Do you know who murdered Vernon Richard Anton in 1977? On the morning of December 16, 1977, at about 10:30 a.m., Vernon Richard Anton—a 57-year-old male, white—was found beaten to death inside his room at 4760 NE Prescott in Portland, Oregon. He had last been seen alive on December 13, leaving investigators to conclude that the precise moment of the fatal assault was uncertain. Signs at the scene showed a forced entry into the residence, a violent breach that framed the final hours of a 57-year-old male, white, whose quiet routines suddenly
ended behind a broken threshold.
Vernon Anton, a 57-year-old male, white, rented a room at the house and had long earned his living as a musician and bartender, though he was unemployed at the time. He was known to frequent several neighborhood taverns—the Backstabber, the 5 Spot, the Kort Haus, the Nightcap, and the Glass House—familiar waypoints that sketched his movements across the city's nightlife before the attack. Interviews with people who knew the 57-year-old male, white, did not turn up enmities or prior threats, adding to the sense that the intrusion and killing came without warning or an obvious grievance.
No arrests have been reported, and authorities have not publicly identified a suspect or suspects in the killing of the 57-year-old male, white, Vernon Richard Anton; the case remains unsolved. The absence of a named assailant or motive has kept the file open for decades, its few fixed points—the forced entry, the narrow window between December 13 and the discovery on December 16, and the victim's well-known bar circuit—standing in for answers that have yet to come.
In the aftermath, the 57-year-old male, white, was laid to rest at Willamette National Cemetery in Portland, his grave marker bearing the span of years that frame the unsolved violence of December 1977. The burial record fixes his age and place among the city's dead even as the circumstances of his death continue to resist resolution.
