View full sizeFamily photoLiysa Northon gathers with new husband Rick Swart (top left) and sons Dane, 14, (bottom left) and Aukai , 20, (right) at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility near Wilsonville. Northon is scheduled to leave prison next year
JOSEPH -- 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
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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:
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."
View full sizeFamily photoPrison inmate Liysa Northon (right) and sons Dane, 14, (left) and Aukai, 20, (center) at Oregon's Coffee Creek Correctional Facility near Wilsonville. Northon is doing time for killing her airline pilot husand , Chris, 11 years ago. She claims she was a battered wife, and expects to be released next year.
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
When Wallowa County Undersheriff Rich Stein found Chris Northon's body, Liysa Northon was gone: She'd left the campground with her youngest son and drove to her brother's home in Walla Walla, and then on to a friend's in Dayton, Wash.
"I pretty much sacrificed my life to save my son," she said from Coffee Creek.
She's spent her time in prison filing repeated complaints against her former attorney, Pat Birmingham of Portland, but the Oregon Bar Association dismissed them in late 2009. That same year, she filed a lawsuit against Ann Rule, but a federal judge also dismissed it.
, Northon claims Rule's book contains 287 errors and falsehoods, including a description of her as an untidy housekeeper.
Rule stands by her characterization of Northon as a methodical killer -- a woman who "can make any man do what she wants, for a while."
"I certainly didn't make up anything," Rule said. "It was all in the files and the transcripts. I couldn't find any real indication that Liysa had been battered, not by Chris."
Rule, an ex-police officer, was upset by Swart's Seattle Weekly article, she admitted -- although she's been through this before. "With all the things I've written, I've been sued three times by killers, and they didn't collect. They said I ruined their reputation."
Birmingham also backs the account in "Heart Full of Lies." "I didn't find any real errors," he said.
Northon's prison-based campaign against him and Rule has been wearing, he said. "When she gets out, I'm afraid she is going to continue."
During Northon's July 2001 murder trial in Enterprise, defense attorneys were optimistic about their chances until the FBI showed up on the second day with a computer Northon had reported stolen, Birmingham said. It had material on the hard drive that proved she was researching forensics, ballistics and poisons. And an email to a relative indicated she needed a silencer for a gun and had plans to make a death "look like an accident," he said.
Her possible motive: a $300,000 life insurance payout, airline pilot widow's benefits that would allow her to fly free and sole control of the couple's property, valued, according to Dick Northon, in excess of $1 million.
Northon contends she was pressured by Birmingham to plea bargain a murder charge down to first-degree manslaughter and 12 years in Coffee Creek.
It was her decision to take the offer, Birmingham said. "She got a tremendous deal," he said. "She's lucky she's not doing 25 to life."
Her new husband insists Northon was a victim. She never got a chance to testify about how she was choked, beaten and nearly drowned the day she shot Chris Northon, he said.
On the other hand, the court didn't hear the prosecution's contention that she may have drugged him with a possibly fatal overdose of horse tranquilizer and tried to drown him in the Lostine River before shooting him.
Does Chris Northon's death trouble Swart? No, he said. His wife saved her own life and that of her child, and nobody else has any reason to fear her, he said.
"I don't beat women," he said. "If I do, she has my permission to shoot me."
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Richard co*ckle
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