‘Hush’ Episode 5: The good old boys club

If the third group that tells a true crime story is the media, Columbia County is lacking in this department.

The local newspaper is on its last legs and ultimately closes after more than 140 years of operation. Facebook and TikTok take over as the primary news sources in the county.

The “Hush” team discovers how this new type of media is working to take on – and reinforce – a culture of secrecy after a new scandal rocks Columbia County.

Listen to all episodes of the “Hush” podcast here.

Leah Sottile: Hi. Nice to meet you. This is Ryan.

Will Lohre: Hi, Ryan. Nice to meet you.

Sottile: Thanks for having us.

Lohre: Yeah, of course. It’s a bit messy, as you can see.

Ryan Haas: That’s OK.

Sottile: Where do you want to sit?

Last fall, Ryan and I walked into the office of the Columbia County Chronicle & Chief, the local newspaper, to meet with the editor, Will Lohre.

Lohre: Here, I’ll show you around real quick. But yeah, I started November 2022 and initially as part-time. Here’s our kitchen. And then here’s all of our papers.

Sottile: The newspaper office was on a busy street corner in St. Helens. That day, the newsroom was a mess. People were clearing out their desks, taping up boxes. Will took us in back to a room where the archives of the 144-year-old newspaper were housed. And right at the front there was a fresh bundle of the newest edition.

Lohre: And I’m going to grab a couple of these for…

Sottile: I was going to say, is this a new paper?

Lohre: This is the last edition. Last edition. I got to grab a few of these to send to...

Sottile: It was the final day of business for the Chronicle & Chief.

Lohre: I’m Will Lohre. I’m the last editor of the Chronicle & Chief newspaper, or at least in the recently current form. The Chronicle, I mean, it’s had a couple different names over the years, but it started in 1881. And I guess I haven’t gone into the business records to check, but it’s the longest-operated business in Columbia County.

Sottile: The newspaper had been around in some form or another for almost 150 years, and in just a few hours, it would disappear. Even its website would come down. As journalists, this was hard to see. All that history and institutional knowledge would vanish.

The Chronicle & Chief’s last issue was filled with stories written by Will, and only Will. He was the editor, but also the sole writer on staff. He flipped through the final issue.

Lohre: So, Halloweentown on the front page, and then we have this St. Helens Reservoir project. This is an article that I had been meaning to do for a little while, so I did that. And then the St. Helens Police Department is going away from 24-hour coverage.

Sottile: We saw that. That seems like a very big deal.

Lohre: It is. It actually – so we post our stories on Facebook, obviously. But when that went up online, that got pretty huge as far as our scale of engagement, obviously. I think that one had more than 150 little angry emoji responses and 180 comments on the thing. And you have people being like, “Why are you publishing this? The criminals are now going to know to attack.” And I’m like…

Sottile: Not the, OK, that’s not where my mind would go right away. But anyway…

As the newspaper operation was literally being put in boxes, Will worried that Columbia County had forgotten what a newspaper actually does: report facts, put out vetted information, stay neutral so people can form their own opinions.

Lohre: I’m trying to help you guys understand that this is the current state of affairs. That without some changes, there’s going to be things that impact your lives. And people don’t always want to engage with that.

Sottile: Like the idea of just don’t talk about it.

Lohre: Yeah, exactly.

Sottile: Will was pretty much it when it came to institutional media in Columbia County. There’s one news site left, but it doesn’t have an office and employs a single reporter who doesn’t live in the county. The day the Chronicle & Chief closed didn’t mean people’s appetite for information went away. They just looked for it in new places.

As we’ve reported on the Zuber case, one thing that’s been abundantly clear is that it’s very hard for residents of Columbia County to sort out what’s real. At True Crime 101, we learned that the media is one of the three parties who typically tell a true crime story, but Columbia County is essentially missing this piece.

What they do have is social media.

From Oregon Public Broadcasting, this is “Hush.” I’m Leah Sottile. This is Episode Five: The Good Old Boys Club.

The Chronicle & Chief was Will Lohre’s first journalism job out of college. He became a full-time reporter in 2023 and commuted to Columbia County each day from Portland.

