At the trial, Ted Finlay testified, \u201cI would say it definitely was not\u201d Oveross\u2019s car he saw leave the murder scene a few seconds after hearing four shots. However, Calvin Kaser later recalled:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Manny Kellerhals and Ted Finlay were scared shitless that Cap was going to come back and shoot them. I was working at the S&M Truck Line, and Ted Finlay had an electrical shop and would come down there all the time to pick up his freight. He\u2019d say, \u201cI knew who the hell that was, hell, that was Cap, sure as hell. I heard those shots, and I heard that car come off, and I was up in the upstairs window.\u201d Cap drove a Ford, and they had a round deal like this right in the grill, and Ted said, \u201cI can still see that round emblem, and hell, it was Cap\u2019s car. I couldn\u2019t see him, but I\u2019d bet my life that it was Cap\u2019s car.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n When all the evidence is examined with an open and unbiased mind, there can be little doubt that Casper Oveross murdered Ervin Kaser. So how was he found not guilty? The answer to that, of course, is that our \u201cjustice system\u201d is not perfect. It was intentionally set up as an \u2018adversarial\u2019 system in which the prosecutor must prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of 12 citizens. Jurists are supposed to be objective, to judge the case based solely on the evidence presented. But, of course, they can\u2019t. Many of them will have heard of the case ahead of time, and all of them will carry prejudices and beliefs that were shaped by their society and their experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prosecution seems to have done a poor job of presenting their case to the jury (more below). The job of defense attorneys is not to prove innocence, but rather, in any legal way possible, to prevent the prosecution from doing their job. In the case of the Oveross trial, it seems that the defense did an excellent job of throwing up smoke screens (\u201clook at all these other jealous husbands\u201d and \u201clook at all these mysterious cars and men that were following Ervin Kaser around\u201d), preventing the prosecution from entering crucial items into evidence, and painting the victim as a nasty bad-man and their client as an innocent, simple carpenter who, even if he had killed Ervin, would have been justified because of the way the nasty bad-man had broken up his marriage. You have to keep in mind that this was 1955, the time of Leave It To Beaver<\/em> and Father Knows Best<\/em>, of white bread and apple pie, a time when very few marriages ended in divorce, sex outside of marriage was verboten, and an unmarried woman getting pregnant was so shameful that she might as well burn herself at the stake before she was impaled by society\u2019s sharpened, pointing fingers. The jury was made up of nine women and three men, and it wouldn\u2019t take a lot to make them return a not guilty verdict. The newspapers and magazines liked to say that the murder remained unsolved. That\u2019s a poor choice of words. There\u2019s no doubt in my mind that the murder was solved. It\u2019s just that no one was ever convicted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lawyer I know, who read a preliminary version of this book, had quite a few thoughts about the trial:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a rule of thumb that juries tend to come back fast with a decision if its clearly in favor of the defendant. It looks like this one took a little over a day. I would guess there were enough people on the jury that were not going to vote for conviction, and that after maybe two or three weeks of sitting through a trial, they decided it was time to go home and call it a day. It was hot; they didn\u2019t like camping out.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I can\u2019t tell for sure, but it looks to me like the defense on the gun was this: the Oveross expert soaked a Winchester in Pudding River water for 11 days, and it must have looked like it was in worse shape than the murder weapon, suggesting that the murder weapon was thrown in the river sometime after Oveross departed for Alaska. <\/em>[EK note: Of course, soaking a gun in shallow, warm water would have a very different result than one where the barrel was buried in cold mud, where the supply of oxygen needed for rusting would be much lower. Also, Cap may have kept his rifle well-oiled, which would have protected it, whereas the test rifle may have been brand new and never oiled. So many variables\u2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the name of establishing that Oveross had left for Alaska, the defense paraded all of his family members in front of the jury, just to give the jury a look at them. The respectable school teacher, the daughters, and everyone else. My guess is that everyone in the family came across as pretty normal, decent people, whereas Ervin Kaser had some baggage.