Murder at Gabriel Park!

This is a fairly popular dog park in Portland, but with lots of nice walking trails through trees and creeks. If you choose, throw your tennis racket, volleyball, or just about anything in your car, because there are fields for all that stuff. Parking does tend to require some ingenuity, though. =)

The clues aren't very difficult at all, per se. Finding the letterboxes is another matter! Since you are acting as the detective on the case, you have leads to follow. Some will pan out. Some won't. When you search a "scene of interest", you won't know how many letterboxes are located in it. One? Two? None? So you'll never know quite where to look, nor when to stop searching. Finding all of the letterboxes I expect will be a challenge. Bringing friends to cover more ground wouldn't hurt either! (Cops usually don't search a murder scene by the themselves, you know.)

Gabriel Park is located at the corner of SW Vermont St and SW 45th. (You can find a map here.) Start at the parking lot entrance on 45th Ave.

The Investigation

On October 28th, 2001, a man was brutally murdered and decapitated in Gabriel Park. A suspect running from the scene of the crime was arrested, but unless evidence is quickly found to link him to the murder, he will have to be released. Your mission: Search Gabriel Park for evidence of our suspect's guilt or innocence, and find out what events transpired that fateful afternoon in Gabriel Park.

To help narrow down your search, there are two leads we currently have:

1. The murder scene. The body was discovered at 6:32am in the trees just behind a small baseball field at the southern end of the park. Imagine a line from home plate to second base, and extend that line into the trees. That's the approximate location where the body was found. The body has since been picked up, but the head was never found.

2. An initial interview with a homeless man named Art (a struggling artist) suggests he might have information regarding the murder. He's made a home for himself in a tree toward the eastern end of the park. Find a bench dedicated to the memory of Stephen Charles Meyer. There's more than one, so it may take a couple of tries to get the right one. A bridge is located at 135 degrees (magnetic) from this bench. From the end of the bridge, follow the trail an additional 75 steps, and Art's tree is the "tree of three" off the trail at 295 degrees.

Good luck, detective, you might need it.

You can rate your detective skills with the following scale:

Num of Boxes Found	Results of Search
0	DA rejects case, calling detective in charge "worse case of stupidity" he's ever seen
1	Suspect aquitted due to lack of evidence. Foreman of the jury suggests detective in charge should be suspended for gross misconduct in handling evidence.
2	Hung jury. Suspect ultimately goes free. Detective in charge centured.
3	Suspect sentenced to 20 years of prison. He'll be out in 10.
4	Suspect sentenced to life with a possibility of parole. Detective in charge gets feather in cap. Nothing to crow about.
5	Suspect sentenced to life without a possibility of parole. Job well done, detective!
6	Ironclad case. Suspect sentenced to death penalty. Detective promoted to Chief.

News Flash! In November of 2001, Joe, the brutal killer in this case, escaped from prison! Be on the lookout for this man. You can see updated sightings here in your quest to hunt him down.

NOTE: Always take adequate precautions (such as prodding with a stick and/or wearing gloves) before reaching into dark crevasses and holes in the wild. Before you set out read the waiver of responsibility and disclaimer.

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