On the Rocks

BY NIGEL JAQUISS njaquiss@wweek.com

On July 30, Olivia Gilliam visited her father, Joe Gilliam, in the Clark County, Wash., assisted living facility that has been his home—and prison—since somebody poisoned him in 2020.

“He was really alert and awake,” she says. “You can tell that he’s still 100% there.”

For more than 20 years, Joe Gilliam ran the Lake Oswego-based Northwest Grocery Association, winning high-stakes political battles in Oregon, Washington and Idaho for some of the nation’s largest retailers.

But today, the man whose clients fed the region cannot feed himself. Nor can he speak or do much of anything. When Olivia Gilliam says her father is “still 100% there,” she means he indicates through eye movement, grunts and rudimentary gestures that he understands her and the short list of visitors allowed to see him.

“I told him, ‘I’m trying to fix this for you,’” Olivia Gilliam says. “‘I promise I will get something done.’”

But the prospects of police determining who tried to kill Joe Gilliam (“Who Poisoned Joe

Gilliam…Twice?” WW, Nov. 3, 2021) using thallium, a toxic heavy metal U.S. officials banned 40 years ago, grew slimmer recently when officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., declared their investigation “inactive.” (Officials believe Gilliam was poisoned at his vacation home in Cave Creek, 45 minutes north of Phoenix.)

The Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Office released the results of its investigation to WW under a public records request (as is customary, the office had declined to release the file while its criminal investigation was active). Here’s what we learned from the file:

The Investigation Went Deep. Police reports provide extensive detail about a search of Gilliam’s Cave Creek home in January 2021. Sixteen officers and lab techs descended on the property, scooping up electronics, samples from a vacuum cleaner, sink traps and 11 bottles of distilled spirits. (Friends theorized that somebody placed the thallium, which is odorless and colorless, in Gilliam’s drink.)

Because thallium is so rare, deputies sent those samples off to the FBI crime lab. Results came back in May 2021: “no signs of thallium.” Meanwhile, investigators zeroed in on Ron Smith, a longtime Gilliam friend who lived in a casita on Gilliam’s Cave Creek property. A former Colorado lobbyist, Smith wrecked his career with a messy divorce: He put raw chicken in the ducts of his ex-wife’s home, poured caustic liquid on her prized piano, and texted her he “will ruin my life to ruin yours.” After a felony conviction, Smith moved in with Gilliam. But records show the men fell out, mostly over money.

In a January 2021 search warrant affidavit, a detective wrote that Smith was the focus of the investigation: “It is the belief of the sheriff’s office that the drink provided to [Joe Gilliam] by Ronald [Smith] on Nov. 9, 2020, may have been laced with thallium.” Records show that the sheriff’s office subpoenaed Smith’s bank and brokerage accounts, looking in vain for evidence of an electronic purchase of thallium, which is available on the internet.

They also interviewed Smith’s ex-wife, Michelle Young. “I asked Michelle if she thought Ronald could have poisoned somebody,” a detective wrote. “After a long pause Michelle indicated that Ronald is capable of that.” (Smith did not respond to requests for comment.)

Two Key Figures Never Talked.

Gilliam initially came to Cave Creek at the behest of another old friend, Tim Mooney, an Arizona political consultant who sometimes worked for Gilliam on Oregon campaigns.

Mooney and Smith loaned Gilliam money to help him buy his Cave Creek home, a deal memorialized in 2019 in what they termed the “Agreement of the Brotherhood.” When Gilliam’s girlfriend, Christina Marini of Lake Oswego, prepared a timeline of Gilliam’s mysterious illness for police, she determined he’d fallen severely ill on two occasions that coincided with meals and drinking with her, Mooney and Smith.

Records in the Maricopa case file show that Marini and Gilliam’s son, Joey Gilliam (a convicted felon whom Lake Oswego police also considered a suspect), spoke regularly to investigators both in Arizona and Oregon. But neither Mooney nor Smith ever agreed to an interview.

