A Notorious 1973 Double Homicide Appeared to Have No Motive, According to PPB Police Detectives, or Did it?
Trigger Warning: This essay contains graphic and troubling content.
By Theresa Griffin Kennedy
April 13, 2023
WHEN WE STUDY HOMICIDE, or homicidal impulse, the professional or amateur investigator has to ask one primary question — why? Opportunity, modus operandi, signature and manner of death will often point in the direction of the killer, but the first consideration is always — motive.
For over fifty years, the family members of two deceased North Portland women have been asking that question repeatedly. It seems as if for decades both families came up against a brick wall where motive was the one thing police investigators could not agree on or readily ascertain.
But perhaps the motive was right there all along.
On the warm Autumn day of September 8, 1973, 30-year-old Roy Lee Jernigan drove to the home of his girlfriend, Delores Thompson, 26, at her rental house at 527 North Ivy Street, only one block north from the Boise-Eliot Elementary School where her children were students.
Jernigan was a tall, thin and powerfully built African American man, standing six feet, six inches and weighing a lean 203 pounds. He was a Vietnam Veteran who had been trained as a military police officer in the US Army.
Jernigan had also worked as a sworn Portland Police officer.
On that Saturday in 1973, Jernigan went to pick up his toddler son, who at the time was called Roy Lee Jernigan, Jr. The boy was his son with Delores Thompson, one of the victims. Thompson was born May 16, 1947, and was a lifelong resident of Portland, unlike Jernigan, who had come to Portland in 1960 as an adult from New York, NY where he was born and raised and where his parents and other family would remain.
According to testimony from Jernigan, he approached the house and found the front door ajar. Wondering why the front door would be open, he walked inside. Once in the house, Jernigan found Miss Gwendolyn Fulce, only 21-years-old, lying unresponsive on a chair in the living room, deceased. The young Black woman appeared to have been brutally bludgeoned with blunt force trauma to the head, and multiple puncture wounds to the neck.
Making his way into the back bedroom Jernigan found his deceased girlfriend Delores Thompson, also brutally bludgeoned with blunt force trauma to the head and numerous puncture wounds to the neck. She was found lying face down on the floor in a thick pool of blood. Jernigan’s two and ½ year old son was found lying next to his deceased mother, near a sofa, unharmed at least physically.
*If the women were found on the 8th of September, it is entirely possible they were murdered the night of the 7th of September. Bodies of murder victims are often not immediately found following violent attacks and may lay where they fall for several hours or even days before being discovered.
In an online Cold Case website, uploaded by PPB, which describes the brutal and bloody 1973 double homicide, no mention is made that the father, Roy Jernigan had worked as a Portland police officer only five years earlier, beginning in 1965 and ending in 1968.
“Upon his arrival, he approached the front door and entered. He immediately saw the body of a female who appeared to have been beaten. Mr. Jernigan began to search the house and in the bedroom, he discovered another body of a female who also appeared to have been beaten. This female was the mother of his child. Continuing his search, he found his son, alive and uninjured. Police officers responded, took control of the scene and determined that both females were deceased. These women were later identified as 21-year-old Gwendolyn Fulce, who had no criminal record and was an acquaintance of 24-year-old Delores Thompson (the mother of the child). Ms. Thompson was the renter of the residence at 527 N Ivy. Investigators interviewed numerous people, but were unable to identify any suspects at the time. A motive for this double homicide has yet to be determined.”
In a 2011 follow up article, written by former KGW reporter Nicole Doll, entitled, “Police: Toddler only witness in cold case double murder,” the claim is made that the toddler, later renamed Ronnie Dee Thompson by the Thompson family, was the only “witness” to the murder.
Whether Ronnie Thompson actually witnessed or heard the double homicide cannot be proven at this point, because he has passed away himself. He died in 2016 at the age of only 45 after a troubled and sad life, in which he never knew his mother and struggled with depression and substance abuse. With the only possible “witness” to the double murder also dead, there is no way to find out what Donnie Thompson might have been able to recall of the horrific event or not.
But perhaps there is enough testimony from remaining family members and existing documentation, including an autopsy report, and PPB personnel files to come up with a theory on who would have committed such a vicious assault on two innocent young women.
In the 2011 recap of the double homicide, the former profession of the father, Roy Lee Jernigan is not mentioned or the fact that Jernigan “resigned” from the Portland Police Bureau in 1968, after getting into trouble with a known Portland drug dealer and pimp, a man named Jaynolyn Moody. (PPB personnel file).
The article waxes sentimental regarding the Thompson family detailing how they miss Delores. The published story seems sympathetic to the struggles the family members have experienced in the decades following the murder, but does not share many things the Thompson family state they told PPB cold case investigators, and the reporter who wrote the 2011 article. Those previous statements from the Thompson family were not included in the finished article. They were glossed over and a surface description was given of what happened, but certainly not what the Thompson family would have liked. The full 2011 article is included below…
“Police: Toddler only witness in cold case double murder:
For the Thompson family, photos mean everything.
An entire wall in Bambi Thompson’s living room is covered with photographs of aunts, grandsons, cousins and one sister, who has been gone for 38 years. “She didn’t even get a chance to know her own kids, you know,” Bambi Thompson said, remembering her sister Delores Thompson.
“This is her wedding day with grandfather right there,” said Delores’ son, Clark Thompson, as he pointed out a faded photo on the mantle. Clark Thompson was only 7 years old when his mother was murdered. He has few concrete memories of his mother with him or his siblings. “The last memory I have of her was two caskets,” he said. Two caskets for two young women; their lives snuffed out on a tree-lined street in north Portland.
Investigators say 27-year-old Delores Thompson and 21-year-old Gwendolyn Fulce were best friends.
On Sept. 8, 1973, the father of Delores Thompson’s 2–½-year-old son came to her rented home on north Ivy Street to pick up the boy. Portland police cold case investigators said the father found the women bludgeoned to death.
The then-child had been left with the bodies — the toddler was the only witness. “He was laying on a couch near one of the victims. The victims were in different rooms and unfortunately, the father had to search for his son because his concern was if his son was also a victim,” said Portland Police Cold Case Detective Meredith Hopper. The killer or killers had spared the child, but the Thompson family said their emotional wounds run deep.
“I go through my little, you know, during their anniversaries and Mother’s Day, and her birthday. I go through little withdrawals from family,” said Teresa Tigner, Delores Thompson’s daughter. Police said both women had drug issues, but they don’t know if it relates to the murders.
Forensic evidence is now being re-examined with new technology. But such an old case presents unique investigative challenges for Hopper, who hadn’t been born yet when the crime happened. It’s also interesting. It’s like a history-type of lesson because you kind of get a feel for what was going on in their lives at the time,” she said. Hopper said she needs to talk to someone who had a theory about the crime or heard a rumor about the murders that lead detectives haven’t followed before.
Delores Thompson’s family said they’re still haunted by the brutality of the crime.” How would you feel if your momma didn’t make it to 30? Your mother didn’t make it to 30,” said Clark Thompson. “I just want justice to be served, you know what I’m saying? They took my mother away from me.”
Detective Meredith Hopper is still employed with PPB. Despite my attempts to reach her after making telephone calls to PPB and messaging her on Facebook, Detective Hopper has never returned any of my messages. Apparently, this cold case is not something she is interested in or able to devote any time to anymore.
The Thompson family had a lot to tell me about Meredith Hopper. After the 2011 article was published by Nicole Doll and shortly after it hit newsstands, Hopper no longer responded to their telephone calls. Hopper, according to the Thompson family members, had been initially quite sympathetic when they told her how Delores Thompson had been murdered and her best friend, Gwendolyn Fulce. The Thompson family told me that Hopper promised she would do all she could to solve the cold case and that she understood how important the case was.
But as soon as the Thompson family shared with Meredith Hopper that Roy Lee Jernigan, the man they believed had murdered Delores Thompson had worked as a Portland Police officer, Detective Meredith Hopper suddenly stopped returning their telephone calls and they never heard from her again.
When doing a close reading of Hopper’s comments in the 2011 article, several things stand out, if only for the surprising tone they bring to the article. When Hopper comments, rather thoughtlessly in my opinion, that the investigation is “interesting” because it provides a window into a forgotten time in Portland history, saying: “It’s like a history-type of lesson because you kind of get a feel for what was going on in their lives at the time,” I found myself surprised at the comment. Hopper may have meant well, but it was the wrong thing to say. It was far too removed, as if she were discussing a science experiment or a grammar lesson and not the double homicide of two young women snuffed out in the prime of their lives.
When presented with an opportunity to make a substantive comment about the importance of solving cold cases, and why the task is important, because of those left behind, in this case three small children, Hopper made a remark that can only be described as thoughtless and superficial.
In one section of the article, Jernigan is presented as a loving father, merely concerned about his baby son. “Portland Police Cold Case Detective Meredith Hopper told KPTV: “He was laying on a couch near one of the victims. The victims were in different rooms and unfortunately, the father had to search for his son because his concern was if his son was also a victim.”
In another final paragraph in the article, regarding Hopper’s purpose as an investigator is also revealing: “Hopper said she needs to talk to someone who had a theory about the crime or heard a rumor about the murders that lead detectives haven’t followed before.”
The Thompson family shared with Detective Hopper numerous times that they believed Roy Lee Jernigan was the killer. They had a theory and more than a few rumors to share of their own. But Hopper apparently didn’t feel sharing those details with the media would be warranted. Even after 38 years of the crime not being solved, and the subsequent 2011 article being written, the former profession of Roy Lee Jernigan, as a PPB police officer was again not revealed.
