FBI Investigates Baker City Police
By J. Todd Foster |The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reviewing complaints that eight members of the Baker City Police Department have engaged in misconduct ranging from brutality to racism to inappropriate sexual behavior.
The complaints come not only from citizens but also from department members who say their agency has a reputation for being among the worst in Oregon. The city's police chief adamantly defends his department’s record and attributes those complaints to disgruntled employees who want to force him out.
A six-month investigation by The Oregonian included hundreds of interviews and an examination of nearly 3,000 pages of court and city records. It shows a department that tolerates conduct that often would be seen as grounds for dismissal elsewhere:
*After 18-year-old Mandy Bowman was sexually assaulted by an intruder Oct. 14, 1995, police Officer John Shepherd photographed her private parts and fondled her, Bowman alleges in a federal civil rights lawsuit.
*Police Officer Elvin ``Woody'' Kellogg mistook retired scientist Beardsley Graham’s diabetic reaction for a drunken stupor and broke Graham’s arm in 1990 while trying to get his wallet from his pocket. Kellogg also broke a woman’s arm during an arrest in September.
*Crime victims and women dispatchers have complained about and documented a workplace atmosphere of pranks and raunchiness. Shepherd kept a panty collection at the office, put Slim-Fast coupons in the mailbox of an overweight dispatcher and put coupons for adult diapers in the mailboxes of two older women dispatchers.
The police chief used to have his Playboy magazines mailed to the office.
“It’s the most corrupt, incompetent department I’ve ever seen,” said Baker City police officer Dennis Beyer, 44, who has worked there 18 years. “These officers are brutal, they’re liars, they aren’t responsible to anyone. It’s a scary place. It’s a department that’s totally out of control.”
Officer John Wulk, whose dispatcher wife, Sharon, says she has been harassed for years, said, “This is the worst department I’ve ever seen.” Wulk is the former police chief in Waldport on the Oregon coast and has 25 years’ experience at several departments.
FBI agent Ariel Miller in Pendleton would neither confirm nor deny he is investigating the department. But Beyer and Carol Guthrie, the Baker County victims’ assistance director, confirmed Miller had interviewed them.
An FBI source said the difficulty in such cases is proving criminal conduct. In some cases, the U.S. Department of Justice launches broader civil rights investigations.
A dozen citizens interviewed by The Oregonian said they no longer respect Baker City police and call the Oregon State Police for help with crimes. They said sympathetic state troopers have told them that Police Chief Douglas Humphress warned them to stay out of his jurisdiction.
Humphress, 58, has been chief 24 years -- the longest current tenure in Oregon. Four years ago, a majority of Baker City officers signed a no-confidence vote against Humphress and urged him to retire. Even two friends, who asked that their names not be used because of their close relationship with the chief, refer to him as the “Old Dinosaur” and have urged him to step down.
“We’re not without some problems,” said Humphress, who joined the department as an officer 32 years ago. “I know my job, and I do my job. But I’ve spent the last two years defending myself, my department and my personnel against the opinions, assumptions, perceptions and half-truths of a group of people who don’t want me to be chief.”
He would not name them.
Officer Beyer has complained in writing for the past decade about officer misconduct, internal memorandums show. He said his whistle-blowing was met with retaliation and ultimately termination. An arbitrator ordered him reinstated in 1994. He even sued the department in federal court alleging retaliation but lost.
Humphress said he has “handled” misbehavior as it arose but refused to disclose specifics, including disciplinary actions against officers. He cited an Oregon confidentiality law that protects public employees. The Oregonian obtained much of the information about several cases through court records associated with lawsuits against the department.
City Manager Karen Woolard, to whom Humphress and his 15 employees answer, refused to discuss specific allegations.
“I don't think there’s any brutality, and I don’t think there’s any sexual harassment,” said Woolard, who signed off on a $10,000 lawsuit settlement after an officer falsely arrested and injured a 16-year-old boy during a traffic stop. “I’m not going to get into that trash.”
A frontier town
Carved from a rolling sea of sagebrush between the Blue and Wallowa mountains, Baker City is a virtual island undisturbed and undeterred by the goings-on of the outside world.