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n When Ethel Oveross testified about the mysterious men, and if she was not cross-examined about it, then it casts a lot of doubt about whether it was Oveross or someone else. It looks like she was not cross-examined about it, and I would guess nobody was going to pick on her. That puts the jury in this position: why would she lie about it? Clearly, she didn\u2019t care that much about Oveross because she was running around behind his back. It creates a lot of doubt. I do know this, though: the defense attorneys knew she was going to testify about the mysterious men and what she was going to say about it. I would guess the prosecutors had no idea that she was communicating that to the defense, somehow. Ethel was probably faced with her daughters blaming her for having their Dad put in prison or worse, so may have elaborated on the story about the mysterious men that had followed them.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ken Brown helps blow the trial by talking about \u201cdry gulching\u201d Ervin, that he was \u201cshot down, shot in the back, dry gulched, shot down like a dog without a chance to turn on his attacker.\u201d He never should have done that.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hindsight is 20-20, but you can really see how this trial was mishandled. I\u2019ve been through a few of these things and lucky enough to learn a few things from some trial lawyers and judges who have been through a lot of them. After a few days the jury just shuts down and gets tired of it all. Danny Gilham and his stepmother were the strongest witnesses for the prosecution and should have been the first witnesses out of the box, not at the end of 3 weeks. Everything should have centered on the fact that Cap Oveross shows up less than 10 minutes after Ervin Kaser was shot and is talking about it (they lived 5.3 miles away, according to the police). Then, you ask the Kellerhalls to establish the time of the shooting and maybe a couple of others, but not everyone in the neighborhood. And your question to each would be this: \u201chow did you learn about the shooting? Who did you talk to at that time? Did you call Cap Oveross?\u201d And then everything boils down to this argument: it is undisputed that Cap Oveross knew about the shooting less than 10 minutes after it occurred. No one told him about it. The only way he could have known about it that quickly is if he did it himself.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n You tend to win or lose these things based on the number of contradictions or inconsistencies the other guy creates. The more witnesses that you have, the more contradictions you will have. Stuff like who said what in taverns, or to the police, or the comings and goings of all the cars, just feeds into that. Never have or allow the same witness to testify three times.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyhow, I\u2019d say Ken Brown must have been a pretty young guy at the time and he must have been really inexperienced. You can see they sort of did a methodical, \u201cleave no stone unturned\u201d type of approach, and it just backfired. The one thing I\u2019ve learned about these things is that you don\u2019t do a build up to a crescendo \u2013 you put your best witness on first.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Edith, for about 30 years after the murder, Harvey wouldn\u2019t allow Ethel or Colleen and Danny into their house because he felt, rightly or wrongly, they\u2019d lied on the stand in a way that might have contributed to Cap getting found not guilty. In order to visit with her twin sister, Edith had to go to where Ethel worked in Stayton. In the early 1980s, probably after Cap had died, the rift between Harvey and Ethel\u2019s family was somewhat healed, but thirty years of anger had caused scars that could never be erased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s hard to read the police reports, newspaper stories, and recollections and not get the impression that Cap Oveross thought he was sharp enough to out-smart the police. He proved rather foolish by going around for six months before the murder threatening to a lot of people that he would kill Ervin, including lying in a field at night with two Silverton police constables watching his (ex-)house to try to catch Ervin visiting Ethel. He tried to set up an alibi that he was in two taverns in town the whole evening, and then drove straight from the murder to the Gilham home and told Danny Gilham that, \u201cErvin has three slugs in him, and I was with you last night.\u201d But then, when the police question him, he switches back to, \u201cI was in taverns all night and no where near Ervin\u2019s house all evening.\u201d He got incredibly lucky at the trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I never knew Cap Oveross, but reading between the lines you can build an image of what his life was like. Edith once said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ethel had a hard life during her early marriage. Ethel and Cap lived in an old rundown house at Four Corners (where Abiqua road intersects Hwy 213) when they were first married. Our father [Fred Knight] was concerned and brought chickens, eggs, potatoes and such to Ethel because they didn\u2019t have enough to eat. Cap drank up everything that he made. Colleen had a case of ringworm that was so bad when she was a young girl that she nearly lost all of the hair on top of her head, because they couldn\u2019t afford to go to the doctor.