Why?
Former PPB homicide detective, Don DuPay, employed from 1961 to 1978 remembers seeing Jernigan for a couple of years when Jernigan worked for PPB as a patrolman in the middle 1960s. DuPay also recalls later when he was a detective hearing some specific rumors among other detectives at PPB: “Jernigan was a jerk. He was well-known among the detectives who I worked with as being a dirty cop.”
Other 1973 newspaper articles offer more details of the horrible manner that both women were murdered and mutilated.
There were several articles written at the time of the 1973 murders. One was published in the Statesman Journal of Salem Oregon, Monday, September 10, 1973: LEADS SOUGHT IN DOUBLE HOMICIDES, the title reads. This article details a Eugene double homicide that occurred around the same time, but focuses more on the two women murdered in Portland.
“The Portland murders were discovered by a man police identified only as a friend of Miss Thompson. He apparently is the father of her three-year-old son, they added. The boy, found unharmed in the house, was placed with relatives. Miss Thompson had a record of narcotic convictions, but police said there is nothing to link the killings to illegal drugs. Miss Fulce had no criminal record. Her mother described her as a regular church-goer who was a student at a Portland beauty college. She had gone to Miss Thompson’s house to spend the night, her mother said.”
In another article written by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, and published in the Longview Daily News, in Longview Washington, the murders of Thompson and Fulce are recounted in gruesome detail: “Police say they are still without leads in the double homicides reported Saturday in Portland… Delores Thompson, 27 and Gwendolyn Fulce, 21, were found dead Saturday afternoon in Thompson’s home. They died from stab wounds to the neck and apparent hammer blows to the head.”
*There was some confusion as to Delores Thompson’s age but I was able to pin down her age from Ancestry.com, to being 26 at the time of her death, which was also confirmed by family members.
Was Jernigan being protected and if so, why?
What seems to be a pattern in all of the newspaper articles and even in some current online descriptions of the 1973 double homicide is the fact that Roy Lee Jernigan, the toddler’s father, is never identified as having worked as a sworn Portland Police Officer and the question begs, why?
Why would that important detail not be included, especially in the 1973 newspaper articles? Wouldn’t full disclosure on the former work history of the father, Roy Lee Jernigan, also present a clearer picture of who the assailant could have been?
Wouldn’t that kind of information ideally be shared with the public, given that in most cases of violent homicide the killer tends to be someone the victim knows? And in the case of young female victims, the killer is often either the husband or the boyfriend. Were 1973 police investigators unaware of that general caveat? Or were they protecting the reputation of the Portland Police Bureau by not revealing the former profession of Roy Lee Jernigan?
There are many interesting aspects to this double homicide that some people might not readily understand. For example, the drug scene in Portland was entirely different in 1973 than it is now or even during the 1980s, when the US suffered under the weight of a huge Crack epidemic that tore through and devastated Black communities nationwide.
When cocaine came to town:
In 1973, cocaine was not commonly used in Portland, although pills, such as “speed” and other pharmaceutical drugs were available on the black market. Don DuPay, who worked the streets of Albina and the Traffic, Vice, Morals, Burglary and Homicide Details has said that cocaine did not come to Portland, or become widely popular until the middle to late 1970s. If people wanted stimulants, they could rob pharmacies, or get a doctor’s prescription, however, the preferred drug of choice was still generally heroin.
In the Black community in Portland, heroin or what was commonly called “dope” meant several things. The first thing heroin meant, if it was being used by pimps to control young women, was how easily it facilitated prostitution. Heroin use made it easier for a church-reared girl, either black or white, to have sex with men for money and not hate herself afterward. Heroin helped her feel numb after allowing herself to be exploited in such a degrading fashion — having sex with men in exchange for money.
Getting a girl addicted to heroin was the Portland pimp’s first job. Once addicted, she would do what he wanted and offer little argument, handing over money and having sex with as many as twenty five men per day or more. Being addicted to heroin meant she would do as she was told to stay in supply of the drug, which numbed her emotions and made surviving easier.
So, in 1973, if a girl was arrested on “narcotics” charges, as in Dolores Thompson’s case, it was safe to presume she might also be turning tricks as well. But prostitutes weren’t necessarily cookie cutter stereotypes of “bad girls.” They were often simply young women with children. These were young women who were trying to create a life for themselves, juggling home life and street life as a way to survive. It is entirely possible that Delores Thompson was just one of those girls, trying to support and feed her children; she had three, by turning tricks on the side.
Jernigan was not a Portlander:
But who was Jernigan? What I discovered in my research was that Jernigan had grown up in New York, NY as an only child, which is generally uncommon in traditional Black families. His father, Thomas Jernigan, born in 1921, had also graduated from high school, attending for four years like his son, and worked as an electrician to support his family. Roy Lee Jernigan came from what appears to be a stable and middle class home and was raised with both parents. He was an above average student, with excellent penmanship and good writing skills, coupled with excellent language skills. He was bright, hardworking and ambitious.
I also learned, Jernigan was a Vietnam Veteran who had served in the US Army for over two years during the conflict. He was born January 25, 1943, and graduated from George Washington High School in New York city, in Manhattan, at 17-years-of-age. He was on the Basketball team, the Track team and voted the best athlete in the yearbook for his senior year: “class athlete — Boy: Roy Jernigan.” He competed in all the available sports during high school.
In a PPB Personnel Information form, the sports Jernigan competed in were listed in order of preference, as: “Basketball, football, baseball, tennis, swimming.” He did it all.
When Jernigan would become an adult, as stated in his 1960 senior yearbook, which was called “The Hatchet,” he wanted to become a “criminal lawyer.” In the process of fulfilling that dream, Jernigan came to Portland on a basketball scholarship to the University of Portland, attending the school from September of 1960 until June of 1961. But because Jernigan couldn’t keep up his grade point average, he dropped out.
It might seem that Jernigan was not a good student, because he couldn’t make it work at University of Portland but what some people might not know is that to even be accepted there, he had to have been an excellent student. Back in 1960, the academic requirements for schools like University of Portland were rigorous. The school is still academically rigorous but was particularly so back in 1960 with most students taking on 15–18 credit hours per week, as opposed to 12 credit hours, now, which is considered “full-time.”
The other issue is that the University of Portland was almost completely white in 1960. Jernigan would have stood six feet six inches and his dark complexion would have made him stand out. One can only guess what attending the University of Portland was like for Jernigan, but it is safe to wager that it was not an enjoyable experience. The fact that he lasted one full year is impressive, alone, as many out of state transfer students, (up to 50 percent) will drop out after their first term.
When Jernigan left University of Portland, he briefly returned to NY, working for one month as a clerk for the “S. Cline Company.” Then from October 31, 1961 until January 6, 1962, Jernigan worked as a “substitute mail clerk for the U. S. Post Office at the 116th & Broadway Branch in NY,” after which he was fired for allegedly leaving work without permission, due to a family illness he was concerned about. (PPB, Personnel File).
But the alluring call of Portland seems to have preoccupied Jernigan’s mind. He returned once again in September of 1962, getting a job at the Nudleman Brothers as a clerk in downtown Portland, and then later marrying at the age of 20, in 1963. Jernigan would become a Portland police officer, being appointed as a sworn officer August 5, 1965, which was also the date of his second wedding anniversary.
But first, Jernigan would go to war.
Learning how to kill:
Before becoming a police officer, Jernigan would become a soldier. In his PPB personnel file, Jernigan is listed as “Sp4 US Army Vietnam.” He began service in the US Army May 24, 1963, and in time he became “attached to a military police component serving first at Fort Ord, and Fort Gorgon and then later in Wertheim, Germany.” Jernigan would then end his service May 17, 1965.
What might a soldier learn while being trained in the US Military? Part of the training a young man would receive in the Army would be how to effectively and quietly kill and neutralize an enemy. As Jernigan was trained as a military police officer, it’s safe to assume he received that kind of training.
One method of effective killing, which many men in the US Military learned, was how to kill execution style with a knife to the neck. Punched forward in the center of the throat, to sever the larynx and the spinal cord just behind the larynx, the victim is basically unable to make a sound while they are dying. They are rendered helpless and nonresistant. Soldiers would also learn how to sever all the major arteries, so that the person bleeds out with no chance of survival.
In an online website, this method of killing is described in nauseating detail by a former soldier:
The knife is plunged into the side of the neck, behind the carotid artery but anterior to the cervical spine. If you were to look downward at the neck’s cross section, with the Adam’s apple being at the 12′o’clock position, you’ll want to be at about 8′o’clock ideally, although this angle requires an adjustment in your footwork if using the hammer grip. The knife is pushed, or more accurately, punched across the front of the neck in a jerking, sawing motion to quickly sever the trachea beneath the vocal folds along with the carotid arteries and the carotid sinuses. Just one of each will technically do the trick, but not nearly as quickly. The sudden destruction of the carotid sinuses and drop in blood flow to the brain causes a global ischemia of the brain, producing a rapid loss of consciousness. While the sentry is alert and oriented during the course of having his throat opened, he is, fortunately, unable to yell because his vocal cords are no longer attached to the trachea and lungs and the nerves that connect the muscles of the vocal process to the central nervous system are also potentially severed. 2
The newspaper articles on the 1973 double homicide reported that in both murder scenes there was no sign of a struggle and the women had been killed with “puncture wounds” to the neck and blunt force trauma to their heads. From reading the various articles recounting the murder scenes, it would appear that the women were killed by someone who knew how to kill in the ways typically taught to soldiers’ in the US Military.
