When Jennifer Massey became mayor of Columbia County’s largest town, she moved from being one of the leading critics of people in power to now being a person in power. But that move was not simple.

Now, Massey is the one facing the tough questions. A bombshell report on the local police leads some community members to raise questions about Massey’s intentions when she took up Sarah Zuber’s cause.

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

Leah Sottile: Last November, on a cool and clear night, a couple dozen people crowded into the St. Helens Senior Center for a last minute meeting. The news about the sexual abuse scandal at the local high school that we told you about in episode 5 was coming to light. Kids had walked out in protest. People had talked for generations about the culture of abuse at the school. And finally, people had enough.

At the front of the room, Jennifer Massey stepped up to the microphone.

Jennifer Massey: I understand and we understand, there are so many strong emotions and high intensity surrounding why we’re here today.

Sottile: Jennifer put together this meeting with her friends from her group, Fuck Around Find Out Doing Detective Shit, or FAFODDS. They were the same people who ran the Justice for Sarah Zuber page.

Sarah’s death and the St. Helens High School abuse scandal weren’t related. But the scandal does show how a culture of secrecy has become normal in Columbia County. And now, Jennifer Massey had put herself at the center of both situations.

Jennifer wanted to offer a forum for people to vent their frustrations and fears. She invited some people to speak, including one person who got a huge round of applause.

Doug Weaver: Thank you. Again, my name is Doug. I guess everyone knows that now.

Sottile: The TikTok influencer, Doug Weaver. He had flown back home to Columbia County from Missouri. And people were treating him like a celebrity.

Weaver: I’ve never seen any community so unified and focused on making sure that what happened in the past and what is happening now is not going to happen again.

Sottile: But not all of the speakers Jennifer introduced that night were so well-received, and audience members were quick to shout their criticisms.

Craig Irwin: I’m just here to tell you…

Parent 1: I’m trying hard to stay calm.

Irwin: I am not here… I’m not here to make any judgments. I’m trying to tell you what boards do.

Parent 1: Well, don’t applaud them.

Irwin: I’m not applauding anybody.

Parent 1: Yes, you did. You just said they did a great job.

Sottile: Jennifer jumped in to mediate.

Jennifer Massey: You guys keep the comments until the end. Keep the comments until the end, please.

Sottile: Overnight, Jennifer had gone from one of those people who shouts from the audience during a town meeting to someone trying to keep things calm. She was in a position of power. Just days before this town hall, Jennifer had won the election to become St. Helens’ mayor. She’d run on a platform of transparency, and put the Sarah Zuber case at the center of her campaign.

She wasn’t even been sworn in yet by the time of the town hall. And one by one, as parents stepped to the microphone to share their stories, it became clear that Jennifer wanted to offer her help, but it wasn’t always received the way she thought it would be.

Parent 2: I am angry because this didn’t have to happen to my kid. This didn’t have to happen to, like, decades of children. And that to me is saying to the community and to the kids that they can tell us what to do and we’re still not going to do it. That’s all. I just want my kid to be the last.

J. Massey: I don’t have the answers. I don’t.

Sottile: She’d gone from the leader of Columbia County’s Greek chorus to the target of that Greek chorus.

Back when she founded FAFODDS, she put the doing detective shit part of that name front and center. But now, as mayor, the finding out part seemed to be creeping in on her. She was the focus of a community who had a lot of questions about what exactly Jennifer meant when she talked about transparency.

From Oregon Public Broadcasting, this is Hush. I’m Leah Sottile. This is Episode 7: Cornered

On the morning of Jan. 2, 2025, Jennifer Massey wore a black pantsuit, and her blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was standing alone in city council chambers in downtown St. Helens.

Sottile: Hey, big day for you.

J. Massey: Yeah, I’m just super excited about this. And I brought, so Rebecca and Randy, at the election party, Rebecca brought this picture down. Because I’m going to ask for her to be on the dais in the council meeting. So she’s here today.

Sottile: In her hands, she held a photograph of Sarah Zuber in a wooden frame. In the picture, she’s smiling in her red cap and gown.

Slowly, the room filled in. There was Jennifer’s husband, Terry Massey, fresh off an all-night shift with the St. Helens police. Several other police officers filed in. There were the folks from FAFODDS, too. And Randy and Rebecca Zuber. Randy wore a sport coat with his usual logging supply company hat. Rebecca wore a long polka-dot dress.

