PORTLAND — Two of the killing victims of a 63-year-old man who has come forward after more than three decades were a woman and a teenage girl, Portland police say.
Police in Texas said that Jeffrey Paul Cutlip called them over the weekend and has confessed to four killings.
In Portland on Tuesday, the Police Bureau released the names of two victims and a few details of the crimes. It had no word on other killings but said its investigation isn’t done.
Police say one victim was Marlene Claire Carlson, 44, who was found strangled in her apartment in August 1975. She was found on her bed, with her hands bound and a belt around her neck. She had last been seen a week earlier.
The second victim was 15-year-old Julie Marie Bennett. She was found face-down in Johnson Creek in April 1977, two days after she disappeared. The Oregonian reported at the time that Bennett encountered Cutlip at a park and left a friend to go with him to buy beer and cigarettes. The friend reported her missing when she didn’t return.
A Brownsville, Texas, officer, Billy Killebrew, said Cutlip told police there that his conscience was bothering him and that he was “having a hard time dealing with what he’d done.”
Cutlip has a long criminal history and was required to register as a sex offender in Oregon after he was charged in 1982 with burglary and sodomy in attacks on two other women. He was convicted in one case and pleaded guilty in a second. The state lists him as a predatory sex offender, using threats of violence and weapons against women.
He was released from prison in 1993 but returned seven times for parole violations. He had been in Brownsville for more than a year and was wanted on a warrant for failing to register as a sex offender. He wasn’t given permission to leave Oregon, parole officials said.
An extradition hearing is scheduled today in Texas.
