Confessions of a Journalist Haunted by a Double Killing
Three years ago this week, a couple named Nate and Cassy were brutally stabbed to death, and I soon began reporting their story. I now realize it will never leave me—for reasons you might not expect.
“The ‘Insane Pirate’ Drifter and the Double Killing at the Fourplex” — my third piece for Narratively — began to torment me after I took on the assignment. Whether I’m writing about housing, the lack of housing, or a bloody double homicide in a basement, a sense of place is crucial. And this place I spent so much time investigating just has an ominous feeling to it.
When I park my butt and laptop on the lawn in front of the faded gray quadplex on NE Davis Street this week, 22 months after I first showed up here to report my story, the building is silent, perhaps empty. But the neighborhood surrounding it is pure Portland, Oregon. Noisy. Sensory. Busy as a Richard Scarry children’s book.
No other place smells quite like this one. When the wind arrives from the nearby Willamette River, it carries a wholesome waft from the nearby Franz Bakery. Then it shifts, bringing whiffs of Voodoo Donuts’ deep-fried fancy sweets. Sometimes it’s the musty organic rot of Portland’s decaying temperate rainforest, or a puff of skunky weed.
People in beanies, pigtails, rainbow-dyed haircuts, punk belts, black t-shirts, leg tattoos and man-buns pass by. The backdrop includes a vintage 7Up sign, the skyscraper known as “Big Pink” across the river, and a new cobalt-and-electric-blue residential building, part of the mid-rises steadily occupying this once-remote urban jungle.
Just above the fourplex’s ill-fated exterior basement staircase, graffiti proclaims “We Love You Cassy Forever” and “N & C - R.I.P.” The door that was sawed through by Nate Hobbs — the “N” in the spray-painted tribute — in his last minutes alive is boarded over now with thin plywood. An iron ring is attached to the curb, a reminder of horses and bygone eras. In surrounding neighborhoods here, in my hometown, one is liable to see a small toy rainbow horse, tiger or velociraptor tethered to such a ring — a child’s or artist’s way of honoring the city’s quirky roots — this one holds no such magic. Not here, not at this place with such a dark past.
These are the stairs that two young lovers climbed one final time, in unimaginable pain, on June 16, 2020. Nate and Cassy were two of too many murdered that year in Portland, and across the country. Six blocks to the south, my young children are inside Buckman Elementary School, hopefully safe and sound and learning.
Why does this story disturb my dreams? Because my kids are nearby almost every day? Because the killing was intimate and grotesque, like one I reported on for the Los Angeles Times, Jeremy Christian’s 2017 Portland-train double-murders, done with a knife? Because it punctuated the housing and homelessness wars, including among vehicle residents, the fastest-growing but least-understood segment of the homeless population?
Or was it that the young couple who died had found new hope here? And that they died seeking access to water, that devastatingly scarce commodity in our warming world?
Maybe it’s because of what is missing from my story and, really, theirs: readily available support for all of us who need it in life – whether for addiction, mental illness, anti-recidivism or shelter.
I devour a squishy chocolate-pretzel doughnut, sip my coffee, get icing on my laptop keys. My blood sugar spikes. The fourplex sits there impassively. A grizzled, hungry-looking guy on a bicycle rifles through the trash bins behind the bright-pink doughnut shop. I think of the seven bucks I just spent, of my years working in social services and homeless shelters with individuals like him, and feel a vague, indefinable guilt.
“Hey, happy birthday,” a worker at the bottling company hollers to another. “Thank you!” Life goes on, despite all the life that was lost right here. Ubiquitous engine noises are punctuated by the clangs, beeps and din of a city at work. A forklift’s horn issues a “beep-beep” like the Roadrunner’s. Power tools, bass from a stereo, the metal-on-metal of construction at Benson High School add to the cacophony.
In Telling True Stories, a book about narrative non-fiction that I often refer back to, author Victor Merina writes of what he calls “listening posts.” “You go to a listening post to find out what’s happening in a neighborhood so you can begin to understand what’s going on in a particular culture or community,” Merina writes. Begin to. “At listening posts, you hear the community speaking and sense the community’s heartbeat.”
I think of my conversation with Michael Johnson, a former Crip gang member who lived in the fourplex and would get up before sunrise just to talk with Nate. On the day I first showed up here, Michael invited me into his living room, where he bounced a baby on his lap, wept and told me a terrible tale about how his neighbors had lost their lives.
If this place is a listening post, then its story is haunting and human, but also peripherally political. I find that’s true of poverty in most places: at the fourplex; in the RV camps where people named Chaos and Cricket lived near Portland’s airport; in the neighborhood jail where Phillip Nelson, alleged killer of Nate and Cassy, is incarcerated; in places with names like Coos Bay, Gresham and Bemidji, small, downtrodden towns that were once home to the people in this story.
As I prepare to leave the fourplex, perhaps for the last time as a journalist, a man with mussed, kinky hair, dirty pajamas and sandals strides by, then the grizzled man with the bicycle returns, his trailer toting a bag of cans and a pair of bike tires. I nod at each man. And then I go and get my children from school.