Local Private Investigator Credited by NBC's Dateline for Freeing Wrongly Convicted Man

"The House on Murder Mountain" - former investigative TV reporter Eric Mason's long journey to free Scott Cannon is intensely portrayed on NBC's Dateline.

It has been a long road for Scott Cannon, falsely convicted in a 1998 triple murder but now free, thanks to the help of Oregon's TV reporter-turned-private investigator, Eric Mason.

(SALEM, Ore.) - The night Bimla Boyd killed her property caretaker at her home on what is now known as 'Murder Hill' near Salem, Oregon in 2002, Bonnie King and I were there on assignment for Portland TV station KGW Channel-8. It was a memorable night. We were a freelance TV news camera crew and the only other person on scene beyond the cops, was a single newspaper reporter.

It was raining, it was cold, and the Polk County Sheriff's Office kept us way back, but I had a serious lens and could see the house to some degree. Otherwise it was as dark as any night could be. Still, KGW was glad to receive it.

Shortly after this freelance period, I was hired by Portland's KATU Channel-2, the ABC station in this Northwest city. There I quickly became friends with Eric Mason, a veteran investigative TV reporter who had recently crossed over from KOIN TV, Portland's CBS station. Eric had a reputation for pulling off big stories and exposing corruption in ways that few could. The fact that he transitioned into the role of a private investigator a few years ago, always struck me as a perfectly logical move.

Monday night Eric's role in helping free a falsely convicted Oregon prisoner serving a life sentence for three tragic murders, was featured in a very compelling episode of NBC's Dateline program. They are murders that happened on the same property, the Bimla Boyd residence in west Salem.

It was the afternoon of 23 Nov. 1998 when Jason Kinser, Suzan Osborne and Celesta Graves were all shot to death, reportedly execution style, in the head with a .22-caliber pistol.

Scott Cannon as it turns out, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This plumber, also a recreational drug user and firearm collector, called out to a mobile home on the West Salem property owned by Bimla Boyd, ended up taking the fall for the murders.

Eric Mason

As the Dateline program revealed, the prosecutor's smoking gun, was a lead match in the bullets used to murder the three victims, with bullets found in Cannon's home.

During Cannon's trial it was an Oregon State University scientist who testified that lead in bullets recovered from the murder scene matched lead in bullets found in Cannon’s garage. He stated that, "There was a 1 in 64 million chance of getting a match like that."

The problem is that the lead matching process used by this scientist to reach the Polk County, Oregon prosecution's conclusion, no longer stands up in court. It has been deemed "Junk Science" by the FBI.

When I worked with Eric Mason at the KATU news bureau in the basement of Oregon's Capitol here in Salem, I remember his frequent contact with Scott Cannon's father, I had a couple of conversations with him myself.

While working for KATU in 2003, I interviewed Polk County's District Attorney John Fisher about the questions surrounding the lead bullet match.

He stated, "I think the matter was fully litigated." He also reaffirmed his confidence in the triple murder conviction of Cannon saying, "I think the jury reached the right decision."

I encouraged Fisher to engage the subject at more length, but he declined.

I might find this all more interesting than some, as we at Salem-News.com continue to investigate serious allegations of levels of corruption in the Oregon state government, particularly relating to Civil Rights crimes against prisoners in the Oregon prison system.

We have the logical belief that such grievances are to be addressed with the Oregon Attorney General, but the office of Oregon AG John Kroger won't engage our requests to engage the subject of corruption, in spite of how serious the charges are.

Interestingly, the Oregon Department of Justice, AG John Kroger, the Polk County District Attorney and the Polk County Sheriff all refused to talk to Dateline. This certainly seems to raise the levels of suspicion in the minds of Americans.

Our ongoing series about former Oregon Corrections Officer William Coleman, which involves extreme racism in the Oregon State Prison and his role as a whistle-blower who experienced very serious retaliation on a state level, intersects with the Cannon story.

Coleman was the supervisor of the cell block at the penitentiary that Cannon lived in.

"What I remember is him telling me that he was innocent of his crime. I had heard about the case on the outside." Coleman recalls Cannon's words, "Sooner or later the truth will come out". Coleman remembers believing that based on Cannon's character, he could have indeed been innocent.

"It was the passion he used to defend himself, he just didn't seem like he did it. The murderers doing time, they all know that they committed their crimes, they aren't going to say they didn't do it. With Cannon where drugs were involved, even if there was a memory lapse in the situation, you would know you were involved, you would know you did something stupid."

For people like Scott Cannon and his son, 20-year old Mathias Cannon, life took an unexpected upswing. While Cannon can't do anything to make up for the lost years, he appears to be set now that he is reunited with a family that never gave up hope.

The families of the three murder victims are not pleased by the change of events.

Quite obviously they all want to have faith in the legal system, and many related people stated their dissatisfaction with the developments. It was clear that none of them wanted an innocent man condemned for the crime, but the good news for Cannon was not something they shared.

There is a lot more to the story of Scott Cannon and Bimla Boyd. Eric Mason discovered along the way that a man described as "Hispanic" by Cannon, who was reportedly in the house with the murder victims, was possibly identified by Polk County investigators during the investigation, but never revealed to the defense.

It is not the only evidence; in fact the prosecution files in Polk County were disrupted, things were missing, and that prevented the prosecution from re-trying Cannon. They never intended to bow out gracefully and the state of Oregon itself, the entity that will not communicate with the national program Dateline, still considers Cannon to be the only suspect.

It is noteworthy that Bimla Boyd's husband also died on the property. That makes a total of five deaths that took place at the Bimla Boyd residence. It is a long and twisted story, Bimla Boyd is originally from Fiji and was a devout Jehovah's Witness. Please watch the Dateline program below.

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More information and Dateline links:

• The House on Murder Mountain - Dateline NBC
• Dateline NBC
• Oregon Man Freed After 10 Years - Innocence Blog