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SMALL TOWN KEPT GIRL’S MEMORY ALIVE
Coquille residents never stopped demanding that police find Leah’s killer

By Winston Ross
The Register-Guard
Appeared in print: Saturday, Sep 4, 2010

COQUILLE — To this day, K’Lynn Landmark still can see the black sedans speeding down Lee Valley Road, past her house on the outskirts of Fairview. Traffic on this rural stretch of county road near Coquille is anything but bustling, so she knew something was up.

Landmark’s husband, Jim Judd, hopped on his four-wheeler to find out what was going on.

“He asked them, and they said they’d found Leah Freeman,” Landmark remembers.

By that point, five weeks after the 15-year-old girl’s disappearance on June 28, 2000, just about everybody in Coquille knew who Leah Freeman was. There were fliers and yellow ribbons and bows all over town: at the grocery store, the beauty salons, the restaurants. Teenage girls don’t disappear from a small town like Coquille. That kind of thing was supposed to happen in other places — bigger, scarier places.

In the weeks that followed her disappearance, the police and the town focused on finding Leah. But the discovery of her body that Aug. 3 provided little closure to a stunned community. Her killer, or killers, were still on the loose, and the Coos County District Attorney’s Office was making no promises that they’d solve the case.

“No arrests have been made,” said Paul Frasier, then chief deputy district attorney, three days after Leah’s body turned up, debunking rumors that someone had been nabbed in the case. “Nor are any anticipated in the near future.”

Nor for a decade, as it turned out, until Coquille police showed up at the home of Leah’s former boyfriend, Nicholas James McGuffin, last Monday. McGuffin and his parents both have said the 20-year-old is innocent. But the arrest marks a huge milestone for Coquille. This town never forgot Leah Freeman. And, led by a grieving mother’s decade-long quest for justice, the community never stopped demanding that police find her killer.

Mother kept up pressure

Regina Kincheloe first learned that Leah was missing when McGuffin walked into Judy’s New Image Hair Salon on Central with a missing-child poster, shortly after the girl disappeared in 2000.

“He seemed like he was in a big hurry to get out of here,” Kincheloe said. “He seemed upset.”

Kincheloe had done Leah’s hair a few days before she disappeared; nothing fancy, just a trim. The girl’s disappearance was a sad mystery, she remembers.

“It bothered everybody,” Kincheloe said. “Nobody knew anything.”

As the weeks went on with no arrests, people started to wonder if they should worry for their children’s safety, Kincheloe said.

“Fairview is an out-of-the-way place that only locals know about, not some bearded stranger,” she said, which meant that the killer was likely “walking among us. We didn’t know whether we were supposed to let our kids walk to the pool.”

Police interviewed dozens of people, but made no arrests, a frustration to the community, which became increasingly critical of the police and their chief, Michael Reaves.

Leah’s mother, Cory Courtright, pestered the chief constantly. When she felt that she wasn’t getting enough of a response, she made an appeal to the media, criticizing the investigation publicly. She continued to write letters to the editor over the years, including one published in The Register-Guard in honor of what would have been Leah’s 25th birthday last fall.

“As I endure this painful anniversary, I am again reminded of everything that was taken away from Leah and everything that could have been. Since I can’t do anything about that, I do what I can: fight for justice,” Courtright wrote. “I miss my daughter horribly, and I fear for others because her murderer is still free.”

Courtright held candle­light vigils on both the anniversary of her daughter’s disappearance and the date she was found; sometimes on her birthday, too. She allied with national victims’ rights organizations. She started a website, publishing documents from the 2000 investigation that showed that investigators were homing in on Mc­Guffin. She spent $14,000 on a private investigator who “gave me 10 pieces of paper of interviews with friends I already knew.” She pushed, and pushed, and pushed.

“For a long time, people would come up to me and say, ‘Is anything going on in the case?’ and I’d have nothing to say,” Courtright said. “It was kind of awkward. I felt like they were looking at me like, ‘What do you mean you don’t know? You’ve got to know something.’ ”

Frustration with police

Courtright wasn’t the only one who never let go of the case. When Mary Geddry moved to Coquille in 2003, she said, Leah Freeman invariably came up in the first moments of her conversations with people in town.

“I hadn’t lived here a month before I heard, ‘We have an unsolved murder here,’ ” Geddry said.

