The local family now has closure after detectives found the person who murdered a beloved Hillsboro mother and grandmother in 1992. Jordan, September 23rd, 1992. Hillsboro, Oregon. Hillsboro sits 20 miles west of Portland in Washington County. A midsize Oregon city of quiet residential streets, churches, and the kind of community where people know their neighbors by name and wave from the driveway without thinking about it.
In 1992, it was even quieter than it is today. A place where an 82-year-old widow could walk her neighborhood selling Avon products, knock on doors, and be welcomed in. Elizabeth Wson was that woman. Earlier that day, her daughter Tracy Doll had visited her. During the visit, Elizabeth mentioned she was planning to go grocery shopping.
It was the kind of ordinary detail that means nothing in the moment and everything afterward. The last known plan a woman made before someone took her life. That evening, Tracy called her mother. No answer. She called again, still nothing. Tracy and her husband drove to Elizabeth’s home and went inside. They found her dead in her bedroom.
She had been stabbed and strangled. Elizabeth Wasson, the neighborhood Avon lady, the widow of a pastor, the pillar of her community, had been murdered inside the home where she had built her life. Hillsboro investigators had a crime scene, a victim, and a growing sense that this was not an isolated act of violence. Because in the years surrounding Elizabeth Wson’s death, women in Washington County were being killed in a pattern that was becoming impossible to ignore.
elderly women living alone, targeted in their own homes. The community was terrified, and the man at the center of that terror had a name, a name investigators would eventually attach to Elizabeth Wson’s murder, but not until 33 years after the fact, and not until they tested the dress she was wearing the day she died. This is the story of Elizabeth Wson.
Elizabeth Wasson was 82 years old and she was the kind of woman that a community remembers not because of what she accomplished in formal terms but because of how she showed up. She was the neighborhood Avon lady. That title carries more than it might seem. Being the Avon lady in a residential neighborhood in 1992 meant knowing people.
It meant knocking on doors and being welcomed in. It meant being woven into the fabric of daily life in a way that made you visible and familiar and trusted. People opened their doors to Elizabeth Wson because she was a known quantity, someone safe, someone kind, someone present. She was the widow of a pastor.
She had built her life inside a community of faith and service and neighborly obligation. The kind of life that leaves a mark on the people around it rather than only on the person living it. Her daughter Tracy Dah inherited the Avon lady role after Elizabeth’s death. She took it over and kept doing the work her mother had done, knocking on the same doors, serving the same customers, carrying the identity her mother had established in the neighborhood.
That is its own kind of tribute, not a monument or a named scholarship or a press conference, just a daughter who kept showing up the way her mother had shown up because it was the thing worth continuing. Tracy told the Oregonian after the case was finally resolved that she had not thought the murder would ever be solved.
I do know that a case like this is never closed unless it is solved and I just never knew whether or not it would be. She knows now. After 33 years of not knowing, she finally has the answer her mother deserved from the beginning. The morning and afternoon of September 23rd, 1992 had been ordinary. Tracy visited her mother.
Elizabeth mentioned the grocery run she was planning. They spent time together in the way a mother and daughter do when they live close enough to see each other regularly. Not a special occasion, just the ordinary rhythm of proximity and love. Later that day, Elizabeth Wson put on a dress and went about her afternoon.
When Tracy called that evening and received no answer, the silence registered immediately as wrong. Elizabeth was not the kind of woman who didn’t answer. She was reliable, present, and connected. Unanswered calls were not part of her pattern. Tracy and her husband drove over and went inside. They found Elizabeth dead in her bedroom.
She had been both stabbed and strangled, a combination that tells investigators something specific about the person responsible. It speaks to a certain kind of sustained deliberate violence. Not a single act in a moment of panic, but multiple methods, multiple points of contact. Someone who had been in that room with her for longer than a robbery or an opportunistic crime requires.
Nothing obvious had been stolen. There was no ransacking, no clear sign of a burglary gone wrong. This had been something else. Hillsboro police investigators arrived and processed the scene. They collected evidence. They preserved what was there. Among the items preserved was the dress Elizabeth Wson had been wearing when she was attacked.
