Richard Laurence Marquette was convicted of first-degree murder in Portland, Oregon, in December 1961 for killing Joan Rae Caudle, a 24-year-old wife and mother of two. He met her in a downtown bar on a June evening, took her to the small house he rented in southeast Portland, and strangled her there. He then dismembered her body and left the remains in several places in the neighborhood before fleeing to Mexico and back into California.
The search for him led the FBI to do something it had never done before. On June 29, 1961, it added his name to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list even though the list was already full, making him the first "special addition" in the program's history. He was arrested the next day in Santa Maria, California, after a man in a credit office recognized his photograph on the new wanted flyer. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder but recommended leniency, which spared him the gas chamber and made a life sentence automatic.
Marquette's early years are thinly documented in the reporting. The Associated Press gave his age as 26 in June 1961 and reported that he turned 27 on the last day of his trial that December. His mother lived in Portland, and he had many relatives in the Albany area, Portland police said in 1961. He told reporters after his arrest that he had known Joan Caudle in grade school, 13 or 14 years earlier, and had not seen her since.
He listed his occupation as logger, but police described him as a "jack of all trades." In the weeks before June 1961 he had worked at Hode's Auto Wreckers in Portland, and the FBI described him as having worked in the auto body wrecking business. Police gave his height as 6 feet 1 inch and his weight as 162 pounds, with blue eyes, brown hair and a tattoo of a wreath around the word "Mom" on his right forearm.
He already had a record. According to police records summarized by the Oregon Statesman in June 1961, he was arrested on January 20, 1956, on a charge of attempted rape, which was dismissed for lack of a complaint; he was then arrested for disorderly conduct and served 5 days of a 20-day term in the Multnomah County jail. On November 29, 1957, he was arrested and later convicted of assault with intent to rob. He entered the Oregon State Penitentiary on December 2, 1957, with an 18-month sentence, and was discharged on December 1, 1958, after serving one year.
Joan Rae Caudle was 24 and lived in Portland with her husband, Lawrence P. Caudle. The state described her at trial as the mother of two young children. Court reporting and police statements give only a few details of her life, and most of what is known of her last evening comes from her husband.
On the evening of June 5, 1961, he told police, she went downtown to buy a Father's Day present for her father, carrying about $100. She later telephoned to say she would stop at a cocktail lounge before coming home. She never returned, and her husband reported her missing.
Marquette's own accounts, given after his arrest, are the only record of what happened next, and they changed. Speaking to reporters in Santa Barbara, he said he met Mrs. Caudle at a Portland bar on the night of June 5. It was his favorite bar, he said, and they went from one bar to another until he could drink no more, and then to his house. He said he was "out of my head, dead drunk" that night. He woke the next morning, he said, and "saw it," and he wished he had never seen her. He would not say whether she was alive when he woke or whether he had killed her.
That day he went to work late and quit after a couple of hours, he said, because he was "scared and shook up."
A few days after Mrs. Caudle disappeared, on a Thursday morning, residents of Southeast Pine Street in Portland found wrapped remains in their yards, on a brush-covered bank between the houses and the sidewalk. Detectives said the remains appeared to be those of a fairly young woman and had been there only about a day. More were found within two blocks. They were sent to the University of Oregon Medical School for examination by pathologists.
Police identified the remains through fingerprints. On June 14 the Oregon Statesman reported that prints from the remains matched prints found in the Caudle home, and that Detective Lt. Dudley Nelson had named the victim as Mrs. Caudle. Police had at first thought the measurements ruled her out, but the first measurement turned out to be wrong.
By then they had a suspect. An informant told police that Marquette had not been seen for several days and had missed work, and that he had been acting strangely. When officers went to the house he rented at 314A S.E. 27th Avenue, about 12 blocks from where the first remains were found, they found more of Mrs. Caudle's remains there. Captain of Detectives Byron Shields said Marquette had vanished. A first-degree murder warrant was filed against him in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
For more than two weeks Marquette's photograph was in Oregon newspapers and reports of sightings came in from across the Northwest. On one day police, aided by bloodhounds and a helicopter, searched woods near St. Mary's School for Boys in the Beaverton area after a farm worker reported a shirtless man hiding there; the dogs, given clothing from Marquette's house, found no trail, and police concluded the man was not Marquette. In Seattle the same day, acting on a tip that he might be riding a freight train from Portland, police searched the train, the rail yard and nearby buses and cabs without result.