Partly, Geddry said, that’s because it’s a small town, with 4,200 people and two stoplights. But what also kept the case alive in Coquille was the community’s growing frustration with its police department, over the Freeman murder and other issues. Some felt that Freeman’s family wasn’t getting justice because it wasn’t prominent enough, that they were just “little people,” Geddry said.

“Eventually, the little people stood up,” she said. “There was this uproar, uprising.”

After Chief Reaves retired in 2008, citing an inability to do his job after a shoulder surgery, citizens demanded that they be in on the process of hiring his successor, that the whole thing happen in a public forum.

When the field was narrowed to five finalists, there were two key questions for each of them, said Frasier, who is now the district attorney and who sat on the hiring committee. What would the candidate do to transform the image of the Coquille Police Department? And what would they do about the Leah Freeman case?

All five candidates were familiar with Leah’s disappearance, and all expressed a willingness to relaunch the investigation, Frasier said.

The district attorney hadn’t forgotten Leah, either.

On the wall in his office is posted a timeline showing all of the known facts about Leah’s whereabouts the night she disappeared, lined up alongside a similar chart for McGuffin and his friend Brent Bartley, who has testified before a Coos Country grand jury and who faces no charges in the case.

Over the years, any time he wasn’t working another major investigation, Frasier said, he pondered the Freeman case, Coquille’s only unsolved homicide, wondering if there was any other way to go after it. He kept a copy of the timelines at home.

Cold case squad formed

There is a blue candle on the top shelf to the right of Frasier’s desk, from the first candlelight vigil held for Leah, the year she disappeared.

“When (Courtright) comes in to yell at me, I point at the candle. She sometimes forgets I’ve been thinking about this case for a long time,” Frasier said. “My house is a block from one of the last places Leah was seen. My daughter’s picture is next to Leah’s in the yearbook. This case has always meant a lot to me.”

When the new police chief, Mark Dannels, got to town in 2008, Frasier immediately approached him about reopening the case. A month later, Dannels reported that he’d already met with a group of retired area police officers; not long after that, the chief started poring over the old evidence.

Dannels and Frasier announced the formation of a cold case squad early this year, a few month’s after Leah’s birthday, and a few months too late for the girl’s father to know her case was finally about to come to a head. Dennis Freeman and his wife, Denise, had moved away from Coquille in 2001. He died of cancer on Oct. 23.

“My husband spent years before he died blaming himself for not being there to protect his daughter,” Denise Freeman said. “That was his baby, you know.”

On the day of Mc­Guffin’s arrest, Leah’s cousin Rily Maggard was cutting hair all day at Judy’s salon, unable to attend to her phone. When she picked it up, she said, she had 15 voice mail messages.

People have been asking her about Leah Freeman at least once a week for the past 10 years, she said, any time anyone new moves to town.

“It’s good this is happening,” Maggard said. “I wish it had happened sooner.”

http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/cityregion/25254065-41/leah-case-coquille-freeman-police.csp

Who was Leah Freeman?
Leah lives in memories of family, friends

Posted: Saturday, September 4, 2010 11:00 am

She was a streak of lightning who could steal a basketball from opposing players.

She was short, opinionated, funny, feisty and energetic.

She was.

"It kills me that all the things that I have now - a husband, kid - she never got to have," said Jennifer Trosper, Leah Freeman's childhood friend.

"She's a human being and, nowadays, she's just the subject of a story."

More than 10 years after someone mysteriously killed the 15-year-old, family and friends shared memories of Leah's life and girlish antics to help the community remember she is not just a victim.

"She was a real live person, and somebody took that away from everyone," Trosper said.

‘Thumb thucker'

One of Terry Middleton's favorite memories of her niece goes back to Leah's first-grade year.

Middleton, who works in food services for the Coquille School District, said she often would recruit first-graders to help stack dishes at lunch time. Her helpers each were outfitted with rubber gloves and aprons.

"Of course, Leah loved it. She wanted to be in there all the time," Middleton recalled.

One day, while Middleton served food to students, she turned and saw her tiny blond niece with a thumb stuffed in her mouth - she had ripped off the rubber thumb from one of her gloves but left the rest intact.

"She got to work and ‘thuck' her thumb at the ‘thame' time," Middleton joked.

"I laughed. It was just the cutest thing. That thumb was very important to her."

All of Middleton's sisters, including Leah's mother, Cory Courtright, giggled at the memory as they sat in Courtright's living room last week.