That dress would sit in an evidence storage room for 31 years. It would eventually say everything that 1992 could not. In September of 1992, the Washington County law enforcement community was already tracking a pattern. Women were being killed, specifically elderly women living alone attacked in their homes. The attacks had a consistency that investigators recognized as a signature rather than a coincidence.
In 1991, 65-year-old Margaret Schmidt had been murdered in Hillsboro. In 1992, the same year Elizabeth Wson was killed, 41-year-old Martha Bryant and 23-year-old Chanty Woodman were also murdered. In 1993, 51-year-old Betty Williams would be killed as well. A name was circulating among investigators. Cesar Bone Baron was not his birth name.
He had been born Adolf James Road Jr. in Florida. He had served in the United States Army and left in 1987, adopting the name Caesar Bone afterward, a name he had chosen out of a reported fascination with Italian organized crime figures. His history before Washington County was a portrait of escalating violence that the system had repeatedly processed and released.
He had raped his stepmother. He had assaulted an elderly woman. He had raped and killed a 71-year-old neighbor in Florida and served 7 years in prison for it. 7 years for raping and killing a 71-year-old woman. He had served his time and been released and eventually made his way to Oregon. When the killings began in Washington County, investigators looked at Baron early.
His method of operation, elderly women alone, targeted in their own homes, aligned with what they were seeing. His history aligned with what they knew about serial predators who escalate. But knowing and proving are not the same thing. When investigators looked at Elizabeth Wson’s case specifically, the pattern fit. But in 1992, the forensic evidence from her murder could not be processed in a way that conclusively connected it to Baron.
They suspected. They could not confirm. In 1995, Caesar Baron stood in a Washington County courtroom and was convicted of four murders. Margaret Schmidt, Martha Bryant, Chanty Woodman, and Betty Williams. He was convicted of multiple sexual assaults as well. The judge sentenced him to death. The community, which had lived in fear through the early 90s while Baron operated, received a measure of relief.
He was convicted. He was sentenced. he would not be back on Washington County streets. But the relief was incomplete and investigators knew it. Elizabeth Wson’s case was not among the convictions. The evidence available in 1995 was not sufficient to bring her murder to trial alongside the others. Baron was suspected.
The pattern aligned, but suspicion and forensic confirmation are two entirely different things, and the dress sitting in the evidence room had not yet told them what it would eventually tell them. Former Washington County Sheriff’s Office detective Murray Ralph worked the Baron cases and carried the Wson file for years.
After the 1995 conviction with Baron on death row, Ralph still believed the question of Elizabeth Wson was unfinished. He visited Barone in prison multiple times. Baron, by all accounts, enjoyed the attention. He was someone who was, in Ralph’s description, so caught up in themselves that nothing else phased him or mattered. He would hold court. He would talk.
He would not confess. I may as well have been talking German, said retired detective Michael Okonnell, who also visited Baron seeking answers about the Wasan case and other suspected crimes. Baron would deny everything. He denied Wasson. He denied the other suspected cases. He denied, remarkable as it sounds, given his conviction record, that he had even committed the four murders he had already been convicted of in a court of law.
He was not a man interested in truth or accountability. He was a man interested in himself. In 2009, Cesar Baron was dying. He was in the prison infirmary, frail in the way that former detective Ralph would later describe in stark contrast to the muscular, intimidating figure he had been at the time of his conviction. Whatever physical presence Baron had used to overpower his victims, and he had overpowered an 82-year-old Avon lady and four other women, was gone.
Investigators went to him. They made their position clear. They told him they were looking at other cases they believed he was responsible for. They asked about Elizabeth Wson. They asked about other suspected victims. They told him in the plain language of investigators speaking to a dying man that this was his last opportunity to give the families of those victims something before he was gone.
He said no. Not in those words. Baron was not a man who said things simply, but the result was no. He denied Wasson. He denied the other cases. He looked at the investigators who had come to his deathbed and gave them nothing. He died 3 days later. In 2009, Cesar Bone left the world without confirming what investigators believed and what DNA would eventually prove.
