Fucked Up - Part 2

1974 Cold Case Solved?

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS IS NOT MUSIC!

On September 4, 2022, I wrote the following:

The double murder scene in October 3 1974.

FUCKED UP

One of the songs from my band The Judys album MORE is Fucked Up. It is the story of the friends that I used to hang out with when I was growing up in a suburb of Portland called Rock Creek. I don’t remember there being any specific creek, but there was a pond that we would frequent, with my friend Doug and his dog Harry. We were the typical 70’s North American teenagers up to no good.

Doug brought his BB gun, and we would go down to the pond and he would shoot bullfrogs. You would see the bubbles on the water indicating where they were - just below the surface, and he would fire. The bullfrogs would leap up bleeding from the shot, then fall back into the murky water. I know it sounds real fucked up, but there were worse things that we did.

We were just bored teenagers. Good kids in a suburban wasteland development. We were surrounded by a golf course, with actual farmland only a few blocks away. That combination of wilderness and wild boredom. We were doing our best, trying to grow up.

We had a very close little group. There was Doug and I, then tall skinny Steve. One day when were were goofing around, Steve’s little brother fell from the hay loft of an abandoned barn to the concrete floor below. His brother was in a body cast for months.

I remember the time I came back to visit after our family moved away. I took the Greyhound down from Vancouver BC, and went to a party with Steve and the others. Steve brought this wet blonde Lebanese hashish, which we hot knifed.

I got so ripped, that when I went downtown the next day on the bus to explore the city, I was still so high that I actually believed I was another person. In my drug addled brain, I had assumed this new identity. I would live a completely different life than the one I was living. Perhaps it even happened. Living the alternative life, that is. But that was later.

Mark was the most promiscuous guy in our little gang. He would walk around the neighborhood, catcalling every girl. Strangely, the catcalling seemed to work. Mark had a magic power. His mother, who was Italian, was always warning him to be careful with that “thing”, that “thing” being his monster sized manhood. “You could hurt somebody with that thing”, his mother warned.

Pat was a very funny Irish/ Italian kid, who we called Pasquale. Why? Because he wanted to be called Pasquale. Pat’s Dad had married another woman, and they had a new young child. Pat was from the former marriage, and was not wanted at home. His stepmother was always blaming him for being such a bad influence on his younger step-brother.

One day they just kicked him out, which shocked us, the unshockables. Pasquale was living in a motel for awhile. That was fun for a week, then not so funny. Later he joined the military to get straightened out. Not sure sure what happened to him, or many of the others.

Greg, aka Burger, was nicknamed after his incident of running through a sliding glass door in a house that was being built. Was he exploring or vandalizing? It was pretty much the same.

An adult caught him in there, and he fled, not seeing the sliding glass door was shut. The door shattered, cutting up his face, hence the name Burger. It wasn’t so bad, mainly a scar across his nose. One hot summer day, we were hanging out, and heard some guy had died at Burger’s house, suddenly having a heart attack. His body lay covered on the hot pavement for hours, waiting for the coroner to pronounce him dead. We took matters into our hands, pronouncing him dead with our blasting Black Sabbath’s Electric Funeral from Greg’s bedroom upstairs. Fucked up.

Another buddy was Rennie. Rennie was the only one who had a car, a shiny black ‘64 Impala with red interior. We would cram into it and go driving the backroads at night, at great speeds. There were many hills and winding roads. We would turn off the lights and speed. Another hot summer day, we were bored, so we had a “sweat out”, where we rolled up all the windows, and cranked up the heat, trying to see how long we could actually survive in the closed car furnace we had just created.

Fucked up. We were bored, and we wanted more. MORE MORE MORE.

But the most fucked up thing was when our friend Pete was murdered.

Pete was a year older, he was tall, skinny, with greasy long hair. He smoked. He was also a bit of a practical joker. When we heard about his murder, it was said that he had teased the killer at school the day before. We heard that this kid went home, found the keys to his Dad’s gun cabinet, and got a gun. He surprised Pete and his friend in a park late at night, gunning them down.

Pete’s murder was never solved….

Until November 2022, when news of a new development broke.

In the photo below, (left) Pete Zito is the 17 year old guy with a shadow of a moustache, Steven Criss- the now alleged killer ( centre), and 16 year old Donald Bartron( right)

RIP PETE ZITO.

Today I discovered that the 47 year cold case for the murder of Peter Zito and Donald Bartron may have been solved in November of 2022, with the arrest of 65-year-old Steven Criss, (Center) who was indicted by a grand jury in Oregon on two counts of second-degree murder. Cross is accused of shooting 18-year-old Peter Zito, Jr. and his friend 16-year-old Donald Bartron on October 3, 1974 in Beaverton’s Oak Hills Rec Center.

