Part 1: The boy in the reservoir

I still hate the rain. Living in the Pacific Northwest, specifically just outside of Portland, Oregon, that’s a hard thing to avoid. But for me, the rain doesn’t smell like pine or fresh earth. It smells like the mud at the bottom of the reservoir. It smells like 1979.

My name is Detective Jack Miller. back then, I was younger, hungrier, and naive enough to think I could save everyone. I was wrong.

It started with a mother’s intuition. Judy Barnes called the station on a Sunday night. Her boy, Aaron, hadn’t come home. Aaron was a good kid—17, blonde hair, deep brown eyes. He was hitchhiking home from the city, a common thing kids did back then along the misty highways of Oregon. He was last seen near a sedan on the outskirts of town. Then, he just vanished into the fog.

Four days later, hikers near a reservoir deep in the woods found him.

I was one of the first on the scene. The water level was low, exposing the muck at the bottom. And there he was. It looked like he had been dropped from the bridge above.

But the autopsy… that’s what kept me up at night. Aaron hadn’t just died from the fall. He had been kept alive for days. His body was washed clean—scrubbed of any evidence. He was dressed in clothes that weren’t his. And his system was full of sedatives and alcohol. Someone had drugged him, kept him, and used him before discarding him like trash.

This wasn’t a crime of passion. This was cold. This was calculated. And the worst part? It was just the beginning.

Part 2

The rain in Oregon doesn’t wash things clean; it just makes the grime slicker.

Two months after we pulled Aaron Barnes out of that reservoir, the city of Portland had mostly moved on. The papers had run their headlines, the parents had cried their tears, and the case file on my desk was starting to gather dust. We had nothing. No witnesses, no murder weapon, just a 17-year-old boy who had been drugged, assaulted, and discarded like refuse.

I was trying to convince myself it was a one-off. A transient crime. A drifter passing through on I-5 who grabbed a kid and kept moving. That’s what you tell yourself to sleep at night. But then came August.

Two fishermen were out on the Columbia River, near an inlet we call Kelly Point, where the Willamette feeds into the Columbia. It’s a gray, industrial stretch of water. They saw a garbage bag snagged on some driftwood, bobbing in the current. They thought it was trash. Then they saw the heel of a human foot kicking through the black plastic.

The victim was identified as Neil Moore. 25 years old. A “country boy” who had come to the city and fallen into the heroin scene. He was trying to get clean, enrolled in a methadone program downtown.

When the medical examiner, Doc Haddon, called me down to the morgue, he wasn’t smoking his usual cigar. He looked pale. “Jack,” he said, standing over the steel table. “I’ve seen a lot of bodies. I was in Vietnam. But this… this is different.”

Neil hadn’t just been murdered. He had been dismantled.

The level of mutilation was grotesque, but it was the quality of the work that froze my blood. This wasn’t the frenzy of a maniac with a machete. The cuts were clean. Precise. Someone had removed his internal organs with the skill of a surgeon. They had dissected him. Whoever did this knew anatomy. They knew how to separate muscle from bone. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they had taken their time.

We weren’t looking for a drifter anymore. We were looking for someone educated. Someone with a medical background.

The investigation led us into a world I barely understood—the underground, high-stakes gay subculture of late 70s Portland, mixed with the drug trade. Neil Moore walked the line between these worlds. We started hearing a name. A “Sugar Daddy” figure. Let’s call him Dr. Peter Mills.

Mills was everything our profile said he should be. He was 45, a wealthy General Practitioner, respected in the affluent West Hills neighborhoods. He drove a luxury car, wore imported suits, and had a practice that treated the city’s elite. But at night, he was a regular at the dive bars and underground clubs downtown, picking up young men, offering drugs and money for company.

We found witnesses who put Neil Moore and Dr. Mills together the weekend Neil vanished. They were drinking at a lounge near the river. Neil was seen leaving, stumbling, likely high or drunk, and Mills was the last man seen with him.