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Calvin said something similar:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ervin was running around with Ethel, but Ethel and Cap were separated. Cap, he blamed Ervin for their breakup. But, hell, they were having trouble long before that. Cap, he was a damn boozer, he drank up everything he made. Ethel was having to work to support the kids, cause he drank everything. He worked only enough to subsist on.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n These memories certainly should be taken with a grain of salt, but there is evidence to back them up. Cap was well known in the taverns at the time of the shooting and was still patronizing them regularly thirty years later. He never remarried. Besides his anger at Ervin, he had also accused his neighbor Wayne Moore of \u201cchasing around\u201d with Ethel. I can imagine asking him shortly before he died, \u201cWhat would you consider the most important moments of your life?\u201d and I wonder how near the top of the list would be shooting Ervin Kaser. Would that have come to his mind before my two daughters<\/em>? Before marrying Ethel<\/em>? Before building a good life with friends and community<\/em>? From a distance, it seems like a very sad life to have murder be a dominant, central feature. They say that, \u201cRevenge is a dish best served cold.\u201d But I have to believe that, \u201cRevenge is a dish that poisons the server as much as the served.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also have to think about the effects murder has on the people around it. I suspect that, in his anger and bitterness, Cap was focused on getting his revenge and didn\u2019t think much about the affect it would have on his family, friends and neighbors. He may even have thought that he\u2019d be viewed as a hero, we don\u2019t know. But we can imagine how this affected the lives of those around him and Ervin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The divorce of their parents was probably very stressful on the Colleen, 18, and Karen, 14. It\u2019s pretty clear from the police reports that Colleen was very defensive of her father and may well have been \u2018informing\u2019 on her mother, telling her father when Ethel would go out and come home, essentially (unwittingly) helping him to learn their habits and patterns, making it easier for him to follow them and set up the murder. It seems that after the murder, Colleen was much more favorable to her father than to her mother. A neighbor girl, Charlotte Moore, told the police:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Colene was very mad and she mentioned something about Mrs. Gilham, the old biddy, being on the side of the law.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, the police were suspicious of her boy friend, Danny Gilham, so two of the most important people in her life seemed in danger. Of course she didn\u2019t want to cooperate with the police. Colleen didn\u2019t want Danny to cooperate with the police either, because that would further endanger her father. So, Danny is caught between the police and his girlfriend because his stepmother has already spoken to the police about Cap stopping at their house. He was the perfect example of being between a rock and a hard place. Then, Danny and Colleen got married, and for the rest of their lives, every family get-together that involved either of Colleen\u2019s parents would have had this large shadow looming over all of them, impossible to evict, impossible to forget. There\u2019s little information about how Karen reacted to these events, but one can easily imagine the day-to-day life of a 14-year old girl in a very small community who\u2019s dad has been accused of murder, very publicly in the news and on everyone\u2019s lips for six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the trial, Ethel had to take the stand and testify. If her testimony helped convict Cap and he got sent to prison for life or executed (Oregon had the death penalty at that time), what would that do to her relationship with their daughters? And yet, her lover had been shot dead by her ex-husband. She, too, was between a rock and a hard place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What about the victim\u2019s family? Ervin\u2019s mother Sarah had lost her husband Fred just a year and a half before, and now her oldest, first-born child is shot to death less than a quarter-mile away from her home. When asked how his mother took the news of the murder, Calvin said: Oh, she was a basket case. She\u2019d want to go over to the cemetery, and you\u2019d no more than drive into the cemetery and she\u2019d start crying, and she\u2019d be crying almost until we got home, unless you could get her talking and get her mind off it. But she had that stroke in the fall of \u201855, not too long after Ervin was shot, along in September, I think. I\u2019m sure she had a pretty good idea why Ervin was shot. She never talked about it much. She never went to the trial. On one trip to the cemetery to visit Ervin\u2019s grave, she said, \u201cI know he wasn\u2019t a perfect boy, but he didn\u2019t deserve a bullet.