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COLD CASE: The murder of Judy Carlson in 1980 in Malheur County remains unsolved

The cardboard box, with “Unsolved” handwritten in felt pen on the outside, is a time capsule.

File folders standing neatly inside chronicle a murder that occurred outside Vale more than 40 years ago.

The police reports tell how 18-year-old Judy R. Carlson left an Ontario party on a fall night in 1980, never to return.

They recount the discovery of her body in a gravel pit.

And they document efforts of police to elicit a confession from the man that to this day the original lead investigator believes is the killer.

Dan Perkins hoped to prove that investigator right.

Perkins turned to the box last year, his final investigation inf a long career of detective work. He was retiring from the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office, but not before Sheriff Travis Johnson asked him to try solving the long-dormant case.

“This case came to our attention due to a past friend of the victim reporting theory information she harbored since 1980,” Perkins would later write in his summary report.

That friend proved to be wrong, but Perkins went to work on the case anyway. He faced long odds. Cracking a decades-old murder isn’t easy. 

As Perkins found, witnesses had disappeared or died. The memories of other witnesses were unreliable under modern legal standards.

And crucial evidence had been laundered, ruining the opportunity that modern DNA techniques could unlock the case.

Perkins read through the old reports over his desk at the sheriff’s office and at his kitchen table at home, searching for openings that could lead to justice for Judy.

The documents included transcripts and notes of interviews, crime scene photos and the medical examiner’s findings from an autopsy.

Those documents detailing Carlson’s death and the subsequent investigation were released recently to the Enterprise. The newspaper then interviewed a half dozen witnesses for fresh details.

A tough life, a violent end

The account of this case starts with a two-story house on a corner lot near downtown Ontario.

Mary Touhy, then Mary Silence, shared the home in 1980 with another woman. They had allowed Judy Carlson to move in after she was evicted from her apartment.

Carlson was born in Denver, two days before Mother’s Day in 1962, attending high school first there and then in Payette, Idaho. She had two brothers and three sisters. At the time of her death, she was attending Treasure Valley Community College.

“She was real friendly, easy going, one of the nicest personalities you’d ever want to see,” a friend later told police.

Judy Carlson was found murdered in a Vale-area gravel pit in 1980. This is the last known photo of her from that year, when she was 18. The case remains unsolved. (Malheur County Sheriff’s Office)

On the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 12, 1980, a group of young people mostly in their 20s gathered at the house, an informal party forming.

One of those who showed up was Paul M. Bayes Jr., who had turned 25 a week earlier.

Bayes arrived in a 1976 Volkswagen Beetle borrowed from the girlfriend he lived with in Vale. He had been married once and had two children. He was a big talker and struck some as a “wannabe biker” with a tough and sometimes threatening demeanor. Witnesses later would say his aggression would emerge when he was drinking.

“He’d drink and he’d turn into a complete and utter demon,” said his girlfriend from the time.

When some at the party suggested heading to swim at Snively Hot Springs outside of Nyssa, Bayes offered to drive.

On the drive out, Carlson’s 15-year-old sister, known as Colleen, sat in the front seat beside Bayes.

“Colleen said that he was grabbing on her and stuff and she didn’t like it,” said one of those in the party. Carlson took her sister’s place beside Bayes for the return drive to Ontario.

“He was grabbing Judy on the way back too,” the witness later told police.

Back at the house, Bayes announced he would make a run to Vale to buy some bootleg tequila.

Carlson, who witnesses said favored hard liquor, piped up that she would go along.

The two took off from the Ontario house that evening. No one there, including her younger sister, would see her again.

Five days after the party, Colleen Carlson reported her sister missing to the Ontario Police Department. The officer took down that Carlson “left with Paul ? + Paul left her off at Circle K later.” The report described Carlson, including “two cherries tattooed on left abdomen.”

A police photo from 1980 shows investigators examining the scene outside Vale where the body of 18-year-old Judy R. Carlson was found. The murder remains classified as unsolved though detectives identified a suspect. (Malheur County Sheriff’s Office photo)

About two weeks after she went missing, Bayes was caught sexually abusing the 6-year-old daughter of his girlfriend, who had walked in on the abuse, according to police reports. The girlfriend ordered Bayes out of the home and reported him to police.

For reasons that aren’t clear, Bayes wasn’t arrested but instead was referred for treatment.

He later sent his girlfriend a handwritten note, apologizing.

“I hope I will be able to find out what’s wrong with me so I can be a better person. I still can’t believe I was doing all of this,” he wrote.

Meantime, Frank Ceniga, then a Malheur County sheriff’s detective, had been asked to help Ontario police with Carlson’s disappearance. Investigators soon identified “Paul ?” from the missing person report as Bayes.

Then, about a month after the party -– on Oct. 16, 1980 – Vale brothers age 5 and 10 were on horseback, tracking down their dog. They rode into a private gravel pit about two miles northeast of Vale, on Foothill Drive.