The nearest metropolitan area is Boise, two hours down Interstate 84. The nearest towns of any size are La Grande, an hour northwest, and Ontario, an hour southwest. Portland is 304 miles west.
The town’s leading families settled Baker Valley after a 1,700-mile journey on the Oregon Trail, scrambling with other European immigrants, Basque shepherds and Chinese laborers for land to farm, run cattle and pan for gold.
The mountains teem with elk, the streams with trout and bass. The recreational opportunities, beauty and sheer quiet were enough to draw Joe Rudi, a former baseball player on the Oakland A’s championship teams of the 1970s. He recruited as a resident former A’s player Carney Lansford, now a coach with the St. Louis Cardinals.
Department critics said the town’s isolation, however, leaves them feeling vulnerable, with nowhere else to turn for help.
Late Oct. 14, 1995, Mandy Bowman changed into flannel pajamas and washed her face at the bathroom sink. A man wearing a ski mask grabbed her from behind, she said, put a knife to her throat and then pricked her left breast near her clavicle, drawing blood. He fondled her and punched her in the face, blackening her eye.
He kept saying, “I know you like it,” Bowman said.
The man eventually fled, and Bowman spent a sleepless night at her boyfriend’s place.
The next day, Officer Shepherd, 39, took her to the police station and interviewed her for a report. Then he took her to another room and asked her to take off her shirt to photograph the superficial knife wound on her upper left breast, Bowman said. She has filed a lawsuit against the city about his actions that day, alleging invasion of privacy and inappropriate touching. The suit, interviews and Shepherd’s photographs detail this account:
Three Baker City police officers said at a minimum Shepherd violated department protocol of photographing women victims only in the presence of a female witness.
Bowman’s knife wound was far above her bra, but Shepherd pulled down her bra strap to expose her entire breast, Bowman said. A photograph shows part of her nipple and her hand trying to pull up the strap.
Shepherd then asked Bowman whether she had other injuries. Bowman said she told him about a small bruise on her right thigh near her knee but stressed that it wasn’t from the attack.
Shepherd photographed it anyway after telling Bowman to remove her panties and giving her a short raincoat.
Bowman said Shepherd slipped his hands under the raincoat in her genital area and twisted the coat around so that her pubic area was visible.
Another officer, Bill Steele, is accused of berating an alleged victim of domestic violence for leaving her husband.
In mid-January 1995, a 37-year-old registered nurse in the middle of a divorce said her wealthy and well-connected husband kidnapped her, took her to the high desert outside Baker City and raped her.
After the assault, she said, he took her to the police station, where he has friends who regularly are invited to hunt on his family’s land. The woman said her estranged husband told the duty desk cop, Steele, that she was trying to divorce him.
Steele, 35, grilled her for an hour, she said, and told her he would deny it if she ever told anyone. She said he told her to dump her new “scum” boyfriend and go home with her husband. Because it happened behind closed doors, the woman has no witnesses to corroborate her account.
The woman said she rolled up into a ball while Steele “kept hammering on me” with the interrogation. She said she was too afraid to file criminal charges and did not want her name published to shield her children and because she feared retaliation by her ex-husband.
Court records show that days before the alleged attack, the woman appealed to a judge for a restraining order. It was granted Jan. 3, 1995, after she outlined in a sworn petition three incidents of violence or threats by her husband in late 1994.
“He grabbed my breast and said he could rape me,” she wrote the court. “He threatened to kill me over the telephone. . . . When he is drinking, he is out of control.”
During Steele’s interrogation, the woman said her husband was made to be the victim.
“He said, ‘You can take one look at that man out there and tell he’s not abusive. He’s a good man. The world doesn’t need any more bad women. You’re going to be a good woman and go home with him,’ ” she said.
After agreeing to be interviewed, Officer Steele did not return a dozen telephone calls to schedule the meeting. The ex-husband was arrested last month and cited for driving under the influence of an intoxicant.
On Sept. 9, 1993, Chief Humphress informed Steele by letter that he was going to fire him for unspecified reasons. Because Steele was in his first year and on probation, Humphress didn’t need a reason.
