The Coos Bay Strangler

There is a moment investigators remember, the kind that stays with you long after the case files are closed and the courtroom has gone quiet. It was the winter of 1981, and a detective named Dave Bishop was standing in a cramped office in Salem, Oregon, staring at a photograph of a knot. Not a murder weapon, not a fingerprint, not a strand of hair under a microscope. A knot. A particular, distinctive, almost signature way that a length of cord had been looped and cinched around a victim's wrists. He had seen that knot before. He had seen it in another file, from another town, another jurisdiction, another grieving family. And in that quiet moment, with the rain doing what Oregon rain does in January, everything began to pull together around a man who had once seemed, to all the world, like someone on the way up.

Randy Woodfield grew up in the small coastal city of Coos Bay, Oregon, the kind of place where everybody knows your name and your mother and your Little League record. By the time he was a young man, his name carried a particular shine to it. He was tall, broad-shouldered, naturally athletic, the sort of person people pointed to when they wanted to illustrate the possibilities of a small town. He played football at Portland State University and played it well enough that the Green Bay Packers selected him in the 1974 NFL draft. That is not a small thing. That is the kind of accomplishment that gets a plaque in a high school hallway, that gets told and retold at holiday dinners, that becomes part of a community's mythology. For a time, Randy Woodfield was Coos Bay's favorite son.

But the shine had already begun to tarnish before most people knew to look. Woodfield was cut from the Packers before ever playing a regular season game. There were other teams, brief stints, nothing that lasted. And alongside those failed football chapters ran a darker thread that the public would not learn about for years. He had prior arrests for indecent exposure dating back to the mid-1970s, a pattern of behavior that should have raised serious alarm and, in hindsight, would become a critical piece of his biographical context. He served time in the Oregon state penitentiary for robbery and related offenses in the late 1970s, and it was after his release from that sentence, in the summer of 1979, that investigators would later determine the most serious crimes began.

What happened along the Oregon coast and the Interstate 5 corridor between 1979 and early 1981 was, piece by piece, a long nightmare for the women who traveled those roads and worked in those businesses. The crimes followed a recognizable, predatory pattern. A man would enter a business — a restaurant, a convenience store, a small roadside shop — typically near closing time, when staff were sparse and customers had thinned out. He would produce a weapon, force compliance, and commit robbery, sexual assault, and in the worst cases, murder. The victims were working women, young women, women going about the ordinary business of their lives.

Among those lives, one stands as a focal point in the legal history of this case, though she was far from the only person hurt. Shari Hull was twenty years old in January of 1981, a young woman working at a Godfather's Pizza restaurant in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland. She was the kind of person her friends described as warm and hardworking, someone who showed up, someone who cared about doing a good job. She had her whole future ahead of her, which is not a cliché when you are twenty years old — it is simply the truth. On the night of January 18th, 1981, Shari Hull and a co-worker, Beth Wilmot, were closing up the restaurant when a man entered. According to court records and the account Beth Wilmot would give investigators, the man bound them, sexually assaulted them, and shot them both. Shari Hull died. Beth Wilmot survived.

Beth Wilmot's survival would become, in time, the fulcrum on which this entire investigation turned.

But before that fulcrum was identified, investigators across multiple Oregon jurisdictions were working largely in the dark, each agency handling what appeared to be its own separate series of crimes. Lane County, Marion County, Douglas County, and others — each had pieces of what detectives did not yet know was a single puzzle. The Oregon State Police, recognizing the geographic spread and the similarities in method, began coordinating what would become a major multi-agency investigation. It was Detective Dave Bishop, working with the Oregon State Police, who took on the role of connector, the person who began pulling threads from different files and laying them side by side.

The threads were real. The crimes shared consistent characteristics: the timing, the targeting of businesses near closing, the binding of victims, the use of a firearm. And then there was the knot. In multiple cases across multiple counties, victims had been bound in a particular way, with cordage tied in an unusual, consistent fashion. It was not a sailor's knot or a standard square knot or anything easily categorized. It was, investigators came to believe, the habitual work of a single pair of hands, the unconscious signature of someone who tied things a certain way because that was simply how they tied things. That detail, unglamorous and precise, would become one of the investigation's most important evidentiary threads.

By early 1981, investigators had developed a general physical description of their suspect from various survivor accounts and witnesses. The man was described as tall, athletic, good-looking, and in some descriptions, disguised with a fake beard or mustache. A composite sketch was developed and circulated. Investigators working the case noted that the geographic spread of the crimes mapped closely to the Interstate 5 corridor, a long north-south highway running through the valley of western Oregon. Someone was moving along that road, stopping to commit crimes, and moving on. Law enforcement began referring to the unknown perpetrator as the I-5 Bandit.

The name Randy Woodfield surfaced through a combination of investigative work that included canvassing, tip-line calls, and the kind of methodical cross-referencing that detective work actually consists of, far less dramatic than television suggests and far more labor-intensive. Woodfield's name came to Bishop's attention in part because of his prior criminal history and his physical description's alignment with witness accounts. When investigators looked more closely at Woodfield's movements and whereabouts during the period in question, they found reason to look harder.

One of the critical investigative steps was reinterviewing Beth Wilmot. She had survived the attack at the Beaverton Godfather's Pizza. She had looked at the face of the man who killed her co-worker and shot her. When investigators showed her a photo array that included Randy Woodfield's photograph, according to court records and reporting on the trial, she identified him as the man who had been in that restaurant on the night of January 18th. That identification, from a woman who had survived the worst night of her life, was devastating to the defense.

