Published: Monday, August 23, 2010, 4:37 PM Updated: Monday, August 23, 2010, 5:09 PM
Lori Tobias, The Oregonian
A Coos County grand jury has indicted a man in the 10-year-old cold case of Leah Freeman, found murdered in June 2000.
Coos County District Attorney Paul Frasier said Nicholas McGuffin, 28, was arrested Monday afternoon on charges of murder and lodged in the Coos County Jail on $2 million bail. McGuffin was Freeman's boyfriend at the time she disappeared and has long been a suspect in the case.
"I am so thrilled," said Cory Courtright , Freeman's mother, Monday afternoon. "Oh my God, I am so thrilled. I know there is a long trial ahead of me. I don't care. I always said I was going to see this through to the end and I will."
Freeman was last seen on June 28, 2000, after leaving a girlfriend's house at about 9 p.m. to walk home. Several people would see the 5-feet-2, 80-plus pound Freeman striding up Central Avenue. But Freeman, who had spent the afternoon with McGuffin and his friend Brent Bartley , 20, never made it home.
Shortly after Freeman left her friends' house, McGuffin showed up looking for her and told police he continued looking for her through most of the night into the wee hours of the next morning.
McGuffin was stopped twice that night by the local police for a missing headlight. Police say at one point he swapped his '67 Ford Mustang for his parent's 1991 Ford Thunderbird, and then again for the Mustang. But the family has denied that.
One of Freeman's Nike shoes was found by the local cemetery the night she went missing. The second shoe, splattered with blood, turned up a week or so later far out of town on a dirt road.
Then, roughly five weeks after she disappeared, county detectives found Freeman's body down a steep, dense embankment about nine miles out of town.
Although police obtained search warrants for McGuffin's cars and questioned both McGuffin and Bartley at length, the case went cold. Then, about two years ago, new police chief Mark Dannels put together a team of detectives to re-examine it.
In June, Frasier announced he was ready to seek the indictment.
"In the very beginning, I didn't believe it was him," said Courtright of McGuffin. "I didn't want to. I don't like believing the fact that he did this. And I know that hasn't been proven yet. But I've got to get this girl her justice. This was my child. She deserves it."
-- Lori Tobias
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