But who would have those special skills, have a close relationship with one or both of the victims and also have access to the house on Ivy Street, if not Jernigan? Why was Jernigan never seriously considered a suspect in this double homicide? And why was his former profession as a Portland police officer never once revealed to the public?!
Was Jernigan being protected? New information and testimony supports the idea that Jernigan was indeed being protected.
Perhaps the answer to many of these questions lies hidden in the mists of that time in Portland history and in the systemic racism that defined life for black people in Portland in the early 1970s. The two women who died were young Black women. Had they been white, the killer undoubtedly would have been identified within at least a week or two. They were two young women, one of whom had a tie to narcotics, which meant probable ties to prostitution.
It is easy to presume that the police department and the detectives simply didn’t care enough to solve this horrendous double homicide. The investigators, including Sgt. Gordon Morgan, also a Marine veteran trained in combat and lethal kill techniques, probably suspected Roy Lee Jernigan from the very beginning, but they chose for their own reasons not to vigorously investigate the double homicide.
Interviews with family members were not revealed or shared with either the Oregonian or the Oregon Journal or any of Portland’s other media and the case slowly dwindled from Portland’s collective memory.
Interviewing the remaining Thompson Family Members:
In an interview on the evening of December 20, 2021, I spoke with the brother of Dolores Thompson, Ural Thompson. I had gotten his address from a former journalist I know and simply drove over and knocked on the front door. Ural is a well-known jazz and blues musician and a beloved member of the Portland community. We spoke in his home in North Portland and Ural and his wife Rosie had quite a sad story to share about the two murdered girls and the man they felt had always been guilty of the crime.
When I first spoke with Ural he described the horrendous wounds that both girls suffered, but he also revealed details about wounds that had never been previously mentioned in the papers or shared with the public. He confirmed the stab wounds to the neck and the blunt force trauma to both women’s heads, likely with a claw hammer, but he shared other information, too.
After the autopsy had been done in 1973, likely performed by Doctor Larry Lewman, a male police investigator came to Ural’s home and told him the gruesome truth about the other wounds that would indicate both women were mutilated with a knife in a militaristic fashion.
Ural was told by that investigator, probably a detective, whose name he can no longer recall that nearly all arteries of both of the women had been severed. On the soft inside of the elbow, the wrists, the arteries in the groin area and the femoral arteries, including the arteries behind the knees had all been sliced open from right to left, indicating that the killer was left-handed.
Rosie, Ural’s wife, quietly commented: “There was blood all over the walls, all over the floors.”
It would have been simple to share the information with the public stating that the murders were a bloodbath and that the killer was indeed left-handed, in some kind of newspaper article. But in 1973 gruesome details of homicides were often edited out of stories, as editors considered those graphic details to be too unseemly and grotesque for regular reader consumption.
Some form of intentional censorship would also function to weaken the investigation and perhaps make it go away. It is possible this censorship was encouraged by the detectives at the Portland Police Bureau who had no interest in solving this homicide.
In the impromptu interview I had with Ural, he described his sister and gave a clear impression of the kind of young woman she was — sweet-tempered, quiet, introverted and perhaps too passive. He provided a mental picture of his incredibly pretty younger sister Delores and the challenges she was up against. “She was such a sweetheart. She was so timid, so timid!” Ural remembered.
Ural presented a story of a young and inexperienced girl trapped within the confines of a deadly parasite/host relationship. Delores was too young and too lacking in life experience to understand that what she had with Jernigan represented the thinnest veneer of anything resembling human empathy or genuine love.
Jernigan was incapable of any of that. His inability to love or respect others became the reason he didn’t last long at the Portland Police Bureau, resigning in 1968, rather than be fired. After repeated instances of Portland Police, and the Seattle Police Department observing Jernigan socialize and interact with pimps, including one Jaynolyn Moody, PPB commanders were onto him and no doubt gave him an ultimatum, at which point Jernigan resigned in 1968.
When police officers resign it is often due to official misconduct. They are given two choices by their commanders, resign or face the public humiliation of being fired. Nine times out of ten, a disgraced officer will agree to resign in order to save face.
Jernigan’s corruption while working for PPB seems obvious for the simple reason that Roy Lee Jernigan in 1973 was working as a pimp and a drug dealer, and according to Ural, Jernigan was specifically pimping Delores and may have been using Gwendolyn Fulce for prostitution as well.
Ural revealed that Delores was “terrified of Jernigan,” but conversely, also hopelessly under his spell. When Delores confided in her brother, telling him of her fears Ural tried to be supportive and indeed he tried to save his sister, providing an alternative to the life she was trapped in.
“I said: ‘you don’t have to worry about anything! He doesn’t know where I live, and the only way he can find you is if you bring him.’ And so she did — because she was in love with him, just crazy in love with him.”
Around this time, shortly before the murders, Ural told Dolores he had rented a new house on 28th and Weidler. He gave her the keys which she took gratefully, going straight to Ural’s new home. Ural was surprised to come home from work that very day and find Roy Jernigan standing in his living room, with his left hand resting on his gun. “He was standing right across the room, with his hand on his gun, in the center of the living room,” Ural said, while motioning with his left hand, to the left side of his hip.
If Jernigan had his gun holster on the left side of his hip, with his hand placed on the gun, that would indicate he was, in fact, left-handed, according to Ural’s statement.
Ural recalled how Jernigan gazed coolly at him, before taking Delores by the arm, and walking past him, silently proceeding out the front door. When I asked him to recount the scene, Ural said: “They were talking quietly. Then he took Dolores with him, and she went with him!” When I asked what her mood was, Ural said she seemed “confused” by what was happening.
It must have been disappointing to know that when Ural had given his sister the keys to his new place, in an effort to help Delores escape an abusive relationship, the first thing she appeared to do was call Jernigan and tell him of her whereabouts. Or, perhaps Jernigan was surveilling Delores and had followed her to Ural’s new home.
Finally, I asked Ural what kind of a person Jernigan was and without hesitation, he said: “He was a bully, very much so. If he had tried to hurt her, out on the streets or something I don’t know what I would have done. But she brought him to the house so there wasn’t too much I could say. He hadn’t known where I lived or anything. And then later, my mom said: ‘I believe Roy killed my baby. But I can’t do anything about it. It’s in the hands of the Lord, now. I don’t want any of you kids to get bitter or try to get revenge. That’s not your job!”
When I asked Ural if Jernigan was actually a pimp he said: “He already had my sister working for him and I think she was a recruiter. But she told me once, ‘I’m really scared to death of him.’” Several months before the double homicide, when Ural implored his sister to get away from Jernigan, she said: “I can’t! He’d find me!”
The question of possible motive:
Later, during the interview, I asked Ural and Rosie what the motive for the double homicide would have been and without missing a beat, Ural said: “Jernigan would always take her very last!” I didn’t understand what that meant and asked him to explain. He told me it meant Jernigan would take all her money and leave her with nothing left over to either pay the rent on her house or feed her children. This included depriving his own son Ronnie and Delores’ older son Clark and daughter Teresa of food and general support.
If Dolores had been holding out on Jernigan and not giving him all her earnings, he might feel cheated. What better way to send a message to the other girls in his stable of prostitutes? If Jernigan was willing to kill the mother of his own son, what better way to convince the other girls that he was stone cold and might do the same to them if they held back money?
Delores was likely meant to be an example to the other girls in Jernigan’s stable and Gwendolyn Fulce may have just happened to be there at the house that night, or she may have been spending the night to provide support to Delores. At the time Delores was killed, she was trying to break away from Jernigan and create a new life for herself and her children.
When speaking with Rosie and Ural, they both agreed money was the motive for the murder, like countless other instances when pimps murder a prostitute who is holding out. There is no question that Jernigan was a pimp who was prostituting both Delores and perhaps even Gwendolyn, along with numerous other girls. His documented history as a pimp goes all the way back to 1967 when he was a Portland police officer, and hanging out with Jaynolen Moody.
But could there have been another reason to murder Delores?
As we continued to talk about the details of Delores’s life and how her murder had tragically impacted the lives of her three children, with Ural sighing and explaining, “It’s hard to talk about this…” he and his wife Rosie had another startling revelation to share. Ural and Rosie revealed that at the time Delores was murdered, she was also pregnant.
The fact that Delores was pregnant is intensely problematic, and creates a secondary motive for murder. If Jernigan already had a small toddler with Delores, who had two older children already, it stands to reason that this second pregnancy was another factor in Jernigan wanting to free himself from the responsibility of having a second child with Delores.
And what about paternity? Could it be possible Dolores had gotten pregnant by someone else or was Jernigan the father? Even though she was working for Jernigan as a prostitute and he was essentially giving her nothing, other than his open palm waiting to be filled with her hard won earnings, it seems plausible that another pregnancy would have meant a secondary motive for murder as well.
Jernigan already had an older child with his former wife, Kay, whom he had married in 1963, in Vancouver, Washington, so did he really want to be the father of a third child?
Of all the people in Delores’s life, Jernigan was the only one who had more than one motive for murder, and general access to her home in September of 1973. The question is if he had general access, coming and going when he wanted, did that also mean he had a key to her front door? If Delores and Gwendolyn were working for Jernigan as prostitutes and he was their acting pimp, it is highly likely that he did have a key, and if Jernigan was Delores’s pimp, as well as her lover, why would he not have a key?