Jessica Chilton: We’re going to call this special session to order. The day is Thursday, Jan. 2 and the time is 9:30 AM. We’re gonna start off introducing. We have Judge Clark here. Do you want to just go ahead and begin? I think it looks like we have Mayor-elect Jennifer Massey first.

Judge Michael T. Clark: And good morning folks. I’m Judge Clark. They asked me to step in and swear some folks in so I’m happy to do that. All right, if I can have you raise your right hand. Okay. I, Jennifer Massey,

J. Massey: I, Jennifer Massey,

Clark: Will honestly and faithfully,

J. Massey: Will honestly and faithfully,

Clark: Perform the duties of mayor,

J Massey: will perform the duties of mayor,

Clark: To the best of my ability and understanding,

J. Massey: To the best of my ability and understanding,

Clark: During my term of office,

J. Massey: During my term of office,

Clark: So help me God.

J. Massey: So help me God.

Clark: Thank you. And then I’ll have you sign right here.

Sottile: Jennifer walked up to her seat in the middle of the council, and for a few seconds, she held the photo of Sarah Zuber up in front of her so everyone could see. In the audience, Randy Zuber started to cry.

After the meeting was over, she posed for photos with the Zubers. Rebecca smiled. Randy looked pained.

Sottile: How does it feel seeing this happen today?

Randy Zuber: Amazing, actually. I say any help we can get, and it seems the wheels of all this just move so slow. But now maybe Mrs. Massey says she has us in the back of her mind, that maybe when things come up, where there’s an opportunity to bring this up or move something forward, we might be able to help. We just… anything…

Rebecca Zuber: I think we’re going to see big things with her.

Sottile: Yeah?

Rebecca Zuber: Yeah, definitely.

Randy Zuber: Anything that we can…

Rebecca Zuber: I mean, she is so highly intelligent and so motivated and I am just, this is the beginning. This is just the beginning. I know it.

Sottile: The Zubers told us they felt like Jennifer’s election signaled a new day in Columbia County. That something was bound to change in Sarah’s case. But, what exactly? They weren’t sure.

Maybe it was just that the old guard was changing. The Zubers felt like Jennifer had done more for them than the sheriff or the detectives or the district attorney had. She had forced all those people to look at what happened to Sarah again, to not let her be forgotten. And now she was mayor of the county’s biggest city.

That day when Jennifer was sworn in, the longtime mayor of St Helens, Rick Scholl, was out. But Rick Scholl isn’t a quiet man and he was about to get very, very loud about Jennifer Massey.

Marty Rowe: And from an unknown studio in an unknown town in a radio station with no listeners, it’s Brady and Tammy on Odd Friday this morning! Hi guys! What’s going on?

Tammy Maygra: We got a big show today!

Sottile: One morning last winter, after Jennifer became mayor, we arrived at the nondescript studio of KOHI AM to listen in on that week’s episode of Odd Friday. It’s a bland looking building, looks like it could be a dentist’s office.

The hosts of the show – Tammy Maygra and Brady Preheim – are two of the most vocal members of the Columbia County Greek chorus on just about every issue imaginable. We were there because that week’s Odd Friday guest was Rick Scholl, the longtime mayor of St. Helens. He’d lost the election to Jennifer Massey, though not by a lot. Scholl was there to talk about a recent bombshell that dropped in Columbia County.

Rick Scholl: 108 pages.

Brady Preheim: 108 page report on the police.

Sottile: The report Scholl had in his hands was about law enforcement in Columbia County. And he started reading sections of it on the air.

Remember, Sheriff Brian Pixley told us that law enforcement agencies in the county are all so small and underfunded, they kind of depend on collaboration to get anything done. We saw that in the initial investigation into Sarah Zuber’s death, how officers from the sheriff’s office, Rainier, Scappoose and St. Helens came to help.

Let me sum up this report quickly. It’s a heavily-redacted, 108-page document that had to do with the chief of the St. Helens Police Department, a man named Brian Greenway. Greenway had just resigned as chief of police in January. The city hired an outside investigator to look into Greenway after officers complained about him. And the report generated by that investigator was wild. It detailed many, many things: Greenway berating his officers, faking their physical fitness test results, and sending porn to employees.

But he also did something that caught our attention, something that made us wonder if Greenway’s behavior affected the Zuber investigation. In the report, the investigator wrote that Greenway prevented his officers from helping the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office because he didn’t like Sheriff Brian Pixley.