They saw a body.

It was Carlson.

Police later would describe that she was lying on her back, in a position indicating that she’d been sexually assaulted. Other than her clothing, investigators found no other evidence or clues. Her body was decomposed.

Ceniga was called at home about the discovery and within hours, he sat across from Paul Bayes at the Ontario police station.

Under questioning, Bayes described going to the Ontario party, driving the group to the hot springs, and returning to the party house.

“I asked Judy if she wanted to drink some tequila,” Bayes said. “She said ‘Yeah,’” according to the interview.

He said he would need to go to Vale to get some and she tagged along, he said.

On the way, he said, he pulled into what was then a Circle K store on Southwest Fourth Avenue.

“I bought a pack of cigarettes. I came back out and she was talking to somebody,” he said. He walked across the street to use a restaurant bathroom, returning to find Carlson was gone.

“I just got in my car and went home,” he said.

He assured the detective that he had not had sex with Carlson. When Ceniga pressed him about being the last to see the teen alive, Bayes told him, “I didn’t murder nobody.”

A police photo from 1980 shows the spot in a gravel pit outside Vale where police found the body of 18-year-old Judy R. Carlson. The murder remains classified as unsolved though detectives identified a suspect. (Malheur County Sheriff’s Office photo)

Bayes was free to go.

“He was pretty uncooperative,” Ceniga recalled in a recent interview. “He wouldn’t answer many of my questions.”

Later that day, Ceniga took a call from Bayes. He confessed he had had sex with Carlson.

The detective already was suspicious of Bayes.

“He was a primary suspect the first time I talked to him,” Ceniga said. “If you lie to me once, you’ll lie to me a lot.”

An autopsy was conducted the following morning, the subsequent report noting the poor condition of the body. The report concluded the cause of death was “undetermined.”

Later, then-State Medical Examiner William Brady reviewed the case. He noted that an Oregon State Police specialist had detected two cuts in Carlson’s shirt over the right shoulder.

“I believe that Judy Carlson received a deep cutting injury to her right shoulder or neck,” Brady wrote. “I believe that this injury materially contributed to her death or in and of itself was the cause of death.”

Carlson’s remains were cremated. Four days after the body was found her family held a memorial service at First Southern Baptist Church in Fruitland.

Accusations, and a changing story

Travis McKinney, now living in Albany, was pastor at the time. He recalled that Carlson came from a “horrible” family situation.

Mary Touhy described recently how the church was full of mourners, a line of motorcycles outside. The pastor thought the riders were from a motorcycle gang.

Not long after that, Bayes left Malheur County for California, $23 in his pocket, he later told police.

One of those at the party was asked by police who he thought killed Carlson.

“Paul Bayes. I know it. I’ve known it. I knew it before she was ever found dead,” said Marshall “Roy” Howington, then 26 and now deceased.

In a later police interview, Bayes said people were shaking their fists at him, calling him a murderer.

“It was messing with my head,” he said.

About three months later, in January 1981, Ceniga trailed him to Placerville, California. He pressed him again about the Carlson case.

This time, according to notes and the interview transcript, Bayes provided a more elaborate account of his time with the young woman.

He said he first took her to a bank in Ontario so she could deposit money and then to an Ontario city park. He said she was going to meet her boyfriend there but they “smoked some pot and had sex.”

He said they then went to the Circle K.

In one version, Bayes said Carlson was talking to a “tall, blond headed guy” when he came out of the store. “She left with him and bunch of other guys.”

But the day after Carlson disappeared, Bayes had told a different account to one of the women at the Ontario party. She recounted to police that he said the teen “took off with a bunch of Mexicans.” She said Bayes first told her they left in a car and then said they left in a pickup truck.

The clerk working at the store that night said none of that happened. Shown a photo of Carlson, she said the teen was not at the store that night. She also said no one had gathered outside the store to talk – behavior that police later established wasn’t allowed on store property.

Bayes in the California interview tried to explain away why he returned home the night of the disappearance with pants muddy from the knees down.

The Vale girlfriend had provided police that detail. She said he returned that night with her car spattered in mud. She found that odd, the witness said, because Bayes earlier that day had carefully washed it.

Bayes dismissed the dirty clothes as the result of the trip to the hot springs.

“It was raining. It was muddy,” he said.

Others who went along said that wasn’t so. One man said it had been raining, but swimmers changed clothes in the car.

“Nobody had mud on their clothes,” he said.

A second man told police that “nobody was muddy because we hadn’t actually been out in it.”

The Vale girlfriend shared another crucial detail – Bayes was familiar with the gravel pit where Carlson was found. He had taken his girlfriend there for target practice twice.

Bayes himself later confirmed he knew about it because “I use to work out in the gravel pit.”

