Rheena Ann Brunson was found on the morning of November 24, 1990, outside a supermarket in Portland, one wrist still in a handcuff, stabbed once in the chest and marked with a number of shallower cuts. She was thirty-four and she died in hospital. Three months later, on February 19, 1991, Victoria Rhone was found strangled and partly clothed in a railway car in the suburbs of the same city.
Scott William Cox drove long-haul, mainly around the Pacific Northwest but as far as Canada, Mexico and Ohio, and he traveled under names that were not his: Seth Scott Cutter, Thomas Wood, Thomas Perkins. It was the false identification that had already brought him a forgery conviction, and he was under supervision for it when he was arrested.
He confessed. The judge then excluded the confessions, because the officers who took them had not obtained them properly, and the prosecution went to court on the DNA and nothing else. It held: on September 15, 1993 he pleaded no contest to two counts of murder. No contest is not guilty. It concedes that the state can prove its case and declines to admit the act, and it is the plea a man enters when the evidence has stopped being arguable but he will not say the words.
The sentence was two consecutive terms of a hundred and fifty months, twenty-five years, with supervision for life. The county prosecutor said afterwards that had the confessions survived he could have been charged with aggravated murder, which in Oregon carries life or the death penalty.
A year after he was sentenced, Oregon voters passed Ballot Measure 11, which set mandatory minimum terms for violent crimes and removed early release. Had Cox been convicted of the same two murders one year later, the same facts would have produced about fifty years with no possibility of getting out sooner. He was convicted before it, and he was released on February 22, 2013, after roughly twenty years, for good behavior.
He is under supervision for the rest of his life. He wears a GPS tracker, keeps a curfew, may not leave Yamhill County, and may not enter a park or a bar. For a period after his release he was free between eight in the morning and eight at night and returned to the county jail to sleep. Asked at the time whether he thought Cox was dangerous, the county corrections director said they would find out.
Police in a number of jurisdictions have named him as a suspect in around twenty unsolved killings of women, most of them found near truck stops along routes he drove, in Washington, Oregon, California and Canada. He has been discussed in connection with the FBI initiative that tracks killings along the interstate network. He has never been charged with any of them, he denies them, and the practical obstacles are the ordinary ones: no usable DNA from the older scenes, and bodies recovered too late to yield much. This archive records two convictions and a body of suspicion, and does not add them together.