They said Leah sucked her thumb up into her teen years but did her best to hide it.

Girlish antics

"I think everybody has their little idiosyncrasies," said sister-in-law Rosemary Courtright.

When it comes to Leah, the statement holds true.

She often walked into sliding glass doors. Her favorite color was pink. Despite being a bit of a tomboy, Leah constantly primped herself.

"She would put lipstick on and kiss the mirrors," Cory Courtright said.

"She had them all over the mirror. You couldn't hardly see yourself."

When the family moved into Leah's grandparents' home in Coquille, Courtright said her daughter would bounce around the living room trying to make them laugh.

She would cartwheel into Middleton's home, climb into her uncle Bill's arms and play skin the cat. Leah also loved to hide whenever they came over.

"I'd pretend like I didn't see her, and then she would jump on my back," Bill Middleton said. Leah even did it in her teens.

"She would make us all laugh," Bill Middleton said. "She just had a lot of energy - spunky little girl."

A bang of a stunt

One Christmas Eve, Leah cut off her older sister's bangs.

That night, as the whole family geared up for a feast, Leah and sister Denise said they wanted to run home.

A half hour later, Middleton noticed Denise wearing a stocking cap down to her eyebrows.

"Leah came in behind all meek and mild and slithered up the stairway," she recalled.

"Denise would not take that hat off for nothing," Courtright added.

She already had seen the damage. Worse, both girls were getting perms for Christmas.

"‘You can't get a rod in that, Denise'," Cory Courtright recalled saying.

‘My first wreck'

Although Leah never got a learner's permit, her mother once convinced her to back her car out of a driveway.

Instead, she struck her grandmother's car, which crushed a workbench.

"She just sat there, and her eyes were this big around, and she said, ‘Oh my God, Mom, I had my first wreck.'"

Aside from her bubbly personality and quirky sense of humor, Leah excelled in basketball and volleyball. Her aptitude at school sports is one thing many friends, family members and coaches easily recall.

Debbie Erler, mother of one of Leah's close friends, said she remembers Leah best from basketball and team sleepovers.

"What a team they were, often placing first or second in their league," Erler wrote in an e-mail to The World.

‘Our secret weapon'

"Leah was our secret weapon. She was so small, players from other teams deemed her a non-threat.

"But Leah was a streak of lightning on the court, and she could steal a ball before anyone (could) even seen her coming, and she was back at the other end of the court before they knew what happened."

Trosper, who sat next to Leah at their preschool graduation and played on her team at Coquille Valley Middle School, said Leah had a unique free throw: She would shoot with two hands with all her might and would often make a basket.

"She was frickin' awesome. She was probably one of the fastest ones on the team," said Trosper, 25.

Played for keeps

Dan Hermann, Leah's basketball coach for fourth, fifth and sixth grades, named her most valuable player in 1996. That year, they won the league championship.

Leah took the game seriously.

"She was out there to win," he said of his starting point guard.

"She would have been an all-league player in school. She was very talented."

Trosper, who now lives in North Bend, said she grew apart from Leah as they got older, but she still thinks of her - and her death - often.

"I can't comprehend how anybody could do that," Trosper said.

"It's just something that stuck with me and will stick with me forever."

Life without Leah

Erler remembers the summer day her daughter told her Leah had disappeared and recalls the months and years that followed.

"I know that as Leah's friends move through their lives with college, love, marriage and children, they, like Leah's family, cannot help but wonder at each stage, where Leah would be right now," Erler said.

"What would she have done after graduation? Who would she have fallen in love with and married?

"And would her little girl be (a) streak of lightning on the basketball court just like her?"

Staff Writer Andy Rossback contributed to this story.

http://theworldlink.com/news/local/article_332d71b4-b7f4-11df-9220-001cc4c002e0.html

Judge avoids Freeman case

Posted: Thursday, September 9, 2010 11:00 am

A Coos County Circuit Court judge has recused himself from court proceedings in the Leah Freeman homicide.

According to a circuit court spokeswoman, Judge Michael Gillespie removed himself from the case Aug. 30. She said no reason was listed.

An attempt to reach Gillespie was unsuccessful, but his assistant said he did not want to comment.

Coquille resident Nick McGuffin is accused of murdering 15-year-old Leah, his former girlfriend, in 2000. He is set to reappear in court for a status check on Oct. 11. At that time, a judge may set a trial date.