Scholl: It also seems that Greenway is willing to do this at the cost of public safety. That right there upsets me the most.

Sottile: There’s more. Greenway also seemed to be taking advantage of the idea that 24-hour police service would be ending in St. Helens. That story ran on the front page of the very last Chronicle & Chief before it went out of business. And the issue came up in the final weeks of the mayor’s race. But this report was saying that was never certain. 24-hour police service wasn’t on the chopping block. But people thought it was, and it made Rick Scholl look terrible.

Live on the air, Scholl reacted to the report.

Scholl: That’s why I asked for an unredacted report, and I still don’t see why it’s not unredacted.

Preheim: It should be!

Sottile: A ton of St. Helens police officers were interviewed for the Greenway report. All of their names were redacted so no one knew for sure who had been interviewed. But Columbia County is small. And it was pretty obvious reading it, that even without names, some of the people seemed very familiar. Like the one St. Helens officer who said he owned several car care centers. And there was discussion about his wife, who posted on social media a lot. Rick Scholl said this was almost certainly Terry and Jennifer Massey.

The police officers interviewed for the report said these two – probably the Masseys – seemingly colluded with Chief Greenway to make Scholl and Sheriff Pixley look bad.

Terry Massey had run against Sheriff Pixley in 2022. And now Jennifer Massey was mayor. The person who ran on a platform of transparency, who told us the first time we met that if something is redacted it means someone is hiding something. Now her name seemed like it was blacked out in a city report.

Scholl: The bottom line is this, she tells people, what I’ve watched online, is to not believe their eyes, what they read.

Preheim: Yes.

Scholl: That’s not true. I had no part in this. I knew nothing about this.

Preheim: Which is a complete lie.

Scholl: That’s ludicrous!

Sottile: We have tried all kinds of things to get an unredacted version of this report. Filed public records requests. Asked Jennifer to just give it to us. Appealed to the district attorney. So far, the city that Jennifer now runs has been able to keep parts of it secret.

The Greek chorus – which Scholl was now a part of – was fine with filling in the blanks.

Scholl: So when you’re reading this, just remember there’s a lot more to these people that are behind here, but you don’t know who they are because it’s unredacted.

Preheim: Right. It’s redacted.

Scholl: I mean redacted. Yes. Because the council decided that was the way to go, which I’m still just…

Sottile: As the interview went on, the conversation turned back to the Sarah Zuber case.

Scholl: I look at the Sarah Zuber case, which I feel for that family and everything that happened, but I don’t know how the hell that even reflects being the mayor of St. Helen’s.

Maygra: Well, and the same way with the school.

Scholl: She announced her mayoral candidacy first on that site.

Maygra: Yeah, that was pretty crass.

Sottile: They saw it as crass and cynical that Jennifer announced her run for mayor on the Justice for Sarah Zuber page.

Scholl: My heart goes out to the Zuber family. This is not, don’t take this as I’m coming after you. There’s just too much...

Preheim: This is her involvement.

Scholl: There’s just too much there.

Preheim: The fascinating thing...

Scholl: But if you happen to listen to this, don’t believe your ears because she’ll tell you otherwise.

Sottile: After the show was over, Rick Scholl sat down in the breakroom with us for an interview. On the table, there were boxes of donuts.

I asked Scholl why he ran for re-election when being mayor seemed to frustrate him so much.

Sottile: We were watching some meetings when you were still mayor and it looked like sometimes you got pretty hot up there on the dias or whatever.

Scholl: I’m a human being.

Sottile: Well, I was curious what was behind that? Was there a moment when the job became… Well, I mean, since we’ve been here today, we’ve been talking about scandal after scandal after drama after drama. Was there a moment where things just turned for you and became less about the rewarding part and more about the public pressure?

Scholl: Yes. Yes, definitely. Well, I think it’s just knowing and suspecting that there’s a bunch of people that are undermining you and you suspect it.

Sottile: He was referring to Jennifer and her friends. Scholl said when they started showing up at meetings, he knew something was up.

Scholl: So that right there rubbed me the wrong way. And how dare these people, and what is their motive? At that time, it didn’t even make sense. What is your motive?

Sottile: Does it make more sense to you now?

Scholl: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense now.

Sottile: Why?

Scholl: Because they were wanting power. Why would one family want to be a sheriff and then switch to being a mayor?