\u201d My mother, Wilma, said: I think that worked on her so bad, that she got so that she wouldn\u2019t even sit in the living room in the night time. She\u2019d sit in the hallway with just one little light in there. She figured if someone had shot Ervin, someone would come and shoot her, too. When you came in the front door, the dining room was on the right, and the living room was on the left, and right in the middle was where the furnace came up through a grate, and there was a doorway that went into the hallway. Calvin picked up the story: It wasn\u2019t a hallway, it was a cloak room, but we called it the hallway. It had five doors going out of it, one upstairs, one into the kitchen, one into the bathroom, and one into their bedroom. It was just a small, square room. When company came, that\u2019s where we hung their coats. It must have been an eight by ten room, and that\u2019s where she would sit. All she had was a straight-backed chair and a card table. Then, in September, she had that devastating series of three strokes that basically ended her life, although she lay in the nursing home for five years before she died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ervin\u2019s brother Harvey, who had also been Cap\u2019s brother-in-law and neighbor, whose kids had played together for years, was also investigated by the police because he\u2019d gotten into a fight with Ervin. People knew that Harvey and Ervin had argued. Calvin remembered it this way:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometime after Dad\u2019s hop yard was pulled out, the place was sewed to grain. <\/em>[Probably 1954, as Calvin\u2019s dad Fred died in August 1953, and the murder was February 1955.] I know that\u2019s what Ervin and Harvey got into a fight about, because they had somebody come harvest Mom\u2019s grain, and Ervin took Mom\u2019s grain down to the Wilco\u2026 well, it was Valley Co-op at that time, and the elevator was still there, and he put her grain in his name. That\u2019s what he and Harvey got into it about, and that\u2019s when Harvey poked him. Then Harvey went down and straightened it out and put that grain back in her name. That would\u2019ve had to have been about \u201953 or \u201954.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n So, when Ervin got shot, a number of folks told the police about the two of them getting into a fight. Of course, the police already had good evidence that Cap was the culprit, but they had to investigate and rule out any and all other possible suspects before the case could go to trial. But Harvey and Edith were also caught between a rock and a hard place: the victim was his brother, and the man accused of the murder had been married to her twin sister, up until a few months before, and was the father of their nieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When talking to Cleta McMorris about the murder, she said, “Oh, Mary <\/em>[Ervin\u2019s wife] just made a spectacle of herself at the funeral, she threw herself on the casket, and was hysterical.<\/em>” When I mentioned this to my dad, Calvin, he said: <\/p>\n\n\n\n The only thing I remember about Mary, we were at the folks\u2019 house after the funeral, a whole bunch of us, and she was standing in the corner over the furnace register. Nobody was saying anything, and she just blurted out, \u201cI don\u2019t care what any of you think, I still loved him!\u201d<\/em> What about you<\/em>? Whoever you are, you<\/em> have been affected by the murder just by reading about it, whether or not you\u2019re related to the families involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hundreds of peoples\u2019 lives were directly affected by the murder, and its effects still echo today in the lives of people who lived through it and in the lives of their descendants, knowingly or not. No story of a murder has a happy ending. No one is a complete saint, and no one is a complete villain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By most accounts, Ervin was not the nicest man in the world. He certainly didn\u2019t deserve to be murdered, but it\u2019s clear he was not innocent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At his trial, Casper Oveross received a verdict of not guilty, but it\u2019s very clear to me that he certainly was not innocent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so ends my blogging of the story of the murder of Ervin O. Kaser. I’m well along in the process of completing the book form of this story, which I hope to have finished and “put to bed” by some time in February 2019, almost exactly 64 years after the murder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blogically yours,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everett<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Much of this final chapter is memories, stories, suppositions, and opinions. I\u2019ll attempt to keep it reasonable and not spiteful or hurtful to anyone reading this, as that\u2019s not my goal. But, in order to try to show how this … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/kaser.com\/BlogicallyYours\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/1950FordGrill.jpg\")
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