Lohre: I wasn’t necessarily told it’s going to be easy, but I was kind of told more that you’re just going to be reporting on these things that happen in small towns. So I got plenty of experience, lots of bylines, all the things that you want as a young journalist, I’d say. But there’s a lot more going on as far as people’s suspicions, or the concerns that they have go far beyond just puff pieces that you can just crank out.

Haas: Was there a specific story where you’re like, you wrote something and then that kind of opened your mind to, oh, this is a problem?

Lohre: Yeah, so that’s why this story – the Zuber story – was a really interesting one for me.

Sottile: When Will started working at the paper, it was clear that Sarah Zuber’s death was still on people’s minds, even four years later. In early 2023, a big vigil was planned for the anniversary of Sarah’s death, and Will decided to do a story about the case.

Lohre: And so I reached out to the family, and the mom, Rebecca, had said, “Hey, we have our spokesperson. If you can reach out to her, she’ll be willing to talk to you. Don’t worry. She’s super friendly.” And I was like, OK. So I sent her a Facebook message saying, “Hey, I’m a reporter.”

Haas: This is Jennifer?

Lohre: Jennifer. And I reached out to her and I didn’t get a response.

Sottile: The spokesperson was Jennifer Massey, the admin for the Justice for Sarah Zuber Facebook group. He didn’t hear anything back from her, but kept reporting anyway. One day he pulled up the Justice for Sarah Zuber page on Facebook.

Lohre: I was scrolling through the “Justice for Sarah Zuber” page to kind of try and get a little more background, a little more information about it. I was scrolling through and I saw a post that was directed to me from Jennifer.

Sottile: He pulled up Facebook on a nearby computer, and turned the screen so Ryan and I could read it.

Lohre: I will show it to you here, but basically, on February 19th, 2023. And it’s, “Will Lohre, thanks for reaching out to me in the Justice for Sarah Zuber team. I understand that you represent Country Media Chronicle & Chief,” and then basically she just calls me and the paper out over this huge post.

Haas: And she hadn’t even talked to you?

Lohre: No, no, not at all.

Sottile: Woah, this post keeps going and going, and then it goes to bold and then all caps.

Lohre: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Sottile: It’s a long, scolding post, so let me just sum it up.

Jennifer called Will out for getting in touch with her. She said if he wanted information on the case, he should comb through all of her Facebook posts and use, quote, ”deductive reasoning” to figure out what went wrong with the police investigation.

She said people in the community thought the newspaper kowtowed to the district attorney and the sheriff, particularly in its reporting on Sarah Zuber. And because of that, Jennifer said, there were better things for Will to write about, like the corruption at the sheriff’s office. That would earn him some trust.

Lastly, she asked him to publicly answer a question. Will read that part aloud for us.

Lohre: And there’s something in here. OK, yeah. “I wonder why Rebecca Zuber’s letter was initially posted to the Chief and promptly removed. Did the DA or the sheriff ask for that? Citizens would like to know. If you could please respond, we would appreciate it.”

Sotile: Jennifer wanted to know why Rebecca Zuber’s letter – the one we talked about in episode three, where she endorsed Jennifer’s husband Terry Massey for sheriff – had been taken off the newspaper’s website.

Lohre: I’d been full-time for less than a month, and I’d been at the paper like for two months, and not even really reporting full-time in the area, so I was just taken aback, I guess. I thought about commenting back and being like, “Hey, I’m just trying to do my job. I didn’t know that anything was wrong.”

Sottile: I want to just dwell on this point for a second, because this is important.

In her letter to the editor, Rebecca wrote that the sheriff’s office had been incompetent in investigating Sarah’s death, and so people should vote for a change and elect Terry Massey.

That letter was published. But later, it disappeared from the newspaper’s website, which is weird. Letters are meant to voice opinions of readers. They are often political. They say stuff like this politician is great, and this other one is an idiot. So, to Ryan and I, it didn’t make any sense why that would have come down, and Will didn’t really know why either. It happened before he worked there.

Lohre: So, I kind of didn’t know any of that background. The reason that, I guess, we took that letter down, from what I’m told, is that it had an endorsement of Terry Massey, who’s Jennifer’s husband for the sheriff election in 2022. And so the thinking, I guess, from our editors or publishers at the time was, “This is political and we’re not going to publish it.” But it was up and then they took it down.

Sottile: Publishing and then unpublishing a letter isn’t standard journalism practice. And if Jennifer was saying the newspaper kowtowed to elected officials, we wanted to see the proof.

