The Deck - Loni Kai Okaruru (5 of Hearts, Oregon)

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Our card this week is Loni Kai Okaruru, the 5 of Hearts from Oregon.Loni Kai Okaruru made several stops on the morning of August 26, 2001, and interacted with several people, before she was beaten to death, her body left on a farm in Washington County, Oregon. Loni Kai’s murder was quickly labeled by police as a hate crime, but decades later her killer is still unknown. If you know anything about the murder of Loni Kai Okaruru in August 2001 in northwest Oregon, please call the Washington County Sheriff’s Investigations Division at 503-846-2500, and ask for Detective Shannon Wilde.To learn more about Basic Rights Oregon, please visit their website by clicking here.audiochuck is proud to support the Trans Journalists Association, an organization whose mission is to promote accurate, nuanced coverage of trans issues and communities in the media. To explore resources, learn more about their work, and join us in supporting them, please visit https://www.transjournalists.org/  Thank you to author and activist Raquel Willis, who helped us by reviewing and editing this episode. Visit her website to learn more about her work! View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/loni-kai-okaruruLet us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo apply for a Cold Case Playing Card grant through Season of Justice, please visit www.seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

Our card this week is Lani Kai O'Gururu, the five of hearts from Oregon. For more than 20 years, investigators have retraced Lani's last steps from the night that she was viciously murdered. And while that tactic has provided some solid clues, none have led to answers as to what happened to her. But police are pretty certain that they know why Lonnie was targeted. That likely motive combined with fresh eyes on the case and some physical evidence means that Lonnie

is closer than ever to getting justice. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. It was just after seven in the morning on August 26, 2001, when a 16-year-old girl I'll call Sally ventured out for a jog on her family's farm near Farmington, Oregon. This area, about a half hour west of bustling Portland, was pretty rural. Picture rolling farmlands and vineyards. Sally got close to her turnaround spot at the edge of their property nearby busy Farmington Road

when something caught her eye at the base of a tree line. She thought it was someone sleeping. But as she got closer, she saw what appeared to be a woman covered in blood with gruesome injuries to her face. Sally ran back to her parents' house and alerted her dad, who at first thought his teenage daughter was playing an awful prank on him. But when he got dressed and followed her outside, he realized this was no joke, so he alerted his wife, who in turn called for help. At the time, they weren't sure if this person was dead or just severely injured, so both medics and the sheriff's deputies got dispatched to the property and arrived just before 8 a.m.

Medics determined pretty much right away that the person they were dealing with was dead. She was fully clothed, wearing two sweaters, jeans, and white sneakers. Because of her injuries, there was no question that this was a homicide, so the county's death investigator was also called out to the scene. Now the victim didn't seem to have a purse, a wallet, license, or any type of ID on them. In her pockets, all they found was a receipt for hot dogs from a few days prior and some debris, something that looked like it might be a partial cigarette, possibly an acorn with some foil. Honestly, it was kind of hard to tell, but they collected everything just in case.

Nearby, they found and collected some loose coins and some gravel that had blood on it, even a clump of hair about four feet from her body and some sort of plastic with what looked like blood on it as well. When the death investigator got there, he took photos and wrote in his report that the majority of the victims' injuries were to her face and head. Here's Washington County Sheriff's Detective Shannon Wilde, who's working the case today. In Oregon, death investigations are in the jurisdiction of our medical legal death investigators. So every county has more than one, depending on how big the

county is, death investigator. And so we can document the scene, but we can't disturb anything or even examine the remains until the medical examiner is either present or has released the remains. So he responded out and does his own investigation. The county death investigators in Oregon basically respond to scenes to determine whether or not an autopsy is warranted. And in this case, it was. So while the body was taken to the medical examiner's office, Washington County Sheriff's deputies ran fingerprints to see if they could identify the victim that way.

