Solved cold cases in Oregon
3 documented cases.
Barbara Mae Tucker
Barbara Mae Tucker, a 19-year-old business student at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Oregon, was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and beaten to death on the evening of January 15, 1980, as she walked to an evening class. Witnesses saw her run onto Northeast Kane Drive with blood and mud on her face, waving for help as drivers swerved around her, before a man pulled her back into a wooded area near the campus. Her body was found the next morning by arriving students. The case went cold for more than four decades. In 2000 the Oregon State Police Crime Lab developed a male DNA profile from autopsy swabs, but it matched no one. In 2021, investigative genetic genealogy by Parabon NanoLabs and chief genetic genealogist CeCe Moore identified Robert Arthur Plympton as the likely source; Gresham detectives covertly collected chewing gum he discarded, and the lab confirmed the match. Plympton, who had been a 16-year-old high school student at the time of the killing, was arrested on June 8, 2021. After a bench trial, Multnomah County Circuit Judge Amy Baggio found him guilty of murder on March 15, 2024, and he was sentenced on October 3, 2024, to life in prison with a minimum of 40 years.
Donald Bartron and Peter Zito Jr.
Donald Bartron, 16, and Peter Zito Jr., 18, both students at Aloha High School, were found shot to death early on October 3, 1974, in the parking lot of the Oak Hills Recreation Center in the unincorporated area west of Beaverton in Washington County, Oregon. Both teenagers had been shot multiple times in the head with a .22 caliber handgun while one of them worked on a 1956 Oldsmobile. The double homicide went unsolved for 48 years. In November 2022 the Washington County Sheriff's Office announced that ballistics testing by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Oregon State Police crime lab had matched the bullets from the 1974 killings to a .22 caliber handgun that an early suspect, Steven Paul Criss, had used two years later, in 1976, to murder his Army commanding officer. Criss was arrested and indicted on two counts of second-degree murder. Authorities described it as the oldest known ballistics match the ATF had confirmed for a prosecutable case.
Elizabeth Wasson
Elizabeth Wasson, an 82-year-old widow known around her Hillsboro, Oregon neighborhood as the Avon Lady, was strangled inside her own home, where she was found dead on September 23, 1992. Serial killer Cesar Barone was suspected at the time because the killing fit his pattern of attacking elderly women living alone, but detectives could not directly link him to the case. In 2023 a Hillsboro detective resubmitted preserved crime-scene evidence for modern DNA testing; male DNA recovered from it forensically tied Barone to the murder. Barone had already been convicted of four other Portland-area murders and sentenced to death in 1995, and he died in prison in 2009. The Washington County District Attorney announced the link on February 10, 2026.