By rssfeeds-admin An affidavit from Sarasota County obtained by KOIN 6 News says Leland Harper schemed this plot up from jail in Florida, but it all comes back to a previous sex abuse case in Portland.
The affidavit says the convicted sex criminal wanted to kill a minor he sexually abused as well as the victim’s family in hopes it’d make his Oregon case go away, so he hired someone to do it.
He’s currently trying to appeal that Oregon conviction, but he’s also facing a multi-million dollar civil lawsuit connected to it.
Harper was first indicted on 59 sex abuse charges back in January 2021, but he was later brought back to Oregon and arraigned on those charges the following October.
Before his Oregon conviction, evidence shows Harper — who had been living in Portugal — went to great lengths to avoid extradition back to the U.S. and went as far as considering a move to Montenegro, prosecutors say.
In 2023, he was found guilty of all those sex crimes. He was also found guilty of 14 more charges for bribery and tampering with witnesses.
In January 2024, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in Oregon. Chuck Mickley, the lead prosecutor on the Oregon case, said the victim had also revealed that some of the abuse took place in Florida.
The detective sent the information to Florida officials, and after Harper was convicted, they decided to charge him for the abuse there.
“Anytime that a new person is serving a sentence, and they are in custody and going to serve a long sentence, the prosecuting attorney’s office wouldn’t want to wait for that sentence to be completed before extraditing a person,” Mickley said. “And so they made the decision to extradite him out to the state of Florida so that he could be prosecuted for the crime that he committed in that state.”
The affidavit says he came up with a plan while awaiting trial in a Florida jail, and a Sarasota County deputy first learned about the threat to the victim and her family in February. It also says Harper was telling his whole plan to an informant.
In March, Harper’s wife wired just under $30,000 to an account set up for the investigation. It wasn’t until this week that charges were filed against Harper for solicitation to commit premeditated murder.
Mickley said the recently uncovered plot is extreme, but not necessarily a shock.
“He’s made efforts all throughout the process to try to avoid the consequences of his criminal actions,” he said. “And so this isn’t necessarily surprising that he is going through a lot of additional steps to try to get out from the trouble that he’s caused himself by committing these crimes.”
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