Conviction dismissed in triple-murder case

SALEM – The sister of one of the victims in a Polk County triple-murder case doubts that justice ever will be done after the release of a Salem man convicted of the crime nearly a decade ago.

“Polk County totally screwed this thing up,” Jennifer Murdock of Salem said Wednesday. “It’s basically a bunch of crap that the families have to go through all this again.”

Philip Scott Cannon was freed Dec. 18 after serving more than 10 years in prison for the 1998 fatal shootings of Murdock’s sister, Celesta Graves, 24, and Suzan Osborne and Jason Kinser, both 26.

Cannon, 43, was released after a state investigator determined that authorities lost or destroyed evidence used to prosecute him in 2000.

Polk County District Attorney Stan Butterfield now describes the case as an open murder investigation. But Murdock holds out little hope for a just resolution.

“I believe they’re going to say they’re actively investigating, but what can they investigate after all these years?” she said.

“The only little bit of evidence they used at the first trial is gone. So what are they going to pursue?”

Murdock described the lost-evidence debacle as a staggering blow to the victims’ families, reopening old wounds.

Despite Cannon’s pleas of innocence, Murdock doesn’t believe him.

“As far as I’m concerned, he’s as guilty today as he was back then,” she said. “It sickens me to know that he gets to live his life.”

Cannon was convicted by a Polk County jury in February 2000 of the three slayings at a mobile home in rural Polk County west of Salem.

No murder weapon was found and there were no witnesses to the killings. Cannon testified that he was at the victims’ trailer on the day of the shootings to look at a plumbing job. However, they were alive when he left, he said.

Then-District Attorney John Fisher never produced a motive. The case against Cannon was largely based on circumstantial evidence and ballistics evidence.

Key forensic evidence used by the prosecution came from bullet analysis work by Mike Conrady, a former Oregon State University researcher at the OSU Radiation Center. He determined that tests showed bullets found at the crime scene matched those found in Cannon’s garage. Conrady concluded that there was only a 1 in 64 million chance of getting that match.

Capping a post-conviction investigation, Cannon and his attorney claimed earlier this year in court papers that the researcher’s conclusions were unfounded and based on “junk science.” The technique used by Conrady, called comparative bullet lead analysis, was abandoned by the FBI in 2005 after it was discredited by the National Academy of Sciences.

In August, the state agreed to Cannon’s request for a new trial because of doubts about the bullet-analysis technique. The day after his murder convictions were overturned, Cannon was transferred from the Oregon State Penitentiary to the Polk County jail.

Polk County District Attorney Stan Butterfield, who was elected DA in November 2008, initially said he expected to re-charge Cannon with the murders, essentially starting the case over from square one.

On Sept. 11, a state investigator began a futile search to find trial exhibits used during Cannon’s prosecution, according to a state report released Monday.

Investigator Dennis Carson said he interviewed current and former Polk County employees, including Fisher. The former DA said he might have signed an order in 2005 to have the trial materials purged, but he had no idea where the exhibits ended up.

Murdock said she learned about the lost evidence and Cannon’s impending release Dec. 17, during a meeting she and other members of her family had with Butterfield and another official whose name she couldn’t remember.

“They said they had searched every stinking building they could think of that it might be in and couldn’t find it,” she said. “We were just in shock. “We were like, ‘What? How could this happen?’ ”

The officials were at a loss to explain it, she said.

“They stated it doesn’t matter what state, county or city you’re in, it’s never the procedure in any murder case to purge evidence.”

Butterfield has said the evidence was destroyed before he took office and that he “enacted policy changes to make sure nothing like this happens again.”