We got a warrant for Mills’ home. It was a pristine, mid-century modern house in the hills. Beautiful view of the city. Inside, it was sterile. Too clean. But luminol tells stories that bleach tries to hide. We found traces of blood in the bathroom—scrubbed, but there. We found carpet fibers that matched debris found on Neil’s remains. We found yellow nylon rope in his garage—the same type used to bind Neil’s body parts.

It felt like a slam dunk. We had the motive, the means, the opportunity, and the circumstantial forensics. I arrested Dr. Mills in his office. He didn’t fight. He didn’t scream. He just looked at me with this arrogant, heavy-lidded stare and said, “I’ll call my lawyer.”

The trial was a circus. The prosecution painted Mills as a Jekyll and Hyde character—a doctor by day, a butcher by night. But Mills… he was slippery. He took the stand, calm and collected. He admitted to knowing Neil, admitted to the lifestyle, but denied the murder. His defense team was expensive and ruthless. They argued that the evidence was purely circumstantial. Lots of people have yellow rope. Lots of people have that type of carpet.

They played on the jury’s doubts. They argued that while Mills might be a “degenerate” in the eyes of conservative Oregon, that didn’t make him a killer.

I sat in the back of that courtroom every day, watching him. I watched his hands—steady, manicured hands. The hands of a surgeon. I knew those hands had taken Neil Moore apart.

The jury deliberated for less than two hours.

“Not Guilty.”

The words hit the courtroom like a physical blow. Mills smiled. He actually smiled. He walked out of the courthouse, into the flashing bulbs of the press, and hugged his elderly mother. “Justice has been done,” he told the reporters.

I stood in the rain outside the courthouse, lighting a cigarette, my hand shaking with rage. We had him. I knew we had him. And we let him go.

The message was clear: If you were rich enough, smart enough, and careful enough, you could hunt humans in Portland and get away with it.

But the devil doesn’t stop just because he beats a charge. He gets emboldened.

While the city debated the Mills verdict, the silence of the woods was broken again. Another boy, Peter Stone, 14 years old, vanished on a Tuesday morning. He had skipped school to go to the mall. He never came home.

Ten months later, a farmer doing a controlled burn on his property north of the city found human bones in the ashes. It was Peter. His legs had been sawed off.

The pattern was re-emerging. The Surgeon was back to work. Or maybe… maybe he had friends.

Part 3

By 1982, the department was exhausted. We were chasing ghosts in the fog. The Dr. Mills acquittal hung over the Major Crimes Unit like a shroud. Every time a phone rang, we flinched, expecting another mother reporting a missing son.

And the calls kept coming.

Mark Lang was 19. A plumber’s apprentice. A good kid who loved astrology—he wore a silver crab charm on a chain for his Cancer sign. He went to a party in the suburbs, got into a dumb argument with his buddies over cigarettes, and decided to walk home. It was 1:30 AM on a clear, cold night.

His friends felt bad. They turned the car around four minutes later to pick him up. Four minutes. That’s all it took. In that four-minute window, Mark Lang ceased to exist.

A driver later reported seeing a car pulled over and a young man fitting Mark’s description talking to the driver. But he didn’t get a plate. He didn’t look closely. It was just a shadow on the side of the road.

Nine days later, a berry farmer in the Tualatin Valley was spraying poison on blackberry brambles. Deep in the thorns, he found Mark.

Mark was dead, but again, the details were sickeningly familiar to the Aaron Barnes case. He hadn’t been killed immediately. He had been kept. His body showed signs of the same sedatives—chloral hydrate and Mandrax. But it was the surgical aspect that brought the nightmare back into sharp focus.

Mark had been operated on. There was a vertical incision on his abdomen, stitched up with surgical thread, covered with medical tape. It was crude, but it was medical. Someone had gone inside him, removed a section of his bowel, and sewn him back up. Why? To remove evidence? To practice? Or just for the sheer, sadistic pleasure of playing God?