Back at the scene, though, more photos were taken of the area, and deputies scoured the field looking for any other evidence. They didn't find anything. They didn't see any obvious tire marks. There were some shoe prints, but the medics had walked all over the scene when they arrived, so photos of their boots were taken in case they could eliminate them later. Something really interesting related to the crime scene, though, was the location of the body. The victim was actually found very close to Farmington Road, which, like I said earlier,

is relatively busy. But it seems like no one driving by that morning had seen the victim. And I think that's because there were dense trees and bushes between the body and the road, as if whoever had put her there wanted her to be hidden. Another observation first responders noted in their initial reports was that the victim

had likely been killed somewhere else and then left at the farm. Just based on her injuries, there was some blood at the scene, but there wasn't blood that matched the level of injury that she had. As they awaited the autopsy results and identification, deputies took down official statements from Sally and her parents since it was technically their land where the victim had been found, but they didn't have any additional information to give them. The fingerprint search was successful and connected to a previous petty arrest for trespassing, revealing that the victim was 28-year-old Lani Kai Okoruru,

a Pacific Islander originally from the island of Saipan but lived locally. By this time, detectives were pretty sure that the victim was transgender, based on observations at the crime scene, but her dead name was still listed on her state ID card. And interestingly enough, while we're talking about Lonnie and her name, her gender on her license was female, or her ID was female.

So I'm not sure what that process was or how that would have happened back then. I'm not sure what that process was or how that would have happened back then. I'm not sure. I note all of this because direct reputable sources are limited when it comes to Lonnie's name and gender. And honestly, we struggled with how to tell her story responsibly and respectfully. First, we took into account interview statements that her loved ones provided to law enforcement back then and concluded that while she was often misgendered,

she did use she her pronouns and went by Lonnie. I also think it's worth mentioning that in Filipino culture, gender is often fluid. And with her having grown up on Saipan, there might be similar gender fluidity there. So Lonnie might have presented in a way that locals in Beaverton, Oregon didn't fully understand back then. All that to say that there are nuances, and Lonnie knew who she was better than anyone else. So I'm using Lonnie as the source on this. But her gender identity has played a role in the investigation, which I'm gonna get into later.

So the autopsy took place the next day, August 27th, and it revealed just how brutal Lani's death was. Her cause of death was determined to be blunt head and neck trauma as well as strangulation. Her beating was so severe that she suffered fractured teeth, neck hemorrhages, full thickness scalp lacerations, fracture of her hyoid bone, which is usually a classic sign of fatal strangulation, and vocal cord damage. The injuries to her face made the pathologist think that Lonnie's attacker used some sort of object, but no blunt objects of any sort were found at the scene. And it seemed like she wasn't even able to put up a fight, because the doctor didn't notice any kind of defensive wounds. I think there's two possibilities. One that someone was restraining her from defending herself

or that she suffered an initial wound that incapacitated her or severely inhibited her ability to fight back or defend herself. She had injuries all over her head and face. I mean, there's almost nowhere that doesn't have bruising. I think she was hit with a combination of, like, blunt objects and fists, because some of the injuries you can tell are probably from getting hit with something soft but hard. And then the other ones are obvious markings where some type of hard tool left an imprint on her face. The photos are, they're really hard to look at. Detective Wilde said those markings on her face were square and seemed to have been made with something sharp,

with these like distinct 90 degree corner type edges. I know swabs were taken at the autopsy, though there were no signs of sexual assault from the initial exam. With Lonnie's death classified as a homicide, detectives got busy with their formal investigation. And the first step was to go back out to the crime scene and canvas, hoping that they might find someone

who had seen or heard something. I mean, even though the area is rural, there are neighboring houses along Farmington Road. And it turns out one of those people did see something suspicious. A neighbor told police he was driving by the property where Lonnie was found on his way to work, which would have been at about 4.05 a.m. on the 26th.

He could see a vehicle and there were at least two people because he could see that the vehicle was moving like slow and then he could see someone outside of the vehicle. The neighbor said that the person he saw outside of the vehicle looked nervous and was pacing, and then he watched the other individual throw their hands up in a way that made it seem like the person was mad or upset. It was like backing up so they could face Farmington Road, and as it swung out, he could see the headlights. And that's when he saw the male outside the vehicle. So clearly there's someone in the driver's seat because they're backing up or repositioning, and then he can see someone outside the vehicle, who he describes as looking nervous.