Meanwhile he remains in the Coos County jail on $2 million bail.

http://theworldlink.com/news/local/article_bae4a9bb-fa0c-577d-9e09-e131357a5862.html

Bruce McGuffin says police seek scapegoat in Leah Freeman case
Suspect's father: Nick is innocent

Posted: Friday, September 10, 2010 11:00 am


Nicholas J. McGuffin, 28, listens to Circuit Court Judge Michael Gillespie read the murder charge Aug. 24 during McGuffin's arraignment. He is charged with murdering 15-year-old Leah Freeman. They dated for eight months before Freeman went missing 10 years ago.

The first time Bruce and Kathy McGuffin laid eyes on their son after his arrest was through the window of a Coos County courtroom door.

He was 'sitting all alone sobbing while the entire jury stand was filled with reporters and cameras only feet from him," Bruce McGuffin wrote in a statement to The World.

'From what I read ... it sounds like Nick was arrested because they needed someone in jail.

'We know our son is innocent."

It's a message Bruce McGuffin has asserted since his son Nick McGuffin first became a murder suspect in the 2000 death of 15-year-old Leah.

Waiting for justice

'He has lived here most of the time because he could not leave until the people responsible for this crime came to trial; otherwise, our whole family would have left a long time ago," the elder McGuffin wrote.

He has an alternate theory for the crime: Bruce McGuffin believes that several people struck Leah with a car, tortured her, and then dumped her body. Those people were granted immunity, he contends, and the homicide was pinned on Nick 'because he's the boyfriend."

'I know Nick had nothing to do with it," Bruce McGuffin said in a subsequent interview.

'How can an 18-year-old kid do something like that and over a 10-year period not come up with any insight to me that he did it?

'And don't think I haven't been looking for it. ... If I had known he killed Leah, I would have been the first person to take him down."

Suicide attempt

He added that if his son had killed Leah, Nick would have attempted suicide.

But Nick did try to take his own life after investigators found Leah's body in August 2000. Bruce McGuffin said he came home one night and found that Nick had swallowed a bottle of Tylenol.

A Coquille Valley Hospital spokeswoman confirmed the younger McGuffin had been seen at the facility sometime that month.

'He didn't want to live in this life no more," his father.

'He wanted to be with her."

Grand jury

Coos County District Attorney R. Paul Frasier wouldn't discuss details of the case or alternative scenarios.

However, he explained that when the case was presented to a grand jury, jurors indicted Nick McGuffin on a charge of murder.

They heard from 113 witnesses -- including Bruce McGuffin and some persons who earlier had been suspects, Frasier said. They heard every theory of the case -- including the accident/torture scenario -- whether or not the theories had been debunked by police.

'The fact that they testified at the grand jury would be an indicator that the grand jury felt there was insufficient evidence to proceed against those particular individuals," Frasier said.

Also, an affidavit for a January 2010 search warrant reveals that an autopsy of Leah's body revealed no fractures, nicks or marks that would indicate she had been stabbed, shot or struck by a vehicle.

Offered immunity

Furthermore, since Frasier began working on the case in 2000 as a chief deputy district attorney, he has offered immunity to only two people.

The first is Brent Bartley, a friend of Nick McGuffin who was found to be deceitful in a polygraph test when asked whether anyone told him he or she was responsible for Leah's disappearance and whether Bartley was concealing critical information regarding the disappearance.

According to a July 2000 letter sent to Bartley's attorney, Nick Nylander, Frasier offered immunity for any crime regarding Leah -- aside from direct involvement -- in exchange for his knowledge and testimony regarding her disappearance.

The offer was not accepted.

Additionally, the DA gave a letter of immunity to another person who worried he could face charges for having withheld information he later gave to investigators.

Polygraph results

Nick McGuffin also failed three pertinent questions in a polygraph exam about whether he physically did something that resulted in Leah's death; if he had any direct involvement in her disappearance; and if he had talked to Leah since she was last seen the night she disappeared.

Polygraphs are inadmissible in Oregon courts.

Bruce McGuffin said his son failed the test because he blamed himself for her death because he hadn't picked up Leah from a friend's home the night she disappeared, and because he had been interrogated for seven hours without a cigarette or lunch break.

'I don't think I would typically pass it after seven hours without a cigarette and low blood sugar," Bruce McGuffin said.