In emails we requested on the Zuber case from the sheriff’s office, we could see that the editor of the Chronicle & Chief – a guy named Jeremy Ruark – traded emails with Sheriff Brian Pixley. Pixley sent Ruark a response to Rebecca’s letter to be published. He said Rebecca’s letter didn’t, quote, “reflect all of the facts of the case.” Ruark replied that the newspaper did take the online version of Rebecca’s letter down after District Attorney Jeff Auxier stopped by the office.

So, it sounded like Jennifer was right about the kowtowing. Here was the editor of the newspaper saying the DA had a hand in his decision to unpublish the letter. And in journalism terms, it’s a five-alarm fire when newspaper editors cave to the whims of elected officials.

We reached out to Ruark and the publisher, Country Media, but they declined our request for an interview. And former DA Jeff Auxier also declined our requests for comment.

By the time Will Lohre arrived at the paper, he unknowingly stepped into a community where some people were pissed off at the media. And Jennifer’s post calling him out proved that.

Lohre: I didn’t have an editor here. Jeremy was my editor, and I could send him articles to review before they’d get published or things like that. But I didn’t have someone just right in the next room who I could go over and be like, “Hey, whoa, I just got destroyed on Facebook. What do I do?” So I called him and was like, “Should I respond?” He’s like, “No, don’t respond.”

Sottile: Will was actually pretty cool about all this. In a way, it seemed like he was expecting pushback from people in the community. People told him being an outsider was going to be an obstacle to earning trust. Jennifer had roasted him on Facebook, but when the vigil rolled around, Will, like any good reporter, showed up anyway.

Lohre: I thought, “Alright, if you’re not going to talk to me, I’m going to go and do my job basically, and I’ll report on this vigil.” And she was like, “Wow, I didn’t think you’d show up,” or “I didn’t expect to see you.” And I was like, “Well, here I am. I just wanted to get the story. I don’t have an agenda.”

Sottile: The fact that he showed up in person really meant something to Jennifer. We asked her about that in her office.

Jennifer Massey: So Will, I blew him up on Facebook. Like, why are you keeping messaging me? I’m not even going to entertain this. You are a garbage news outlet. I mean, it was aggressive. Stop messaging us.

Sottile: At the vigil, Will showed he was only there to report facts.

Massey: I’m like, “I didn’t invite you here.” And he goes, “That’s precisely why I’m here.” And we started talking. He said, “I just got here. I’m brand new here. Something really bad must have happened here for you to have that type of visceral reaction online to me.” And I said, “Absolutely.” I just went into this diatribe about the fact that this is unacceptable. Her mom posted, they publish a letter, obviously they took it down, that’s not non-biased journalists. We need independent journalists here. This is garbage, what we have out here. And so he’s like, “I want to earn your trust.” And so I’m like, alright. I said, “Then I think you need to get DA Auxier to commit whether this case is open or closed.”

Sottile: Will told her he’d look into the status of the case. At that time, no one really knew whether it was open or closed. He stayed for the vigil and went up to Jennifer to say goodbye at the end.

Lohre: This is the exact moment that I was kind of telling you that really crystallized in my mind, there’s definitely a skepticism and distrust of media at a pretty baseline level.

She said something along the lines of, “It’s good that you’re here because for the longest time everyone’s thought of these papers in the pocket of the sheriff,” or something along those lines. And so I said something along the lines of, “Well, if we’re in the pocket of the sheriff, I haven’t gotten my check yet.”

Her eyes got pretty wide, and she gave me this look. And I was like, “Oh, I’m joking. I’m kidding. I am not in the pocket of the sheriff. That was a bad joke. I am sorry that I said that.”

Sottile: I mean, it seems like very clearly a joke though, but it’s just that people really believe that’s true.

Lohre: Yeah, and her reaction, as soon as I said it, just the way that she kind of took a step back and looked at me, not the right audience to make that joke.

Sottile: Jennifer Massey was the leading voice in the community around how Sarah’s death investigation was handled. And she had just as many criticisms of the media as she did the police. Will smoothed things over his bad joke with Jennifer, and went on to do a series of stories about Sarah’s death and the reaction to it. One story reported that Jennifer and her group of citizen sleuths had presented their theories about the case to the sheriff’s office.