The neighbor described the car as a dark, newer SUV, possibly a Bronco or Explorer. But he didn't get the plates. He said it only drew his attention because it's not something he sees every day, and he wasn't sure where they went or what happened next. He said that all of this was happening about 60 yards east of a driveway, which was pretty spot on to where Lonnie's body was found. So it made detectives wonder if this neighbor had actually witnessed the disposal of Lonnie's body.

They went over. they found this area that this witness described. They looked for any signs of blood or any other evidence because, like I said, this scene indicated that Lonnie was assaulted somewhere else. They didn't find anything like that. They found tire tracks, but there were so many, it was hard to discern which ones might be

of evidentiary value. Some detectives continued canvassing efforts near the crime scene while others went to Lani's house to talk to her family. It was time to piece together where she had been the night before her body was found. Lani lived with her cousin, Grace, Grace's husband Martin, and their children. She was living in a community called Aloa, which is essentially Beaverton, Oregon. It's part of unincorporated Beaverton.

Aloa is west of Beaverton and about 10 to 15 minutes northeast of where Lani's body had been found. Her family told police that she was well-liked and they couldn't think of anyone who would want to hurt her. The last time they saw her had been the wee morning hours of the 26th before Lonnie left the house to go out. She left the house sometime between 1.30 in the morning and 1.45. Family members were awake at that time.

It was not uncommon for her to leave at that hour and it was not uncommon for her to have people pick her up, like down the street. So people didn't necessarily like pull up in front of the house. Sounds like she would meet them down the street or around the corner. Detective Wilde said the old reports don't indicate why this was or even who her friends were. The old reports indicated that Lonnie's family, quote unquote, understood Lonnie to identify as gay.

And by all accounts, they seemed to love her, but they didn't really know who she ran around with. The family didn't really know who the important people in Lonnie's life were, like her good friends or close friends, which made, I think, the early parts of this investigation challenging. Here's what detectives did learn about Lonnie through interviews with her family.

She had moved to Oregon two years prior in 1999, Here's what detectives did learn about Lani through interviews with her family. She had moved to Oregon two years prior in 1999, and she was between jobs when she died. Previously she had worked at Epson, the major electronics company doing some assembly and quality control work. But after, she found work through a temp agency and sort of kind of hopped from job to job, so there wasn't really a workplace that the police could go to find out more. Lani also didn't have a cell phone or her own car, and very little is known about Lani's immediate family.

Detectives believe that her mom was deceased at the time of her death and that her father lived in Hawaii. I don't know that we've ever had any question-answer session with her immediate family. I don't know that we've ever made that connection. This is a gap that Detective Wilde is working on filling today, trying to reach any other relatives of Lonnie's. She's also still filling in the timeline,

which back in 2001, they had made some progress on. Knowing that Lonnie had left her house around 1.45 the morning of the 26th helped detectives narrow down their canvassing efforts. They went to all the bars and businesses in Beaverton that would have been open at that hour and showed Lonnie's photo around to see if anyone remembered seeing her.

What they found is a lot of people recognized Lonnie from being in there before, but not that night. And the only place that we got confirmation she had been there was DK Wild's, And the only place that we got confirmation she had been there was DK Wild's, one of the adult stores. Here's the weird thing though. The clerk at DK Wild said he was certain Lonnie came in alone that night slash morning.

But when police got the video surveillance, she wasn't on it. So either the video had blind spots and somehow didn't record Lonnie, or maybe the clerk had his nights confused. It was a weird thing, but ultimately useless. Police also got a tip that Lonnie had been at the Golden Fountain Lounge,

but they weren't ever able to confirm that sighting either. Then they got word of another sighting, one that suggested she'd been seen at a nearby 7-Eleven at around 2.07 a.m. And that would have been just 20 minutes after her family said she left home. And it's this lead, this potential sighting, that they found to be much more promising than the others. We have video footage of her, and she is at a 7Eleven, not far from her house, and she bought gum and cigarettes. I've watched the video, she seems to be in good spirits.