Other details of Jernigan’s complicated personal life reveal yet another motive for murder. At the time his first wife Kay Dean was divorcing him in 1971, Jernigan’s son Ronnie would have been about six months old. Did Jernigan’s longtime wife Kay leave him because he was unfaithful with Delores Thompson, which resulted in a pregnancy? It would appear that could easily have been what happened.
Was Jernigan the kind of man who wanted to have his cake and eat it too? Did he want his longtime wife Kay to stay married to him, while he played around on the side? Was he enraged at Delores for destroying his marital happiness? Did he blame her for the divorce?
Jernigan’s PPB Personnel File and What it Reveals:
Perhaps learning some of Jernigan’s true nature can come from the contents of his PPB personnel file. When I examined the 108 pages of Jernigan’s personnel file, I found a clever, educated man who was leading a double life, and perhaps even reveling in that role, with the alluring glamour of sin becoming something that was irresistible to him.
Jernigan’s level of education becomes obvious, while looking at his personnel file. His penmanship, as evidenced from several letters he wrote longhand, was exceptional and attractive — his writing skills were exemplary and his language skills were listed in the 96 percentile in his PPB test results. Jernigan could read and write in Spanish, and could even speak German, in a “limited ability.” Nonetheless, Jernigan was exceptional in many ways. As hobbies, he had listed his love of basketball but also that he was into “painting” as in fine art painting. Jernigan even began the process of attending Clark College in 1965, while working at PPB, image below. But from the very beginning, Jernigan was breaking the rules and giving his superiors at PPB continued red flags. (PPB Personnel File).
January 5, 2022, I spoke by phone with Billy Ballaastressi, a close relative and half sibling to Delores Thompson’s three children. I listened to his emphatic statements about the double homicide and who he had always heard and believed committed the two murders. Ballaastressi had a lot to say about what he and his other family members have known for decades and have struggled to come to terms with — which was the specter of Roy Lee Jernigan and what he had done to shatter their family.
Ballaastressi shared a heartbreaking story that would preoccupy my mind for days afterward, telling me that Jernigan was a frightening persona. “He was a very imposing figure. He used to do drugs right in front of us!” Ballaastressi also shared about Jernigan’s son, Ronnie, who would lose his mother when he was only a baby, saying: “Little brother Ronnie? He knew deep down inside. He knew. That it was his Dad. That his Dad did it!”
In the end, Ballaastressi told me that it would be cocaine that would ultimately destroy Jernigan. This would confirm what I later discovered about Jernigan’s early death at the age of only 42 in 1985. “Cocaine got him. His heart literally burst from using drugs. He had a heart murmur and died from a massive heart attack. I heard it had to do with his drug use. I saw him openly use drugs right in front of us, when we were kids. He’d be driving and he’d snort and then just drive, and we’d be like, what?! It was crazy.”
Jernigan had remained in contact with the Thompson family and often took the children, Clark, Teresa, Ronnie and Billy out for activities and for fun. Ballaastressi says Jernigan did this because in some part of himself he may have felt bad and perhaps “guilty” about what had happened to Delores and Gwendolyn Fulce.
But the Thompson family always suspected it was Jernigan who had killed Delores and Gwendolyn, and that resentment was always just under the surface. Their suspicions were such that it was decided that Jernigan’s son with Delores would no longer be called Roy Lee Jernigan Jr.
After the 1973 murder of Delores Thompson and Gwendolyn Fulce, the boy was renamed Ronnie Dee Thompson, when he went to live with Delores Thompson’s mother. This was something Jernigan deeply resented, but also did not legally challenge. He let it go.
Ballaastressi shared other information that he’d learned over the years: “Jernigan told people he was on the vice squad. I heard this dude was wearing disguises! He was doing stuff that was like, made for TV! And then the police just turn a blind eye?!”
Ballaastressi was angry about the level of power Jernigan had and how no one would cross him, explaining: “This never got solved because they were all scared of him. The police, everybody! They were scared of that dude, because he had the police department behind him. They were scared because he had old ties to police buddies, and he was also a photographer for the Portland Trail Blazers. He had pull. They all had respect for him, because not only did he have ties to the Portland Police, and The Trail Blazers, but he was out golfing with people. He was tied in — he was mobbed up!”
Ballaastressi shared that Jernigan was a golfer, and enjoyed hobnobbing with the wealthy and the elite of Portland, mostly business owners, politicians, professional athletes and other white Portlanders. When Ballaastressi shared that Jernigan was a golfer, I asked which hand was dominant, and Ballaastressi said something revealing: “The clubs were for someone left-handed. I remember, I saw them lots of times in the car.”
As I spoke to Ballaastressi, he shared something else that might have contributed to a third motive for murder. “I heard before Delores died she might have gotten pregnant by a guy named Babe, that was his nickname.” If Delores was trying to get away from Jernigan and had started seeing someone else, that possibility could present a third motive for murder.
Ballaastressi shared why this tragedy won’t leave his mind and why the truth needs to be revealed, saying he’s not against exhumation, and even saying that other family members would be willing to offer their DNA for analysis comparison. “This whole situation is necessary. We have to do it for my family. We have to do it for the cover up. They’ve been trying to sweep it under the rug for so long, keeping it under wraps, because they didn’t want it to make the police look bad. The bodies are at Rose City Cemetery. We visit them, sometimes.”
A tiny scrap of newsprint:
In my research, looking through Jernigan’s personnel file, I discovered that Jernigan was arrested for cocaine distribution, and for using a telephone to conduct drug deals. In an Oregonian Newspaper article, dated November 3, 1977, located in his old personnel file, more information is shared about the level of Jernigan’s corruption and involvement with illicit street drugs and the sale of drugs.
What is significant about this tiny shred of newspaper print is that it was included in the Jernigan personnel file in November of 1977, nine full years after he had resigned from PPB in 1968. This indicates that Jernigan was being watched, at least informally, by those still working within the Portland Police Bureau.
The title of the article reads: Ex-Police Officer Convicted on Multi-count Drug Charge. The short article details the conviction and what the charges were. (PPB Personnel File).
“A former Portland Police officer was convicted Wednesday in U.S. District Court of four counts of distribution of cocaine and four counts of using a telephone in the commission of the crime.
Roy Lee Jernigan, 34, of 9801 NE 13th Ave., was found guilty of the charges after a two-day jury trial presided over by U. S. District Judge Otto Skopil Jr.
Skopil set sentencing for Dec. 12.
Jernigan was a Portland police officer from 1965 to 1968 when he resigned, according to the Police Bureau.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Bauman said Jernigan was charged with the offenses after selling cocaine to an undercover informant Jan. 26, Feb. 1 and Feb. 9.
On March 8, Bauman said, Jergnigan sold to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent a “sample quantity” of cocaine after the agent had arranged for him to purchase 1 and ½ pounds of the drug for $40,000.
Jernigan was indicted on the charges May 25 by a federal grand jury and arrested May 27.
Bauman said Jernigan could receive a maximum sentence of 15 years on each of the distribution counts and four years for each of the counts involving use of a telephone in commission of the crimes.”
What this Oregonian article indicates is that Jernigan had likely been a drug dealer for decades, and could easily have been a pimp, as Ural Thompson, Rosie Thompson, Teresa Thompson, Clark Thompson and Billy Ballastressi have all stated is true, and that the PPB personnel file also corroborates.
Continuing the search:
Because life can be complex, demanding and busy, another year would pass before I found my way back to the research I needed to do in an effort to finish this project. That research again led to another conversation I would have with Ballastrassi, this time in 2023, in which he shared how the murders have impacted his family: “Teresa was the most traumatized. She was the oldest, and she was the most affected. She’s still really emotional about it to this day. Her and my brother have really vivid memories of the two caskets, and the funeral. The funerals were together. Teresa and Clark took it the worst.”
After talking with Ballaastressi, I was told that Clark Thompson, the older son of Delores Thompson wanted to speak with me. Eventually that was arranged and on the afternoon of February 21, 2023, I spoke to Clark Thompson, via telephone.
Clark Thompson, like Billy Ballaastressi, stated that he has always suspected the Portland Police Bureau spent decades covering up the brutal double homicide of his mother and Gwendolyn Fulce, by not vigorously investigating the murders, all in an effort to save face professionally and avoid embarrassment to the department.
Clark also shared more information about the kind of person Jernigan was, explaining that Jernigan was physically abusive to Delores, recalling what he had heard from all the Thompson family members while growing up. “I remember them talking to me about how he beat the shit out of my mom, and why she was hiding from him, and how she got pregnant by another man.”
Clark’s testimony supports the idea that Delores was trying to get away from Jernigan, and had perhaps continued to try to get away from Jernigan even after Ural Thompson gave her a set of keys to his house and Jernigan had found her there, anyway.
Clark lamented how carelessly the initial 1973 investigation was done: “I can’t believe that they didn’t have any kind of information on him being vicious. I mean he was known through the whole town! People were terrified of him!”
My theory on what happened the night of the murders:
In my efforts to make sense of this 1973 double homicide and after speaking with several of Delores Thompson’s family members, and after examining the contents of the PPB personnel file on Jernigan, I have a theory on how the murders were conducted.
*For myself, I believe the Thompson family when they say the murderer of Delores Thompson and Gwendolyn Fulce was in fact Roy Lee Jernigan, the only man close to both women who had access to them, the house in which they were murdered, and multiple motives for murder.