When I read about this today. I thought, “did they finally catch Pete’s killer?”

But what is even stranger is that I think I remember Steven Criss and his little brother Dave.

It was 1973. I was 16 and living in Rock Creek, which is a suburb of Portland Oregon. The Rock Creek kids would ride the big yellow school bus to school. The bus driver was a woman n a farmhouse down by the pond. The bus picked up the Rock Creek kids first, so we sat in the back, heckling the other kids from the farm lands who would get in after us.

We would pick up two brothers with very choppy haircuts and overbites. To say they resembled what someone today would identify as Bart Simpson types, is cruel. The youngest one, Dave, would get sick to his stomach when riding the bus, probably from motion sickness. Whenever poor Dave puked, and it was quite often, the entire bus would reek, we would start to gag. We made fun of him, probably calling him names like Pukie or something stupid like that. His older brother, Steven Criss, would have to clean up after his little brother. This is the same Steven Criss who allegedly murdered Pete Zito and Donald Barton.

Zito’s mother, Faith, described her son, Pete, as a “gentle boy” whose biggest loves were his 1956 Oldsmobile and the family’s four cats. He had dropped out of Aloha High School, where he was on the football team for a short time, and had got a job as a dishwasher, but talked of plans to get his diploma via Portland Community College.

In my song, Fucked Up, I said Pete was trying to get his life back on track. I placed the blame for their deaths, on a guy named Joe Wilson, or Crazy Joe, who had widely been thought to have been the killer. Wilson died in 2000 of a heart attack, claiming to the end that he was innocent. The DA dropped charges against Wilson after he’d been in jail for nearly four months. After his release, he went to Aloha High School to finish his senior year. But his life was never the same.

According to The Oregonian reporter Savannah Eadens:

Sheriff Pat Garrett formally apologized to Wilson’s relatives for the wrongful arrest nearly 50 years ago.

“[I]t is clear Wilson was innocent and should never have been arrested,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release. The sheriff’s office said it has not been able to identify or locate any surviving family members to make a personal, direct apology.

Even while Wilson was in custody, there was a detective named Jim Welch who never believed Wilson was responsible for the killings. Welch had continued the investigation despite Wilson’s arrest. His investigation in 1974 documented and preserved vital evidence,” Povolny said, acknowledging and thanking the late detective. “Without his excellent police work, this case would’ve never been solved. Welch died more than 10 years ago, Povolny said.

December 1974, about two months after the shootings, Steven Criss was arrested for theft. Deputy Jim Spinden, who later was elected Washington County sheriff, found an illegally concealed .22-caliber handgun in Criss’ car, and the gun was taken for testing the same day.

But the crime lab reported the gun wasn’t a match to the shooting scene at Oak Hills Recreation Center. At the time, ballistics testing typically involved an expert using a microscope to compare a test fire from the suspected gun to a slug retrieved from the crime scene. The method was far from foolproof. The sheriff’s office didn’t confirm what method was used for the ballistics test 48 years ago.

The gun was returned to Criss, and he went on to join the U.S. Army, where he was based at Fort Lewis in Washington state.

On Oct. 8, 1976, Criss shot and killed his commanding officer Sgt. Jacob “Kim” Brown.

“Criss had damaged Brown’s car and owed him a few hundred dollars. Instead of paying his debt, he shot Sgt. Brown five times in the head,” Povolny said.

Criss was sentenced to 25 years in Leavenworth, but released after serving 12 years of his sentence.

In November of 2022, the Oregon State Police crime lab confirmed that the gun Criss had when he was arrested in December 1974 was the same one used to kill Brown in 1976 – and the teenage boys in 1974. Criss didn’t have a personal relationship with Bartron and Zito, sheriff’s officials said, but they had an encounter at a restaurant they both worked at earlier in the evening on the day the boys were killed.

Detectives want to speak with anyone who has information about the killings or Criss’ life since his release from prison in 1988; they’re investigating the possibility he was responsible for other homicides.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed evidence on the alleged murder weapon, is now the oldest comparison and match on a prosecutable case ever made.

Postscript: With this news I will have to rewrite the second verse of the song FUCKED UP. I am very happy for the families of Pete Zito, Donald Bartron, and Joe Wilson, as these new developments can hopefully help in their healing from this tragic event. To all my old Rock Creek friends far and wide, all as old as me, I raise a glass to all of us survivors.

l