That Elizabeth Wson was among his victims. that the 82-year-old woman who had been selling Avon products in her Hillsboro neighborhood was attacked in her own bedroom by the same man who had killed four other women in Washington County. He took the silence with him into death. The dress in the evidence room waited. In 2020, the Washington County District Attorney’s Office secured federal funding with a specific purpose to launch a cold case unit dedicated to investigating violent crime cold cases that involved identified DNA from a
possible suspect. That funding framework built around cases where a DNA profile existed but could not be conclusively connected to a named suspect was precisely the category Elizabeth Wson’s case occupied. Investigators had long believed Baron was responsible. They had Baron’s DNA from the 1995 case.
They had the dress from the 1992 crime scene. What they had never done was test the dress with modern forensic methods capable of finding what 1992 technology could not. Hillsboro police detective Megan Townsend was assigned the Wasan case as part of the cold case unit’s work. Townsen reviewed everything. She went through the original investigative file, the witness accounts, the crime scene documentation, the physical evidence that had been collected and preserved three decades earlier.
She assessed what modern forensic science could now do with that evidence that the investigators of 1992 had not been able to do. The answer was clear. The dress needed to go to the Oregon State Police Forensic Laboratory. In 2023, it was submitted. The dress Elizabeth Wson was wearing on September 23rd, 1992 had been sitting in evidence storage for 31 years.
31 years in a properly maintained chain of custody, preserved the way physical evidence is preserved when investigators in 1992 knew they had a murder case that might not be resolved quickly and understood that what they collected at the scene was the permanent record of what had happened there. The Oregon State Police Forensic Laboratory received the dress in 2023 and subjected it to modern forensic testing.
Testing that could identify and analyze biological material at levels of sensitivity that did not exist when the dress was originally collected. Technicians discovered male DNA on the submitted material. The DNA was compared against the profile of Caesar Baron, already in the system from his 1995 conviction, and the biological evidence connected to the four murders he had been found guilty of committing.
The comparison produced a match. The Washington County District Attorney’s Office announced the result in February of 2026. Cesar Baron, born Adolf James RH Jr., a convicted serial killer who had died in 2009, still denying responsibility for crimes a jury had already confirmed, was forensically linked to the murder of Elizabeth Wson.
The dress had waited 31 years. It had outlasted Baron himself, and when modern forensic technology finally asked it the right question, it answered. Understanding what happened to Elizabeth Wson requires understanding that the man who killed her did not begin in Washington County. Cesar Baron, Adolf James RH Jr. had a documented history of violence against women that ran back years before he arrived in Oregon. He raped his stepmother.
He assaulted an elderly woman. He raped and killed a 71-year-old neighbor in Florida and served 7 years in a Florida prison for it. 7 years for the rape and murder of a 71-year-old woman. And then he was released. After his release, he eventually made his way to Oregon, adopted the name Caesar Baron out of an apparent fascination with Italian organized crime, and settled in the Washington County area.
The killings in Hillsboro began in 1991 and continued through 1993. four women convicted in the 1995 case. And Elizabeth Wassan, the fifth, the one the prosecution could not close in 95, the one whose dress sat in evidence for 31 years waiting for the science to catch up. Former detective Ralph described the atmosphere in Washington County during those years with the kind of plain language that only comes from having lived inside a community under active threat.
The community was in a lot of fear. Women were in fear for their safety before Mr. Baron was caught. Many of that community still remember that time. An 82year-old Avon lady, a 65year-old woman, a 51-year-old woman, a 41-year-old woman, a 23-year-old woman. Five victims across three years. A community that had learned to be afraid of its own neighborhoods.
Baron had been convicted of four of those five murders. The fifth, Elizabeth Wson, went unconfirmed until he was already 17 years in the ground. Go back to 2009. Baron in the prison infirmary. Two investigators at his bedside. The question hanging in the air about Elizabeth Wson and other suspected victims. He said no. He denied everything.
He made them feel, in Okonnell’s words, as though they might as well have been speaking a foreign language. That scene carries a specific weight now, viewed from the perspective of what the DNA eventually confirmed. Baron knew. When investigators sat across from him on his deathbed and told him they believed he had killed Elizabeth Wasson, he already knew the answer was yes.
