Killed by a Fake Cop: The Kaylee Sawyer Story

0:00 Bend Oregon averaged about one murder per year. People moved there for the mountains and the safety. Then on a July night in 2016, a 23-year-old woman walked home alone after a fight with her boyfriend. A man in a uniform pulled up to offer her a ride. What he was allowed to do that night should have been impossible. [Music] Kaylee Ann Sawyer was 23, finishing classes at Central Oregon Community College, working as a dental assistant at Aubrey Dental, and living with her boyfriend Cameron just outside campus.

0:56 She was a photographer, a poet, a snowboarder. She wrote, she drew, and she carried a heritage most people don't know about. She was an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, and the great-great-great-granddaughter of Chief Joseph Forbearer. Friends remembered her creative spirit, her family remembered everything else. July 23, 2016 was a Saturday night. Kaylee went to a bachelor at party in downtown Bend, came home late, and got into a fight with Cameron. We don't have the full story of the argument, and honestly we don't need it. Couples fight, she was upset. After midnight she left the apartment and went to have a walk, tried to cool off.

1:41 Her phone battery was almost dead. The last text she sent Cameron was, "A goodbye." And here's something about Bend, Oregon, you should know going in. This is a small mountain town in Central Oregon. Historically they averaged about one homicide per year, and almost all of those were domestic. It was a place people moved to specifically because nothing happened there. The biggest threat on a Saturday night was usually a tourist who couldn't parallel park. Kaylee was walking along the edge of Central Oregon Community College campus, when a marked SUV with a roof-mounted light bar pulled up. The man inside was wearing a uniform, a ballistic vest, a duty belt with handcuffs and pepper spray.

2:23 He looked exactly like a cop. He was not a cop. His name was Edwin Laura, and to understand how he ended up in that vehicle that night, we have to back up. Laura was born in Honduras, moved to Mexico when he was 11, then immigrated legally to the United States. His teenage years included a stretch and some rough LA neighborhoods before his family settled in Modrez, Oregon. Dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, eventually got his GED, then his associate's degree in criminal justice from COCC. He was active in the college's criminal justice club. He played piano at his family's church, and he helped with food drives.

3:04 If you were a classmate, you would have described him as religious, as polite, slightly intense, with thoughtful questions. If you were his coworker on the campus safety team, you would have described him as something very different. Laura, behind closed doors, was telling people he had an obsession with dead bodies. He fabricated stories about being a police officer in Honduras and seeing dismembered corpses. He showed coworkers his personal nude photos and homemade pornographic videos of an affair he was having while his wife was at the police academy. At least one female cadet on staff refused to even ride in a patrol car with him.

3:45 His wife, by the way, was a rookie bent police officer named Isabel Ponce-Lora. This whole household was law enforcement adjacent, and here's the part that should hit you. Laura had applied to become a real certified police officer, but he failed the psychological evaluation, so he could not legally become a cop. What he could do was take a job at the Community College's campus Public Safety Department, where there was no psychological screening required. COCC's campus Public Safety Department in 2016 was something special, and not in a good way. The college had styled its security officers to look exactly like municipal police.

4:28 Police style uniforms, ballistic vests, marked SUVs with light bars, push bumpers, and rear suspect cages with auto locking handles that you could not open from the inside. They wore body cameras. They were doing traffic stops. They were running their own investigations. They were even confiscating drugs and then not turning them over to the Bend Police Department. The Bend Police Chief at the time, Jim Porter, and the county district attorney, John Hummel, had began begging COCC to dial it back for years. Porter ran audits. He found the campus was "underresponding to crimes to protect their stats."

5:08 In 2015, a hidden camera was discovered on campus, and campus safety sat on it before telling the actual police. A serial stalker had been targeting at least 13 female students and campus security botched the whole investigation. Female students reported officers banging on their dorm doors, listening through walls, and demanding to search their backs. The college had been warned. Internal safety audits had been commissioned. The audits confirmed everything Porter was saying, and COCC leadership took no corrective action. They liked their look alike police force. So this is the environment Edwin Lawyer was working in on July 24th, 2016 at 1 o'clock in the morning.

5:52 He saw Kaylee walking alone. He stopped. She was distressed. Her phone was dead. It was in the middle of the night. He offered her a ride home. Everything about him said law enforcement. So she got in the back of the SUV. The doors locked behind her because of the prisoner cage. There was no handle on the inside. She was, at that moment, trapped. He did not drive her home. He drove her to Lot B12, a remote parking lot on campus. And what happened in that lot was every fear every woman has ever had about getting into a car at night. The autopsy showed that she fought back hard. She had defensive wounds. But Edwin Lawyer raped and sawdemized her. He strangled her and killed her by bludgeoning her with about a 50 pound rock.

