saying the detectives' "methods and inducements may have persuaded defendant to tell the detectives what they wanted to hear, whether or not that was the truth." The murder charges were later dismissed, and Jackson was convicted of four counts of criminally negligent homicide. He was released in January 2022, sentenced to time served and probation, and in August 2023 his sister found him dead in his Portland home. He was 63.
What this story covers. The arrest, the indictment, the detectives' account, the details of the four deaths and Jackson's record come from a Fox News report of October 18, 2015, which relied on FOX 12 Oregon, The Oregonian and a Portland Police Bureau release. The suppressed confession, the 2018 ruling, the negligent homicide convictions, the release and Jackson's death come from a Fox News report of August 25, 2023. In October 2015 every one of these killings was an accusation, and none was ever proved against him as murder. Some accounts give Latanga Watts's first name as Latagna. The image is an illustration of a rainy Portland-style street, not the real place or the arrest.