At the end of that article, Rebecca Zuber provided a statement thanking Jennifer Massey and the “Justice for Sarah Zuber” team. “It was all proof of God’s words in action,” she said, to “love your neighbor.”

Will did his best, but he didn’t really have enough time to change people’s perceptions about the media before the paper closed. He listened to people, hand-delivered copies of the paper to people’s homes. Again and again, he told us he heard versions of what Jennifer said to him that day at the vigil about corruption in the county, about a good old boys club. But in his year of working there, he could never quite get his arms around how to report on that.

Lohre: To go back to that “good old boys club” thing that you referenced earlier, that is something that I have definitely been told by a lot of people, and it’s something that I’d never feel like I was able to untangle in a way that would’ve made any sense.

Sottile: When the Chronicle & Chief announced it was closing for good, some people reached out to see how they could help. But the decision was made. The paper just wasn’t profitable, and the publisher shut it down.

Columbia County is like so many small communities across the West. Traditional newspapers are dying because of disappearing revenue. News media shrinks when, I don’t know, a newspaper appeases powerbrokers because it’s afraid of losing more revenue. And that pisses off its already dwindling list of readers. Then, reporters stop showing up in person to document what’s happening. The community forgets what journalism is.

Lohre: I talked to someone who said something along the lines of, “It’s sad to see you close. I thought you did a good job, but unfortunately this is a community that just relies on Facebook for their information now.”

Sottile: OK. So, let’s talk about Facebook groups. Talk to us about what they are. Maybe give us the landscape.

Lohre: Yeah, this community, I’d say, almost primarily shares news through Facebook.

Sottile: It’s been like this for decades. Social media, and particularly Facebook, has moved into those communities as traditional media shrinks.

Will showed us the Facebook groups where the information flows now in Columbia County.

Lohre: So, Justice for Sarah Zuber, Concerned Citizens, Women-owned businesses, Rainier Community Bulletin Board…

Sottile: We were pretty blown away by the sheer number of Facebook groups in this area. Just as an example, he showed us how many groups focused on the 6,000-person city of Clatskanie, just up the river from Rainier.

Lohre: Clatskanie Bulletin Board Uncensored, with a seatbelt. So what that means is that it’s uncensored, but there’s still some guardrails on.

Haas: What is uncensored? What are they posting that needs to be censored?

Lohre: So here’s the group rules from the admins. You can see: threats to others not allowed, no name calling.

Haas: So we’re censoring threats.

Sottile: No animal sales!

Lohre: No animal sales. But then, let’s see if I can find the Clatskanie Uncensored Without a Seatbelt.

Sottile: So there’s With a Seatbelt and Without a Seatbelt.

Lohre: Clatskanie Uncensored Bulletin Board, no control freaks.

Sottile: Oh, OK. No control freaks.

Lohre: And it’s private.

Haas: So I’m guessing these are offshoots from each other. Someone’s like, fuck this group, I’m making my own.

Lohre: Right. Or, someone probably posted on Clatskanie Uncensored, said something that was censored. And then they’re like, “What? Well, I’m going to make one where you could just say whatever you want!”

Sottile: Far and away, “Concerned Citizens of Columbia County” is the most popular group in this area. It has over 40,000 members. If they all lived there, that would be equivalent to 75% of the people in Columbia County. I’ve never seen a newspaper that could reach that percentage of its audience. The New York Times is the most popular newspaper in the nation. It bragged when it reached 11 million subscribers. That’s about 3% of the U.S. population.

As the newspaper in Columbia County died, groups like “Concerned Citizens” and “Justice for Sarah Zuber” basically replaced it. But the information they were putting out wasn’t vetted. They didn’t aspire toward neutrality. Like Truman Capote before them, the groups told a story they had decided on in advance: that something had gone very wrong with the Sarah Zuber case.

It was a rainy Saturday morning when we arrived at a house in St. Helens, and rang the doorbell.

Teresa Kuypers: Hi, how are you?

Sottile: How are you? I’m Leah.

Kuypers: OK. silly question. Do you guys have any sort of, like, something that you can show me where you’re really from?

Haas: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I actually have my badge right here.

Sottile: Sure. I do too.