Typically, people undergoing a polygraph exam can take breaks, Frasier said, and won't be given the exam if they're under the influence of drugs, are sleep deprived or are pregnant, among other factors.

McGuffin's logs

Over the years, Bruce McGuffin said he's kept a log of every interaction with police and abusive community members, as well as tips he's received from the public.

'We thought if we kept hearing stuff, pretty soon we'd be able to piece it together," he said.

He added that he offered it to Coquille Police Chief Mark Dannels, but it was later seized by police.

Frasier said he had requested the log several times, as Bruce McGuffin claimed it contained the identity of Leah's true killer.

'Every time we have asked for them, they said they needed to speak with their attorney and they would get back to us," Frasier said.

'They never did."

Eventually investigators sought a search warrant to take the information from the McGuffin home on Baker Road in Coquille.

Family harassed

The 10-year onus of Leah's death has weighed heavily on the McGuffins.

'The first two years were terrible; having to lock the gate on our driveway and (keep) a loaded shot gun by the door due to threats of murder towards our son and us," Bruce McGuffin wrote in his statement.

'People yell from their car windows, 'You murderer,' then gesture to you with their middle finger, or people in the store yell out 'You're a murderer, your whole family is.'"

Frasier and Dannels said they are unaware of any reports of harassment or similar crimes made by the McGuffin family.

McGuffin added that police officers pulled his son over upwards of 60 times in the first eight months after Leah's body was found.

'Everyone he met, the police would go to their parents and tell them that Nick is a person of interest in a murder case," Bruce McGuffin wrote.

The DA said people occasionally called to check on Nick McGuffin's status but that he was unaware of officers initiating that type of contact.

Visits on the job

Bruce McGuffin noted that police came to his son's places of employment while he worked at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort and again when Nick worked as a banquet chef at The Mill Casino-Hotel.

Frasier said he was unaware of police conducting traffic stops against the defendant aside from legitimate ones. Also, he said, officers visited Nick on the job at both locations.

While he was at the golf resort in 2004, an FBI agent and a Coos County Sheriff's Office detective came by to ask if he had any involvement in the death of Brooke Wilberger in Corvallis.

He proved that he had not.

Then, after Leah's case was reopened this January, officers talked to Nick McGuffin's co-workers at The Mill, and put up reward posters requesting information leading to the arrest of the person responsible for her death.

The $10,000 reward has not yet been claimed.

Officers also began intermittent surveillance of the suspect.

'But as far as harassing him in the sense of pulling him over for no reason, ... I don't think that's true," Frasier said.

Sure of innocence

Just as Nick McGuffin's parents are sure of his innocence -- and are willing to put their home and land up for sale to pay for his defense -- one of Nick's friends said she, too, can't believe he killed Leah.

'I know he really cared about her," said Veronica Tolle.

'You could see it in his face and the tone of his voice.

'Anybody is capable of murder, but I would never, ever think that he is capable of that. I just don't see it."

She described her friend and confidante as laid back, professional at work, and empathetic.

'The Nick I know will cry on somebody's shoulder before he would lose his temper."

Tolle believes investigators are looking for somebody to blame.

'In the back of my head, I hope he didn't, I hope that he's innocent, and I hope he gets to laugh in everybody's face."

http://theworldlink.com/news/local/article_5e99c78b-3b8a-5de2-b0af-a58c9b97efa4.html

Justice for Leah Freeman: Hunt for Popular Oregon Teen's Killer
Ten Years After 15-Year-Old's Body Was Found, Suspicion Surrounds Then-Boyfriend Nick McGuffin

Oct. 15, 2010

More than a decade after 15-year-old Leah Freeman's body was found dumped a few miles from her home in Coquille, Ore., a trial date has been set for the man accused of killing her.

Nick McGuffin, who was Leah's boyfriend at the time of her death in 2000, is expected to stand trial for her murder on May 10, 2011.

After a grand jury's indictment was handed down, police arrested McGuffin on Aug. 24, 2010 and charged him with murder.

When police arrived at McGuffin's home, he was retrieving his mail and still wearing a uniform from his job as a short-order cook. He stood quietly as police read him his rights and handcuffed him.

"I didn't do it. Love of my life, man," he told "20/20" at the time of his arrest. "They have nothing else to go on, and I'm the boyfriend."

McGuffin pleaded not guilty and continues to maintain his innocence. His bail was set at $2 million.