Steele, whom department members have accused of making false 9-1-1 calls to badger dispatchers, appealed through the union and had his probation extended by a year. He remains on the force.
His attitude toward domestic violence is typical of most Baker City officers, according to MayDay Inc. The nonprofit group counseled 1,400 battered women and their children last year out of a Baker County population of 16,000 -- nearly 9 percent of residents. The figure was included in a report used to obtain a charitable grant for domestic violence services.
Many other victims didn’t call authorities or counselors, said executive director Elizabeth “Liz” Estabrooks. Her client surveys show that Baker City police routinely ignore a 20-year-old Oregon law that requires police to arrest batterers.
“They might as well skywrite, ‘Beat your wife today because we’re not going to do anything,’ ” she said.
Two broken arms
Baker City had a few hundred more people in 1862 than its 9,600 residents today.
Its economy is stagnant, unemployment is 12 percent, and most newcomers trickling in are retirees.
Beardsley Graham, an 82-year-old former engineer, consultant and college lecturer, moved to Baker City in late summer 1990. A few days later he collapsed outside the Big V Department Store from a diabetic reaction.
He was wearing blue jeans at the time and didn’t look like an intellect who had helped lead the United States into the high-tech frontiers of satellite communications, microwave radar, guided missiles, nuclear weapons and outer space.
But on Sept. 5, 1990, a 9-1-1 call reported Graham as a disorderly drunk. Officer Kellogg, 46, responded and wrote in his official report that he had to “subdue” Graham, then 76, with an “arm lock” to get his wallet for identification. In the process, he broke Graham’s right arm in what his doctor called a spiral, or twisting, fracture.
Graham’s case is detailed in a police report and court records from an unrelated lawsuit.
A few Oregon police departments train their officers on how to recognize inebriation vs. diabetes. Baker City doesn’t. In fact, officers here get almost no training after they leave the basic police academy, academy officials said.
Graham said he tried to find a local attorney to sue the department, but none would take the case because of the potential political ramifications. He remains angry and thinks the department never will change.
“This is a small town, run by small people, doing small things for their small purposes,” Graham said.
His arm is not the only one Kellogg has broken.
On Sept. 21, 1996, Kellogg arrested a drunken woman for hitting her boyfriend’s sister in a family fight. As he tried to handcuff her, Melanie “Dolly” Gutridge, 23, said she told Kellogg she had a steel rod in her left arm from a severe January 1995 car wreck. The arm has deep, wide scars from surgery.
“I said, ‘I know you have to grab my arm, but don’t grab that arm. I’m disabled,’ ” Gutridge recalled. “It snapped. It was agony.”
Gutridge said Kellogg refused to take her to a hospital and instead transported her straight to jail. She got out a few hours later and went to an emergency room.
Kellogg agreed to be interviewed for this story but failed to show up at the arranged time and place. Gutridge’s account is detailed in medical records and interviews with department members.
Court records show that a judge granted Kellogg’s wife a restraining order Jan. 19, 1989, after she wrote “he caused me bodily injury” and said he repeatedly broke into her home and threatened her. The judge ordered both Woody and Vickie Kellogg to undergo mental evaluations, but there is no evidence in the court file that either did.
Women claim brutality
Baker City officers have injured other citizens during confrontations, photographs and records show.
On April 23, 1992, Shepherd -- the officer whom Mandy Bowman accuses of fondling her -- went to the Stockmen’s Exchange bar on Main Street to arrest a rowdy woman customer.
Debbie Wimp, 31, said she had to use the restroom, ran inside and sat on the toilet, according to Shepherd’s arrest report. Shepherd reported that he had to drag her off the toilet with her pants around her ankles. She was left with a missing tooth, a broken tooth and numerous bumps and bruises, photos show.
Shepherd’s report states Wimp resisted arrest and ripped his shirt. There was no internal affairs investigation.
“I was too drunk to assault anyone,” said Wimp, reached in Alaska, where she moved after tiring of police run-ins. She has a 1991 arrest on suspicion of delivery of marijuana.