We were at the home of Teresa Kuypers, the admin of the Concerned Citizens of Columbia County Facebook group. And she was asking us for ID. Honestly, good on her. I’m surprised more people don’t do that.

Inside her living room there were toy cars, kids’ books, and Barbie DVDs lying around. On one wall there was a sign that read, “My house isn’t messy. It’s grandkids approved.” Her husband sat in a chair reading on his phone.

Kuypers takes care of her grandkids all day. But she says running Concerned Citizens of Columbia County is her other full-time job.

Kuypers: I can’t remember if it was in 2012 or ‘13 when it first started, and somebody posted on a buy-sell-trade page and they said, “Does anybody know where that siren is going?” and somebody said, “That’s not what this page is for,” and they went off on ‘em. So my friend and I were sitting in church and we’re like, wouldn’t it be funny if we started a page that said, “You can post here for the sirens? “ And I was like, oh, I’ll do it. I don’t have any time on my hands.

So I started it and I invited just five family members. Then within the week it was like a hundred, and then as soon as we hit a thousand, I was laughing and I was like, “Oh, this is funny, ha ha.” And now here we are at like 35,000.

Sottile: Some days there are more than 100 posts to her page: missing dogs, found dogs, job postings, local events, new businesses, cows in the road.

She has a pretty serious set of governing rules for the page. No politics, no name-calling, no bullying. When she enforces those rules, sometimes people have wild reactions. She’s had stalkers. Once, a guy showed up at her house with a gun. But she remains undeterred.

Kuypers: Take your trash talk somewhere else. That’s what I cannot have on the page. And I’m constantly like, OK, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.

Sottile: How much of your time is it?

Kuypers: Oh my gosh. It’s literally full-time.

Sottile: For no pay.

Kuypers: For no pay. It’s literally full-time. There’s times when I’m up, sometimes if there’s something going on, and I’m like, OK, I have to stay on this because I have to watch the comments. I will stay up sometimes 24 hours so that I can watch and make sure that it’s being taken care of, that comments are being taken care of.

Sottile: She said she never meant to get into the business of moderating Columbia County’s Greek chorus.

Sottile: What have you learned about Columbia County since running this page?

Kuypers: I’ve learned that Columbia County knows your business before you know your business, that’s for sure.

Sottile: Kuypers does a lot more than delete posts and moderate comments. She tracks down missing items for people, connects strangers who wouldn’t have otherwise met. There have been a number of times she’s removed posts, like if she believes something is a baseless rumor or someone violates one of her rules.

In a sense, she’s a lot like a one-person, hyper-local community newspaper.

Around town, people have asked her for autographs and told her husband, “Hey, you know you’re married to a celebrity, right?” That all makes Kuypers squirm. She said she’s not doing this for any kind of clout.

Sottile: I can’t think of any engagement with a news organization like that the public has. It seems like a huge responsibility to be having this. Do you feel like you are the media here?

Kuypers: I don’t really like feeling that way because to me, this page is the community’s page. I started it, yes, great. But it’s not my page, and I’ll always say that. It is the community’s page. It is not… I don’t know. I just feel different about it. I guess, when everybody’s like, “No, it’s your page.” I’m like, “It’s not my page. It’s our page.” I feel like it’s a collaboration.

Sottile: She gave us an example of what collaboration looks like. She said a few years after Sarah died, she got some text messages from Randy Zuber. They didn’t know each other, and she’d only heard bits and pieces about the case.

Kuypers: Sarah’s dad actually reached out in text messages and asked me if I would put it on the page because they didn’t have Facebook at the time. And so I have all these messages from clear back when it started, and I said, “OK, write me up everything that you want. I need it in your words. I don’t want to miss something. I don’t want to word it wrong. Exactly how you want it.” And so they were in the process of working that. I have all the text messages from just the information that he wanted me to know kind of in a quick way, and what was missing, and what he thought they did wrong, what they missed. And I said, “OK, write it up.”

Sottile: Randy and Rebecca Zuber don’t have social media, so Kuypers posted what Randy sent her. She didn’t write an article, like a journalist would. She didn’t file records requests to get more information about the case, or ask questions of the sheriff. But she did want to make sure this grieving father’s words got to the community accurately.

