In the autumn of 1995 Robert James Acremant, a 27-year-old from Tulare County, California, killed three people in two states in a little over two months. The first was Scott George, a 23-year-old family friend, in Visalia on October 3. The others were Roxanne Kay Ellis, 53, and Michelle Abdill, 42, partners of twelve years who lived in Medford, Oregon, and who had spent years campaigning against the ballot measures that sought to limit the rights of gay Oregonians. They died on December 4, and their deaths drew attention far beyond southern Oregon.
Acremant confessed to all three killings within days of his arrest. In Oregon he pleaded guilty to aggravated murder, and a Jackson County jury sentenced him to death in October 1997. California sentenced him to death a second time in 2002 for the murder of Scott George. He was never executed in either state. In January 2011 his Oregon death sentence was reduced to life without parole, and on October 26, 2018, at the age of 50, he died of natural causes on Oregon's death row. In the two years before his trial he gave at least three different accounts of why he had done it, and the question that most troubled Medford in December 1995 was never resolved to anyone's satisfaction.
Acremant was 27 at the time of the killings, which places his birth in about 1968. In December 1995 he was living in Tulare County, California. His father lived and worked in Stockton, the California city Acremant regarded as the place he came from.
Within days of the arrest his father spoke to reporters. He said his son had been under heavy pressure from a computer software venture in Los Angeles that had failed, and from the end of a relationship with a girlfriend. Acremant himself later told a reporter that he had been despondent after that relationship ended and after he lost his job. Prosecutors in Oregon would describe the same period differently, as a hunt for money to spend on a woman in Las Vegas whom he called his girlfriend.
Scott George was 23 years old and lived in Visalia, the seat of Tulare County. He was a friend of the family, and of Acremant's mother in particular. He died on October 3, 1995, and his death remained unsolved until Acremant confessed two months later.
In December 1995 Acremant's father said that his son had admitted killing George in a fit of anger. Visalia police declined to comment on the father's remarks, and by late 1997 Acremant had still not entered a plea in California.
Roxanne Kay Ellis and Michelle Abdill had lived in Medford for about five years by 1995. They had been together for twelve years, and they ran a property business in the city as partners. Ellis had a daughter.
They were known well beyond their circle of friends. Both were active in church life, and the pastor of one congregation later said they had been a vital part of his church family. Abdill edited the newsletter of the Rogue Valley chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, whose president said she thought of the two women as her daughters. Friends described them as devout Christians. They were remembered too for caring for people living with AIDS, and for the time they gave to political work.
That work had placed them in the middle of the most divisive public argument in Oregon in the early 1990s. In 1992 the Oregon Citizens Alliance brought Measure 9, an anti-gay ballot measure, before the state's voters. It failed statewide but passed in 21 of Oregon's 36 counties, Jackson County among them. In November 1994 a second statewide measure, Measure 13, was defeated by 51 percent to 49 percent, and the most recent of these measures had won a majority in Jackson County. Ellis and Abdill had worked on a campaign that defeated one of the statewide measures, and had spoken out publicly against the efforts to limit gay rights. In Medford, a local gay community figure said in December 1995, anti-gay feeling had become more open since the Measure 9 campaign, and police later said there had been vague threats against the two women in the past.
Roxanne Ellis and Michelle Abdill died in Medford on Monday, December 4, 1995. Their deaths became known three days later, on Thursday, December 7.
The news spread fear through the city's gay community and beyond it. Because of the women's public role, many residents believed at once that they had been killed because of their activism. One local activist said frankly that people were afraid, but she also urged them not to draw conclusions before the facts were known. Police said that they were pursuing the possibility of a hate crime but had no evidence for it. Nationally, the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force asked Attorney General Janet Reno to have the Justice Department assist the local police, citing department guidelines that treated crimes motivated "in whole or in part" by bias as hate crimes.
Nearly 300 people attended a memorial in Medford on Sunday, December 10, and others followed in Ashland, Corvallis, Roseburg and Portland. Mayor Jerry Lausmann declared Medford a "hate-free city." Within days the Rogue Valley chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays had set up the Abdill-Ellis Memorial Fund.
Medford police moved quickly. Within a week detectives had a name, and on December 12 officers carrying an arrest warrant were in California looking for Robert James Acremant, wanted on charges of aggravated murder. Police Chief Ray Shipley said a telephone tip, confirmed by physical evidence, had led his detectives to Acremant. He would not describe the evidence or discuss a motive. "We hope to catch this guy and get him into custody in short order," said District Attorney Mark Huddleston. A brother of Michelle Abdill said he hoped the identification would finally explain why his sister had died.