Sottile: The 108-page Greenway report answered his question. One supervisor said Chief Greenway, “hated Pixley with a burning passion” and hand-tapped Terry Massey to run for sheriff. Even crazier, that supervisor said Greenway specifically wanted Terry to have Jennifer send anonymous emails to the city council that would make Scholl look bad. He said asking her to do such a thing would be “disgustingly unethical.”

One officer said Greenway pulled St. Helens out of helping on any major crimes because he hated Pixley. Greenway allegedly said he wasn’t going to send any officers out to help people who didn’t pay city taxes. And if that’s true, that would have included the Zubers.

We could see in the investigative files that in the first days after Sarah died, a St. Helens officer did interview Rebecca Zuber but then was off the case.

This drama was all going on as Sarah Zuber’s death was being investigated. Jennifer’s main beef with the investigation into Sarah’s death was that she thought the sheriff’s office – led by Pixley - could have done a better job. But this report made it look like Jennifer was in cahoots with a chief who might have been fine with actively inhibiting investigations like Sarah’s.

Greenway was looped in with the major crimes team when Sarah died. What might have happened in the investigation if St. Helens PD – the most well-resourced department in the county – had been helping the sheriff’s office since day one?

We might never know the extent that Greenway hampered policing in the county. He quit as chief while we were working on this series and didn’t respond to requests for comment. But Rick Scholl said he thinks Greenway had a big influence. He said, as mayor, he should have been the first person to hear St. Helens might not have 24/7 police service. Instead, he heard about it on Facebook from Jennifer Massey.

Scholl: So she announced it on this transparency page, and all of a sudden I’m like, what the heck is this?

Ryan Haas: So what does it say? It says, St. Helen’s will no longer have 24/7…

Scholl: Yeah, get ready, St. Helen’s citizens, no 24-hour service, coming soon.

Sottile: And you as the mayor of St. Helen’s did not know that?

Scholl: Did not know. The entire council didn’t know. I was very upset.

Sottile: This investigative report made the 24/7 policing scandal look like that was all a stunt on Greenway’s part to get Scholl out of office. And Scholl believes Jennifer was involved.

Scholl: I’m not going to go out of my way to try to cook up this huge narrative, but I know it doesn’t read right. It doesn’t sound right. It’s not right. If it looks like a duck, quacks duck, it’s a duck. She ain’t right. I’m tellin’ ya.

Sottile: When we sat down with Sheriff Brian Pixley, we talked to him about the Greenway report.

Sheriff Brian Pixley: So there was, essentially a conflict arose between the chief of police for St. Helen’s at the time, and myself. They launched a policy that said they were no longer going to assist outside agencies, and that spurred the conflict. And Chief Greenway has since left.

Haas: So that, but that policy affected during this case?

Pixley: I believe it was like 2020 when the policy was enacted.

Sottile: And this is unprecedented, right? Because what you’re telling me is that the only way everybody survives out here is by helping each other.

Pixley: Correct.

Sottile: And so Greenway just said, we’re not helping anymore.

Pixley: Yeah, we’re out.

Sottile: Why?

Pixley: I don’t know. So after he launched the policy, I tried to get a hold of him but I couldn’t. So I actually went to the then-mayor, who was Mayor Rick Scholl, and I said, “Look, Rick, I don’t expect you to change anything, but I can’t get a hold of Brian Greenway and this policy will kill someone or will get someone hurt and we need to figure out how to move past this.” And Greenway saw that as me kind of “going over his head.” And we didn’t talk literally from then until probably mid-last year.

Sottile: So do you think that bad blood at all led to confusion in this investigation, or maybe a subpar investigation in any way?

Pixley: No, absolutely not.

Sottile: An officer from St. Helens PD did help the day Sarah died, but then was off the case. And Pixley claims the Greenway thing didn’t get in the way of the investigation. Most officers we have spoken to said they didn’t believe the dysfunction among the two largest police agencies in the county affected what happened. But given the findings of the 108-page report, it was hard to believe.

When we first met Jennifer, she seemed like someone who wanted to use the tools of a true crime investigation to help the Zubers. She drummed up pressure on the police and gave leads that her group found to the detectives.

She became mayor by taking on what she called the Good Old Boys Club. But maybe in this game of power in Columbia County, Jennifer had been holding more of the cards than we realized this entire time.

Parsing what was real and what wasn’t in the Sarah Zuber case was really difficult. And parsing what was real and what wasn’t about Jennifer was also difficult.