In one taped conversation with Olivia Gilliam, the lead investigator, Detective Tyler Thompson, says, “Do you ever speak to Tim Mooney? If you do, ask him to give me a call.”

Mooney confirms he never agreed to an interview but says he supplied information in writing to help Gilliam, whom he calls his “irreplaceable best friend.”

“I’ve encouraged the police to be more active in their investigation,” Mooney says, “giving the police in detailed writing everything I know and suspect. I’ve answered every question they’ve posed to me and added more that wasn’t asked.”

Law Enforcement Agencies Weren’t on the Same Page.

Among the many barriers to figuring out who poisoned Gilliam: early confusion about what was wrong with him, and investigations proceeding on different tracks in different states.

Doctors in Oregon misdiagnosed him initially, telling him he had a nerve disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome. Not until after his second poisoning six months later did doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix identify thallium as the culprit.

In geographical terms, Gilliam was a big deal in

Oregon, well known to the state’s most powerful officials. But in a remote part of a sprawling Arizona county more populous than all of Oregon (Maricopa County contains 4.5 million people), he was nobody special.

Lake Oswego police pursued the case here, but records show the two jurisdictions struggled to cooperate. “I don’t have any control over what Lake Oswego does,” Maricopa County’s Detective Thompson said to Olivia in a taped interview. “They are doing things I’m asking them not to.”

One particular point of frustration: Marini, Gilliam’s girlfriend, took and reportedly passed a polygraph test in 2022. Thompson told Felicia Capps-Gilliam, Joe Gilliam’s sister and guardian, that the test results—which aren’t admissible in court—were allowing Marini to say she’d been “cleared,” which irked him. “We’ve been blocked by Tim [Mooney], we’ve been blocked by Ron [Smith], and now, after the polygraph, I expect we’ll be blocked by Christina [Marini],” Thompson told Gilliam-Capps.

An interview Arizona detectives conducted with their state’s head of poison control raised the possibility that Gilliam wasn’t poisoned in two discrete incidents. “This sounds like someone who was poisoned over months,” Dr. Dan Brooks told detectives, a suggestion that could implicate Marini, Gilliam’s constant companion.

“I never heard about that,” Marini says of the idea the crime took place over time, adding that no matter the scenario, she had nothing to do with Gilliam’s poisoning.

A Bombshell Interview Fizzled.

Last August, when Joe Gilliam’s health worsened dramatically, his daughter, Olivia, and his sister, Felicia, rushed to his side. Investigators had asked family members not to discuss the poisoning with Gilliam. But now his closest relatives feared he might die without ever having a chance to share what he might know.

With a video camera running, Olivia asked her father unrelated questions designed to show whether he could understand and respond. When she and her aunt determined he was tracking, Olivia began asking a series of questions: Did he know what had happened to him?

Olivia would later tell Detective Thompson in a taped call that when she asked about Ron Smith and Tim Mooney, her father gave a thumbs-up signal and raised his arm as best he could. “He had a full memory of how things played out,” Olivia Gilliam tells WW. “He remembers the entire incident, not just who was there.” (Mooney denies any involvement in Gilliam’s poisoning.)

Olivia Gilliam and Felicia-Capps Gilliam hoped the tape of that interview would shake up the case. Instead, it ground to a halt.

“I am very disappointed in the investigation by Maricopa County,” Felicia Capps-Gilliam says. “I’m frustrated that they didn’t do more.”

Olivia Gilliam, like many of Joe Gilliam’s friends, isn’t ready to give up. “I want to make sure the rest of his life is as safe as possible,” she says. “It’s unnerving to know there are people out there who want him dead.”

The Lake Oswego investigative file remains exempt from disclosure pending resolution of felony charges against Joey Gilliam, who stands accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his father as Joe Gilliam lay in a vegetative state. Trial is set for Sept. 28.