This is a story about Oregon’s oldest recorded murder case. It wasn’t the first murder; there had been a few others. But for technical reasons that I won’t bore you with, this was Oregon’s first recorded murder and it happened just down the road in Benton County in 1852. Before Billy the Kid or Butch Cassidy were even born, when Jesse James was still a little boy, before Wild Bill Hickock’s gunfighting career had even started and more than a quarter century before the Earp