Her keyboard warrioring on Facebook was how I first heard about the Zuber case. She’d been forthcoming with us in our interviews, eager and ready to answer just about any question we had. She sent us thousands of records she found. And she seemed to feel very deeply for the Zubers. There was little doubt she was trying to help.

But she’d also come up with this theory around a hit-and-run. She was suspicious of Nick, that he’d been driving drunk down Sarah’s road that night and hit her. But that theory didn’t seem to hold up. And now there was this Greenway report which seemed to suggest that Jennifer was cozy enough with the former police chief that some people considered her part of the Good Old Boys Club of Columbia County.

We had arranged to sit down with Terry and Jennifer Massey in the afternoon after we visited the radio station. We wanted to ask Jennifer, specifically, what she had to say in response to the claims that she’d used the Zubers for her own political benefit. And we wanted to ask Terry if Greenway had explicitly asked him to run for sheriff against Brian Pixley.

Jennifer sent us an address for our meeting. It was a marina on the Columbia River, and when she arrived, we followed her down a long wooden dock toward a pod of floating homes. She said she and Terry owned three of them.

J. Massey: Oh, our flag. The windstorm. So this is one, and then we have another one down there. But we did the deck and all this stuff. It’s kind of fun. But we have parties down here.

Haas: I can imagine, that would be a good choice. Theme parties?

Sottile: The houseboat was decorated up with American flag-themed decor. There were metal cutouts of AR-15s hanging on the walls. Jennifer showed us the kegerator, the full bar, the view looking out over the river where kayakers paddled by.

J. Massey After my election, we had a hundred or more people in here. It was listing to that side.

Sottile: She pointed to the big door off in the corner.

J. Massey: That’s the gun safe that almost took out the dock.

Sottile: Wow. That thing is big.

J. Massey: Yeah.

Sottile: How many guns can you fit in that?

J. Massey: Like 80. I think we have six of them. And we’re collectors also.

Sottile: Did you say 80?

Haas: 80. They only have six. You’ve got a long, a lot of room to fill.

J. Massey: No, no. We have six of those.

Haas: Oh, six safes.

J. Massey: Safes, that are completely full.

Haas: Safes. Gotcha. An investment.

J. Massey: Yeah.

Sottile: I’m not doing math. I’m not a math person, but what’s the math?

Haas: Six times eighty… that’s two hundred…No, that’s like 480…

J. Massey: No, that’s not even close to what we have, but we actually collect them.

Sottile: You do?

J.Massey: We collect them. Older, like Tommy guns, or just some things that I like and just history.

Sottile: When Terry arrived, we all settled down on a couch.

Sottile: Did Greenway directly tap you for the job to run against Pixley?

Terry Massey: No.

Sottile: Okay.

T. Massey: No, it was officers that…. No.

Sottile: Okay.

T. Massey: Greenway had no idea until I asked. I didn’t want to just put my name in the hat without talking to him as the chief of police. So I talked to him and I talked to Hogue, I talked to all those guys. I talked to my sergeants, I talked to the whole management team before I ran.

Haas: It seemed like he had problems with Pixley. Like, he didn’t like him.

T. Massey: They had issues.

Haas: Yeah.

Sottile: Yeah. Did you get along with him?

T. Massey: With Greenway? I didn’t work with him on a day-to-day basis, but I didn’t really, I mean, I didn’t have any major problems with the guy.

Sottile: Terry said he decided to run for sheriff because other officers asked him to. That it had nothing to do with Greenway.

Sottile: Do you think either of you received any political benefit from making it a prominent issue?

T. Massey: No, I think I could have. We specifically didn’t involve the Zuber case in my campaign, and Randy and…

J. Massey: Rebecca.

T. Massey: Rebecca, they both said, they said, we don’t want a campaign won on our daughter’s name. And so we specifically said… I didn’t do anything with that during my campaign. And I think honestly, I could have really drove that home and used it to my advantage. But I as well, I didn’t want people to vote for me because of a case. I wanted people to vote for me because the overall direction of county and law enforcement at the time.

Sottile: Terry Massey did not mention Sarah as a part of his political campaign. That is true. He said that would have been against the Zubers’ wishes, even if it could have helped him.

Jennifer had a different answer.

J. Massey: My answer is yes. I think it helped me politically, I do. I think that the people, I had already, we had 2,400 people-ish on Sarah’s page. I think my name got out there and they already knew me from the work that I was doing on Sarah’s case. So I think I became more known because I wasn’t really, like I didn’t have social media dealing with his campaign, but I think that I made my own way on that. And as I sit today, I’m extremely proud of it and I’d talk about it again because I think that other people should step up when things are uncomfortable and hard to talk about and defend other people in our community.