In Salem, on a Saturday afternoon in a 98-degree heat wave, city officers, state police and Polk County deputies rushed into crowded Wallace Marine Park after a skin diver reported seeing a man who looked like the fugitive trying to swim across the Willamette River. The man was traced to a farm labor camp and identified as a transient.
Marquette was far away by then. He later told reporters he had taken a bus from Portland to Los Angeles, then to San Diego and on to Tijuana. After about a week in Mexico he came back into the United States, gave his name at the border, and hitchhiked north. He reached Santa Maria, on the central California coast, on June 14.
On June 29, 1961, the FBI announced that Marquette had been added to its list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. He became number 154 in the list's history. The AP reported that the FBI described him as possibly mentally unbalanced and extremely dangerous.
Since the list began in 1950, the FBI has kept it at ten names, adding a new fugitive only when one is removed. Marquette was the exception. The FBI's own history of the program records that "the first 'special addition' was Richard Laurence Marquette who was wanted for murder." There have been 13 special additions in all, the Bureau said in 2020, among them James Earl Ray and Ramzi Yousef.
In Santa Maria, Marquette had been picked up hitchhiking by Clark R. Powell, a partner in a local construction and real estate business, who gave him odd jobs. (The Oregon Statesman's version of the AP story says he was doing odd jobs at a salvage shop for a minister who had befriended him.)
That Thursday, Powell's partner, Harvey Allen, was in the Merchants' Credit office when the manager came across Marquette's picture in a newly arrived FBI bulletin. The manager handed it to Allen as a joke, saying, "Here's YOUR picture." Allen recognized the man and notified agents. The FBI's summary of the case says simply that a citizen recognized his photograph on a wanted flyer posted in a credit bureau.
Agents arrived the next morning, June 30, and asked Marquette to step outside the shop, saying they wanted to see a mattress that was for sale. "Are you Marquette?" they asked. "Yes, I am," he answered. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover quoted him as saying he had known the FBI would get him sooner or later. Powell said Marquette was "very cooperative." The agents found only a closed pocketknife on him, handcuffed him and drove him 75 miles south to Santa Barbara.
There, before U.S. Commissioner Arnold D. Gowans, he was committed to the Santa Barbara County Jail on a federal fugitive warrant, with bail set at $100,000. He admitted that he had fled Oregon but refused to discuss Mrs. Caudle's death. "I'd better not say," he told the FBI.
Charles R. Harvey, a Multnomah County deputy district attorney, said Marquette had told California authorities he would waive extradition. Governor Mark O. Hatfield, returning to Oregon at 4 a.m. after a delayed flight from the governors' conference in Honolulu, signed extradition papers at the Portland airport, and state police took them to Salem for the signature of Secretary of State Howell Appling Jr.
Marquette signed a waiver of extradition and was flown to Portland that Saturday night and placed in a city jail cell. That weekend, police said, he dictated a confession to a court reporter.
According to Harvey, Marquette admitted that he had strangled Mrs. Caudle after an argument and then dismembered her body at the house. He said he woke the next morning to find her dead. He told investigators that he had disposed of the remains because he feared the neighbors would get curious, and he denied any sexual motive. Harvey said he could give no logical reason for the killing and kept saying he had been drunk and could not remember. Harvey's account dated the killing to June 6; the charge gave the night of June 5.
The next morning, a Sunday, Marquette led Portland detectives to a marshy area near Oaks Park in southeast Portland, where the last of Mrs. Caudle's remains were found. A grand jury had already indicted him for first-degree murder.
The case was tried in Multnomah County Circuit Court before Judge Alan F. Davis in late 1961. Marquette pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity. He was defended by Stephen M. King and George Van Hoomissen; the prosecutors were Deputy District Attorneys Julian Herndon Jr. and Charles R. Harvey.
The state asked for a verdict of first-degree murder without a recommendation of leniency, which under Oregon law then meant a death sentence in the gas chamber. Its theory was that Marquette had killed Mrs. Caudle during a rape or attempted rape, which would make even an unplanned killing first-degree murder, and that he claimed not to remember because it suited him. "He killed her and spread her body over the city," Herndon told the jury.
