Maxine Bernstein's Article in the "The Oregonian" Detailing the Jeffrey Cutlip Case

Photo by Randy L. Rasmussen, The Oregonian

Multnomah County Circuit Judge Eric Bergstrom is expected to sentence predatory sex offender Jeffrey P. Cutlip to life Friday morning for the violent killings of three women.

Cutlip, 64, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty in October to one count of aggravated murder and two counts of murder.

After skipping out of Oregon and failing to report as a sex offender for years, Cutlip was arrested in July 2012 once he called 911 in Brownsville, Texas and confessed to the unsolved homicides. He said he wanted to talk to detectives "about some bad things he had done in the past.''

He ended up confessing to the 1975 strangulation of 44-year-old Marlene Claire Carlson, who was found dead in her downtown Portland apartment. Cutlip lived down the hall from her at the time, but was never questioned by Portland detectives then. Police said Cutlip strangled Carlson with a phone cord and then sexually assaulted her corpse.

Two years later, Cutlip drowned 15-year-old Julie Marie Bennett, a Milwaukie girl, in Johnson Creek after meeting her at the park earlier that day. Police said he lured her to his nearby cabin, forced her clothes off and sodomized her for nearly two hours. When Bennett threatened to alert police, Cutlip decided to kill her, detectives said he told them. Bennett was the only one of the three victims he could identify by name, police said.

In the summer of 1993, shortly after Cutlip was released from prison on sodomy and burglary convictions, he told detectives he killed a woman in Portland who police identified as Nielen Loribell Doll, 33, of Spokane. She had come to Portland to find her three sons, who were the subject of a custody dispute. Cutlip said he met Doll at a bar, they shared methamphetamine and he took her back to his Northeast 29th Avenue apartment. When she refused to get tied up and have sex, Cutlip held his hands around his neck until she went unconscious, pulled off her pants and attempted sexual intercourse, police said. He put her body in a sleeping bag and dumped it near Oxbow Park.

The aggravated murder count stems from Doll's killing and the two other murder counts are for Bennett's and Carlson's deaths. The remaining charges from his 11-count indictment were dismissed, and he won't be classified as a dangerous offender under the plea deal reached.

The sentencing hearing is scheduled to start about 9 a.m., with relatives of the victims expected to address the judge.

--Maxine Bernstein