For years, since I had moved into my neighborhood, someone had owned the property at the end of my street. I had never seen or met the owners. I hadn’t known this property existed; there were no houses on it, and the neighbors next to them mostly kept to themselves, so there was no reason to go to the end of the street.
At the end of May, this property went up for sale. According to my parents, this land was largely uninhabitable. It had the potential to build two houses on it, but one of these houses would be on a big hill. Also, if houses were to be built on it, a waterline would have to be run all the way down the little dirt road we live on. The road leading to the property was required to be widened when the lines were run. It was 8 acres of hassle, hills, and blackberries.
Much to my parents’ surprise, the property appeared as a pending sale on Zillow in July, about two months later. Not long after, the houseless property had still not sold, but the soon-to-be owners started passing by with U-hauls, shipping containers, an RV, and cars. They had also poorly built their own mailbox, held together by a jumble of screws and bolts that seemed not to connect to anything. We all thought it was bizarre that they would move in with no house, without the property even belonging to them.
One day, my mom was about to leave for work when she saw a man and a woman walking down the street. She connected that they must be our new almost-neighbors. She introduced herself to welcome them to the neighborhood.
The woman introduced herself as Carolyn and said that the man standing next to her was Wayne, her fiancé. By then, another man could be seen walking down the street. “And this is Robert.” Carolyn gestured to him.
From the way she said this, my mom perceived the trio’s dynamic to be more than a couple and their friend. My mom, being who she is, often doesn’t have a filter. She decided to blurt out the question, “Oh, are you a throuple?”
Carolyn awkwardly laughed and said, “No, no, Robert’s just a friend.” She then went on to explain how they planned to start off building one house for the three of them to share, but then would eventually have one built for Robert. From the way in which she explained this, my mom sensed that they didn’t yet have a solid plan for how the building of the two houses would be achieved, and that they would be in for far more than they signed up for. However, she wished them well and went on with her day. This would be the only interaction my family ever had with Carolyn, Wayne, or Robert.
Friday, November 7, 2025, was the day the official ownership of the property would be transferred to the trio, the day scheduled for the signing of the closing documents. However, Wayne never showed up.
At 10:08 that morning, it was reported that a man riding an electric scooter was hit and killed by an Amtrak train between Southwest 11th Avenue and Clinton Street in Southeast Portland. That man was later identified as 58-year-old Wayne Houff, the man who was about to become my neighbor.
Because of Houff’s passing, Carolyn and Robert decided to walk away from the property, as Houff was the one who had wanted to buy the property in the first place. My parents first heard this from our other neighbors, along with the news that Carolyn was allegedly married to Robert, and that Houff was her boyfriend. To put it in my mother’s words, “So they were a throuple!” (We’re very nosy.)
When I heard the news about Houff’s death the following Monday, I decided to look his name up online. I found the various local news articles reporting his death, but I also stumbled upon his LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. I went on his Facebook and scrolled down to his relationship status and saw that he had been engaged to one Carolyn Kerleine since July 4, 2025. This confirmed his identity. I clicked on the LinkedIn profile with the same name, which showed a selfie of the same man, this time at a more flattering angle, and noted that the bio states he was a paralegal for the Oregon Justice Resource Center. Underneath these profiles was the website link to the Oregon Innocence Project, administered by the Oregon Justice Resource Center. Within this link, there was an introduction for each staff member of this organization, including Wayne Houff.
The paragraph beneath his name states, “Wayne spent his first 30 years in Minnesota…He was arrested and confined in prison at 30 years old. Shortly into his prison sentence, he realized that the Just Us system quickly eats the poor, marginalized, and underprivileged. Barely weeks into his 24-plus-year prison sentence, he vowed to himself that he would learn, and continue to learn, as much as he could about the Just Us system with the hope of helping himself at first, then later morphing into a desire to help as many as he could navigate the system…” It then went on to discuss his accomplishments both during and after his prison sentence.