Leah was a high school freshman when she disappeared in August 2000 after leaving a friend's house. Police initially treated the disappearance as a runaway teen case. Weeks later, the girl's decomposing body was found on a wooded roadside slope a few miles outside town.

Authorities said circumstantial evidence initially pointed to then-18-year-old McGuffin. But there was no hard evidence to link him to the crime.

Leah's best friend, Cherie Mitchell, said she thought Leah's relationship with the high school senior was bad for her.

"I think that he was kind of dangerous and, you know, maybe she liked the danger side of him," Mitchell said.

Leah's mother, Cory Courtwright, said that she did not approve of her daughter's relationship either.

"I found out that they were being sexually active, and that was disturbing for me," Courtwright said.

On the night of Leah's disappearance, Mitchell confronted her friend and told Leah she should break-up with McGuffin. Furious, Leah stormed out. She last was seen walking alone near a gas station in downtown Coquille, but she never made it home.

Justice for Leah: A Small Town Is in Uproar Over the Teen's Death

Former Police Chief Mike Reeves, who was head of the town's police department in 2000, turned down several requests to be interviewed, but recently told ABC News' Jim Avila that five days passed after Leah was reported missing before he was convinced of foul play.

Two blood-splattered gym shoes found miles apart had surfaced during that time and it would take investigators another month to find her body, but still no arrests were made.

As the years dragged on, the small community of Coquille, a town of about 4,000 residents, became more furious that Leah's murderer hadn't been caught.

A new police chief, Mark Dannels, vowed to solve the case and a team of forensic experts known as the Vidocq Society, based in Philadelphia, was brought in to advise on the case.

A crime-solving team made up of former FBI special agents, police officers, forensics experts and profilers, the Vidocq Society specializes in solving cold cases. One of the members, forensic pathologist Richard Walters, traveled to Oregon to review the evidence early last spring.

After reexamining Leah's bloody shoes and how her body was dumped, Walters labeled Leah's killer a "power assertive crime type."

"Power assertive is that muscle flexing, tectonic kind of braggart who thinks he's John Wayne, who wants to be a bigger man than what he is," Walters said. "The end goal was to get [Leah] dead and to get her dead in the most efficient way."

With this fresh perspective on the case, police were even more convinced that their prime suspect from the beginning, Leah's boyfriend, Nick McGuffin, was her killer.

But without a DNA match or an eyewitness, they needed enough evidence to build a circumstantial case that would hold up in court. They again reviewed integration tapes of McGuffin's account of what happened the night Leah disappeared.

McGuffin claimed he went to Leah's friend Cherie Mitchell's house to look for her around 9 p.m., but Leah already had stormed off. Then, he said he drove around for hours in his 1967 Ford Mustang looking for her.


Police and Friends Begin to Suspect Leah's Boyfriend, Nick McGuffin

Police said they had several witnesses who saw McGuffin acting strangely that night, including Mitchell, who said he showed up at her house a second time at around 10 p.m.

"He was definitely, you know, jumpy, talking fast," she said. "It was definitely odd."

Police also noticed that McGuffin seemed convinced that the worst had happened to Leah when they first interviewed him in 2000, and that he kept reverting back to past tense in his written statements.

"He tells us that Cherie was, was, her best friend, and the question is: How does he know that Cherie and Leah are no longer best friends?" said Mark Mclish, a handwriting expert who specializes in statement analysis. "The answer is 'cause he knows that at this point in time, Leah's dead."

Police then reexamined McGuffin's Mustang, even though it had already been sprayed with a chemical called luminal to test for the presence of blood during the initial investigation in 2000.

"There was nothing in there," said police chief Mark Dannels. "It had been cleaned. It had been wiped."

During the second round of searching, police got a huge break in the case.

Another witness, Kristen Steinoff, was questioned, and told police that McGuffin had stopped by her house around midnight on the night of Leah's disappearance. She said she and McGuffin did drugs, and when he tried to have sex with her, she refused. He also barrowed her car that night -- a Kia.

"Here's a guy that's worried about his girlfriend, that he's frantic about her ... but he's making a move on this girl," Dannels said.

The Kia had been sold, but detectives traced it back to its new owner in northern Idaho. After searching it, they found it, too, had been thoroughly cleaned, with air fresheners placed in the passenger side compartment and the trunk.

Steinoff was bought in again for questioning. She insisted she knew nothing about what happened to Leah, but then revealed to police that she had seen McGuffin twice that night. When he came around a second time, he was wearing different clothes and had threatened her.

