State v. Layton

The indictment charges that the defendant, in an attempt to commit rape, killed Ruth Hildebrand. The jury made no recommendation of leniency and hence sentence of death was imposed.

On the morning of June 8, the day after Miss Hildebrand was drowned, Miss Doris Hardesty, while in the company of two of her playmates, found on the bank of the river near the scene of the drowning, some three or four feet from the water’s edge, a half of a brassiere; but the first public notice of the death of Ruth Hildebrand came when her body was found lodged against a boom log in the Willamette River near the…