Our interview with Kuypers turned into an unexpected conversation about what modern media looks like. In an ideal world, journalism is supposed to be a check on power. Reporters are supposed to advocate for those without a voice. On her page, Kuypers doesn’t allow people to make fun of homeless people, or people struggling with addiction. She has no patience for it. She’s driven by some of the same goals as Will Lohre. Get the information and put it out there so people can make decisions.

Haas: I mean, do you consider yourself a journalist or a part of media?

Kuypers: Oh, heck no.

Haas: Why, though?

Kuypers: It’s just nothing I’ve… I’ve never thought of it. I don’t know. I just consider myself just somebody who literally created a Facebook page. It’s just not a big deal to me. It’s just like a Facebook page that you create for your personal self, and you just have friends on it.

Haas: It sounds like a full time job doing this, though.

Kuypers: I have said if I got a dollar for everybody that asked to be on it, I would have a couple dollars.

Sottile: You would have $35,000, Teresa.

Kuypers: Well, I mean, it’s a couple.

Sottile: Here was Kuypers saying, “I’m no journalist.” But the more she talked, Ryan and I were saying, “kinda seems like you’re at least journalism-adjacent.”

Kuypers: If somebody asks me not to say something, I’m not going to say something. It’s the one thing that I will hold. It’s whatever. That’s my morals.

Sottile: I mean, you’re operating the way you’re describing. We call it a code of ethics. You call it morals. It’s basically the same thing though. We have standards and there are things we don’t do. And if somebody says, “Look, I’m going to give you some information, but you got to keep my name out of it,” we protect our sources. We take it to our grave.

Kuypers: I constantly have people come to me and just say, “Hey, will you post this anonymously?” And I just think, how do all these people that don’t know me and never met me, how do you trust that I’m going to post this anonymously and not say your name?

Haas: Well, you’ve built trust over time.

Sottile: Will Lohre told us he wasn’t sure he ever got the trust of people in Columbia County through his reporting at the newspaper. But tens of thousands of people trust Teresa Kuypers as a source of information. She’s accomplished that by being consistent with her rules around decency and making space for all people in the community.

At the same time, running Concerned Citizens of Columbia County has opened her eyes to issues the community has. The way gossip spreads. The ways certain people are treated by police.

As we talked, she shared with us that her sister struggled with substance abuse. She died in another Oregon county under strange circumstances. Kuypers felt like the police disregarded her sister because she was an addict. So when she heard about Sarah Zuber’s death, her mind went right back to her sister.

Sottile: Would it surprise you if investigators didn’t do a thorough job with the Zuber case?

Kuypers: Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Sottile: That’s what we’re trying to figure out. I’m sure you know, but in case you don’t, they’ve concluded she died of hypothermia and alcohol.

Kuypers: Yes. And that’s what I’m sick and tired of hearing. I’m sick and tired of hearing she was a young girl who was drinking, it was probably her fault. She just fell. She was drunk. Stop freaking blaming the victim.

Sottile: As we’ve reported on Sarah Zuber, the prevailing theory that we’ve been told is that she died from drinking and hypothermia. The police told us, no, they don’t think she just laid down drunk on the side of the road and died. But then again, they don’t have another theory.

And that chafed Kuypers. She felt like they were saying Sarah was responsible for her own death. She didn’t buy that.

At the end of the day, Kuypers is sort of a mirror image of Capote. Where he was an outsider parachuting in on a new community, she lives with the people she covers. She knows this place. She sees thousands of posts every week. She knows way too much about Columbia County to believe Sarah laid down on the side of the road and died.

Kuypers: There’s some dark secrets and issues in Columbia County that, really, we need to get to the root of, we need to get to the bottom of. And there are some things that need to happen in Columbia County. We need a fresh start.

Sottile: Soon, a dark secret came to light in Columbia County, and we saw exactly what Kuypers meant. It was a coverup so explosive it would affect everything we thought about what could have happened to Sarah Zuber.

When Ryan and I sat down with Will Lohre, the last editor of the Chronicle & Chief newspaper, we talked for almost three hours about being a journalist in Columbia County. And he brought up a scandal that played out at St. Helen’s High School in 2019, the same year Sarah died.

Lohre: This guy, Kyle Wroblewski, was a track coach there and he just did some absolutely horrific abuse. Just an awful, awful story.