The tip had come from Acremant's mother, who recognized her son from a police sketch and contacted the authorities. On December 13, 1995, six days after their deaths became known, Acremant was arrested in Stockton on the Oregon warrants. An extradition hearing was set in San Joaquin County Superior Court, and he was returned to Jackson County to face two counts of aggravated murder, Oregon's capital offense.
Acremant confessed soon after his arrest, to the Medford killings and to the death of Scott George in Visalia. His father said publicly that his son had told him he killed the two women in a robbery that went wrong, because he needed money "to get out of the country." Police, prosecutors and the father all said at that stage that there was no sign the killings had been motivated by the women's activism. The Human Rights Campaign answered that it was too early to rule out bias as a motive.
No part of the case caused more anguish in Medford than the question of motive, and Acremant himself kept it open. Shortly after his arrest he said he wanted the death penalty by lethal injection. In late January 1996 he pleaded not guilty. He said at first that he had chosen the women in order to rob their business, and later said he had not yet revealed his true motive because he hoped to sell his story. He insisted that prejudice had played no part, and he told police that he had killed the women for money.
In a letter dated August 8, 1996, sent to a Stockton newspaper, he reversed himself. He now wrote that he had killed the two women out of hatred for gay people, and that he had invented the robbery motive because he feared how other inmates would treat a man who had committed such a crime. "Now, I just don't care what people think, including the jury," he wrote. "They can kill me for all I care." The same letter attacked his father and made threats against his father's household; his father called it a lie written after an argument over belongings.
The Jackson County prosecutor, John Bondurant, said he would bring no new hate crime charges on the strength of the letter. "I think he's grandstanding," he said. "I'm very skeptical." He described Acremant as publicity hungry, but noted that the letter could still be used as evidence at trial. A board member of the new community association named for the two women doubted the account as well, suggesting that it might be an attempt to build a defense.
Prosecutors settled on a different picture. Acremant, they said, had wanted money to spend on the woman in Las Vegas, and the killings grew out of his attempt to rob the two women. In 1997 Acremant returned to that account himself. He said the killings stemmed from a botched robbery and that prejudice had nothing to do with them.
The public defender who first represented Acremant, Ralph Monson, opposed capital punishment and filed motions challenging Oregon's death penalty law. Lieutenant Tom Lavine, who led criminal investigations for the Medford police, said in early 1996 that he expected a defense of temporary insanity. A trial was scheduled for February 4, 1997.
Weeks after the August 1996 letter, Acremant changed his plea. He pleaded guilty to four counts of aggravated murder for the deaths of two victims, and to first-degree kidnapping and first-degree robbery. The guilty pleas left only one question for a jury: whether he would live or die.
The penalty trial opened in Jackson County Circuit Court on September 23, 1997, nearly two years after the killings. Bondurant told the twelve jurors that Acremant had prepared for further robberies and further killings. The defense attorney, Mark Rader, asked for a life sentence. "Let this smart man sit behind prison walls and suffer every day the pain he created," he told the jury. His lawyers said that Acremant, who had once asked to be executed, now wanted to live.
On October 27, 1997, after about four hours of deliberation, the jury sentenced him to death. Oregon law sent the case directly to the state Supreme Court for automatic review.
For those closest to the two women, the verdict brought no sense of triumph. The president of the local parents' chapter said that whatever was done to him, it would not bring them back. Roxanne Ellis's daughter said she had lost her own house, her career and her dreams in the two years since her mother's death, and that she hoped the sentence might give Acremant some taste of the fear her mother had felt. Friends of the couple said the two women would have shown compassion even to his family, and that they preferred to put their energy into the community center that now carried the couple's names.
The memorial fund had raised about $20,000 by March 1996, and a separate association had raised $7,000 more, toward a community center for gay and lesbian residents of the Rogue Valley. A unity rally against hate crimes in the town of Rogue River drew about 200 people that winter. Donations came from across the country, from $5 to $1,500, and the Abdill-Ellis Lambda Community Center was established in Ashland.
In 1999 the center moved to larger quarters in downtown Ashland, where it could hold meetings and dances.
The Oregon Supreme Court heard argument in State v. Acremant on July 21, 2004. Deputy Public Defender Eric Johansen argued for Acremant, who also filed his own supplemental briefs; Assistant Attorney General Janet A. Metcalf argued for the state. On March 17, 2005, in an opinion by Chief Justice Carson, the court affirmed. "We affirm the judgment of conviction and the sentences of death," it held. It found one error: the trial court should not have entered more than one aggravated murder conviction for each victim, and the case was sent back for a corrected judgment showing one conviction per victim, based on alternative aggravating factors.