We were dealing with a predator who didn’t just kill; he possessed. He kept these young men as pets, as experiments, before disposing of them. And the forensic links between Aaron Barnes, Neil Moore, and Mark Lang were becoming undeniable. The same drugs. The same surgical precision. The same dumping grounds on the fringes of the city.

But we still couldn’t touch Dr. Mills. He had been acquitted. Double jeopardy meant he was untouchable for the Neil Moore murder, and he was being incredibly careful.

Then came the case that broke the city.

June 5, 1983. Richard Kelly.

Richard wasn’t a drifter. He wasn’t involved in the drug scene. He was 15 years old, an honor student, a star athlete. And his father was Rob Kelly, the lead news anchor for the biggest TV station in Portland. Rob was the man everyone invited into their living rooms at 6:00 PM. He was the face of trust.

Richard walked his friend to a bus stop in a nice neighborhood in Northwest Portland, just a few blocks from his home. He never made it back to his front door.

A security guard living nearby heard it. A scream. “Help me!” Then the slam of a car door and the roar of a loud, faulty exhaust pipe peeling away.

The kidnapping of Richard Kelly changed the atmosphere from fear to hysteria. This wasn’t happening to “other people” anymore. It happened in a safe neighborhood to a famous family.

The pressure on us was tectonic. The Mayor, the Governor, the FBI—everyone was breathing down our necks. Rob Kelly, Richard’s father, was a picture of stoic devastation. He continued to anchor the news, night after night, his eyes hollow, reading reports about other crimes while his own son was missing. It was heartbreaking to watch.

We threw everything we had at it. We had helicopters scanning the forests. We had divers in the rivers. We had tip lines ringing off the hook.

A psychic called in, saying Richard was in a cabin in the mountains. We checked every cabin. Nothing.

Then, a tip came in about a car. An old gray sedan, maybe a Chevy or a Holden model, with a loud muffler. We put the description out, but in a city of half a million people, old sedans are everywhere.

Five weeks passed. Five weeks of Rob Kelly waiting by the phone.

On a Sunday in July, a family was out looking for mossy rocks for their garden in the remote hills of the Mount Hood National Forest. The father walked into a clearing and saw something pale in the brush. He thought it was a mannequin.

It was Richard.

He was lying on his side, curled up in the fetal position. He was dressed, but not in his own clothes. He was wearing a shirt with a generic logo and… this is the part that broke me… a dog collar around his neck.

I arrived on the scene an hour later. The air smelled of pine needles and decay. Richard looked peaceful, almost like he was sleeping, but the autopsy would reveal the hell he had endured.

He had been alive for weeks. He was malnourished but fed. He had been washed. His hair had been cut. And the toxicology report came back with the signature cocktail: Mandrax, Valium, alcohol.

But this time, the killers had made a mistake.

Forensics in 1983 were advancing. We combed every inch of Richard’s clothing. We found hairs that didn’t belong to him. But the gold mine was the fibers.

On the trousers Richard was found in, the lab found microscopic synthetic fibers. Green. Red. Gold. They were carpet fibers. And they were distinctive.

We also found something else. Richard had suffered a severe blow to the head early in his abduction, causing a brain bleed. But it had started to heal. That meant someone had nursed him. Someone had taken care of him, medically, to keep him alive long enough to torture him.

The profile was screaming at us. We needed a location. We needed a house where Richard had been held. A house with that specific carpet.

We were looking for a needle in a haystack, but we had a magnet. We started looking at known associates of Dr. Mills again. We looked at the weirdos, the hangers-on, the men who lingered in the shadows of the violent underground.

And one name popped up. A man who didn’t fit the “Surgeon” profile at all. A man named Bevan Spencer.

Bevan was a nobody. An overweight, socially awkward accountant who lived with his mother. He was known in the gay beat as a “grabber”—someone who liked rough trade but seemed too pathetic to be a mastermind. But he drove an old sedan. And witnesses said his car had a loud exhaust.

We brought Bevan in. He was sweating, nervous, arrogant in a petty way. He denied everything. But we had a warrant for his house.