I theorize that on the night of September 7th, 1973, or perhaps the early morning hours of September 8th, Roy Lee Jernigan, waited until after dark and then using a key entered the house at 527 North Ivy Street while Gwendolyn Fulce and Delores Thompson and her baby son, slept.
Because Jernigan may have been beside himself with anger that Delores had been holding out on him and not giving him all her earnings, and because he knew she was trying to get away from him and had started seeing another man, a man named Babe, Jernigan may have been seething with jealousy and a desire for revenge. He may have decided that if he couldn’t have Delores and continue to use her for prostitution, (as she was actively avoiding him and trying to cut ties) then no one else could have her, either, including her new boyfriend.
As Jernigan was trained as a military police officer, he would be trained in lethal kill techniques. Part of that military training involves being stealthy and completely silent when on the offensive and actively stalking a victim.
After Jernigan entered the house he would have found Gwendolyn Fulce, asleep in a chair, in the living room, near to the threshold that divides the living room from the foyer adjacent to the front door. If Fulce woke up, and it’s possible she did, Jernigan may have put his finger to his mouth to shush her, saying something like: “Shhh, I wanna talk to you, but I don’t wanna wake Delores.”
If Gwendolyn obeyed and was silent, Jernigan may have approached her and then, with a hammer hidden behind his back, began beating Fulce on the head, to stun her into unconsciousness. Both women were beaten on the head with what police believed was a claw hammer that was never recovered.
Rendering Fulce unconscious would have been Jernigan’s first task. When Fulce was no longer a threat, and could not scream he would first begin with several punching stabs to the center of her throat, twisting and jerking the blade, severing the vocal cords and rendering her unable to utter a sound in protest. This would also cause her to lose consciousness quickly. Finally, Jernigan would begin severing all her major arteries. This would include the arteries in her groin and the femoral arteries and the arteries behind her knees.
If this was done quickly enough and silently, Jernigan could continue down the hall, to do the same to Delores Thompson, the mother of three children, including his own toddler son. He would then leave for several hours. He would go back to his home, clean up, dispose of any weapons and bloodied clothing, clean the interior of his car, and come back later, to innocently pick up his son, and “discover” the horrendous bloodbath inside the house.
Another red flag is that the manner of death appears to have been so personal. Was all that slashing really necessary? It seems like overkill. If Jernigan had simply wanted to kill both women, a single stab wound to the heart, to the left of the center of the chest would have sufficed. That would have been all that was needed, but to slash them all over their bodies, including their groin? Why? Unless he was sending a message, the slashing of both women represents overkill and that the murders were done with rage that was personal.
Indifferent Police Investigators:
I contend that the police investigators, such as Sgt Gordon Morgan may have dusted for prints and even shoe prints, but Jernigan would be far too smart to leave fingerprints or shoe prints at a murder scene. He would have been wearing gloves and perhaps even plastic covers over his shoes. If his young toddler son did not actually witness the slaughter, (it is possible he slept through it) then he would eventually wake up and might wander the house for hours. His little feet likely tracked through all the pools of blood, contaminating the crime scene and covering up any possible foot imprints Jernigan may have left.
If Jernigan was so stone cold that he could kill the mother of his own child, what would prevent him from allowing his young son to wander the house, walking through pools of blood in both the living room and in the back bedroom if it meant his alibi would be made stronger and more believable to the responding police detectives?
Based on the testimony of the Thompson family members, including Billy Ballaastressi, I contend that this is what happened. I further contend that the police investigators who were the first responders to the scene tasked with investigating this double homicide would have suspected Jernigan from the start.
In the long run, they would choose not to investigate Jernigan, because if he had an alibi, (namely someone willing to lie for him) and if his story was consistent and there was no physical evidence to tie him to the scene, what could they do, except go onto the next case? They would choose not to fully investigate Jernigan because ultimately, I believe they were afraid of him.
Jernigan was an incredibly tall and powerful looking dark skinned Black man who was known for being intense and vindictive. He was not a Portlander but was from New York. Jernigan was more than likely quite familiar with the five boroughs of New York — the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Manhattan, (where he would graduate from high school) and the illegal activity that went on in all those areas.
Jernigan would have grown up around vice of every kind. He would have been a witness to the casual corruption that would rival any Serpico story of a dirty, racist NYPD cop. As a man born and raised in New York, Jernigan would be wise to all kinds of criminal activity during the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s.
And because of how Jernigan had grown up, around such toxic dynamics, he would have been intimately familiar with racism in all its ugliness. Jernigan would have learned to stand up for himself early, to defend himself against all kinds of possible predation. He would have had an aura about him — an intensity, a mystery and a particular kind of knowledge — an air of silent threat to anyone foolish enough to cross him.
The officers and detectives with PPB would have known that only five years before the murders, Roy Lee Jernigan resigned from the Portland Police Bureau, rather than be fired, to avoid public humiliation for his felonious activities. They would have known he was out prostituting and pimping women and young girls with the help of notorious Portland pimp, Jaynolen Moody. (PPB Personnel File).
The detectives would have known Jernigan had been caught in multiple felonies in 1967 by the Seattle Police, for which he was never charged and which led to his 1968 resignation. They would have known Jernigan was seen and photographed in places like Federal Way, Kent and Seattle Washington with Jaynolen Moody, for the sole purpose of prostituting young women and girls for money. As a Portland police officer, Jernigan would have stood out like a sore thumb, simply because of how dark and tall he was, standing at an impressive six feet six inches. (PPB Personnel File).
PPB detectives may have decided that if the two young victims were Black, then why look for the killer, if the killer was a Black man who had also been a disgraced Portland cop? If the truth came out, it would be a huge embarrassment to PPB for the simple reason that Portland citizens would want to know why PPB had hired such a bad apple.
The Portland Police Bureau would have to admit that their recruiters and psychologists, whose job it was to screen applicants were so lacking in judgment, that they had given the go-a-head on a New York man who would prove to be a sociopath, and later a heartless murderer of two young women. They must have come to the conclusion that perhaps, it would just be better to leave this stinker of a “family beef” alone. This would not be the first time a Portland police officer or detective would turn a blind eye to something bad they knew was bad simply to protect the bureau from embarrassment.
Moreover, there is no doubt in my mind that if the two murdered women had been white, the trajectory of the investigation would have been conducted entirely differently. But Gwendolyn Fulce and Delores Thompson were not white. Because they were Black, the investigators, all white men, simply didn’t care enough to vigorously investigate the double homicide and get justice for either the Thompson or the Fulce family.
They let it go.
There have been several PPB investigators, who over the years have interviewed the Thompson family. This includes a cold case detective in 2011, Meredith Hopper. But it would appear that all of these investigators, including Hopper, have not taken what the Thompson family has told them seriously. When the Thompson family told PPB detectives repeatedly over the intervening decades that Delores Thompson had no enemies, other than who they believed the killer was, Roy Lee Jernigan, a former Portland Police officer, their collective statements to PPB detectives seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
Perhaps now that will change.
The painful legacy of the murder of Delores Thompson and Gwendolyn Fulce:
If you have read this far, do you wonder what the murder of Delores Thompson and her best friend, Gwendolyn Fulce has cost their loved ones?
The reality is that the cost of losing a loved one to this kind of violence, particularly a parent, is simply immeasurable. Teresa, Clark and Ronnie Thompson’s lives have all been irrevocably altered because they lost their mother in the prime of her life, in 1973, the victim of a horrible murder conducted silently in the darkest hours of the night.
The morning of March 2nd, 2023, I was contacted by Teresa Thompson, the daughter of Delores Thompson. We chatted for over an hour and Teresa confirmed and elaborated upon many things I’d heard already from Clark Thompson and Billy Ballaastressi. She confirmed that Jernigan was a brutal abuser, who beat her mother regularly. When she tried to protect her mother and intervene, Jernigan would bark at her, “Get outa here!” ordering her into another room, where she would continue to hear Jernigan physically batter her mother, and verbally berate her as Delores wept and struggled to defend herself.
Delores Thompson’s youngest child, Ronnie Dee Thompson, would never get to know his beautiful mother with the poetic face and the sad eyes. He would have no concrete memory of her, other than perhaps intuitively feeling her love and care for the two years or so that he was her son and she loved and cared for him.
After a life of sadness, confusion and the sorrow of knowing, as his family members have attested, that his own father murdered not only his mother, but his mother’s best friend, Ronnie’s life would be sacrificed to the fire of this enormous loss — through the reprehensible violence that would devastate so many lives.
Ronnie would also live with the knowledge that his father had gotten away with it.
The morning of March 7, 2023, I again chatted with Teresa Thompson. She told me she had not known that Roy Jernigan resigned from PPB in 1968. She shared that Jernigan had been telling people he was still working for PPB as of 1985. When I asked Teresa if she’d ever seen Jernigan’s badge she stated she had, on many occasions: “There were lots of times I saw his badge. He’d wear it on his hip.”
This is not altogether uncommon among some police officers who are forced to resign rather than be fired for misconduct. Sometimes they claim to have lost their badges and ID cards, but keep them anyway. Teresa has said that this was what Jernigan was doing, claiming he was still a PPB officer seventeen years after he had been forced to resign due to being a pimp who worked directly with Portland pimp Jaynolen Moody in the late 1960s.
The horror of seeing a dead body covered in blood:
One of the saddest, most tragic memories comes from Teresa Thompson, (Delores Thompson’s oldest child) when she told me more of what happened the day her mother and Gwendolyn Fulce were discovered murdered in 1973.
