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Thread: "Heart Full of Lies" killer Liysa Northon due to be released from prison in 2012

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    Moderator nestlequikie's Avatar
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    "Heart Full of Lies" killer Liysa Northon due to be released from prison in 2012

    Eastern Oregon killer Liysa Northon, featured in Ann Rule book, eyes new life after her release from prison next year

    Published: Saturday, November 05, 2011,Richard Cockle, The Oregonian




    She was a barefoot, bikini-clad surfer and jet-setter who swam with dolphins, earned $8,000 a month as a sports photographer, wrote books and screenplays, and had homes in Hawaii and Bend.

    It was the perfect life until Liysa Northon went to prison for killing her Hawaiian Airlines pilot-husband 11 years ago in a remote Wallowa-Whitman National Forest campground. Afterward she became the pivotal figure in the chilling 2003 best-seller"Heart Full of Lies" by Northwest writer Ann Rule.

    Now, with less than a year of time to serve, the 49-year-old Northon has a new husband and is trying to change her image from convicted killer to heroic battered wife.

    She claims she got a raw deal in her Wallowa County Circuit Court trial, blames her defense attorney and takes special aim at the 75-year-old Rule, author of more than 30 books including one about serial killer Ted Bundy.

    Northon's effort recently caught some traction when an ex-newspaper editor wrote a freelance piece about Rule's book: "How Seattle's Queen of True Crime Turned a Battered Wife into a Killer Sociopath." But it turned out the freelancer neglected to disclose that he had a romantic interest in his subject. Rick Swart -- now Northon's fourth husband -- remains unrepentant for the omission. "My personal life is my own business," Swart said. As for his article, "I'm selling a product."

    In a telephone interview from Coffee Creek Correctional Facility near Wilsonville, Northon said Swart knew what he was doing. "Nobody would have run the story when he told them he'd fallen in love with me," she said, "and the utter injustice that was done to me needed to be printed."

    They look forward to starting a new life together, Swart said. "We have a lot of hopes and dreams, starting with, we have to get her out of that prison," he said.

    'I was horrified'


    Still trim and youthful from daily yoga workouts, the inmate known as "Surfer" to other Coffee Creek convicts is scheduled for release Oct. 9. That's 12 years to the day after police found 44-year-old Chris Northon dead in his sleeping bag from a gunshot wound to the head near an Eagle Cap Wilderness trailhead.

    The couple's 3-year-old son, Dane, was asleep in a nearby tent and another son, Aukai, 9, was with friends in Dayton, Wash., when Northon killed her husband. She never denied shooting him and insists she acted in self-defense, despite evidence that he was asleep or drugged unconscious when she shot him at close range with a .38-caliber revolver.

    Northon said she and her son would have been at risk when he awakened. "For a battered woman, the danger is always imminent, always," she said. "Oregon badly needs a self-defense law for battered women. Right now, they just expect you to die and not make a fuss."

    Chris Northon, according to Liysa, was a drug-addicted "high-functioning alcoholic" given to rages and violence rooted in sexual abuse she said he suffered as a child. Because she was 5-foot-4 and 113 pounds to his 6-foot-3 and over 200 pounds, she was vulnerable, she said.

    "One time he was stone-cold sober and he came into my office and he said if I left him, he would hunt me down and kill the children," she said. "I was horrified." She reported his alleged abuse to Bend police, she said, but they didn't arrest him.

    Eighty-five-year-old Dick Northon of Joseph, Chris' father, said his son never abused anyone and wouldn't have lasted 14 years as a pilot for Hawaiian Airlines if he'd had a drug problem.

    "Chris was a gentle, sweet, wonderful guy," he said. "He was the light of our life ... bright, talented, a terrific pilot. Everyone who knew him thought he was wonderful."

    As for Liysa, Dick Northon won't comment. Negative remarks might bring a court-mandated end to visits by his grandson, Dane, now 14, the couple's son, he said.

    Aukai, now 20, Liysa's son by an earlier marriage, said Chris was "a great guy in many aspects, a really good stepdad, and he was a lot of fun." On the other hand, Chris wasn't the saint portrayed in Ann Rule's book, he said, "and Liysa wasn't the satanic person, the terrible psychopath, that Rule makes her out to be."

    But in combination, the couple "were the two worst personalities to put together" -- they often argued and neither was willing or able to give in, said Aukai, a business major at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

    Aukai habitually took his little brother to another room when the adults fought, he said. He remembers how frightening and dangerous "physical and verbal confrontations with someone as physically powerful as Chris and as petite as Liysa" could be.

    His mother makes a compelling argument that shooting and killing Chris was her only recourse, he said, but he often asks himself, "What could have happened differently?"

    "That is something I struggle with," he said.

    Met 30 years ago

    Liysa Northon and Rick Swart married Sept. 18 in the prison visiting room, less than two months after his article ran in July in the Seattle Weekly. So low-key was the ceremony that Coffee Creek's correctional staff, who'd busted them earlier for a three-second kiss, didn't notice a wedding was under way, Swart said.

    "She's beautiful, she's bright, she's funny, she's gentle and genuine," he said. "It makes my heart stop just to look at her." Of Swart, Northon said, "I'm astonishingly grateful for his love. Despite the fact that this is a dark, horrible ordeal, I have found the kind of pure love, true devotion, that most people only dream about."



    Their marriage is merely the latest chapter of a relationship stretching back 30-plus years. They met at Wallowa Lake when she was 17 and he was 22. Instantly smitten, Swart asked the young Liysa DeWitt from Walla Walla for a date. The girl who would soon become Walla Walla High School's homecoming princess and walk through the gym on the arm of Randall Edwards, later to become Oregon state treasurer, agreed to a date and then stood him up. They lost touch with one another.

    "Rick told me he thought about me nearly every day for 30 years after that, and I broke his heart," she said. "Obviously, I hugely regret that."

    Swart, now 54, was editor of the Wallowa County Chieftain weekly newspaper more than 20 years later when Liysa Northon shot Chris Northon. He assigned coverage and edited stories about the killing, unaware Northon was the girl who mesmerized him as a young man. Chieftain reporter Elane Dickenson covered the trial the following summer, and Swart edited her stories, still unaware of Northon's identity.

    Three or four years later, on an airliner bound for a Hawaiian vacation, Swart picked up Rule's book and saw Northon's photograph. "I said, 'Oh, my God, it's Liysa DeWitt!' It hit me like a ton of bricks," he said. "The little gal that was at the lake was in the center of this maelstrom."

    He wrote to her in Coffee Creek last December and she agreed to an interview. "I was pretty hard on him," Northon recalled. "His paper wasn't very nice to me."

    But then love blossomed, and now he lives in an apartment he calls "base camp" because it's close enough to Coffee Creek to visit her and a quick commute to his job as a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

    Rule stands by book

    REST OF THE ARTICLE CAN BE READ HERE: http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-no..._liysa_no.html
    I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to. - Donnie Darko

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    Senior Member irishkat's Avatar
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    She creeps me out

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    Senior Member deeply shaded's Avatar
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    He must be slow if he did all that editing, etc., while it was all going on and it never once occurred to him that Liysa is a pretty unusual name and maybe it's the same one he used to know. And he didn't see a pic that whole time either?
    Quote Originally Posted by beli View Post
    kim kardashian - made famous for having a sex tape, should die in a fire
    Quote Originally Posted by McMama View Post
    Have you ever walked into a mall, sat on God's lap, and had your picture taken?

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    Unicorns and glitter! HeyyyMan's Avatar
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    Ohhh yeah I remember the pictures from that book.

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