He insisted that “I ain’t never murdered nobody.”

Bayes said there was a chance he had a split personality, and that he wasn’t sure if he might have killed the Ontario teen.

“I don’t know,” he said in a taped interview. “I hope not.” 

Ceniga questioned others that Bayes was associating with in California.

One woman said Bayes told her he didn’t like being told what to do.

“I could kill you and it wouldn’t bother me. It’s nothing new to me,” she quoted him as telling her.

She said he had told her that he had “shown this one girl that she wouldn’t say no to him anymore.”

A man who spent time in jail in California with Bayes recounted to a detective that Bayes twice told him he had killed a woman in Oregon, according to the interview transcript.

During his trip to California, Ceniga seized an “Old Timer” pocket knife from Bayes.

“I told him I suspected that he used that knife to kill Judy,” Ceniga said.

He turned the knife over to a state police forensics specialist, who later reported there was no trace of blood on it.

Sometime the following year, Jacques DeKalb, the Malheur County district attorney, presented the evidence to a grand jury. For reasons no official could explain, there remains no record of the presentation or the grand jury’s action.

In more recent interviews, surviving witnesses recalled testifying before the grand jury.

That included Ceniga, the detective.

“I believe there was sufficient evidence to arrest Paul Bayes for the murder of Judy Rose Carlson,” Perkins wrote in his report last fall. 

Ceniga happened to have a friend on the grand jury, who later told him the jurors voted to indict Bayes. The retired detective said DeKalb told him at the time that he wouldn’t prosecute because he didn’t believe the evidence would hold up.

That included the statement of a California witness, who recounted how Bayes implied he had murdered a woman in Oregon.

DeKalb said he doesn’t recall taking the case to the grand jury.

“We had a body, we knew how she was killed. We had the suspect’s name as the last person who had seen her,” DeKalb recalled. “I just needed something from the suspect to make the case.”

The case went cold but was briefly revived in 1987. A witness came forward, telling police an account of someone other than Bayes as being the killer. Police chased down witnesses and dug back into the case before concluding the informant had been lying.

Frank Ceniga, with his dog Lucky, recalls the effort he put in as a detective with the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office to solve the murder in 1980 of Judy R. Carlson. Ceniga, who lives in Vale, remains convinced that investigators identified the killer. (LES ZAITZ/The Enterprise)

Ceniga left the sheriff’s office in 1984 for another police job and the Carlson murder remained unsolved. But he never forgot the woman’s murder.

“There’s still a family out there with a lot of unanswered questions,” Ceniga said recently. “They don’t have closure and I think that’s damned important.”

A quarter century would pass before the case came back to life with the assignment to Perkins.

The murder intrigued Perkins professionally but also personally.

He grew up in Vale.

“I never heard of it,” Perkins said of the murder.

He knew the Circle K in Ontario where Bayes said he took her. Perkins knew about the youthful party scene in Vale.

Later, he worked in law enforcement in the California county where Bayes was last interviewed, in 1981.

“I felt like I was the right person to take this on,” Perkins said. “I thought to myself, ‘Can I make this work?’ I need to put a period on this.”

Perkins went through the reports, concluding that Ceniga “did a good job” on the original investigation.

He started tracking down witnesses.

He located the woman who lived in the Ontario house, now in Washington state.

The former girlfriend from Vale talked to him from Arizona.

He learned that Carlson’s sister, the one who reported her missing, had since died. So had others who had been at the swimming party.

Perkins said Bayes remains the prime suspect. Prosecuting the case on available evidence isn’t possible, chiefly because important witnesses are now dead.

Perkins concluded the only hope of breaking the case rested with Bayes.

He had another goal in mind: “To make sure what he did was not forgotten.”

Bayes didn’t respond to two letters, two emails and one note delivered to his home from the Enterprise, seeking an interview and telling him the subject.

Perkins traced him, now 70, to a rural property outside Burns. Teaming up with officers from the Harney County Sheriff’s Department, Perkins drove in a marked pickup truck, pulling up to the gate across Bayes’ driveway on Tuesday, April 11, 2024.

The suspect was outside with a woman who said she had been with Bayes for 42 years.

As Perkins later recounted, the investigators and Bayes went back and forth over the case.

“Paul said that his memory was pretty shot,” Perkins wrote.

Bayes said he remembered little of Carlson except that he had a one-night stand with her.

Perkins, seeing an admission wasn’t coming, instead pressed Bayes to consider a death bed confession.

He considered Perkins’ suggestion, Perkins recalled.

He told the detective that as he prepared to die, if he realized he was the killer, “he’d call.”

A cardboard box marked “:Unsolved” contains police reports from the original investigation into the 1980 murder of Judy Carlson, an 18-year-old from Ontario. (LES ZAITZ/The Enterprise)

CONTACT Editor Les Zaitz: [email protected].

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