Teresa and her brother Clark had been living with their grandmother Margaret Lucile Thompson, Delores’ mother. The arrangement had been made sometime before because their mother’s lifestyle had become “too chaotic.” It was an arrangement that seemed to work well for all concerned. Their grandmother, Margaret, lived only four blocks from the rental house where Delores lived with her baby son and there were regular pleasant visits between both houses.
On the night of the murders, Teresa had wanted to spend the night with her mother, something she and Clark often did. But after Teresa had been at her mother’s house for a few hours, and it was getting toward evening, her grandmother called on the phone and told Teresa she had to come home. The older woman told Teresa she “had a bad feeling” and wanted her home with Clark. The sudden change of plans was upsetting but Teresa honored her grandmother’s wishes and walked home, weeping all the way. She went to her room and was soon getting ready for bed. The following morning, Teresa heard her grandmother in the living room wailing and instantly knew something was horribly wrong.
She sprung out of bed, and raced out the door, still in her nightgown, and sprinted the four blocks to her mother’s house. The scene was absolute chaos. She found police cars surrounding the house and more than ten Portland police officers milling about in the yard, on the front porch and in the house.
“I remember the night of the murders, my grandmother called and made me come home, which was on Haight Street, down from where my mom lived. I remember being upset because I couldn’t spend the night with my mom. My grandmother said she had a ‘bad feeling’ and to ‘come home now!’ I left crying as I walked home. The next day I heard my grandmother on the phone saying: ‘OH LORD JESUS!’ Right then I felt sick to my stomach and ran out the door for my mom’s house. When I got there, there was police everywhere. As I ran up the stairs Roy was coming down the stairs with baby Ronnie in his arms. I ran past the police who were at the door and that’s when I saw a bloody body laid out on the floor. There was blood everywhere and I thought it was my mother, but later I heard it wasn’t — it was Gwendolyn Fulce. A cop picked me up and took me outside. By that time the rest of the family got there, I remember just crying and crying and crying. When I looked at Roy as he was coming down the stairs, his face was so eerie to me. I believe if I’d spent the night Roy would have killed me too, cause I was old enough to tell, and I wasn’t his child. The smirk on his face was like he didn’t care. There were no emotions of sadness at all. His whole attitude was cold-hearted and cold-blooded. One of the cops even patted his back as he was coming down the stairs!”
When I asked Teresa to elaborate on the look Jernigan gave her she said: “It was like a smug glare. Like he was satisfied with himself and was telling me I was too late.”
Back in 2011, Teresa Thompson remembers being interviewed by PPB cold case Detective Meredith Hopper. Teresa was angry when she shared with me what Hopper said, after she told Hopper how she had run to the house that horrible day in 1973 and everything she saw, including Jernigan’s strange, hostile glare. Teresa’s voice dripped with bitterness when she said: “After I told Detective Hopper about how I ran to the house and what I saw, she said, “How could you remember any of that? You were only nine.”
*Most people know that a nine-year-old child can remember and recollect extremely complex experiences, particularly if they involve trauma. The traumatic incident becomes embedded in their brain, and burnt upon their memory, often replaying in a continuous loop of memory.
The refusal to listen to Teresa Thompson and other Thompson family members’ recollections, as they pointed to Roy Lee Jernigan as the killer has only one purpose for Hopper and the other PPB cold case detectives, and that purpose is to continue to deny the reality of this case and what that reality means.
The refusal to take the Thompson family’s testimony seriously minimizes what they remember by suggesting they were mistaken or that in Teresa’s case, she was too young to accurately remember specific details. The end result of this continued denial is that again, this double homicide remains swept aside, not dealt with and relegated to an even darker corner of that mysterious PPB cold case shelf where problematic cold cases seem to end up.
*All of my attempts to reach Meredith Hopper over the past several months have been unsuccessful. This included messaging her on Facebook, emailing her and calling PPB on the telephone and leaving two messages to have her call me. She has never once responded to one of my queries, and that tells me a great deal in itself.
And what of Gwendolyn Fulce? What of her life? The only family I can in any way speak for, in my limited capacity as a writer of history, is the Thompson family. I have not been able to contact the Fulce family, though I’ve tried.
I have communicated with one distant cousin, but that woman, reached through Ancestry Dot Com could not help me. The reality is, I can only share what the death of Delores has meant to the Thompson family and what they have told me personally. Gwendolyn Fulce, the first to die, is often the forgotten victim, because there is no one left or able to speak for her.
This is the other sad reality of history writing and crime writing. Sometimes you can’t locate surviving family members because they don’t want to go down the sad path of remembrance. When a fragile thread of hope springs up, only to be destroyed again, with yet another disappointment, sometimes after so many decades, people simply turn away. And who can blame them?
The Thompson family wants justice–after fifty years this justice must happen:
When it comes down to why this double homicide has not been solved, or why the Thompson family has not been genuinely listened to, I have only one explanation. It is an unpopular one that will not gain me any friends with fans of PPB.
My explanation is that those working in the Portland Police Bureau, during 1973, and even after that have avoided the reality of the implications of this double homicide for decades. They have not honestly addressed the reality of who the only suspect to this crime ever was because of what that honest appraisal would mean.
Some of Jernigan’s words and what they mean about racism and his life:
On the last two pages of the Jernigan PPB personnel file, jumbled as it was, I found a revealing passage and in it I got to see some of the perspective of Roy Lee Jernigan, reading his recorded words transcribed in a written report from over fifty years ago, several lifetimes ago, really.
The report details an incident that occurred only days after Jernigan had been hired as a sworn Portland police officer and illustrates the timelessness of racism, identity and disenfranchisement, based on how people of color were treated then, even by other Black people.
In a special two page “Intelligence” report, dated August 18th, 1965, from the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, two officers, Officer Travis and Officer Winalow observed a Black man they didn’t recognize drinking in a Portland tavern at 2:10 pm. The man they didn’t recognize began talking with the bartender, “…pertaining exclusively re: “The Racial Problem.”
Roy Lee Jernigan had visited the Theme tavern, a popular spot which black and white Portlanders often frequented, located at 3819 N.E. Union Avenue. Two Multnomah County Sheriff’s officers overheard Jernigan and what he was saying to the bartender, a man named Johnny Hamilton, and as they listened, they began to take notes. Jernigan had been working as a sworn Portland police officer for only eleven days, having been hired August 5, 1965, when this incident occurred. (PPB Personnel File).
In the report, the two officers come to the dramatic conclusion that Jernigan was not fit to be a Portland police officer. At the end of the report, the two officers had written the following: “SUMMATION: In writers opinion, subject Jernigan is (as per his performance re: this situation) is a “DISGRACE TO THE POLICE PROFESSION” and perhaps a re-evaluation of his status as a Police Officer should be forthcoming.”
Jernigan hadn’t been a police officer for even one month and already he was turning heads and making himself known. In a certain respect, Jernigan was ahead of his time. He was well educated, intelligent and outspoken — a dangerous combination for Portland, Oregon in 1965, especially if you were a Black man.
When I read the recorded statements from the written report about Roy Jernigan, aged only 22-years-old at the time, I heard the logical complaints of a man who understood the sting of racism, and social, cultural and economic inequity. Jernigan’s recorded statements are as follows, numbered from one to five.
“No negro is an American Citizen nor are any recognized as such.”
“There’s no such thing as brown or black, etc, if you have Negro blood, then you are black.”
“I don’t like to be called colored by any white man.”
“When Negros call for assistance for food, in an Negro area, they are refused by white Officers.”
“ALL white Police Officers are prejudiced toward the Negros & will go out of their way to not render assistance when said assistance is requested.” (PPB Personnel File).
But who was Jernigan talking about?
Was he talking about officers within the Portland Police Bureau or officers within the police departments of NYPD, in New York, where he had been born and raised? At the time of this 1965 incident, Jernigan hadn’t been a police officer for even two weeks. He could not have that manner of knowledge about Portland police officers after only eleven days on the job. I believe his statements were made in a generalized way and that he was referring to the years and decades when he had seen those very things happen — white officers turning away hungry Black families requesting food assistance — in New York City.
When former PPB detective Don DuPay, wrote a long essay regarding his time working for the Portland Police Bureau, called The Black and Blue Retort Report, he specifically mentioned the “food closet” at North Precinct, maintained by police officers’ own personal food stores. DuPay also mentioned the food bank at The Sunshine Division, and that he and other white and Black male officers were required to bring food boxes from those two locations, to struggling families all through North and NE Portland.
DuPay also mentions in the above essay that he always performed that duty, happy to help feed hungry families, children, particularly. DuPay remembers bringing food to white, Black, Asian and Native American families, denying no family, even bringing food boxes when the family did not specifically request food assistance.
I suspect when Roy Jernigan made the remark: “When Negros call for assistance for food, in an Negro area, they are refused by white Officers,” he was remembering things he witnessed or may have perhaps experienced himself, back home in NY. There is no way Jernigan would have had the experience working with PPB to make that kind of incorrect assertion about officers in Portland, Oregon, when he hadn’t been an officer for even one month.
When looked at as a whole, however, is there anything in Jernigan’s general statements regarding racism that would not make sense to a person of color, going all the way back to August of 1965?
It is noteworthy to know that Officer Travis was also a Black officer, but lighter skinned than Jernigan. At one point, having inserted themselves in the conversation Jernigan was having with the bartender, Officer Travis asked Jernigan a question regarding Travis’s own skin color. “Officer Travis asked subject Jernigan how he felt about the difference between his (Travis, who is lighter than subject) Jernigan’s color. Jernigan replied that there is only one color — BLACK.”
