On August 17, 1974, in Portland, Oregon, 22-year-old White/Caucasian male William Joseph Dean was found shot to death inside the living quarters at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Accounts indicate his body was discovered in that residence on August 17; some later records contend he had been killed several days earlier, with the discovery following on that date.
The discovery immediately drew attention to the church's maintenance worker, Thomas Eugene Creech, whose room Dean was found in.
Creech had recently cycled through the Oregon State Hospital system before obtaining the sexton job at St. Mark's. In the days after the killing, he left Portland and headed south, vanishing from the city where Dean's life had ended.
Creech was later arrested out of state in 1974 on unrelated matters and, as investigations across jurisdictions converged, he ultimately pleaded guilty to the murder of William Joseph Dean in Oregon. In a Portland courtroom on August 3, 1979, Creech was convicted and received a 99-year sentence for the crime, formally establishing him as the man responsible for the shooting death that had haunted St. Mark's since the summer of 1974.
Dean's short life is memorialized in records listing his age as 22 and his death on August 17, 1974, in Multnomah County. He is remembered under his full name, William Joseph Dean, with burial noted at Greenwood Cemetery in Astoria, Oregon.