6:40 He then loaded her body back into the vehicle and drove out west of Redmond off Highway 126 into a canyon called Dry Creek, where he dumped her into a ravine. He then drove home. He showered. He went to church with his wife on Sunday morning. That afternoon, he, his wife and his cousin Vinnie went to the movies and watched the horror film lights out. His wife noticed he was unusually quiet. She thought he was upset about the affair that she'd recently found out about. Monday morning, with the search for the missing Kaylee already underway, Edwin Lawyer broke. He told his wife, tearfully, that he had accidentally hit Kaylee with his patrol vehicle.

7:20 He panicked and had hidden her body. Before she could process or call her department, Edwin Lawyer grabbed her personal 9 millimeter clock and he ran. She immediately reported him after that. And then everything came apart. Edwin Lawyer fled across state lines. He kidnapped another woman, named Andrea Mace, and held her for a terrifying 10 hours. Carjacked other vehicles and turned a quiet missing person case into a federal manhunt. He was eventually caught. In 2018, facing the death penalty in Oregon, he pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and robbery and was sentenced to life without parole.

8:02 In 2019, he pleaded guilty in federal court to kidnapping and carjacking and received a second concurrent life sentence. At synancing, he gave a flat, self-pitying speech about how tired he was of crying. A federal judge cut him off and said, quote, "It's all about you." Andrea Mace, the woman he kidnapped during the spree, stood up in that courtroom and said to him, quote, "You thought you stole my life from me. I'm not a victim. I'm a survivor, a warrior. I'm stronger now than I've ever been and you are going to rot." Kaylee's family sued the college. In 2020, COCC agreed to a $2 million settlement, which is significant because Oregon law cap damages public institutions can receive at about $1.38 million.

8:50 COCC paid over the cap. People in legal circles understood exactly what that meant. And then Oregon legislators got to work. Senate Bill 576, signed by Governor Kate Brown on May 24, 2019, became known as Kaylee's law. Campus security officers in Oregon can no longer wear uniforms that look like actual police officers. They cannot use red and blue lights. They cannot have prisoner cages in their vehicles. They cannot use push bumpers. They can't conduct stop and frisk. They must notify local police of arrests immediately. Their vehicles have to be tracked by GPS and equipped with front facing cameras.

9:33 Kaylee's mom, Julie, started a children's book club called KK's readers in her daughter's honor. She said after the settlement that she could finally grieve Kaylee her daughter instead of Kaylee the murder victim. Her father and stepmother, Jamie and Crystal became advocates. They show up to other victims' court hearings. They sat in solidarity with Andrea Mays. A 23-year-old woman went for a walk because she'd had a bad night, an argument with her boyfriend. The man in the uniform should never have been wearing it. The institution that gave him the costume had been worn for years and did nothing. That's the story of Kaylee and Sawyer, and it's the reason Oregon's campus security looks different today.

10:24 Thanks for listening to 10-minute murder, binge-able true crime stories. I'm Joe, I'm the host, and here's an email, "Subject Recommendation with the Warning." Hi, Joe. Whenever I recommend your show to people, I tell them two things. First, it's really good, and two, they're probably going to end up listening to three episodes in a row. Question. What's a book, movie, or a show you wish you could experience again for the first time? Mark and Flagstaff, Arizona. Mark, first of all, thank you for introducing new people to the show. Thank you yourself for listening to the show. To answer your question, I want to say it's Harry Potter, but that would make me sound like a big giant nerd, so I'm not going to say Harry Potter.

11:06 But I will say one of my favorite books, it's like top in the top three, my favorite books of all time. I wish I could reread for the first time 11/22/63 by Stephen King. That's an unbelievable book. There's a series that's also out, it's good, it's a good series, but the book is amazing to me. I really, really love that book. So, since I'm not saying Harry Potter because it's going to make me look like a big giant nerd, I will say it's 11/22/63. Again, Mark, thank you for the email. Hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, welcome. Get comfortable, put your feet up because there are hundreds and hundreds of nearly 700 episodes at this point.

11:48 I'll feed you to go back and listen to in the back catalog of 10-minute murder. Also, subscribing makes you get the episodes as soon as they come out. If you're subscribed, it's automatically going to come to your phone or whatever device that it is that you're listening to the show on. You don't have to go searching for it every single time. You've got questions, if you've got anything you want to know about the show, go to 10minuteMurder.com. And that's going to do it, that's your episode for today. Thanks again for listening to 10-minute murder. See you next time.