Sottile: Jennifer isn’t shy about the ways she believes she helped the Zubers, even if her critics in the Greek chorus now blast her for it.

Sottile: But why put the Zuber case at the center of the campaign when it didn’t actually have to do with the St. Helens mayor position?

J. Massey: I think that it came up, the fact that, I think for me it was demonstrating my commitment and my follow-through. Even though I was up against challenges. I was being attacked. I was having to deal with a sheriff and a DA. And that I can look at community needs and I can be selfless and put them first. So I’m extremely proud of the work that I’ve done with Sarah’s case. We’re not done. But I think that that’s a testament to my civic engagement and my dedication on follow-through.

Sottile: So you ran on a platform of transparency. We’ve talked to you about that. So why vote to redact your own name from the Greenway report?

J. Massey: I didn’t. So if you go back, and if you find that I am saying this in error, please correct me. I said the officer’s names. If you go back to that council meeting when we decided that, and I’m talking to Council President Chilton, I said this, the lawyers were talking about redacting the officer’s names. Didn’t give a shit about my name. I don’t care about my name. In fact, I would’ve preferred mine. But that was not part of any redaction that I thought was going to be there. I thought it was strictly going to be for just the officers.

Sottile: Jennifer was saying she didn’t vote to redact her name from the report. But in the end it’s still blanked out. Just out of the public’s view.

Haas: Why did the lawyers want to redact? I mean, these are all public employees. Why are we hiding their names?

J. Massey: So I think that there was a part of it on just trying to protect them as much as possible, the people were stepping out there.

Sottile: We asked Jennifer about how well she knew Chief Greenway, and she told us she could only recall texting him once about 24-hour coverage, and whether it was going away. And as for the allegation that she was sending anonymous emails on his behalf, she said that was ridiculous, and her nonprofit had even hired someone to try to trace the sender, but came up with nothing.

Sottile: I have to say in the time that we’ve known you, your role here has really changed. You’ve gone from being, like you say, this person who’s blunt and factual and puts things up front and confronts people, and now you’re in the position where you have to think about the reputation of your officers and their employment and things like that.

J. Massey: So this kind of goes into the… God, I love this conversation. It goes into that clarifying confusion memo so we can get the facts out there. This, I think, was a very, for me, an awkward situation because I didn’t request this investigation. The whole time that this investigation was going on, the mayor made it very clear that this was supposed to be some Massey collusion with the chief of police for 24-hour coverage.

And so I really felt like coming into it and not knowing what was going on, also learning what was in that report, I felt really uncomfortable with the whole thing. And I really wanted to try to like, minimize really my… I felt like that happened way before me, and I just felt like I didn’t want to say anything because I felt like it should take its course, because I didn’t want to interject really much of anything into it because I felt like that would be worse on what the accusations were. I didn’t want to steer it. I didn’t ask about the investigation.

Sottile: Jennifer Massey’s role in Sarah Zuber’s case is complicated, to put it mildly. It’s undeniable she created the pressure that has kept her name on people’s lips in Columbia County. She’s the reason you’re listening to this podcast. But she also is very invested in a hit-and-run theory that isn’t supported by Sarah’s physical injuries.

J. Massey: So that bodycam footage and then the audio from the grandmother that was in there. And so that put us on the rabbit trail of him, looking at him, looking at baby mama, looking at him, where he’s at, where he was living. Plus he also had, I believe a couple hit-and-runs.

Sottile: Okay. Yeah. I mean, how close do you think you are here to…

J. Massey: Well, I don’t think I’m very close. I’m hoping that the detectives dealing with it are. I feel like we’ve got to be, I feel like we’re closer than we ever have been.

Sottile: Still, she doesn’t deny all this pressure on the local police politically benefited her. At the same time, after she became mayor, she donated thousands of dollars to a scholarship fund the Zubers set up in Sarah’s name.

How much the politics of it all matters depends on who you talk to. It seemed to us that the people whose opinions should matter the most are the Zubers.

Sottile: Do you think the Zubers are ever going to have an answer for what happened to Sarah?