"He started saying to keep my mouth shut," she said. "Then, I kind of figured that he did have something to do with it because of the way he was acting."

Police Arrest McGuffin After 100 People Testify at a Grand Jury Hearing

By that point, it was 2010 and police believed they had enough witnesses to prove McGuffin had lied about his whereabouts and he was the only one with a motive.

Steinoff and 100 other people testified in front of a grand jury, hoping to convince it that there was enough evidence to indict McGuffin for homicide. Shortly after the decision was handed down, police arrested him.

The question still remains: If McGuffin did kill Leah, what was his motive?

According to police, Leah allegedly had told some of her friends that her period was late and she possibly was pregnant. He was 18 and she was 15, and police suspect that McGuffin feared statutory rape charges.

After his arrest, McGuffin's family claimed that drug dealers should be investigated for Leah's death.

Leah's mother, Cory Courtright, said she doesn't believe there will ever be closure for her, but believed her daughter deserved justice.

"I just can't stand the thought of somebody getting away with taking such a beautiful, young life. It's just wrong," she said. "Whoever did this needs to pay."

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/leah-freeman-cold-case-decade-oregon-killing-solved/story?id=11871048&page=1

McGuffin faces May murder trial

Posted: Friday, October 15, 2010 11:00 am

COQUILLE -- The wait to get into the courtroom was longer than the hearing itself.

Within two minutes of Coos County Circuit Court Judge Richard Barron's appearance in court, he had set a trial, motion and omnibus dates. Then he promptly closed the status hearing for murder suspect Nick McGuffin.

A projected nine-day, 12-person-jury trial, starting May 10, 2011, will determine McGuffin's involvement in the 2001 death of Leah Freeman, his former girlfriend. If convicted on the one count of murder, 28-year-old McGuffin could face a life in prison with a 25-year-minimum sentence.

Before the hearing, Leah's mother, Cory Courtright, said she was nervous, but she and family later described the hearing 'short and sweet."

Emotions in the courtroom

Unlike his arraignment, neither McGuffin nor Courtright cried in the courtroom. She did scrunch her face in disgust, however, when she saw McGuffin shackled and dressed in a blue Coos County jail uniform.

He said nothing at the hearing.

Tension also was obvious between the Courtright/Freeman family and McGuffin's relatives. As Courtright and her family were led into the courtroom first, McGuffin's father, Bruce, complained loudly to Court Administrator Ed Jones.

'Why aren't we seated first when it's our son whose on trial?" Bruce McGuffin of Coquille said.

Jones said it's a common procedure for victims' families. The McGuffins and the media walked in next.

Two Coos County sheriff's deputies remained at the hearing to prevent any potential tussles.

'Emotions are high in this case ... so just to keep things calm we had a couple of extra deputies today," said Coos County District Attorney R. Paul Frasier.

Besides setting the trial, Barron told Frasier and Eugene defense attorney Shaun McRea they'll have until Dec. 15 to file pretrial motions.

Change of venue?

Those could include a change of venue request, although Frasier later said that a decision to move the trial elsewhere could come as late as jury selection if it proves difficult to find 12 unbiased jurors and two alternates.

Frasier said it's typical for defense teams file for the change, but he has never seen such a motion granted in Coos County on a homicide case.

They'll run into problems if most potential jurors say ''I've made up my mind, I can't be fair.'"

'I'm not worried about it at this point," Frasier said.

'It's never been an issue for me before."

The start of the trial comes earlier than Frasier expected. With his and Barron's caseload, he feared it wouldn't be tried until 2012.

Next year, the DA is scheduled to prosecute other homicide cases, including a Bandon-area double homicide case in August 2011 and one in January in which a Bandon-area is alleged to have shot his wife in the head.

Fewer witnesses

Frasier said he plans to call fewer witnesses than he brought before a grand jury in August to help indict McGuffin in Leah's death. At that time, more than 100 testified in person, via videoconferencing or written statement.

Because there were many theories surrounding the case, he called so many to discuss other possibilities that could have been at play. That number will be pared down by May because many of their statements won't pertain to the trial.

He added that he and the defense team, made up of McCrea and her father, Bob, have 5,500 pages of discovery to review for the case.

'They have everything I have," he said.

The DA would not discuss whether there has been any attempt at a plea negotiation.

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