If the third group that tells a true crime story is the media, Columbia County is lacking in this department. The local newspaper is on its last legs and closes after more than 140 years of operation. Facebook and TikTok take over as the primary news sources in the county. We discover how this new type of media is working to take on – and reinforce – a culture of secrecy after a new scandal rocks Columbia County.

Typically, true crime stories tell tales of women killed by the men in their lives. And in the early days of the Zuber investigation, close attention was paid to the two men in Sarah Zuber’s life: her father, Randy, and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Vishal Christian. The Hush team looks at the ways police focused on these two men, and the resulting damage to the Sarah Zuber investigation and the community.

In an absence of information about the Zuber case, and in reaction to issues around law enforcement in Columbia County, Jennifer Massey - a citizen sleuth and wife of a St Helens Police officer – rises up as the loudest voice of the community on the Sarah Zuber case. Alongside several other community members, Massey starts the Justice for Sarah Zuber Facebook page, using it to push for greater transparency in this case. Eventually, Massey decides to run for mayor of St Helens — the seat of Columbia County — and puts the Sarah Zuber case at the center of her campaign.

OPB Journalists Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas are reluctant to engage in an investigation that slips into true crime pitfalls. The pair attend True Crime 101 at Oregon State University and speak to professor Justin St Germain — whose life has been impacted by violent crime. They learn who typically dictates a true crime story: the police, the community and the media.

In March 2019, in the wooded hills above the rural river town of Rainier, Oregon, 18-year-old Sarah Zuber was found dead 400 feet from her front door. Six years later, her family still has no clue what happened to their daughter.

Hush is an investigative podcast from OPB, uncovering the buried truth about critical stories in the Pacific Northwest. In season 2, Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas investigate the 2019 death of Sarah Zuber, and the ways declining local media, citizen sleuthing and a police department that can’t find answers have led to serious rifts in rural Columbia County, Oregon — as well as the damage done when true crime tropes take over.

On September 5th, 2023, Jesse Johnson walked out of jail a free man. He’d spent a quarter century incarcerated, including 17 years on death row, for a crime he always insisted he didn’t commit: the 1998 murder of Harriet Thompson in Salem, Oregon.
Two years after his release, Johnson is suing the state of Oregon and the Salem police detectives who locked him up for much of his life. The lawsuit argues that flagrant racism played a key role in the investigation into Johnson that led to his imprisonment.
The case against Johnson was the focus of the first season of OPB’s investigative podcast series “Hush,” reported by Leah Sottile and Ryan Haas. Today, Ryan joins us for an update.

Jesse Johnson is free, but what has changed in Oregon? Experts who have closely examined the state’s racist history say very little. A close look at a murder on a train in the 1940s, a lynching in Southern Oregon, and the state’s last executions in the late-90s reveals a straight line to Johnson’s plight. The architect of Oregon’s death penalty says it’s time for the state to chart a new path.

Today we're sharing the first episode of 'Lost Patients,' a deeply reported podcast from KUOW and the Seattle Times examining our complicated system for treating people with severe mental illness – a system that, almost by design, loses patients with psychosis to an endless loop between the streets, jail, clinics, courts and a shrinking number of hospital beds. Follow and listen to more episodes of 'Lost Patients' here: https://www.kuow.org/podcasts/lost-patients

If Jesse Johnson did not kill Harriet Thompson, then who did? It’s a question police and prosecutors rarely - if ever - considered. We take a deep look at three men who all had connections to Thompson and violence in their pasts, including one man who told Salem police detectives in 1998 he “dreamed” of a murder eerily close in circumstances to the killing.