The ghastly secret inside Christopher Lovrien’s shed stayed hidden even as he was sitting behind bars on charges of killing a different man decades earlier.
Lovrien had been arrested in May 2020 after he was linked by DNA evidence to a man who disappeared in 1999. On a recorded call from jail to his brother, he said: “There is more to this than has been revealed, and it’s bad.”
Days later, the grizzly truth came out as investigators removed three plastic totes from the shed. Inside was the dismembered body of 53-year-old Kenneth Griffin.
A Multnomah County jury of nine women and three men spent only 100 minutes deliberating Monday before returning a guilty verdict against Lovrien for second-degree murder and first-degree abuse of a corpse in Griffin’s death.
Lovrien, now 53, served as his own attorney for most of the trial, but didn’t call witnesses, take the stand himself or deliver an opening statement. A defense attorney appointed to help Lovrien sat behind him in the public gallery for most of the trial. Lovrien asked the attorney, Keith Goody, to rejoin the case and deliver a closing statement.
Griffin, a part-time roofer, Roosevelt High graduate and one of six siblings who grew up in Portland, was reported missing Feb. 16, 2020, when he failed to show up at his mother’s house for dinner.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Kirsten Snowden said Griffin and Lovrien chanced upon each other at the 82nd Street Bar & Grill. Lovrien was celebrating a gambling win and invited Griffin back to his home, where he lived alone and kept dozens of weapons mounted in a finished basement.
Snowden told the jury during opening statements last week that it was unknowable why Griffin accompanied Lovrien back home but, she said, “It would be a fatal mistake.”
Investigators had searched Lovrien’s home after his arrest in May 2020, but said the search warrant didn’t include the outbuildings. Lovrien’s lawyer at the time invited them to return two weeks later to search the manufactured plastic shed, telling authorities to bring a hazmat team.
The jury heard testimony from those investigators as well as Lovrien’s recorded jail calls and segments of his testimony before a grand jury, in which he recounted swinging an ax at Griffin’s head and then shooting him five times with a crossbow in a drunken stupor while they two were hanging out his basement.
Lovrien took a week off work and said he planned to drop Griffin’s dismembered body in a river using his boat, but became suicidal and never went to the river.
“Easy, cheesy, nobody would have known nothing,” Lovrien said in the grand jury recording.
After a week alone at the defense table clad in jail scrubs, Lovrien changed his mind and asked Goody, who had been serving as a legal adviser, to represent him. Goodey didn’t present any evidence but said during closing arguments that Lovrien had lied in the grand jury testimony and didn’t kill Griffin.
Lovrien had told the grand jury that he killed Griffin in self-defense, but couldn’t advance that argument during the trial because he didn’t testify. Instead, he frequently complained of a set-up, accusing prosecutors of deleting phone records or removing an autopsy photo from the evidence.
“I know for a fact that it was stolen. This is just sneaky tactics,” he said. “Your honor will be complicit in allowing this to happen.”
Circuit Judge Christopher Ramras responded in a measured tone, and the purportedly purloined photo was soon located among his paper files.
Lovrien bowed his head but showed little emotion as the verdict was announced. He remains in custody ahead of a sentencing hearing set for next week. He faces a minimum of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years in Griffin’s death.
He was previously sentenced to 20 years in prison for the 1999 killing of Mark Dribin, whose body was never recovered from Larch Mountain.
Once the plea deal was signed in that case, Lovrien said he met Dribin at an adult bookstore and had sold him methamphetamine on several occasions. He claimed Dribin made an unwelcome advance.
Investigators identified Lovrien as a suspect in 2019 after submitting cigarette butts found at the scene for DNA analysis.
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