Right after this exchange occurred, the bartender Johnny Hamilton, appears to lose patience with Jernigan and asks him, “How can you, a Police Officer, make such statements and take that attitude about race?”
The report continues, with the two deputies asking Jernigan if he is in fact a police officer and he admits that he is. Later in the report, Jernigan would be asked another troubling question: “Bartender Hamilton asked subject if he was an American Citizen. Subject replied, “No, how can I consider myself an American Citizen when the white people treat us as they do.”
This exchange indicates that the bartender Johnny Hamilton wasn’t even sure if Jernigan was American born. There can only be two reasons for this. Number one because Jernigan was so articulate and well spoken, and number two, because Jernigan was as dark skinned as he was. Hamilton must have presumed Jernigan was African — a man who had immigrated from the African continent, but certainly not “American,” in the accepted sense of the word.
The world Jernigan grew up in, in New York, a world that was dominated by white supremacy would have acted as a constant reminder of his general powerlessness and irrelevance as a human being. Even as Jernigan excelled academically and athletically in high school and later on in college, he would be told in daily passive-aggressive “microaggressions” that he was not accepted, not good enough and not wanted in the white America all around him.
Despite being born and raised an American, Jernigan would not feel accepted by anyone, least of all the many white Portlanders during that time in 1965. Jernigan would have been like many Black men during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, trying to survive in a world clouded by racist behaviors, racist beliefs and racist traditions.
Jernigan would have heard the smirks and racist remarks from other white police officers, particularly from the older officers, the “old timers” as they were called who came up the ranks during the 1930s and 1940s. For they were certainly there and their harassment of officers of color within PPB was well known and has been documented in other PPB personnel files of other Black officers.
One longtime Portlander, a woman who will remain anonymous, remembers Jernigan going to a well-known bar popular with Black Portlanders. The bar, was located in the North End during the early 1970s and this Portlander remembers that Jernigan seemed to always be looking over his shoulder:
“I never knew he was a cop! I met him in 1974. I only knew him as a guy who would stop in mostly after Blazer games. He’d socialize a while and leave. If he was once a cop that explains why I always thought he was kind of mysterious when he came into the club. He seemed like he was always on high alert when he came in. There were some guys that would come in and you kinda knew they would ‘set up the bar’ because they could. Jernigan and his two buddies, Zolly and Thad Spencer were guys that would do that. They’d purchase drinks for everyone sitting at the bar.”
Ultimately, by the time Roy Lee Jernigan was 30-years-old, I contend he would be consumed with self-loathing, deep frustration and even hatred at his lot in life, at the cards he had been dealt as a Black man, whether he realized it or not.
Jernigan had big dreams once. He had wanted to become a “criminal lawyer” but couldn’t last more than a year at the University of Portland. The self-hatred he would struggle against expressed itself outwardly in his contempt for people who were the same color he was, but were perhaps inferior to him in his own mind, lacking his level of education, intelligence, perception, sophistication or social standing.
Later, in 1973, that hatred and contempt for his own color and his own powerlessness would be projected onto two blameless Black women who had never done anything to deserve the contemptible fate they were dealt at his hands. Jernigan’s hatred for his own people would have made it easy to murder two Black women he decided had crossed him and as a result deserved to die.
And Jernigan would have known that no one in the white upper command staff at PPB would really care to do anything about it. Because the women were Black, Jernigan would have known this. The responding officers in uniform, and even the detectives working the homicide detail would simply not have cared enough to fight for those two young women who had their entire futures ahead of them.
Like crushed roses, the lives of Delores Thompson, and Gwendolyn Fulce, would be snuffed out forever in a planned and deliberate attack that would cause irreparable heartbreak for Thompson’s three surviving children and the rest of the extended families.
Rumors and Possibilities: In my effort to learn as much as I could, I tried to get copies of additional PPB personnel files, which might help shed light on Jernigan and anyone who might have been close to him. I was told by an unnamed insider, whose anonymity I will protect, that Jernigan had been friendly with Richard “Dick” Bogle, (1930–2010), and that they had “run together” while working as Portland police officers and may have pimped out girls together, as well.
I had to consider this possibility but I also took it with a huge grain of salt. This was of course only rumor, but often where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
Dick Bogle had been a Portland police officer from 1959 to 1968, resigning January 22, 1968, the same year Jernigan would resign. A second unnamed source has told me that Dick Bogle engaged in illegal and opportunistic behavior while he was a young Portland police officer. This person alleged that Bogle became drunk with the power he was afforded as a police officer. I believe this second source was relying on good information that has been corroborated by others I know who’ve retired from PPB.
After Bogle left PPB, he was hired elsewhere in 1968 as “…the first Black on-air reporter for a Northwest television station when he was hired by KATU.” He later entered politics and became a city commissioner in 1984, becoming well known for doing his best to create policies that would help make Portland a better place and help promote social justice for Black folks, specifically. In his off time, Bogle wrote articles and reviews for the Portland jazz music scene and much later in his life he would spend a couple of years volunteering to help solve cold case murders, despite never having been a homicide detective with PPB.
I contacted the Portland Archives and Records Center and applied for access to two personnel files, the Bogle personnel file and the file of the lead investigator of the 1973 double homicide, Sgt. Gordon “Gordie” Morgan. After a month of searching I was contacted by an archivist from the records center, and was told that the Bogle file could not be found. They told me that Bogle or his family had likely taken the personnel file themselves, which if true, is also entirely legal.
Two weeks later, I received a followup email from an excited archivist telling me that the file had finally been located in some obscure location within the Archives and Records Center. Looking over the PPB personnel file for Dick Bogle was quite interesting. As hobbies he had listed fishing, bodybuilding and reading, with memberships to the NAACP Urban League and the Masonic Order, with three years of college listed as well. I could tell by reading Bogle’s written reports he was educated and intelligent.
There are parts of Bogle’s PPB personnel file that are revealing, though, if only when you read between the lines. In two early typed reports, Bogle shared that he was receiving death threats from residents in the North End. These residents were men and from what my second unnamed source has told me, corroborating the claim, the threats were coming from only Black men within the Black community. Bogle’s over confidence is openly displayed in the report when he writes: “This report for informational purposes only and is not to be considered as a request for transfer Ha Ha.”
In other documents in the Bogle personnel file, early on in his career hand written supervisor evaluations express concern over Bogle, beginning when he began working in the Vice Squad in April of 1960. One evaluator expressed concern that Bogle was “too aggressive” and “too friendly” upon first meeting other officers and that it may lead to problems.
My second unnamed source claims that Bogle, when he was young and only a couple of years after becoming a sworn police officer, was, “…coercing light-skinned Black women to have sex with him, telling them if they didn’t agree, he would arrest their husbands, and put them in jail.” In the early 1960s, when men were the primary breadwinner, that kind of a threat might lead to a family being ruined, unable to pay their rent, and perhaps ending up without a home.
“The women Bogle targeted were Black women who were married. They had husbands and children. Respectable Black women. Beautiful Black women. This is when the outrage in the community started. When Bogle first signed on with the police, the Black community was proud. There would be more than only the Duke brothers and a couple of other Black officers at the police department. Bogle came from a respected family of educated hard workers who helped people in the Black community, including his mother who was a journalist. So, how could he turn on his own people like that? There were Black men who were furious, and they were more than just the husbands of the women affected. These guys wanted to kill him. Everyone felt betrayed by what he had been doing. He was not raping the women but he was giving them no choice but to go along.”
The story I was told, (repeatedly over a period of almost ten years) by my second unnamed source, is that sometime after Bogle had written the two letters to his supervisors in April of 1961 regarding the death threats, he was in fact cornered in the back of a tavern. The incident is alleged to have occurred “after hours” and that Bogle was beaten to within an inch of his life by several Black men from the community. While they whipped him, kicked and punched him for almost an hour, they berated him and expressed their anger at what he’d done to these “decent Black women.” His badge and gun were then taken from him and he was thrown out into the rainy Portland night, bleeding and injured.
What Bogle would find out later, according to my source, is that the Black men had wanted to kill him and had contacted two officers they knew they could trust, telling them of their desires and what Bogle had been doing. But the officers, who worked in Vice told them: “You can’t kill him. You can teach him a lesson but you can’t kill him. He’s still a Portland police officer.”
Code for “teach him a lesson” would be to administer a beating and nothing more. That is what happened, at which point, Bogle spent several weeks recovering at home, according to my source. Later, he had time to think about what had happened and what it meant. According to my second unnamed source, Bogle put two and two together. He knew there were Black men in the North End who acted as longtime informants for certain Portland police officers working the Vice Detail. And he knew those Black men would be able to contact the officers in question if they had a beef with anyone.
Bogle knew that for these Black men to assault him for almost an hour, they had to have been given “the go-a-head” by someone in the upper command staff. And the upper command staff in 1961 were all white men. That realization, more than anything, according to my source, altered his perspective and he “changed his life and turned over a new leaf.” Bogle would then resign from the Portland Police Bureau a few years later in 1968, the same year Jernigan would resign.
I was told by my first unnamed source that Bogle may have pimped girls, along with Jernigan, and that they were indeed close. And while that is a possibility, I refuse to believe that Dick Bogle would ever have been involved in any manner of serious crime above or beyond that. I don’t believe Dick Bogle would have had the temperament or inclination to engage in serious predatory behavior such as commit any form of homicide.