J. Massey: I think that the Zubers are going to, at some point, have a better understanding of what happened. Whether it is found out that she was unfortunately something like a hit-and-run or that somebody can discuss with them and provide them logical and rational explanations from a most scientific and medical expectation as possible, of how this possibly could have happened if it’s not it. Somebody that can actually explain how she could die of ethanol and hypothermia in the current conditions. Nobody has ever afforded them the opportunity. And as a mother, I can’t imagine sitting there saying, these puzzle pieces don’t fit and this doesn’t make sense and I’m just supposed to accept it, but nobody will give me the time of day to tell me how you would render that opinion.

Haas: I mean, I’ll say Leah and I have agonized a lot about… We’ve gone down a lot of avenues on this trying to find answers, and it’s very hard, and I feel like you’ve done the same thing. And how does it make you feel if you can’t provide those answers?

J. Massey: Still makes me motivated. And I really honestly believe that I have Sarah’s presence with me a lot. Like, I just got in a pretty severe car accident where my car was totaled on Gable Road and I was banged up, and I walked out of it. And I just feel like a lot of times when things get very contentious, I just feel like I have this blanket.

I don’t know this girl. I have her picture up on the dias to remind me to make good decisions. And I would hope that if there was ever a time that there’s an unfortunate situation that I felt like I no longer had strength to fight because I’d been so weakened and despaired, that there would be somebody to come alongside me and say, I got you, and we’re going to continue going to see if we can make you whole, or as whole as possible.

Haas: But I think that’s what is difficult for me personally, is Randy and Rebecca are extremely understanding and kind people and you want to help them. And, yeah, I mean, maybe I don’t have as much faith as you that we’re going to…

Sottile: It’s the thing we’ve wondered is, what is…

Haas: Helping.

Sottile: It’s so clear to me that everyone we’ve looked at in this case believes that they were helping in some way. Even Auxier is like, we got to get these people an answer. And the county sheriff’s office thinks that they’re doing a good job, and every single person who waved a sign and was showing the Zubers, we want to help you. And it’s, in one regard, it’s so heartwarming to know that there’s a community that truly cares for this family, and yet I’m not sure the needle has moved. And I wonder, so what then does justice look like for Sarah?

J. Massey: That is a heavy question. I do feel like the needle has moved. I do. I feel that it has moved because I think it brings more awareness. And I think that we’ve had other incidents that have happened within the county that I think were handled differently. There was another hit-and-run in Rainier…

Sottile: So, in summary, Jennifer Massey says Sarah’s case scored her political points on her way to becoming mayor, but that her motivations and tactics were basically aboveboard. She says she didn’t send anonymous emails to the city council about losing 24/7 policing. And her husband Terry says that he wasn’t hand picked by Greenway to challenge Brian Pixley and run for sheriff.

But then, months after this conversation with Jennifer, the city of St. Helens finally agreed to send us a partially unredacted version of the Greenway report showing Terry and Jennifer Massey’s names. And it contradicted a lot of what Jennifer told us.

The report said Greenway did tap Terry to run for sheriff. It said Jennifer had reached out to Greenway warning him that officers in the union were becoming concerned with his behavior. And officers in the report said Jennifer might have been the person sending anonymous emails on Greenway’s behalf.

We also learned there was an entire supplemental report all about Jennifer and what role she might have played in this drama, but the city denied all of our requests to see it.

The Oregon Department of Justice took a preliminary look at Jennifer’s connection to Greenway after one of her political rivals filed a complaint. Attorneys for Oregon decided there was circumstantial evidence Jennifer and Greenway had talked about the 24/7 policing issue, but ultimately, there likely wasn’t a crime.

So, who do you believe? The Masseys say the report can’t be trusted. Scholl, all these officers who spoke candidly about Greenway, they tell a story where the Masseys are pulling more strings in Columbia County than they claim.

But when it comes to the Zubers, Jennifer promised Randy and Rebecca that she cared. She was donating her stipend as mayor – about $1,500 a month – to a scholarship fund in Sarah’s name. She had promised the Zubers that, come hell or high water, she’d get everyone in this county to care. And she thinks she made good on that promise.

After we talked to Jennifer, we sat down with Randy and Rebecca Zuber again, and we asked them about the criticisms we had heard about Jennifer. The Zubers aren’t on Facebook so they don’t see the local chatter about her. But, even so, they were pretty clear with their opinion.

Rebecca Zuber: Justice for Sarah is having a full and thorough investigation. That’s their job. And so then Jennifer Massey, that’s what she did, I think, is that she brought to light the idea that these victims deserve a full and thorough investigation. That’s whoever the investigator’s job to do that. And so I think that’s what she did was she brought that to light. And so I don’t have a problem if she benefited.

