Oregon investigator accused of taking murdered Ohio boy’s name says little at federal hearing

Man accused of taking murdered Ohio boy’s identity

BOISE, Idaho. — An Oregon liquor control investigator accused of assuming the identity of a murdered Ohio boy waived an extradition hearing Tuesday and awaits transport from Idaho back to Oregon, where authorities have been trying to determine the man’s true name.

Federal prosecutors have alleged that a man calling himself Jason Robert Evers assumed the identity of a 3-year-old boy who was kidnapped and murdered in Cincinnati in 1982. Investigators have said the man was 17 and living in Colorado when he took the name in 1996.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Magistrate Judge Candy Dale referred to Evers as Mr. John Doe, a name also listed on court records.

Doe, wearing an orange and white striped Ada County Jail suit and a shaved head, said little during the 20-minute hearing in U.S. District Court.

Doe was hired by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission as an investigator in 2002, the same year he submitted a passport application listing his occupation as law enforcement. He went through an Oregon State Police background check that turned up nothing to stop him from being hired by the commission.

Doe’s fingerprints were sent to the FBI, and he was run through the Law Enforcement Data System, commission executive director Steve Pharo said.

“He passed all those,” he said. “We also had copies of his Social Security number and driver’s license from him.”

Doe rose to become a regional manager in Bend, Ore., before asking to be reassigned as an investigator to the office in Nyssa, Ore., close to Idaho, where he owned a home in the town of Caldwell.

Prosecutors said the case grew out of a routine check of a passport application against death records by a division of the U.S. State Department.

Investigators started gathering evidence with Google searches that turned up news stories of the murdered boy and later compared a 2002 passport application against an Ohio death certificate for the child, according to an April 26 affidavit from Special Agent Calvin Sherstan of the Diplomatic Security Service in Seattle.

The Social Security Administration found that the Social Security number used on the passport application had been obtained in Colorado in 1996, leading Sherstan to believe that Doe assumed the dead boy’s identity when he was just 17.

The birth dates on the passport application and the death certificate are the same, but the passport application listed a different birth date for Robert Evers, the boy’s father.

“This is further evidence to me that the passport applicant is an impostor because he did not know his purported father’s birth date,” Sherstan wrote in the affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore.

Investigators also established that the man making the passport application was the same man who worked for the Oregon Liquor Control Commission by comparing his picture against a news video on the Internet, and calling the telephone number listed on the application, which rang through to the commission’s Portland, Ore., office, the affidavit said.

Doe is charged with providing false information in applying for a passport, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

Friends from his time in Bend said they were shocked at the charge against him.

“He seemed to me to be a great person,” Janelle Hess said in an e-mail. “I always listed him as a mentor on job applications. He was as close as a brother. Would do anything for me. Loaned me money time after time in an instant.”

The Bulletin newspaper in Bend reported another friend, 73-year-old Helen Wohlen of Redmond, said Doe was like a grandson to her, going on vacations with her. She even listed him in her will as the person to get her house when she dies. She met him in Denver, where they often played tennis.

Assistant U.S. Attorney George Breitsameter said Doe will soon be transported by the U.S. Marshal to Portland, Ore., where his first court appearance will be a detention hearing.

He was put on administrative leave without pay last week after failing to show up for work, Pharo said.

In Boise, the magistrate appointed public defender Tom Arkush, who acknowledged that Doe will likely be unable to afford legal counsel. Arkush left the courthouse immediately after Tuesday’s hearing and didn’t immediately return phone messages left by The Associated Press.

Barnard contributed reporting from Grants Pass, Ore.