Do you know who killed 51 year old Melvin Longie?
Melvin Longie, a 51-year-old male American Indian, was found dead on the evening of May 2, 1989, along the railroad tracks in the 100 block of SE Oak Street in Portland. The discovery began when an unidentified white male transient hurried into a nearby café at SE 2nd and Oak around 7:20 p.m., telling an employee there was a body on the tracks. Responding officers located Longie and secured the scene as homicide detectives were called in. An autopsy later established that he had been killed by multiple stab wounds.
In the days that followed the murder, accounts surfaced of a white man, roughly 35 years old, who was heard saying he had killed someone. Detectives worked those leads but were unable to confirm the braggadocio as a credible confession. Despite the provocative claim and the public location of the crime, investigators did not identify a suspect they could definitively tie to the stabbing. The absence of witnesses to the attack itself and the transient nature of some of the people around the scene complicated the search for evidence that could hold up in court.
Longie was known to police as a transient and had prior contacts related to what authorities described as “transient” type offenses. That lifestyle—moving between public spaces and temporary shelters—may have placed him in proximity to the rail corridor where he was killed and made it harder to reconstruct his final movements. Detectives canvassed the area and interviewed people who frequented the neighborhood, but no weapon recovery or forensic breakthrough emerged to anchor a prosecution.
No arrests have been reported in Longie’s killing, and the case remains unsolved. Public summaries of the investigation continue to highlight the unverified boast by the unknown man as one of the few tantalizing threads from the period immediately after the homicide, a reminder of how quickly crucial information can scatter in the days following a crime.