The family of 16-year-old Ryan Brewster sued the city alleging Officer Ken Draze falsely arrested him and rammed the teen’s face into a patrol car trunk Aug. 19, 1995.
Brewster, a 120-pound championship wrestler, had driven with his headlights turned off during a night parade and had forgotten his driver’s license.
Draze, 31, and the first officer on the scene, Sgt. Robert Pierce, 42, said they were forced to handcuff Brewster and take him to the station to find out his identity. The Brewsters, however, said Ryan was a celebrated sports figure often featured in the local newspaper.
His mother, Carol Brewster, said the officers referred to Ryan by his last name and knew who he was but were simply harassing him. He had to be treated at a hospital.
“People here are afraid of the police,” Carol Brewster said.
Draze said the handcuffed teen was trying to flee or resist arrest. Pierce refused repeated requests for an interview by telephone. While wearing a Baker City police uniform, he also denied that he worked for the department.
After Carol Brewster complained in late 1995 to Lt. Keith Rogers, the department’s second-in-command, he told her, “ ‘Lady, I've got more power in my little finger than you do in your whole body,’ ” Carol Brewster said. “I was fearful for my child’s life,” she said. “I told him, ‘Keep your dirty cops away from my kids.’ ”
Chief Humphress confirmed that Draze received a written reprimand for interfering with a senior officer’s arrest of Ryan Brewster, but he wouldn’t elaborate. Ultimately, department records show the 16-year-old never was arrested or charged. The city settled his lawsuit for $10,000.
Misconduct has not been confined to rank-and-file officers or limited to criminal suspects, records show.
Debbi Duby, now 39, reported a peeping Tom for three weeks in the summer of 1993, but police said they were too shorthanded to watch her house and arrest him.
Baker City has 12 sworn officers -- about half as many as in Ontario and La Grande, which have similar populations.
On Sept. 12, 1993, the peeper entered Duby’s home while her four children slept and her husband worked in an adjacent wood shop.
With a T-shirt pulled over his head, the intruder bruised Duby’s breast and gouged her vagina so hard with his finger that she bled for three days. He fled after she raked her fingernails across his abdomen and drew blood.
But what happened next left Duby feeling hopeless, enraged and violated again.
Lt. Rogers, who retired last year, spent less than 15 minutes interviewing Duby and looking for evidence, records show. He refused to lift fingerprints or to scrape beneath Duby’s fingernails to collect tissue from her attacker.
He told Duby’s attorney in notes obtained by The Oregonian that he didn’t know how to take fingernail scrapings -- a basic evidence-gathering technique that anyone can do with a toothpick or file.
Then trying to reassure Duby, Rogers said as he left, “Now that he has copped his feel, he probably won’t be back. But if he does come back, here is my card. Call me.”
After Duby complained, Humphress said he verbally warned Rogers, 51, for “inappropriate and insensitive” remarks.
Humphress admitted during an Oct. 15, 1993, meeting tape-recorded by Duby that officers conducted a poor investigation. But he said evidence was not gathered because, “That comes down to . . . money, m-o-n-e-y.”
What Duby didn’t know was that the Oregon Crime Lab, a unit of the state police, analyzes fingerprint and DNA evidence at no charge. In big cases, the lab will process the entire crime scene.
“This has destroyed my faith and trust in people,” Duby said.
One week after the assault, the peeper returned to her home. Her husband chased him off, and he never was arrested.
Duby’s attorney, James McCandlish of Portland, filed notice of an intent to sue but said he dropped plans for a lawsuit after deciding Rogers’ conduct was immoral but not necessarily illegal.
Sexual innuendoes
Two officers openly are ribbed by their colleagues and called perverts. Sgt. Doug Schrade, 44, is nicknamed “Deviate Doug.” The other officer is Shepherd.
On Jan. 15, 1993, a 2-year-old girl was taken to the hospital after a day-care operator noticed vaginal bruising during a diaper change and suspected abuse. Police and child welfare investigators later determined the girl had fallen on a wooden dowel covering a screw hole in a chair.
Schrade was not the investigating officer but volunteered to photograph the victim.