There's another woman in the convenience store and they're chatting, you can see them just kinda talking to each other, you can see Lonnie smiling. But it didn't seem like it was someone she knew, it just was another person in the store. And the store clerk had thought Lonnie was talking with this woman about tattoos. The clerk told police that Lonnie had come into the store by herself and it

seemed like she was just making friendly chit-chat with a stranger while waiting in line to check out. Unfortunately the clerk didn't know if Lonnie came or left the store in a car or on foot and And ultimately detectives were unable to track down the other patron that Lonnie was talking to. So even though it seemed great to have eyes on her, that lead kind of just died there. But with a sighting of her captured on camera, it did help police key in even more on a timeline.

They put out some flyers with what they knew so far, trying to generate more information. And that actually worked. After that, they got a call from a clerk at a different 7-Eleven saying that he saw Alani using a payphone outside his store the morning of her murder. He was outside sweeping the front sidewalk, and he noticed her at the payphone, which is outside of the store.

And then he saw a second person walk up to her at the payphone, which is outside of the store. And then he saw a second person walk up to her at the payphone, but he had to go back inside to ring someone up so he didn't have constant eyes on her at the payphone. The clerk said this happened at around 2.45 in the morning, but he didn't overhear the conversation she was having. He also didn't have a description of the person that he saw approaching Lonnie,

just that it was maybe one, maybe even two men. Now the location of this 7-Eleven is several miles away from the one that Lonnie had been at some 40 minutes before. So if this was in fact her, police think that she had likely gotten there by car. Now we don't have surveillance available for this sighting. It got totally dismissed by police back then because the clerk described Lonnie

as wearing a long black leather coat. And since she wasn't found in a coat like that, detectives assumed that the clerk was mistaken. But today, Detective Wilde disagrees. Yeah, it doesn't match what she left in or what she was found in, but I think there's explanations about why maybe she picked up a different jacket if she's with someone or

especially if she's in a car and maybe gets cold and grabs whoever she's with's jacket. I think this investigation is very well done, so I don't want to criticize the original detectives too much, but I think to make that determination just based on the jacket seemed a little premature. Premature or not, detectives back then moved on to another investigative tactic. They started looking at calls for service around that time in that area, on the off chance that Lani had had any contact

with law enforcement before her murder. I mean, this might feel like a total shot in the dark. Honestly, it kind of is, but they got lucky. It turns out that two Beaverton police officers did have contact with Lani at 3.30 that morning. That's the last time we know Lani was alive. What we know from this call is that Lani was walking west along Tualatin Valley Highway, better known locally as TV Highway, which is this main road that connects Beaverton to Aloa, where Lani lived.

She was just approaching 141st Avenue on the western edge of Beaverton when she flagged down an officer. So he had just arrested somebody and was on his way to the jail. So he said on the radio, hey, I've got someone flagged me down. I have a custody. I'm going to stop. But can someone else come over here basically to handle whatever this person needs? And so essentially this other officer gets there and the first officer leaves. So this officer talks briefly with Lonnie and she said that she was coming from down there. She points down this very busy road that she was walking along and said she came from that bar down there. Beaverton officer Brandon Herring was the second cop to arrive.

He later told the Washington County Sheriff's Office that his interaction with Lonnie was brief. The officer even asked, do you mean Monty's Tavern? I don't think that's there anymore, but Monty's or Goldie's, which is the Golden Fountain. Lonnie just repeated the same thing, that bar down there. Officer Herring told the Sheriff's Office that Lonnie didn't seem to have an emergency or anything she wanted to report. I'd seen it was more to ask for a ride. There's nothing described in the report that makes it think like it was anything other than just her trying to get a ride. The officer asked Lonnie if she had been drinking. She said not too much.

And the officer noted Lonnie didn't seem intoxicated. The officer didn't smell any alcohol in Lonnie, like nothing to make the officer think that maybe Lonnie was too impaired to get home on her own kind of thing. The officer offered to call Lonnie a taxi. She didn't want that. She asked for a ride home and gave kind of a confusing, conflicting answer about where she wanted a ride to because she lived in Aloa, which is technically part of Beaverton, and so she had asked for a ride there and then she asked for a ride to Cornelius.