The question of his mental state then took over the case. For years Acremant complained of hearing voices and believed that a transmitter in his head allowed others to control him. In January 2011 his Oregon death sentence was reduced to life without parole after he was diagnosed as delusional and unable to assist in his own appeals.
California had waited its turn. In 2002 Acremant was extradited to Tulare County to answer for the death of Scott George. He was sentenced to death for the first-degree murder of George and received a further 16-year term for first-degree burglary. His California death sentence formally began on October 4, 2002, but he served it in Oregon, where he remained in the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections. Because of the California sentence he was never removed from Oregon's death row, even after his Oregon sentence was reduced.
Acremant was sentenced under a death penalty that Oregon had abolished and restored more than once. The state first adopted capital punishment in 1864. Voters repealed it in 1914, restored it in 1920, repealed it again in 1964, and in 1984 approved the modern law under which Acremant was tried. In the years that followed, Oregon carried out only two executions: Douglas Franklin Wright in 1996, the first in 34 years, and Harry Charles Moore in 1997, who gave up his remaining appeals. Both took place under Governor John Kitzhaber.
On November 22, 2011, ten months after Acremant was resentenced, Kitzhaber declared a moratorium on executions for the rest of his term, saying he was morally opposed to capital punishment and regretted allowing the executions of the 1990s. There were then 37 people on Oregon's death row. Governor Kate Brown kept the moratorium in place, and in 2019 she signed a law that narrowed the crimes eligible for death. When Acremant died there were 30 people on the state's death row. In December 2022, four years after his death, Brown commuted the sentences of all 17 people then on it to life without parole, and the Oregon State Penitentiary later phased out its death row housing.
California's death row was far larger. At the time of Acremant's death it held 742 people, and the state had carried out 13 executions since 1978, against 79 condemned inmates who had died of natural causes. Acremant is entry 130 on California's register of condemned inmates who have died since 1978.
Acremant died at the Oregon State Penitentiary on Friday, October 26, 2018. He was 50. A corrections spokeswoman, Tonya Gushard, said there was "nothing suspicious that we know of." As in every death in custody, the Oregon State Police were notified and the state medical examiner was asked to determine the cause. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which still counted him among its condemned, recorded that he had died of natural causes.
The central dispute in the case is motive, and it was never tested before a jury in the form of a hate crime charge. Acremant said in his first accounts that the Medford killings were a robbery that went wrong, said in August 1996 that they were acts of hatred, and returned in 1997 to the robbery account. Prosecutors treated the case as a robbery and declined to add hate crime charges, and federal hate crime law did not explicitly cover crimes against gay people until the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.
1984: Oregon voters approve the modern death penalty.
1992: Measure 9 fails statewide but passes in Jackson County.
November 8, 1994: Measure 13 is defeated statewide, 51 percent to 49 percent.
October 3, 1995: Scott George, 23, dies in Visalia, California.
December 4, 1995: Roxanne Kay Ellis, 53, and Michelle Abdill, 42, die in Medford, Oregon.
December 7, 1995: The two women are found dead in Medford.
December 10, 1995: Nearly 300 people attend a memorial at Medford Congregational Church.
December 12, 1995: Medford police name Acremant as their suspect.
December 13, 1995: Acremant is arrested in Stockton, California, on Oregon warrants for aggravated murder.
January 1996: He pleads not guilty.
August 8, 1996: He writes a letter claiming the Medford killings were hate crimes; the prosecutor calls it grandstanding.
Late 1996: He pleads guilty to four counts of aggravated murder, first-degree kidnapping and first-degree robbery.
September 23, 1997: The penalty trial opens in Jackson County Circuit Court.
October 27, 1997: The jury sentences him to death.
2002: Extradited to Tulare County, he is sentenced to death for the first-degree murder of Scott George; the California sentence begins on October 4, 2002.
March 17, 2005: The Oregon Supreme Court affirms the convictions and death sentences and orders a corrected judgment.
January 2011: His Oregon sentence is reduced to life without parole.
November 22, 2011: Governor Kitzhaber declares a moratorium on executions.
October 26, 2018: Acremant dies of natural causes on Oregon's death row, aged 50.
December 2022: Governor Brown commutes all remaining Oregon death sentences.