The defense argued that the killing was not premeditated, that Marquette had not raped or tried to rape her, and that his mental condition left him unable to tell right from wrong; his lawyers said he blocked out periods of emotional stress. Van Hoomissen suggested that Marquette might have knocked her unconscious by accident, believed she was dead and panicked, and he set out several other ways she might have died, any one of which, he said, should leave the jury with reasonable doubt about first-degree murder. He told the jurors that his client had been indicted for first-degree murder "not because he killed a girl but because he cut her up."
Marquette took the stand himself. He admitted that he had killed Mrs. Caudle but said he could not recall the details. No clear motive for the dismemberment was offered beyond moving the body out of the house unseen.
The jury of nine men and three women received the case on a Wednesday morning, after Judge Davis instructed them on insanity and intoxication. They had been told to bring overnight clothes, and they spent that night locked in a Portland hotel. At 2:08 p.m. the next day, a Thursday, they found Marquette guilty of first-degree murder and recommended leniency. The Oregon Statesman put their deliberations at about 28 hours.
The recommendation ruled out the death penalty and made life imprisonment automatic. When the verdict was read, Marquette said "Thank God" in a voice that was almost inaudible, his clasped hands resting on the table. His lawyers had 30 days to give notice of an appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court and had not decided whether to do so. On December 18, 1961, the AP reported that Judge Davis would pronounce sentence that day.
His years in prison in the 1960s, his release and the cases that followed are poorly covered in the reporting. In a 2018 overview of Oregon crimes, Portland Monthly wrote that between 1961 and 1975 Marquette killed and dismembered three women, and that he had been held at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem since 1975. The magazine did not name the women or describe the later cases.
Decades later he was still in Oregon custody and still before the parole system. In a case brought by him against the Oregon Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision, docketed as A174670, the Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed the board's decision without a written opinion on March 2, 2022. The published entry does not say what decision he had challenged.
No news report of his release or death has appeared. When the Court of Appeals ruled on March 2, 2022, he was alive and in the custody of the state of Oregon.
Proven by a jury's verdict, and final: the first-degree murder of Joan Rae Caudle in Portland in June 1961.
Reported but not firmly established: Marquette's parole, its date and the debate it caused; a second killing, in 1975, to which he is reported to have pleaded guilty; and a confession to a killing in 1974 that is reported never to have led to a charge. Portland Monthly's statement that he killed three women stands alone for the later cases, and it gives no details.
Details that vary between 1961 reports: Mrs. Caudle's age (24 in most AP stories; 23 in the Justice Department's announcement of the arrest); the date of the killing (the night of June 5 in the charge; June 6 in the confession as Harvey described it); who in Santa Maria had given Marquette work (Powell, or a minister who ran a salvage shop); the spelling of Powell's middle initial; the length of the trial (12 days in the Oregon Statesman; about two and a half weeks in the News-Review); and the spelling of his middle name (Laurence or Lawrence).
January 20, 1956: arrested in Portland on an attempted rape charge, later dismissed for lack of a complaint; serves 5 days of a 20-day term for disorderly conduct.
November 29, 1957: arrested; convicted of assault with intent to rob.
December 2, 1957: enters the Oregon State Penitentiary on an 18-month sentence.
December 1, 1958: discharged after serving one year.
June 5, 1961: Joan Rae Caudle, 24, leaves home to buy a Father's Day gift for her father and does not return.
June 1961: her remains are found in southeast Portland and at the house Marquette rented on S.E. 27th Avenue; fingerprints identify her; a first-degree murder warrant is filed.
June 14, 1961: Marquette, having traveled through Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana, reaches Santa Maria, California.
June 29, 1961: the FBI adds him to the Ten Most Wanted list as number 154, its first "special addition."
June 30, 1961: arrested by the FBI in Santa Maria; bail set at $100,000 in Santa Barbara.
Early July 1961: flown to Portland after waiving extradition; dictates a confession and leads detectives to the last of the remains near Oaks Park.
December 1961 (reported December 15): convicted of first-degree murder; jury recommends leniency, making life imprisonment automatic.
December 18, 1961: reported due to be sentenced by Judge Alan F. Davis.
1975: held at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem from this year, according to Portland Monthly (2018).
March 2, 2022: Oregon Court of Appeals affirms a Board of Parole decision he had challenged, without opinion.