Obviously, the lines “arrested at 30 years old” and “24-plus-year sentence” caught my eye. Who was this man about to become my neighbor, and what did he do to warrant a prison sentence of over two decades?
I immediately showed my findings to my mom, who then promptly texted our neighbor. The next day, my mom leaves work early to hear information my neighbor found not only about Houff but also about his fiancée, Kerleine. She discovered that the people preparing to move into our quiet neighborhood, which was home to several young children and located just five minutes away from Sam Barlow High School, had horrifying backgrounds; Wayne Houff was a convicted child sex offender, and Carolyn Kerleine was a murderer.
According to public court records filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon (Case 3:06-cv-00445), on May 1, 1998, “in a bench trial, the court found Houff guilty on four counts of Using a Child in a Display of Sexually Explicit Conduct, four counts of Encouraging Child Sexual Abuse in the Second Degree, and two counts of Sexual Abuse in the First Degree. The court imposed an indeterminate 30-year sentence on counts 1-4 and a 150-month minimum sentence for the Sexual Abuse convictions. ” The victim was a four-year-old Vietnamese girl. The details of his crime can be found within the document, but its truly horrifying and explicit contents cannot be discussed in this article. Houff was released from prison in 2021.
In a bikeportland.org article, Houff is described as a “beloved” paralegal. It illustrates him as a hero for defending himself and helping others “navigate the criminal justice system”. However, according to this article, the reason that Houff was riding the rented scooter when he was hit by the train was that he was ineligible for a driver’s license due to his incarceration.
While I do believe in second chances, I have never thought that someone’s death or punishment automatically makes up for their actions. Almost every article I can find that discusses Houff’s life only briefly mentions his imprisonment, fully disregards the reason for his imprisonment, and places all the emphasis on how he made something of his life after prison. This, for any other person who wasn’t a pedophile, might be acceptable to me, but many articles and posts paint him as a visionary, and one post goes as far as to call him a “champion of justice.”
One account, Adults in Custody, posted a memorial to Houff on Instagram. It said, “He never let the system define him. Instead, he studied it- mastered it. Wayne became the go-to for incarcerated people trying to navigate a system designed to break them.”
This post absolutely enrages me. Houff’s career as a paralegal stemmed from his attempts to appeal his sentencing and a petition for a writ of habeas corpus (whether his imprisonment is justified), which were all denied. He was never able to accept his punishment and give the victim and her mother peace. He argued that his victim was too young to know how to describe what he did to her, and that her mother manipulated her into testifying against him. He “mastered” the system because he believed he was above punishment. He thought he could take advantage of another human being, specifically a child, who was completely helpless, justify his innocence by discrediting her testimony because she wasn’t mentally conscious enough to have known what was done to her, and get away with the whole thing, ultimately naming himself the victim. How unbelievably selfish can one person be? This man was a sick, twisted human being, and while I would never wish death upon anyone, I fully believe he deserved the way he died.
As horrifying as Houff’s background was, his fiancée carried her own chilling history. Bill and Carolyn Exum, presently Carolyn Kerleine, had met and started dating at Sandy Union High School when Kerleine was a freshman, and Exum was a senior. They married in 1983 when Carolyn graduated from high school, and went on to have four children.
According to oxygen.com, on the night of March 21, 1999, in Gresham, Oregon, Kerleine ran to her neighbors’ house, telling them to call the police after her husband had been attacked and killed by an intruder in the family’s garage, with Kerleine herself suffering a head injury during the break-in. All of this had happened with Exums’ four children asleep upstairs.
Kerleine told police she was getting ready for bed when she heard a loud noise coming from the garage downstairs. She knew her husband was working in the garage, so she went to check on him. That’s when she found him lying on the floor in a pool of blood. While kneeling to see if he was alive, she was approached from behind and hit over the head with a heavy metal object. She told police that she saw the shadow of someone fleeing the garage just before she fell unconscious.
She was taken to the hospital, while investigators analyzed the scene. They swept the house, ensuring the intruder’s absence while also checking on the kids. Then they went to the garage. The first observation made by the police was the brutality of this crime. There was blood all over the room, and pieces of brain and tissue scattered throughout. There was also a chair tipped over in the room, but the murder weapon was notably absent and unknown.
