Tip from cab company led to fugitive
Oregon officials question Nevada prison release
Police in rural southwest Oregon were on high alert: A man with a history of kidnapping and torturing women in two states was on the run in their territory.
When a tip came in from a cab company that had given him a ride, they went house-to-house to check on residents. Peering through a window of one home, they found a gruesome scene: the bodies of two men who had been beaten to death.
The discovery Tuesday near Grants Pass, Oregon, was a bloody link in a chain of events that ended hours later with the suicide of the wanted man, 36-year-old bartender Benjamin Obadiah Foster.
The finale, played out on a normally quiet residential street in Grants Pass, marked an end to the largest manhunt in the state in recent memory and brought relief to terrified residents in the region of forested mountains.
Authorities in Grants Pass say none of this would have happened if authorities in Nevada hadn’t been so quick just over a year ago to release Foster from prison, where he was serving time for holding his then-girlfriend in Las Vegas captive for two weeks and torturing her.
And a Grants Pass woman would not now be in a hospital, comatose and in critical condition, they say.
It’s “extremely troubling,” Grants Pass Police Chief Warren Hensman said.
Fifteen months after he was set free in Nevada, Foster was living in Oregon and in a relationship with the Grants Pass woman.
On Jan. 24, her friend grew concerned because she hadn’t been seen for several days. The friend went to the woman’s house, where she was found bound and beaten to unconsciousness.
The case rattled the town of 40,000, which has seen high unemployment and poverty rates and public safety layoffs with the decline of the timber industry.
On Jan. 26, police, sheriff ’s deputies, an Oregon State Police SWAT team and federal agents carried out a raid in Wolf Creek, about 20 miles north of Grants Pass, after receiving word Foster was there. Agents seized his car, but Foster had vanished.
The next day, police announced that Foster was using dating apps to find people who could help him avoid the police or find new victims. Authorities offered a $2,500 reward for Foster and set up a tip line.
Then, a major break in the case. One of the tips came from a cab company saying a man had requested a taxi from Sunny Valley, just south of Wolf Creek, Hensman said Wednesday.
Police went around checking homes Tuesday in Sunny Valley, to ensure residents hadn’t been harmed. But in one house, they found the bodies of Richard Lee Barron Jr. and Donald Owen Griffith, according to Oregon State Police Capt. Kyle Kennedy.
The officers, carrying rifles and using an armored personnel carrier, massed outside the house. Area residents were told to shelter in place.
The officers expected a gunfight. Instead, Foster shot himself in the head, Hensman said.