However, another curious element of the Bogle PPB personnel file is a form dated November 21 1984. In that document, which was signed by Bogle only 15 days after he was elected as a Portland city commissioner, on November 6th, 1984, Bogle admits he has, “Received this date, November 21, 1984, from Captain R. Haven, Personnel Division, 71 pages copies from my Personnel Division Folder.”
There are only 87 pages currently remaining in the existing Bogle personnel file. The pages, which were generally numbered by hand in pen or pencil in the right hand top corner from 1 to the final number are a jumbled mess in Bogle’s file. This is not uncommon with many of these old PPB personnel files including Jernigan’s. They are often a complete mess. What is curious about the Bogle file is that the first eleven pages read numerically… 96, 16, 102, 87, 84, 85, 104, 98, 101, 106 and 92. Where are all the missing pages and why were they taken? Because there are pages missing.
Why would Bogle want to copy or remove 71 pages? The request sounds strongly like an attempt to sanitize a personnel file, and perhaps do damage control now that he was a newly elected city commissioner. Being a journalist Bogle would also have known that at some point, someone might gain access to his PPB personnel file and learn something he wouldn’t want them to know. Did Bogle receive only copies or were the pages actually removed?
It is hard to know based on what has happened to other PPB personnel files, even going back to 2014 when numerous files were strong-armed away from Jim Huff who had assembled and organized over 2,500 PPB personnel files for the Police Museum.
At this point, it is unlikely anyone will ever know the truth behind such a suspect request for records that were likely never returned to the original file. All anyone can do now is speculate.
Despite all of these unanswered questions, I continue to believe that Roy Lee Jernigan acted alone when he murdered Gwendolyn Fulce and Delores Thompson. This is supported by what Ural Thompson told me when he shared details about the investigator who visited him in his home, in 1973. That investigator told Ural that both women had been murdered by the same assailant, a person who had been left-handed.
While looking through the extensive personnel file of Sgt. Gordon Morgan, I found nothing of consequence. He was never once officially disciplined, or written up. His commendations and letters of appreciation from Portland citizens were glowing and numerous. The only thing of interest that I did see were three separate references by police evaluators that he became “too involved,” in murder investigations and in his desire to solve them, providing families of murder victims with answers and resolution. But Morgan had been in the military just as Jernigan had, and would have learned various kill techniques common in soldiering.
There is no mention of the horrific 1973 double homicide in Morgan’s PPB personnel file, despite the lead investigator being listed by Portland media as being Sgt. Gordon Morgan. The personnel file of Sgt. Morgan showed only an exemplary police officer who retired after over 30 years and was a credit to the Bureau in every way.
Why would Morgan never have suspected Jernigan, though? Or perhaps he did, but just didn’t want to take Jernigan on. If “everyone” was terrified of Jernigan, as Billy Ballaastressi has stated, would it be impossible for a well-intentioned PPB Sergeant like Morgan to also be so unnerved by Jernigan’s secretive, inscrutable and intense demeanor that he would just let it go? The murder of two Black women?
The fast life is a burner:
What history does tell us is that Roy Lee Jernigan died at the age of only 42 of what family members say was a massive drug induced heart attack. If Jernigan did die of a heart attack, it was likely due to an enlarged heart after decades of consistent cocaine use. Cocaine, something he couldn’t seem to live without, would finally put an end to his tumultuous and chaotic life.
According to family, Jernigan collapsed while playing golf and was taken by ambulance to a Portland hospital where he fell into a coma and died shortly after. Teresa, Ronnie and their Aunt Bambi were at his side, with Teresa comforting young Ronnie, who would have been a boy of only 14 and now an orphan.
When I asked Teresa Thompson about her feelings for Jernigan, or whether he was abusive to her, she said: “I didn’t like Roy. He was mean to me, and very distant, but he never put his hands on me. He was verbally abusive towards me, and I didn’t like how he used to beat my mom and tell me to leave the room.” When Teresa explained that Jernigan would beat her mother in front of her, it became clear that Jernigan was as brutal a man as was possible, with no concern if Delores’ three children were present or not.
When I asked Teresa if she also believed Jernigan had murdered her mother she replied: “YES I DO WITH ALL MY HEART!”
Teresa elaborated, explaining that Jernigan “was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” type of personality. She went on to state: “I feel in my heart that he was evil. As I got older, I sure saw his true colors, as a person who didn’t give a damn about anyone but himself!”
When recalling her mother, Delores, Teresa shared many things that are universal about love and longing when remembering the departed. She said she misses her mother’s hugs, and the special way she smelled and her laugh. “I remember that on Easter she’d make it a game by cracking the Easter eggs on our forehead. Another memory was of her pushing me on the bike, then letting go, and her laugh of happiness that I learned how to ride a bike.”
This is what is lost when children lose a parent to murder. This.
Growing up and becoming an adult doesn’t change the trauma, or the longing, or the melancholy. In a way, they remain that small child, trapped in time, the child who lost their parent to murder just like that.
Roy Lee Jernigan’s haunting death in 1985 leaves an unforgettable impression:
Maybe it is true, as Billy Ballaastressi has suggested, that in his later life, Roy Lee Jernigan may have tried to make up for the disaster he created when he murdered two young women, one of whom was Delores Thompson, the beautiful young mother of three small children, including the mother of Jernigan’s own baby son, Ronnie.
Perhaps by then, when Jernigan was older, he saw the bigger picture — the unhappiness and bottomless sadness he had created in so many lives. Maybe it is true that Jernigan “felt guilty” for what he had done, and was perhaps even haunted by his actions. Maybe that’s why he spent all those years taking the kids out for activities, including trips to ice cream shops on Ronnie’s birthday — trying to show them a bit of fun — Teresa, Clark, Ronnie, and Billy — trying to make up for what he had done in stealing Delores away from them in a moment of irrational craziness and unjustified hatred.
Perhaps Jernigan felt none of that and never gave his malevolent actions a second thought.
Teresa confided that on the day Jernigan died, he tried to cash two welfare checks belonging to family members, snatching them away from the women they belonged to, telling them the checks were his now. They were too scared of him to object. He died later that day, before he was able to cash them and the checks were returned to their rightful owners.
The truth is, none of us will ever really know how Jernigan felt about the many crimes he committed in his troubled and short life, or how his history in New York City shaped him into the toxic, troubled and rage-filled man that he became.
Perhaps in some unexplainable way, Jernigan timed his death to occur when it did. Maybe for him there was a particular date that haunted him, that he couldn’t get out of his mind, or perhaps it was merely the universe righting a wrong in an ironic and spectacular fashion.
Perhaps that is why Roy Lee Jernigan died September 7th of 1985, which could easily have been the very night he murdered Gwendolyn Fulce and Delores Thompson back in 1973. It is possible that Thompson and Fulce were murdered the night of September 7th, lying where they were slain, their bodies to be “discovered” by Jernigan the following day on September 8th.
Perhaps the day Jernigan died was a simple accounting of his many perpetrated sins and a desire for the relief only absolution could offer him, by dying on that very day.
Author’s Note: This essay is not an attack on the current Portland Police Bureau in any way. It is not my intention to embarrass PPB. We in Portland have one of the most transparent and dedicated police departments in the country. But in 1973, over 50-years-ago, the Portland Police Bureau was an entirely different department. It was filled with corrupt vice cops, patrolmen, and corrupt commanders, captains and lieutenants. Most armchair historians who have looked into Portland history are well aware of this fact. Again, it is not my intention to embarrass PPB, but rather to do my small part in helping to right a wrong, and provide what documentation and personal testimony I can, to help shed light on a double homicide that ought to have been cleared decades ago. If any PPB detectives are offended by anything I’ve suggested in this essay, perhaps they should look into why that is, and how their behavior impacted Teresa Thompson and the rest of the Thompson family.
There will be a shorter followup essay on this unsolved double homicide when additional information becomes available.
Important Links:
https://www.portlandoregon.gov/police/article/457982
https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/dolores-thompson-24-35qff0z
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/582/1211/400997/
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/123573162/gwendolyn-fulce
https://www.misconductpodcast.com/episodes/2020/7/2/cold-case-spotlight-2
http://www.interment.net/data/us/or/multnomah/willanat/j/willamette_j03.htm
https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F2/582/582.F2d.1211.78-1174.html
https://www.facebook.com/meredith.hopper.14/
References:
Alexander, Devonte. Telephone Interview with Theresa Griffin Kennedy. Oregon. 02–23–2023
Ballaastressi, Billy. Telephone Interview with Theresa Griffin Kennedy. January 2022
Goldman, Evan. “Why do some trained assassins prefer a knife to the kidney for a silent kill instead of snapping their target’s neck?” Quora. 2020.
Thompson, Clark. Telephone Interview with Theresa Griffin Kennedy. Oregon. 02–21–2023.
Thompson, Ural. Personal Interview with Theresa Griffin Kennedy. Oregon. 12–20–2021.
Thompson, Rosie. Personal Interview with Theresa Griffin Kennedy. Oregon. 12–20- 2021.
Thompson, Teresa. Telephone Interview with Theresa Griffin Kennedy. Oregon. 03–2–2023.
“It was far too removed, as if she were discussing a science experiment or a grammar lesson and not the double homicide of two young women snuffed out in the prime of their lives.”
That sounds like the same Meredith Hopper who gave me the brush-off. Why would somebody in a job like that be so dismissive?
https://portlanddissent.substack.com/p/speaking-in-codes