He knew because he had been there. He had been in her bedroom. His DNA was on her dress. He knew and he said no anyway. He died 3 days later with that no on record. Apparently satisfied that it would stand forever. The dress in the evidence room did not share his satisfaction. The dress was patient in the way that only physical evidence can be patient, entirely indifferent to denials, entirely indifferent to death, entirely indifferent to how many years passed between the moment it absorbed biological material in 1992 and the
moment a laboratory technician in 2023 finally asked it the right question. Baron’s deathbed denial means nothing against what the dress said. His no became a yes the moment the DNA came back. Tracy Doll visited her mother the day Elizabeth Wson was killed. She heard about the grocery shopping plan. She went home.
She called that evening and received no answer. She and her husband drove over and went inside and found her mother dead. For 33 years, Tracy Dah carried the unanswered question. She took over her mother’s Avon lady route, continued the work Elizabeth had been doing in that neighborhood, knocked on the same doors, served the same customers.
It was a way of keeping her mother present in the community that had loved her. And for 33 years, she did not know who had taken her mother from her bedroom on September 23rd, 1992. There were suspicions. Baron’s name was not a secret in Washington County, and the pattern of his crimes was well documented publicly by the time of the 1995 conviction.
Tracy likely knew, as most people in the community knew, that Baron was the suspected killer. But suspicion without confirmation is not closure. It is just another form of uncertainty wearing different clothes. The DNA confirmation in 2026 is not suspicion. It is forensic fact. Male DNA matching Caesar Baron found on the dress Elizabeth Wson was wearing when she was killed.
I just never knew whether or not it would be, Tracy told the Oregonian after the announcement. Now she knows. The Wasan family requested privacy when the case was resolved. After 33 years, they were not ready for cameras or press conferences or the particular theater of public grief. They communicated through investigators that they are relieved the case is closed.
Relief, not celebration, not triumph. relief. The specific emotional state of someone who has been carrying something heavy for so long that putting it down feels less like joy and more like exhaustion finally being allowed to rest. Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton stood at the announcement in February of 2026 and said something that belongs in the record.
With every cold case solved, we are sending a message to victims and their families that they are not forgotten. He also said something that points forward rather than backward. The Washington County cold case unit is not finished. The federal grant that funded Detective Townsen’s work on the Wasan case is also funding renewed investigation into the 1994 murder of 85year-old Veta Hardebeck found deceased outside her home on a rural farm in Gaston, Oregon. Another elderly woman.
Another unresolved Washington County case from the same era. Peron was suspected in other deaths beyond the five connected to him, his former mother-in-law, other women who fit the profile. Whether the dress in the evidence room was the only item from those years still capable of speaking is a question the cold case unit is still working to answer.
Detective Townsen’s statement at the conclusion of the Wasan investigation was precise. For years, this family lived without answers. Today, we’re finally able to give them the truth they deserved from the beginning. Our thoughts remain with them, and we honor the life of Elizabeth Wson by ensuring this case is no longer left in silence.
No longer left in silence. That framing, silence as the wrong that was done, truth as the thing owed, is exactly right. Elizabeth Wson’s case had been silent for 33 years. Not because the evidence wasn’t there, because the technology to read it had not yet existed, and then existed, but hadn’t been applied, and then was finally applied by a detective who treated a 33-year-old dress as a document that still had something to say. It did.
Elizabeth Wson was 82 years old. She was the neighborhood Avon lady. She was the widow of a pastor. She was a pillar of her community, a woman who knocked on doors and was welcomed in and was trusted because she had earned that trust over decades of showing up. She visited her daughter the day she was killed.
She mentioned she was planning to go grocery shopping. She put on her dress and went about her afternoon. She was found in her bedroom by the daughter who had visited her just hours earlier. The man who killed her had already murdered women in Florida. He would go on to murder four more women in Washington County. He was convicted of those four murders in 1995 and sentenced to death.
He denied everything, denied the four murders he was convicted of, denied Elizabeth Wson, denied the other suspected cases until the day he died in 2009. The dress sat in evidence storage for 31 years after his death. In 2023, Detective Megan Townsen submitted it to the Oregon State Police Forensic Laboratory. Male DNA was found on the material. It matched Caesar Baron.
The denial he carried to his deathbed was not enough. His silence was not enough. 33 years were not enough. The dress remembered what he had done. Type her name in the comments. Elizabeth Wson. She was 82 years old. She was the neighborhood Avon lady. She was the widow of a pastor and a pillar of her community.
She was planning to go grocery shopping. She deserved to make it.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