I remember walking into his bedroom. It was a time capsule of mediocrity. But then I looked down.

The carpet.

It was a hideous, cheap weave. Green. Red. Gold.

I got down on my knees with a pair of tweezers, my heart hammering against my ribs. I pulled a fiber.

“Bag it,” I whispered to the tech. “We got him.”

Part 4

The trial of Bevan Spencer was the trial of the century for Oregon. We had the fibers. We had the hair matches. We had the car description. It was enough to convince a jury this time.

Bevan was found guilty of the murder of Richard Kelly. He was sentenced to life in prison, never to be released. The city breathed a sigh of relief. Rob Kelly finally got to mourn his son with some semblance of closure. The “Portland Monster” was behind bars.

But for me… for those of us in the Major Crimes Unit who knew the details… there was no closure. There was only a cold, gnawing pit in our stomachs.

Because the math didn’t add up.

Bevan Spencer was a follower. He was a low-level sadist. He didn’t have the intelligence, the charisma, or the medical knowledge to pull off what happened to those boys.

I sat in the interrogation room with Bevan many times after his conviction. I tried to play on his ego. “Come on, Bevan,” I’d say. “We know you didn’t do the surgery. You can’t even sew a button on a shirt. Who did the cutting? Who was the doctor?”

Bevan would just smile that oily, cryptic smile. “I did it all, Detective. Just me.”

He was lying. We knew he was lying.

The forensic evidence on the other victims—Neil Moore, Mark Lang—pointed to a level of surgical skill that Bevan simply did not possess. The dissection of Neil Moore, the removal of organs, the suturing of Mark Lang’s abdomen—that was the work of a professional. That was the work of the Surgeon.

And then there was the physical evidence of multiple people. Richard Kelly had been held down by strong hands—hands stronger than Bevan’s. There were trace evidences of other individuals in that house, other cars seen at the dumping sites.

We realized the terrifying truth: We hadn’t caught a serial killer. We had caught the garbage man.

Bevan was the one who did the pickup. He was the one who drove the car. Maybe he watched. Maybe he held them down. But the “Master”—the one who administered the drugs with precise dosages, the one who performed the surgeries, the one who orchestrated the theatre of cruelty—he was still out there.

We looked back at Dr. Mills. We looked at other high-profile men in the city—lawyers, businessmen—who ran in those same dark circles. We called them “The Family.” A group of predators who protected each other, who shared their victims like toys.

But we could never prove it.

The Dr. Mills acquittal had spooked the District Attorney’s office. Without a smoking gun, without a confession from Bevan, they wouldn’t authorize new charges against the high-society suspects. They didn’t want another embarrassing loss. They were content with Bevan taking the fall for everything.

“It’s over, Jack,” my Captain told me when I tried to reopen the Neil Moore file in 1985. “The public is happy. The monster is in jail. Let it go.”

But I couldn’t let it go.

I retired six years later. The rain still falls in Portland, and every time I drive past the river, or look up at the misty hills, I see them.

I see Aaron Barnes, waiting for a ride that would take him to hell. I see Neil Moore, dismantled by a man sworn to heal. I see Mark Lang, walking home under the stars. I see Peter Stone, reduced to ash. And I see Richard Kelly, the boy with the dog collar, crying out for a father who couldn’t save him.

Bevan Spencer died in prison a few years ago. He took his secrets to the grave. He never named names. He never gave up The Family.

Somewhere in this country, maybe even still in this city, there are old men living out their golden years in comfort. They bounce their grandchildren on their knees. They go to church. They are respected members of the community.

But they know what they did. And I know.

I solved the case on paper. I got a conviction. But in my heart, I know the truth. The Surgeon put down his scalpel, washed his hands, and walked away. And the rain washed the blood off the streets, but it never washed it off my soul.

That’s the thing about the darkness. You can lock a door, you can put bars on a window, but you can’t lock out the fog. It always finds a way in.

End of Story.