Sottile: In early 2024, Will wrote a story about how that coach was sentenced to prison for grooming and sexually abusing a 17-year-old student. In a lawsuit, she is referred to as “Jessica Doe.” Doe alleged that the school district knew about her teacher’s abuse of other female students long before her time. The district settled the case and paid Doe $3.5 million.

Lohre: I talked to the lawyer who had represented, but he had said that the case was one of the most shocking examples of state-allowed danger to children, just based on the timeline of events and how the staff ‒ district staff ‒ knew that this guy posed a danger to students and just didn’t really do anything.

Sottile: By the fall of 2024, the St. Helens High case was in the news again because of some TikTok videos.

Doug Weaver: My former history teacher Kyle Wroblewski was arrested and convicted of SA.

Sottile: In these videos, a guy with a beard talks straight to the camera, pointing to Will’s article in the Chronicle & Chief about the case.

Weaver: They reached a settlement of $3.5 million, the largest settlement of this kind ever in the state of Oregon. And good for her for getting that money. But that’s not gonna have the impact on the school that you would expect, because all of that money is being paid by the district’s insurer. Those consequences aren’t being passed on to the district.

Sottile: This TikTok influencer is named Doug Weaver. He lives in Missouri but he grew up in Columbia County. And in the videos, he put up photos of the St. Helens School District superintendent.

Weaver: And Scot Stockwell is still the superintendent. He’s still there. And that’s wild to me. And it wasn’t just Stockwell. Everybody knew! I knew that Wroblewski was a risk to students in 2006. Everyone, everyone in that school knew. There are a lot of secrets that didn’t get made public because of that settlement. Just because one predator was caught does not mean the environment that protected him has been changed.

Sottile: Doug Weaver’s TikTok videos blew up. They went beyond viral, with hundreds of comments where people alleged more examples of abuse at the high school. At one point, the principal of St. Helens High said people shouldn’t share the TikTok videos, because what happened was in the past. But that only further inflamed people. Weaver kept making videos. A flood of new allegations came in, and by November 2024 police arrested two more teachers on charges of sexual abuse. And the students staged a huge walkout and protest.

As the months rolled by, even more allegations came. The superintendent was fired, and the principal faced criminal charges for helping hide the abuse. When Will wrote his article, people didn’t really react to the news. But when Weaver’s TikTok videos came out, the dam broke on the story. The community couldn’t stop talking about it. We decided to get on the phone with Weaver.

Weaver: So yeah, I’m not a journalist. I’m not an investigative journalist. I’m not a reporter. I just made some videos talking about some experiences that I had in high school, and it started getting shared around the high school.

Sottile: Sarah Zuber didn’t go to St. Helens High School. She was homeschooled. But we knew by the time we spoke to Weaver that Columbia County as a whole kind of operates like one big town. We thought Weaver could help us understand the larger culture of the place, and if young people in this community were in danger because of that culture.

Weaver: Some of the younger people don’t understand this concept of just being silent about something because that’s what you do. And so as they started sharing things around, they started contacting me a lot about things that they were experiencing. And I did make some of those reports, and I was very serious about making those reports.

But when I did them, I removed everyone’s names. I did them in a way that no one could actually get the information unless they talked to me. To make sure that the people who were investigating had to talk to me and couldn’t go to those students and couldn’t ruin their lives.

Sottile: Weaver told us he inserted himself in the middle of all this simply because he knew the students making allegations needed some level of protection. They were sources who needed someone to speak on their behalf. To hold power to account.

Weaver: I just had a feeling that these students, they’re going to come talk to me, they’re going to tell me this information, they’re going to tell me they’re being abused. I’m going to make the report. The report is going to go to someone at the school district, and they’re just going to go to these students and they’re going to get in trouble for their social media use. They’re going to get in trouble for making these reports. They’re going to be having rumors spread about them throughout the school. They’re going to have teachers treating them poorly. The administration’s going to treat them poorly. They’re going to have repercussions against their parents.

Sottile: It’s kind of uncanny that you said, “If we don’t do it this way, these reports will get buried and people will get retaliated against.” That you really knew. The difference here is that you knew that about Columbia County, and that that was possible. And then, like you say, it turned out that was happening.

Weaver: Well yeah.

Sottile: Maybe that’s the difference here in this situation, is that you are of that place.