As the little girl was lying spread-eagle on an examination table, Schrade snapped away with the camera. Then he turned to the mother and in front of her, a doctor and a social worker, said, “I sure hope she doesn’t grow up to earn her living lying on her back naked while men take pictures of her.”
Everyone in the room was outraged, said the mother, who has moved to Idaho and didn’t want her name used to protect her daughter, now 5. The social worker’s boss and records obtained by The Oregonian confirmed the incident.
At the time, the woman was a possible suspect and feared losing her daughter.
“If I hadn’t been scared of losing her, I would have slapped him,” she said of Schrade. He did not return telephone calls to his home and office.
Chief Humphress said Schrade made the remark and was disciplined, but he wouldn’t give details. Records show he got an oral reprimand.
Complaints about Baker City officers also come from within the department.
Schrade and Shepherd used to keep a collection of sexually explicit magazines at the police station, according to four of their colleagues. They said Schrade and the department’s other sergeant, Pierce, frequently make lewd gestures and references to women.
Humphress knew the department had a sexual harassment problem since at least 1987, when dispatcher Betty Davis, who has since quit, filed a formal complaint. Among dozens of other incidents, Davis said during an internal affairs investigation, Schrade and Lt. Rogers looked down her blouse and commented on her breasts.
The chief cleared Rogers but reprimanded Shepherd, Schrade and Pierce for sexual harassment.
On Jan. 8, 1988, the chief wrote to all employees: “It has come to my attention that remarks that could be construed to be sexist in nature have been used by police personnel in addressing other police personnel. The remark that first comes to mind is the remark ‘here skirt’ when addressing one of the department’s” dispatchers.
“This conduct will cease immediately, and recurrence shall be disciplined accordingly,” he wrote. “Discipline may include suspension with or without pay and/or dismissal.”
Humphress also acknowledged during an interview that he used to have his Playboy magazines mailed to the office, where they would be delivered to him by a woman who worked for the Water Department. He said he stopped the practice when the woman complained.
“I didn’t think it was inappropriate, but I changed it,” Humphress said.
Shepherd, who used to keep a panty collection at the office and wear a pair in his police hat, was disciplined at least two other times for sexual misconduct, internal affairs and court records show.
Last year, Shepherd told a dispatcher that he had stuffed Slim-Fast coupons in the mailbox of an overweight dispatcher and coupons for adult diapers in the mailboxes of two older dispatchers. The chief confirmed the incidents but said he never knew who was responsible.
One dispatcher who received the coupons agreed to be interviewed if her name was not used.
“All of us hate to go to work every day. Nothing changes,” she said. “We have a lot of fat, bald cops, but I never stick Rogaine coupons in their mailboxes.”
On June 17, 1991, Shepherd’s wife mailed a lewd postcard to Officer John Wulk, whose wife, Sharon, is a dispatcher.
“John, I had a wonderful time the other evening, darling . . . ,” the postcard read. “I had no idea you were such a lover, considering the frump you said you had at home . . . “
The Wulks said they complained repeatedly, but nothing was done until they went to then-City Manager Art Reiff and his successor, Woolard.
An investigation determined the postcard was written by Shepherd’s wife, Jonette, and that her husband knew about it. Records show that Shepherd lied about his involvement at first before changing his story. He was suspended without pay for three days -- his harshest punishment in the 15 years he has worked there.
Sharon Wulk, 54, said Shepherd also has walked past her and passed gas in her face. Another dispatcher corroborated her statement.
Race and tolerance
Racial intolerance also is a problem with Shepherd, records show, and allegedly with the chief himself.
About 98 percent of Baker County’s 16,000 residents are white. There are about eight blacks in the county.
On Aug. 7, 1996, Shepherd cited a man for criminal mischief and turned in a brief, handwritten report to be typed by a woman dispatcher. Attached to the report was a list of 11 demands Shepherd wanted as a member of the police union, Teamsters Local 670.
Nine demands were legitimate labor issues, such as pay raises, a guarantee against layoffs and four 10-hour shifts a week. Items numbered nine and 11 were “Give up nigger day,” a reference to the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and “No ugly dispatchers.”
