Five years ago, LaVerne Pavlinac made up a story about how she and her abusive boyfriend raped and strangled a woman and left her body in an isolated river gorge.
She told the story to get the boyfriend off her back.But police believed her. Prosecutors believed her. A jury believed her. Her boyfriend pleaded no contest to avoid the death penalty, and they've been in prison ever since.
Friday, she was awaiting word on whether she will gain her freedom now that a stranger has led police to the victim's purse and divulged other details only the killer could have known.
"I'm not bitter or anything, but I'm kind of upset with the way my case wasn't investigated. They just took my word for it and didn't try to find out anything else," she said at the Oregon Women's Correctional Center Friday.
"I figured what would happen was they would arrest him and find out I had lied and let him go," said Pavlinac, 62. "It just snowballed into something else."
The lawyers, judge and jury did nothing wrong and the evidence at hand was sufficient for a conviction, District Attorney Michael Schrunk has said.
But he told Circuit Judge Paul Lipscomb on Thursday that there is considerable evidence that Pavlinac and John Sosnovske were wrongly convicted in 1991 of murdering 23-year-old Taunja Bennett. The judge was expected to rule Monday.
A man who claims he has killed eight women in the past five years was taken to the scene of Bennett's slaying, and gave police details that even included helping find her purse, Schrunk said.
The man, Keith Jesperson, was dubbed the "happy face killer" because he draws smiley faces atop neatly printed letters to the media claiming that he killed women in five states, including Wyoming, Florida and California, and his conscience is bothering him.
The 40-year-old interstate trucker is imprisoned in Washington, awaiting sentencing for kidnapping, raping and strangling a woman in March. He faces up to life in prison on last week's guilty plea.
Prosecutors say they will charge Jesperson with Bennett's death and investigators are looking into his other claims.
At her trial in January 1991, Pavlinac told jurors the story was all a ruse. She said she made up the tale to try to get away from Sosnovske, who she said abused her.
But prosecutors played a tape of her confession, and she was convicted.
The threat of that tape also led Sosnovske to plead no contest to murder in order to avoid the death penalty.