So that would have been like a 20-plus minute drive for that officer. So he said, I can't drive you that far, but you, I can, do you need me to call someone? And she said no, and that was basically the end of their contact is they just had this brief interaction and the officer said the last time he saw her, she was walking west, which is the general direction of her house. So something I want to point out is that Cornelius is the name of a town in Oregon, but it could have been a miscommunication

because Lonnie lived off Cornelius Pass Road in Aloa. So I feel like there's a good chance Lonnie was just trying to communicate her address to Officer Herring. Either way, he declined to give her a ride. And in all fairness, it is against many department policies to give pedestrians rides while you're on patrol, unless that person seems to be

in some sort of immediate danger. But either way, Lonnie's interaction with Officer Herring was her last known sighting. And just over three hours later, her body ends up getting found. Now what we know is that spot where Lani flagged down the officer is about four and a half miles east of where she lived, and it's about eight miles northeast

of where she's found. Either way, it would have been a long walk. And TV Highway isn't walkable. It's this really busy four lane highway. I mean, she really had to have gotten a ride from someone. But that was all the information Beaverton PD could provide. And it seemed to be the end of leads for the Washington County Sheriff's Office

in those early days. Though it was around this time that detectives also sent swabs from Lani's autopsy, and Blood found at the crime scene to the state crime lab for testing, along with her clothes, looking for, you know, foreign DNA. But everything they were able to pull from came back as being a match to Lonnie herself. Something they did find, though, during this time, something that both the death investigator and the medical examiner had missed, was a $50 bill in the pocket of Lonnie's jeans.

It was apparently tucked way down deep into her pocket. They even tried testing that as well, but it didn't have any DNA or fingerprints on it. Even that clump of hair that they found near Lonnie's body turned out to match her too. In hindsight, I wonder why Lonnie declined to call a taxi when she had plenty of cash on her. But who knows, I mean, she maybe was saving it for something else.

By August 30th, four days after she was found, Lonnie's murder was finally making the news. And that's when a possible motive was first revealed. The Oregonian newspaper published a story with the headline, Slaying Called County's First Hate Crime. In that story, former Washington County Sheriff's Detective Mike O'Connell was quoted saying that the investigation and evidence showed that Lonnie was targeted and killed because of her sexual orientation and the fact that she was transgender. He also stated in that article that the investigation had hit a wall and gave a plea to anyone who saw Lonnie on the 26th to contact them.

Another article published that same day in the Albany Democrat Herald reported that Lani's family knew she had previously been assaulted, once in Portland and another time in Washington County, but that she had not reported the attacks to police. Her family said that they understood those attacks to be hate crimes. That story also reported that Washington County detectives believed Lani's killer likely picked her up and killed her because of her gender identity. I don't know how that conclusion was drawn. It's hard to know what the motivation was, especially with all the unknowns we have. But by all accounts, all the people we talked to that knew Lonnie, she was pretty well liked, seemed like a happy person. In the 7-Eleven video, you can see she's smiling and seems to be in a good mood.

And so it's hard to know, especially with the small scope of people we have, whether she had any true enemies or anyone that may have wanted to hurt her. I do think it's a good thing to keep in mind, and I'm glad the detectives thought of it back in 2001, because I think when you have someone with no other obvious motive that is different and they are that severely beaten, I think it's a natural possibility to keep your mind open to. I think it's important to keep in mind that this was the year 2001, and hate crimes were being discussed more in mainstream media back then in the wake of Matthew Shepard's 1998

murder, just two states away in Wyoming. Now in early September, a reward of $2,500 was announced in order to try and get more people to come forward with information. And in that same month, on September 7th, the public got a little more context about Lonnie's murder when Just Out magazine did a story titled, Hate in Hillsboro. The magazine was a Portland-based LGBTQ plus publication. And not only did the story call out mainstream media for using problematic language and misgendering while covering Lonnie's death, it took a deeper dive into why police were leaning toward it

being a hate crime. Detective O'Connell was interviewed and said that he learned that one of the past attacks against Lani was because of her gender identity. Quote, are we absolutely certain at this point? No, but I think it's a pretty good determination based on all that we've learned up to this point." Detective O'Connell also told Just Out that people were being unusually hush-hush.