Shepherd once turned in a time card and, on the day honoring MLK’s birthday, wrote “Nigger Day,” said several department members who saw the time card.
Shepherd refused repeated requests for interviews.
Officer Draze, the union shop steward, agreed to speak for him and other officers accused of misconduct.
He said Shepherd’s pattern of boorish behavior was “poor judgment” and that Shepherd’s act of stapling the union demands to an arrest report was simply “inadvertent.” Draze said there was nothing wrong with writing down the racist slur, only with submitting it.
“Overall, I think the department is good,” said Draze, the officer whose traffic stop prompted the 16-year-old wrestler’s lawsuit. “On the whole, I think the department is full of good guys. John Shepherd is one of the better officers we have. He’s a good family man. He’s been put through a lot of hell.”
Some department members blame Chief Humphress for tolerating sexual innuendoes and smutty behavior.
Officer Beyer said that in the early 1980s, a black state trooper from Nebraska walked into the office and handed Humphress and Lt. Rogers his resume and credentials. Beyer remembered that the trooper was well-dressed, had attended college, had a letter of recommendation from a professor and had won the Rattlesnake Open regional weightlifting championship.
After the black man walked out of the police station, Beyer said Rogers looked at Humphress and said, “Chief, what are you going to do? The nigger’s got some good credentials.”
Beyer said Humphress replied, “As long as I’m chief of police, no nigger and no woman is going to work here” as an officer.
The applicant, Cedric Shanks, 43, is a program manager and parole/probation officer for Union and Wallowa counties in La Grande. When asked his background, Shanks said he had attended the University of Nebraska for three years, had been a Nebraska state trooper nearly seven years and had trained other officers. The Nebraska State Patrol confirmed his credentials.
He also said he was the two-time Nebraska state weightlifting champion in the 220-pound class and had won a regional meet called the Rattlesnake Open.
Chief Humphress, asked why there were no black officers in Baker City, said he remembered only one ever coming through town, a “crackerjack” Nebraska state trooper. The chief said he “invited” the man to come to work for him, but “we lost him to La Grande.”
Shanks said Humphress never offered him a job. In fact, “I knew within five minutes of meeting that man that I could never work for him. Call it black man’s intuition.”
Shanks said he occasionally sees Humphress on the Baker City golf course. The chief calls him “Cecil.”
“It wasn’t long after I moved here that I realized Baker City is 20 years behind La Grande,” said Shanks, who completed his bachelor’s degree and opted for a new career in community corrections.
Humphress denied using the racist epithet. “Don’t ever accuse me of being a racist,” he said angrily. “Because I’m not.”
Rogers refused to discuss any allegations, saying, “Just go ahead and write it.”
Bowman v. Baker City
Six photographs will be at the center of a trial expected this summer or fall. It pits now-20-year-old Mandy Bowman against Baker City.
Bowman said that during her deposition in preparation for her trial, Shepherd and Chief Humphress stared and laughed at her and made jokes. She remembered Shepherd saying under oath that he didn’t even believe she had been wearing any panties that day and suggested she never wore them.
The city recently hired a private investigator whom three Baker City residents, including two of Bowman’s friends, say questioned them about Bowman’s background and boyfriends. The investigator suggested the city would argue that Bowman’s attack never happened.
That would mean she knifed herself and blackened her own eye.
“People look at me weird like I’m a troublemaker, and I’m a little slut, and I deserved it, and I’m making it up,” Bowman said. “I know that I’m telling the truth and that Shepherd is lying. He’s a pig. Any man who would be so perverted as to take a young girl into a police office and get off on taking pictures and touching her bra strap or making her pull her underwear down . . . there’s something wrong with that. That’s sick.
“You grow up thinking the cops are your friends, they’re here to help you. I was 18 years old. What’s going to happen when he gets a 12-year-old in there?”
J. Todd Foster works for The Oregonian’s Crime, Justice and Public Safety Team. He can be reached by phone at 221-8070, by fax at 294-5009, by mail at 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, Ore. 97201, or by e-mail at jtoddfoster@news.oregonian.com
