Hush

Oct 02 2024 11 ep. 37 mins 232
Hush Podcast artwork

Hush is an investigative podcast from OPB, uncovering the buried truth about critical stories in the Pacific Northwest. In the first season, we look at the case of Jesse Lee Johnson, a Black man who lived for 17 years on Oregon’s death row for a crime he says he didn’t commit, and we try to understand why the state tried for so long to kill him.

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Episode 9: State of Denial

Oct 02 2024 42 mins  
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&rsquo

Hush presents: Lost Patients

Sep 30 2024 48 mins  
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 lis

Episode 8: A History of Violence

Sep 25 2024 55 mins  
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.

Episode 7: The Nature of Certain Lies

Sep 25 2024 36 mins  
To this day, Det. Mike Quakenbush believes Jesse Johnson is guilty of murder. Even when confronted with significant evidence pointing away from Johnson, Quakenbush said there is no doubt. But what starts as a cordial discussion of DNA evidence and witness interviews at a Salem diner quickly turns into something much more revealing.

Episode 6: Two Strangers

Sep 18 2024 37 mins  
Police and prosecutors have always insisted they thoroughly investigated Harriet Thompson’s murder, but some people who did not appear at Jesse Johnson’s trial have insisted for 25 years that they have information that raises new questions. A former state of Oregon employee who was at Thompson’s house the night she died said police only ever wanted to charge Johns

Episode 5: One Little Drop

Sep 18 2024 40 mins  
The late 1990s and early 2000s were a time of rapidly evolving forensic science. Jurors at Jesse Johnson’s trial heard a lot about how forensic scientists at the Salem Police and Oregon State Police developed fingerprints of Johnson’s inside Harriet Thompson’s home. But newly revealed documents and DNA testing show those scientists may have been more interested in

Episode 4: Patti

Sep 11 2024 41 mins  
Patricia Hubbard lived across the street from Harriet Thompson in 1998, and was the kind of neighbor who doesn’t miss much. She said the white house on Shamrock Drive was known as a “party house.” The night of Thompson’s killing, Hubbard was smoking on her porch after a long shift at the local fruit cannery. When she heard screaming and saw a man come runnin

Episode 3: The SAINTS of Salem

Sep 11 2024 28 mins  
Salem police in the 1990s began to crack down on drug users. At times, their efforts turned deadly, and regularly targeted people of color in the mostly white city. Fatal police shootings led to the formation of a police oversight board that the head of the police union, Det. Craig Stoelk, opposed. Stoelk’s critics say this time period revealed his personal biases, and raise

Episode 2: Shorty

Sep 04 2024 32 mins  
After spending six years awaiting trial, a jury in Salem convicted Jesse Johnson in 2004. Prosecutors relied on an alleged confession to the murder of Harriet Thompson that Johnson made to a fellow drug user named Donald “Shorty” Blocker. But the jury did not hear the full story. If they had, they may have had doubts about the police investigators at the heart of the Jo

Episode 1: Jesse

Sep 04 2024 43 mins  
On March 20,1998, police in Salem, Oregon, discovered the body of a 28-year-old Harriet Thompson inside her apartment. Within a week, they arrested Jesse Johnson for murder. Johnson drifted west after a troubled childhood in Arkansas and a stint in prison there. In Salem, he was known around town as a homeless drug user. A random encounter with Thompson the week before she was kill