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More than 44 years after murdering a 19-year-old Mt. Hood Community College business major, Robert Plympton (61) was sentenced to life in prison by a Multnomah Circuit Court judge yesterday.
On the evening of January 15, 1980, Gresham student Barbara Tucker was attacked, r*ped, and beaten to death near a campus parking lot by Plympton, who left her body in a grove of trees a few feet from the college where she was attending night classes.
DNA Testing Identified the Killer
Plympton was 16 years old at that time of the murder and lived half a mile from the college campus. The murder remained unsolved until DNA testing made it possible to identify the student’s killer. In 2021, investigators followed Plympton and retrieved a piece of gum he spat out, and subsequent DNA testing led to his arrest that June.
After sentencing Plympton to death, Circuit Court Judge Kelly Skye doubled the mandatory minimum to 40 years before he would be eligible for parole.
Five years after the murder of Barbara Tucker, in 1985, a woman walking home from a Portland grocery store was offered a lift by Plympton. The woman managed to escape after Plympton slammed her into the footwell of his truck and tried to restrain her arms with duct tape.
He received a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for the attempted kidnapping and his victim, Patricia Spangler, who testified in court yesterday, said she wondered what else Plympton may have done in the intervening years.
Plympton was involved in several DUI, assault charges, and restraining orders in the years following the murder.
Defense attorneys cited ‘transience of youth’, pointing out that Plympton had not been in trouble with the law since the 1990s. They asked the judge to reduce parole eligibility from 40 to 20 years, adding that Plympton would appeal his conviction.
However, prosecutors argued that the strongest punishment was warranted, pointing out that the murder had not only destroyed a family but had also shattered the peace in Gresham, a small community surrounded by fields and farms.
The murdered student’s two sisters sat weeping in the gallery, and after sentencing, older sister Alice Juan told reporters that she did not believe Plympton had ‘any remorse, regret, conscience.’
The trial was attended by Plympton’s former high school sweetheart, but she was not present for the sentencing.
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