But the case being built against Woodfield was not built on that identification alone. The physical evidence was also being assembled with care. Ballistic analysis was conducted on the weapon used in the Beaverton shooting. Investigators worked to trace the firearm. Evidence connecting Woodfield to the crime scene and to the broader pattern of I-5 corridor crimes was being documented and prepared. Prosecutors also had the testimony of individuals who knew Woodfield or had encountered him during the relevant period, and they had the geographical and circumstantial evidence tying him to multiple crime scenes across the state.

Randy Woodfield was arrested in March of 1981. He was thirty years old. The arrest made immediate news in Oregon, in part because of the football background, in part because of the alleged scope of what investigators believed he had done. The charges against him were serious and multiple. Prosecutors charged him with the aggravated murder of Shari Hull, along with assault and other charges related to the attack on Beth Wilmot and additional crimes.

The trial took place in the spring and summer of 1981 in Marion County, Oregon, and it drew considerable public attention. Woodfield maintained his innocence. His defense challenged the eyewitness identification and the other evidence marshaled by prosecutors. But the jury, after hearing the testimony of Beth Wilmot, the ballistic and physical evidence, and the broader investigative picture assembled by the state, returned a verdict of guilty on the aggravated murder charge, along with guilty verdicts on multiple counts of assault and other serious offenses.

The sentence handed down was not a modest one. Randy Woodfield received a life sentence for the aggravated murder of Shari Hull, along with an additional ninety years for the other convictions. The judge was not leaving ambiguity about what the court intended for this man's future.

In the years that followed, Woodfield's legal team pursued appeals through the Oregon appellate courts. The conviction was reviewed and ultimately upheld. The appellate record affirmed the evidentiary foundation upon which the jury had reached its verdict. The Oregon courts found no basis to overturn what twelve jurors had decided in that Marion County courtroom. Randy Woodfield has remained incarcerated in the Oregon state prison system ever since his conviction. He has never been released, and given the nature and length of his sentence, release has never been a realistic prospect. He is in his early seventies now, a man who has spent more than four decades behind bars.

The case against Woodfield, it should be said, did not resolve every question surrounding the crimes attributed to the I-5 Bandit. Investigators over the years have sought to connect Woodfield to additional crimes beyond those for which he was charged and convicted, and the full scope of his alleged criminal activity has been the subject of ongoing examination by law enforcement and journalists. In 1984, journalist Ann Rule — already well-known for her work chronicling the crimes of Ted Bundy — published a book examining Woodfield's case in detail. Rule's work brought national attention to the investigation and the trial, and it contributed to the public record surrounding this case in ways that remain part of its history. The question of precisely how many victims Woodfield had, across how many jurisdictions, has never been answered with complete legal certainty. What is certain is what the jury found, and what the courts affirmed: that Randy Woodfield murdered Shari Hull.

There is something that should be said about the victims in this case, not in the aggregate, not as a count of offenses on a charging document, but as individuals. Beth Wilmot, who survived, who walked back into the hardest possible circumstances when she sat in a witness chair and faced the man prosecutors said had taken her co-worker's life and nearly taken hers as well — her courage in that courtroom was a real thing. The survivors across the I-5 corridor who gave investigators descriptions, who sat through interviews and photo arrays and the exhausting, re-traumatizing process of cooperating with a criminal investigation — they were the ones who made it possible to build this case. And Shari Hull, twenty years old, who went to work on a January night and did not come home — she deserves to be more than a data point. She was a daughter, a friend, a young woman in Beaverton, Oregon, with her whole life in front of her. The verdict in her name was the only justice the law could offer. It is not a complete answer to her loss, but it is the one the system had to give.

The investigators in this case, the detectives who drove Oregon's highways and sat in small offices comparing files from different counties, who looked at knots and composite sketches and ballistic reports, who made phone calls and knocked on doors and followed the unglamorous, necessary path of methodical police work — they did what needed to be done. Dave Bishop and his colleagues did not have DNA technology or the digital investigative tools that modern law enforcement takes for granted. They had paper files, photographs, shoe leather, and careful attention to detail. That a case spread across so many jurisdictions, attributed to a suspect whose crimes ranged across hundreds of miles, was assembled into a conviction that held up through decades of appeals — that is no small thing.

There is a particular quality to cases like this one, cases where the perpetrator came from a background of apparent promise, where the distance between public persona and private reality was so vast. The former draft pick, the hometown hero, the man with the athletic build and the easy smile — and beneath all of that, the investigators allege, and the jury found, something else entirely. People want those cases to make sense, want there to be some visible warning that was missed, some obvious sign. The truth is usually more unsettling. The warning signs existed, in the form of Woodfield's prior criminal behavior, but the full picture only became clear in retrospect, as it so often does.

Randy Woodfield is serving his sentence at an Oregon state correctional facility. He has never publicly acknowledged guilt for the crimes of which he was convicted. Shari Hull's family has lived for over four decades with the knowledge of what happened to her and with whatever measure of resolution the guilty verdict provided. Beth Wilmot, who carried the weight of her testimony into that courtroom and faced what she faced in order to tell the truth — she went on. People do, somehow. They carry what they carry, and they go on.

That is, in the end, what this story is about. Not the man whose name is on the charging document, though the law requires us to speak it. It is about the women who were targeted along those dark Oregon roads and in those late-night businesses, and about the ones who survived, and the ones who did not, and about the investigators and prosecutors and jurors who made sure that the law had something to say about all of it. The knot. The survivor in the witness chair. The verdict that held. That is what the record shows, and that is what the record will say.