Weaver isn’t a journalist. But he’s someone who understands the way this county runs. He grew up here. He saw a problem, and he thought he could fix it by broadcasting it. It was the same impulse Jennifer Massey said she had when she put the Zuber records on Facebook.

Weaver: So I got out of Columbia County, and I think getting out of Columbia County gave me a different perspective that there were a lot of things growing up that seemed super normal that I learned quickly are not that normal.

Sottile: He was overwhelmed with comments on his videos. He could see this problem was both deeply present and incredibly old.

Jennifer Massey made the good old boys network here sound like people who run things behind the scenes and do each other favors. That was on display when the DA could show up at the newspaper and Rebecca Zuber’s letter could get taken down.

Weaver pointed out another version of it at the high school.

Weaver: The good old boys network in Columbia County is not even a secret. It’s not even something that they try all that hard to hide. I remember when I was younger, in the high school, hearing about certain teachers, a group of teachers calling themselves “the good old boys.”

Also, with it being such a small community with people being connected the way that they are, that you might have this high school teacher who is connected to the principal, who’s connected to the superintendent, who’s connected to the school board member, who is the county commissioner, who’s connected to the sheriff, who’s connected to who knows.

It’s so interconnected that everybody has a story with everybody and you just don’t know what those stories are. Columbia County has a lot of secrets, but pretty much everybody knows them.

Sottile: They’re just all open secrets.

Weaver: They’re kind of open secrets. Everybody knows that there’s corruption going on, but it’s like you can’t say it out… You can’t just really say it.

Sottile: Saying the quiet part out loud in Columbia County could mean facing consequences, your kids facing consequences. Weaver said there’s another element to all of this. Something Teresa Kuypers hinted at, too. That even if you get the guts to speak up and say something, there’s a good chance nothing will change.

Weaver: There’s corruption everywhere. People do this everywhere. This is just how people are. This is just how institutions are. This is just reality.

Sottile: When Jennifer Massey took up Sarah’s case for the Zubers, she was acting as the community and saying, “You can’t trust the institutions to solve this. They’re corrupt.” And now the social media power brokers in this county were telling the same story. Corruption is everywhere. It’s in the schools. It’s in the police. It’s in the people who own the local newspaper. It sounds conspiratorial. But there’s also some truth to it.

Weaver was pretty up front with us that he’s not the media and doesn’t want to be. He felt he had to do what he did because no one else was doing it. But there’s an irony to his videos. He points at Will Lohre’s story about abuse at the high school in the background. When the traditional media outlet wrote about what happened, people moved on. No one bought the paper, and it shut down. But when Weaver put the story out on TikTok from Missouri, things went crazy.

So, in this true crime story, the media isn’t a newspaper with an office. It’s the “Justice for Sarah Zuber” Facebook group. It’s “Concerned Citizens of Columbia County.” It’s a guy on TikTok in Missouri. It’s the community itself.

Sottile: Do you consider yourself a journalist now? Do you think you’ll do more types of projects like this?

Weaver: No. This isn’t fun. No. I think that I crossed the line into journalism for this. I don’t want to stay there.

Sottile: Weaver said he has a video of him splitting wood that got 13 million views. Content like that is a lot easier than breaking open a child sexual abuse scandal. So he’d rather go back to that.

Sarah Zuber died in this environment. A place where the media is Facebook moderators and TikTok influencers who are simply doing what they think will help. Sarah Zuber died in a county where kids could be abused for decades at the local high school, and no one would say anything. She died in a place where the district attorney comes to the newspaper and says, “Take the letter of that grieving mother down,” and they don’t show him the door. She died in a place where facts are disseminated by a woman while she babysits her grandkids, and a journalist loses his job.

It was starting to make a little more sense why this case was so stagnant. Everyone was so busy repeating rumors, protecting people or playing politics, that good information got lost or overlooked.

Still, it felt like we were getting close to figuring out this place’s secrets. But uncovering them was going to take every journalistic skill we had.

Det. Peabody: If you get a lead, you follow that lead. But it can be harder sometimes when you’re dealing, say, with informants. That can be harder.

Sottile: So, I think I know what we’re talking about. We got a record from the St. Helens Police that they, I want to say in late December, Officer Gaston and a couple people met with two informants. Is this what we’re talking about?

Peabody: These are the kind of things that hurt an investigation.

Sottile: That’s next time.