I’m pretty sure that she never thought of running for mayor until all of this happened with Sarah. I mean, I understand people will be like, “Oh, she did it just for that. She doesn’t care about you.” But I don’t believe that.

Randy Zuber: We don’t give a crap about politics. We don’t care. Because that is so frickin’ wrong. And that is so rude.

Sottile: The Zubers are happy with what Jennifer Massey has done for them, no matter what anyone says. She made people pay attention. She made us pay attention. And maybe that’s the job of the Greek chorus. To be the beating heart of a place, and keep the story focused on what the community thinks is important.

At the same time, Jennifer said she wanted to get facts. But no matter how much attention she drummed up about Sarah Zuber, it seems no one is any closer to knowing what really happened.

Jennifer became powerful within her community by telling a story that Columbia County is a place filled with corruption, and that she was the person to fix it. And she kept telling us that she believed Nick – the guy in prison for beating his kid, with a record of driving drunk – hit Sarah with his car, and drove away.

So many decades of true crime has pulled a kind of trick on all of us. It’s convinced us that a messy truth isn’t enough. We want to know who did it, how and why. Everything else just feels like a distraction. That’s why Truman Capote tucked away inconvenient details and made up quotes when he wrote “In Cold Blood.” He was papering over the parts of the case that didn’t serve his story. Maybe the main thing true crime prioritizes over the truth is an ending.

One day we pulled over in a parking lot in Columbia County. We were frustrated because if we couldn’t solve what happened to Sarah, what were we really doing here?

Haas: I think us peeling back how unreliable this information is naturally raises the question about Jennifer, right? It’s like, Jennifer is hot to trot on this guy. We’ve done the legwork on this hit-and-run theory and it’s thinner than ever. And so it’s like, OK, well, who is she then? Why is she so insistent that this is the case?

Sottile: Do you have any worries that there is an effort on her part to serve up a very undesirable person? Beats up kids, beats up toddlers, drunk drives like crazy, is a terrible driver, a dangerous person by all means. Do you have any fears that Jennifer’s like, let me just serve up this person that is a danger in our community?

Haas: Maybe, but she’s not presumably forcing informants to say his name. You know what I mean? I think she’s just like, sees a convenient person and is like, bam, we did it, everybody. Mission accomplished. George Bush banner. As opposed to us being like, show me the proof.

This is like, there’s no circling. It’s like you either have it or you don’t have it, and we don’t have it.

Sottile: So actually true crime is…

Haas: The truth about solving crimes is you either have factual information or you do not have factual information.

Sottile: And the rest is all just storytelling.

Haas: Right.

Sottile: Woof. I mean, yeah. I think, to what you were saying before, I am afraid you and I have bought into this because we know how great a good true crime show could be. You solve a case, a family is given a solution and justice is served. That feels good. But like, that’s not the majority of crimes. The majority of life is like small town police departments with a retired guy knocking on doors on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. So unsatisfying. What can the ending be though? It doesn’t have to... OK, so we can’t solve the case. So what’s the ending that works?

Sottile: One thing we’ve come down on is that the job of a journalist is sense-making. It’s organizing facts in a way so people can understand them. It isn’t theorizing or speculating. It’s keeping a sharp eye on the truth. And the truth is never clean.

In fact, I think it’s the antithesis of truth to think that it can be clean. That there’s always one person at fault. Or one group of people. Or one perpetrator. I think people who tell you those kinds of stories are often opponents of truth.

It isn’t our job to tie this up in a bow. Our job is to show the world as it is. And the world is complex and messy. And here’s one thing we can tell you with real certainty. Columbia County, for a place of its size, is a messy, complex place. The sex abuse case at the high school. The mayor’s race. The Greenway report. The lack of journalism that isn’t Facebook.

None of these events directly impacted Sarah Zuber, and yet these are the forces that have shaped the people who are supposed to be getting to the bottom of what happened to her. It is the undercurrent. The gravitational pull that makes this story seem like a true crime mystery.

Next time, on the final episode of Hush, we look at what’s left when the mystery is demystified.

Randy Zuber: You don’t know me, Mr. Pixley, but I know you a little bit because I see your writings and your bullshit and how you put me off and you lie about us. You don’t know the first thing about us.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/11/19/hush-podcast-episode-7-cornered/