Court hears opening statements in Keizer murder trial

Tuesday morning was the beginning of the trial that ended Keizer Police's longest-running murder investigation, as attorneys gave opening statements in the trial against Victor David Smith.

Smith is accused of shooting and killing Phillip Johnson at his Keizer apartment on the night of July 1, 2004.

Smith was arraigned on the charge in June of last year after a Grand Jury handed down a secret indictment; he was serving a prison sentence inside the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution on an unrelated charge at the time.

In July of 2004, Keizer Police found Johnson lying in the parking lot of Cascadian Village Apartments around 11 p.m. Medics pronounced him dead at the scene.

According to details laid out in opening statements by the prosecution, Johnson was murdered over unrequited love and jealousy. Johnson had been in a relationship with a woman, but Smith himself was madly in love with her and jealous of the pair's relationship.

Prosecutor David Russell Wilson opened by showing to the jury a copy of a letter Smith had written to her from prison.

"I'm fiercely protective to you and I'll leave a person dead over you," the letter stated. "That may be a problem cause I do have an anger problem and low tolerance towards people."

"There was only one way for the relationship to stop and that was for the defendant to put an end to it," Wilson told the court. This jealousy went on until July 1, when Smith "decided then and there he was going to take care of his problem."

According to prosecutors, a friend and his girlfriend drove Smith over to Johnson's Keizer apartment that night. While the friend and his girlfriend remained in the car, Smith got out and jumped a chain-link fence into the apartment complex where Johnson lived.

Johnson had come outside to take out the trash and say good-bye to a friend who had been visiting, prosecutors said. It was near the dumpster that Smith jumped out and began shooting.

"He shot Phillip Johnson four times," Wilson said. "In the neck, in the back and in the arm. The final shot entered his pelvis and lodged in his shoulder. Phillip Johnson collapsed on the ground, and that's where he died."

But according to Olcott Thompson, Smith's defense attorney, his client had nothing to do with the murder.

"There is no question that ten years ago, someone shot and killed Phillip Johnson," he said. "Absolutely not. The question is whether Mr. Smith did it."

Thompson argued that the relationship between Johnson and the woman had already ended before that night. He argued there were other people who had issues with Johnson; that maybe he had been involved in a drug issue that had gone wrong. And he argued that the two people who had driven Smith to the apartment that night "concocted a story" about what happened.

By the end of the trial, he told the jury, "the state won't have proved he was the one who did it."