We're not getting the calls that we should be getting from her friends in the community. We need to talk to those people. That issue of Just Out also detailed a candlelight vigil that was being planned in memory of Lani, set for September 14th in downtown Portland. But then, 9-11 happened. The vigil still took place, but according to continued coverage in the Northwest News section of Just Out Magazine, the vigil ended up being partially to honor Lonnie and partially to honor victims of the terrorist attacks. Those Just Out Magazine stories aren't archived online,

but Detective Wilde had them in the case file and let us take copies. So you can actually see them in our blog post for this episode on the deck podcast.com. Pretty soon after those stories were published, the Washington County Sheriff's Office started getting calls. One of them said that they had overheard a local man describing killing someone. And they thought that the person he killed was part of the LGBTQ plus community based on derogatory language that the man, who we're going to be calling by his initials DG, so based on the language that DG used. And we had a couple different people that overheard this conversation come forward.

Another tip that came in regarding DG had to do with drugs. The tipster said Lonnie had an outstanding drug debt involving DG. Detectives knew DG had a lengthy criminal history involving drugs and also found out that he was widely known to be pretty racist. And as it would turn out, DG had been driving a borrowed car at the time, a dark SUV, just like the ones seen at the body site by the passing neighbor. So bingo. The investigation into DG really heated up after that, and by December detectives were

able to locate and process that SUV. We did not find any sign that Lonnie had been in that vehicle. We did find more of that same belief system inside the car. On the outside, I think it had all kinds of stuff like hate team written on it. Even though no blood or anything was found in the car, detectives still thought Bee Ge had means and motive.

So they brought him in. He was interviewed. He denied any involvement. He basically said that he was, well, I don't think he even admitted that he made those statements, but he kind of just said that he runs his mouth a lot. Like that was his. I say a lot of things and some of them aren't necessarily true. DG agreed to take a polygraph, but he failed. He showed deception on questions like, did you kill Lonnie?

And do you know who killed Lonnie? But detectives felt that they needed more to arrest him. So they went looking for evidence, but again, they couldn't find any. They couldn't even confirm that DG knew Lonnie because no one in her life knew Lonnie to have a history of illicit drug use. So even though they couldn't rule him out, the case against him fizzled. But detectives weren't ready to give up. They turned to the only physical evidence they had. Remember the stuff that was in Lonnie's pockets, the random items that they could

hardly identify? They had to wonder that, you know, maybe the cigarette and this foil, maybe by some long shot those were drug or paraphernalia related items in some way, and if so, maybe they could tie them back to DG or even someone else. So they ordered a controlled substance test. So this was described as partial handmade cigarette containing green and black plant material packaged with pieces of dry green and brown husks and a small piece of silver foil. It was not drugs.

We tested it. It was like a piece of acorn and maybe like part of a tobacco cigarette. It looked like what I would assume was trash, but I'm not sure. I know we did some testing on that. It came back as like natural material, like the acorn and stuff. It wasn't anything evidentiary that we could tell. A whole year went by without any movements in Lonnie's case. And in February of 2002, detectives approached DG again

in hopes of him coming clean this time. But he still claimed to be innocent. And even his girlfriend at the time and other friends of his told police that DG wasn't a violent person. Lonnie's case stalled for another full year after that. But then in February of 2003, a different tip came in and this one from an inmate at a state prison in Oregon.

And this wasn't just more of the same. This one implicated two new suspects. The inmate, whose name is Confidential, said that he heard information from a fellow prisoner whose initials are JD. And he said this information from JD was about Lonnie's murder. The Confidential informant told police

that JD said he helped hide Lonnie's body after his friend BJ killed her. BJ had called JD and told JD, I just killed someone. I need you to help me dump my body. Detectives ran with this new tip. They started looking into JD and BJ and figured out what car the two had been using in August of 2001. The thing is, they found out it was a sedan, not an SUV. And neither of them even owned it anymore. But just in case the detective's 4AM eyewitness was mistaken about the type of car he saw, police checked the car out anyway. We were able to track it to its new owner,