The medical examiner later determined her husband, Bill, died of blunt force trauma with 11 strikes to his head. District Attorney of Multnomah County, Stacy Heyworth, reported to Oxygen that “his brains, his skull were essentially mush.” Whoever killed Bill Exum had done so in a blind fury.
When the police scoped the neighborhood and talked to its inhabitants, the only thing that seemed out of the ordinary was a red truck parked near the Exums’ home in the months leading up to the attack.
Police soon learned that Kerleine was having an affair with a classmate from her high school, Allen Browning, who was discovered to drive a red pick-up truck, despite Kerleine’s insistent denial of any kind of relationship other than a friendship.
According to Browning’s ex-wife, a partial reason for the failure of their marriage was due to Browning’s obsession with Kerleine. She recalled finding a letter addressed to Kerleine from him that said, “I can live without my son, but I cannot live without you.”
When asked by the police if Browning had owned any weapons, his ex-wife answered that the only thing resembling a weapon was his “fishwhacker”, a heavy metal rod. This was the exact type of weapon that police believed they were looking for.
After installing a court-approved wiretap into Kerleine’s apartment, police were able to discover the extent of the power dynamic between Kerleine and Browning. It was soon discovered that whatever Kerleine said, went, and Browning was just along for the ride. He fell head over heels for her, allowing her to walk all over him. He would have done anything for her. Even kill for her.
On May 9, 1999, Kerleine and Browning were arrested and put into separate interrogation rooms. Police confronted Kerleine with the knowledge of the affair. Kerleine confessed to the affair but minimized it, then admitted that Browning murdered her husband, claiming that she was afraid for her and her children’s lives, saying that Browning had been threatening her. Browning, upon hearing this after requesting to listen in on Kerleine’s interrogation, was crushed and betrayed. Kerleine had been his whole world, and she threw him under the bus. Browning confessed that he and Kerleine had been having an affair for months before her husband died, and over time, Kerleine gradually became more and more controlling. Kerleine had convinced him that the only way they could be together was if Exum died, so she could inherit his life insurance money to fund their future together, also convincing Browning that Exum was physically abusive. On the night of the murder, Kerleine managed to lure Exum down to the garage and convinced him to sit tied to a chair, while blindfolded. After he was tied up, Browning was to hit Exum over the head with the rod once or twice to knock him unconscious. Then, they were going to light the house on fire with her four children inside.
However, this did not pan out the way they intended because after Exum was hit over the head, he stood up, still tied to the chair, and began trying to fight back. Browning began to panic and flail the “fishwhacker” around, landing the final killer blows. He hit Kerleine over the head to stage the attack, then left and buried the murder weapon in his parents’ backyard. (Killer Instinct Podcast.) The story of the murder of Bill Exum can be found on Peacock’s Master Mind of Murder S2: E7, “Love Struck.”
Being the orchestrator of this brutal killing, Carolyn Exum (Kerleine) was nicknamed the “puppeteer” by the media, and she and Browning both received a life sentence with a 25-year minimum. Browning is still in prison, but Kerleine was released in 2024.
Somehow, within that brief period between being released and Houff’s death, she managed to get married to Robert and find a fiancé. I do find it a little ironic that after she killed her husband, she now finally didn’t get the choice over the death of a loved one. I was unable to find any of Robert’s background, but given his association with these people, I highly doubt that he’s an ordinary person.
How well do we really know our neighbors? For months, my neighborhood’s only concerns were the mysterious love life and building plans of these three strangers. We would have never guessed the disturbing truth about their criminal pasts. It’s profoundly alarming how quietly people with such horrifying histories can reenter society. These people were truly monsters who got exactly what they deserved, and I’m relieved that Houff died before the young children in my neighborhood would have had to live near him. What I cannot reconcile is the coincidence that Houff died the day he was supposed to finalize the purchase of the property.
