Among the couple dozen people who attended serial killer Warren Forrest’s sentencing Friday was a juror from his recent murder trial.
The woman — who asked to be identified as Juror 7 — said everyone on the jury believed Forrest was guilty of killing 17-year-old Martha Morrison in 1974.
“That first day of trial was hard,” she said, referring to testimony from Norma Countryman Lewis, who detailed how she escaped after Forrest abducted her near Ridgefield and left her tied up at Tukes Mountain in July 1974.
“That was the hardest for me, hearing her testimony that she stayed up all night, hopping post to post, trying to get free,” Juror 7 said.
There were days, after difficult testimony, jurors would go back to the jury room and stare at each other in silence, she said.
Because the jurors were instructed not to talk about the case until it was time to deliberate, she said she didn’t know what the others were thinking.
When it was time to deliberate, she said one juror called into question whether the crime had occurred in Clark County, an essential element required to find Forrest guilty. But Juror 7 said the jury relied on Forrest’s pattern of abducting girls and women and taking them to remote locations in Clark County to kill them.
In addition to the DNA evidence, what was particularly damning, she said, was audio of Forrest from a 2014 parole board hearing in which he described his pattern — admitting to abducting and killing 20-year-old Krista Blake; abducting Countryman Lewis; and abducting, raping and assaulting a 20-year-old Camas woman, who also survived.