and this new owner willingly gave us his car when we kind of explained why we wanted to look in it. And our forensics people thoroughly examined that car to the point that we had to buy a new interior for the car. And they found no trace of Lonnie in that car. We all know anyone can clean up a mess, but most people can't clean up something that well that I think I'm confident in saying that Lani was not in that car

while she wasn't injured in that car. But who's to say they didn't have access to a different vehicle back then? In an effort to find out, detectives next interviewed JD. He was very, very adamant that he had no involvement. He said that he didn't even really know BJ, and that he definitely didn't know BJ well enough that he would help him dump a body. So basically, J.D. said whoever told police's info about him helping BJ was just straight

up lying. Police went searching for BJ, but they couldn't find him. He apparently worked at a horse stable back in 2001 when he lived in Washington County, so detectives tried to go there, but his former employer had no idea where BJ was and didn't even have any forwarding information. We have never been able to interview BJ.

We do not know where he is, and I have tried to look into that, and the best I can tell, he probably is not in this country. Because JD was so adamant that the story was a lie, and because no one has ever been able to locate BJ, the investigation went cold. And has stayed cold. The weapon that was used to kill Lani was never found, and her wallet and ID were never found either.

Detective Wild is again working with the state crime lab to try and retest all the evidence in Lani's case. She hopes that they're going to be able to extract a suspect profile from at least one of the items, but there's also a long list of people that Detective Wild would like to interview, or in some cases, re-interview. I would love to talk to anyone that knew Lani, that was friends with her. I would love to talk to anyone that was a consensual partner with her.

I'd love to talk to the person that picked her up that night, both leaving her home and then maybe after the Beaverton police. And I would love to talk to her family. If anyone hears this, please call call me but I don't know you look at the photos you look at the facts of the case you look at how highly people that knew her spoke of her and you can't I mean no one deserves to die that way but you can't fathom how someone did that to someone that seemed like they're really a light in this world in a world that wasn't a light back. Detective Wilde took over Lani's case in late 2022

and has been working hard ever since to try and find justice for Lani. We asked her what keeps her motivated when it seems that there are so many people in Lani's life who have been unwilling to talk or unwilling to come forward. The reason I got into this profession, which is to help people and to give a voice to people that don't have one.

I've always been drawn to Lonnie's case because I'm a member of the LGBTQ plus community. And it's a case that got deservedly a lot of attention. And it's just one of those things that she died such a brutal death and someone has to advocate for her. And that's me. In the early days of Lani's homicide, her most vocal advocates were members of Basic Rights Oregon,

a nonprofit that helps fight for LGBTQ plus Oregonians to be able to live free from discrimination. Lani's case heavily influenced Basic Rights Oregon to push for statewide legislation based on gender identity. If you listened to our Crime Junkie episode this week about Scott Johnson, then some of this information may sound a little familiar to you. Trans women are far more likely to be victims of violent crimes in the U.S., according to a study by the Human Rights Campaign. The campaign study, conducted in 2023, states that the average age of those killed in 2023 was 28. That is the same age Lani was when she was murdered.

Additionally, 84% of transgender or gender nonconforming victims were people of color. 50% were black transgender women and about 50% of transgender people were misgendered or their dead names were used by the press or local authorities after their death, meaning that the numbers are likely even higher than we realize. So if you don't have a tip to provide about Lonnie's case, I'm going to urge each and every one of you to support in other impactful ways. There are incredible organizations like Basic Rights Oregon that are fighting the fight during a time when crime against the LGBTQ community is on the rise. Another organization I want to mention is the Trans Journalists Association. Their style guide is what we referenced while putting this episode together.

You can find information for both organizations in the show notes for this episode. I also want to give a shout out to an author and transgender rights activist Raquel Willis who helped us by reviewing and editing this episode. I'll link to her website in the show notes too so you guys can check out more of her work. If anyone is listening who came in contact with Lani Kai Okoruru near Beaverton, Oregon early on the morning of August 26, 2001. The woman maybe who Lonnie was talking to

about tattoos in the 7-Eleven. The person who picked her up from her cousin Grace's house. Police want to talk to you. Please call in. Or if you know anything, please call the Washington County Sheriff's Investigations Division at 503-846-2500 and ask for Detective Shannon Wilde.

The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?