Joyce Marie Scarbrough was a 61-year-old woman who was found dead inside her home in Hillsboro, Oregon, on February 4, 1993. Her death did not initially present investigators with an obvious crime scene. Authorities classified the cause of death as undetermined, and no autopsy was performed at the time. With no clear evidence of violence, the case might have remained viewed as an unexplained death if events later that month had not brought a troubling figure from Scarbrough's own family circle under intense police scrutiny.
That man was Cesar Francesco Barone, also known as Adolph James Rode Jr., who had formerly been married to Scarbrough's daughter, Kathi. Barone was arrested on February 27, 1993, only a little more than three weeks after Scarbrough died, as investigators built a case against him in connection with the murder of Hillsboro-area nurse-midwife Martha Browning Bryant. Once Barone came under investigation for a series of attacks and killings of women in the Portland metropolitan area, the circumstances surrounding Scarbrough's death suddenly appeared more concerning.
Kathi Scarbrough asked authorities to take another look at her mother's death and sought the exhumation of her remains. Investigators agreed, hoping that a more detailed forensic examination might reveal an injury, toxic substance, or other evidence that had gone undetected when Scarbrough originally died. The exhumation became particularly significant because the original investigation had not included an autopsy, leaving authorities with limited medical evidence from which to determine exactly how she had died.
Investigators also examined a possible financial motive involving Barone. Reports from the investigation indicated that he was suspected of taking approximately $3,000 from Scarbrough's bank account shortly before her death. The money was reportedly used to purchase expensive gifts for a girlfriend. That allegation added to the suspicion surrounding him, particularly as investigators learned more about his pattern of violence and crimes against women. The financial issue, however, did not establish that Barone had caused Scarbrough's death, and it never resulted in a murder charge in her case.
The forensic examination ultimately failed to provide the proof investigators had hoped to find. In May 1993, Washington County medical examiner Eugene Jacobus concluded that Scarbrough's cause of death remained inconclusive. Authorities found no apparent physical signs of violence on her remains that could demonstrate she had been strangled, beaten, shot, or otherwise deliberately killed. Because of that lack of forensic evidence, investigators could not medically establish that her death was a homicide.
Suspicion of Barone nevertheless became more serious because of what investigators were discovering in unrelated cases. He was eventually convicted of killing four Oregon women: Margaret Schmidt, Martha Browning Bryant, Chantee Woodman, and Betty Williams. Schmidt had been sexually assaulted and strangled in her Hillsboro home; Bryant was sexually assaulted and shot after being forced from her vehicle; Woodman was abducted, sexually assaulted and shot; and Williams died of a heart attack during Barone's sexual assault upon her. Barone received death sentences for the murders and an additional lengthy prison sentence in connection with Williams's death.
The possibility that Scarbrough represented another victim was never proven. Barone was regarded as a suspect in the death of his former mother-in-law, but investigators did not arrest him, indict him, or put him on trial for killing her. The distinction is important: although his later convictions demonstrated that he was responsible for multiple killings in the same geographic area during approximately the same period, the evidence recovered after Scarbrough's exhumation was insufficient to establish how she died or to prove that Barone was responsible.
Later developments strengthened the belief that Barone may have committed more murders than those for which he was convicted. In February 2026, Washington County authorities announced that modern DNA testing had forensically linked Barone to the September 23, 1992 murder of Elizabeth Burtis Wasson in Hillsboro, a killing in which he had been considered a suspect decades earlier but had never been charged. The identification demonstrated that at least one long-standing suspicion involving Barone was eventually confirmed through improved forensic technology. It did not, however, provide new evidence proving his involvement in Scarbrough's death.
Barone died at the Oregon State Penitentiary on December 24, 2009, while still under death sentences for his Oregon murders. His death meant that even if stronger evidence concerning Scarbrough were later uncovered, he could never face criminal prosecution for it. As the available record stands, Joyce Marie Scarbrough's February 4, 1993 death remains medically inconclusive. Cesar Barone was the principal publicly identified suspect connected to the circumstances surrounding it, but no arrest, murder charge, trial, or conviction ever occurred specifically for Scarbrough's death.
