In February 2023, I posted a follow-up to the cold case murder of a friend, entitled Fucked Up Part 2. At that time charges had been laid against Steven Criss for the double homicide.
I was relating this story today with an old high school friend, and thought I would check in the status of the case against Criss.
Last night my band The Judys played the International Pop Overthrow festival in Vancouver. We were given 30 minutes to get our message across. We used most of our allotted time, but our set was truncated with the demise of the bass amp. The last song we played was called THE WHOLE WORLD’S ON DRUGS. Our bass player, Pete Feend, is a local legend and a…
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.
That's a tragic story all the way around, for the two guys who had their young lives cut short and for the friend who was wrongly accused. The only good thing is that a cold case was finally solved. Has Criss been charged with the murders?
That's a tragic story all the way around, for the two guys who had their young lives cut short and for the friend who was wrongly accused. The only good thing is that a cold case was finally solved. Has Criss been charged with the murders?