Imprint of Evil

Carrie Love was twenty and worked for a small trucking company in Seattle. On June 16, 1986, she left town with her boss, fifty-two-year-old Jesse Clarence Pratt, who was driving a load to Los Angeles, where he said he was opening an office and where she meant to visit her father. Pratt had a 1980 kidnapping conviction for taking a woman from Washington into Oregon and assaulting her at a motel, and he had served just over three years of a ten-year term.

On June 17 a passerby found her purse, her identification and a blood-soaked sleeping bag in a ditch beside Highway 97 near Klamath Falls, Oregon. Her body turned up the next day about twenty-five miles away, concealed in gravel at a truck turnout. She had been stabbed, asphyxiated and run over. Arizona Highway Patrol stopped Pratt’s green Kenworth on June 19. A tire expert cast the retreaded tire from the rig, dyed the cast and matched the tread pattern to the marks on Carrie’s body.

A jury convicted Pratt of two counts of aggravated murder in 1988 and he was sentenced to death. The Oregon Supreme Court reversed in 1990 because evidence of the earlier kidnapping had tainted the guilt phase. He was convicted again in 1991, sentenced to death a second time, and that judgment was affirmed in 1993.