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The St. Johns Review, a community newspaper circulated throughout 13 neighborhoods in North Portland, has published a weekly or monthly print edition for nearly 120 years.
There will be no July issue.
The Review’s turmoil isn’t for the typical reasons so many local newspapers are failing, like print ads evaporating or 15-second social media videos replacing reputable news sources.
It’s because its owner, Richard Colvin, is behind bars in Alabama after a federal agent says he phoned the elderly female receptionist of a Methodist church in Mobile and threatened to kidnap, cage and rape her.
According to an affidavit filed by the FBI agent investigating the case, Colvin, 60, had a pattern of making harassing phone calls to law enforcement agencies and religious centers in Oregon, too—long before he was arrested in Alabama.
The bizarre saga has left the century-old North Portland newspaper’s future uncertain.
The Review’s director, Anisha Scanlon, says she and Colvin are exchanging paperwork to transfer ownership of the paper to her. Scanlon says she’ll have to pay off about $10,000 in outstanding bills (she declined to say to whom) before printing the next edition—for that, she will probably need a GoFundMe campaign.
“These issues with the paper are not issues that I have created or was even privy to until Richard had been put in jail,” Scanlon says. “I need these problems to not be associated with me or the paper’s future. These need to go away.”
Running a neighborhood newspaper is a labor of love. There’s little profit. Your advertising prospects are constricted within a tight radius. Writers willing to write for pennies are unpolished, retired, or just saints. Investors aren’t clamoring to pitch in a buck.
For 26 years, Gayla Patton published The St. Johns Review—a paper she now wants no part of.
“I want nothing to do with Richard Colvin, any of his employees, or be associated with what a mess the paper has turned into,” Patton wrote WW in a text. “It was once respectable, entertaining and reliable. It is none of that now.”
The paper’s nosedive began in late 2022. Patton, then 75, decided to sell. She had two prospective buyers: Colvin, a musician who built and maintained the Review’s website, and the duo of Barbara Quinn and Mark Kirchmeier, two longtime North Portland residents.
By her telling, Patton’s decision was a simple one: Colvin offered more money. She says she sold the paper to him on Dec. 30, 2022. Business filings show Colvin became the paper’s sole member on Feb. 12, 2023.
Colvin was known in the community as a quirky fellow with the voice of an angel. He regularly crooned Frank Sinatra songs at Pattie’s Home Plate Café before it closed in 2019. He was active in organizing the St. Johns Parade and patronized the St. Johns Bachelor Club.
But several St. Johns residents, including the former owner of a vintage shop in downtown St. Johns, recall a darker side. “I saw him rant and rave at people right outside of my shop,” says the shop owner, who asked to remain unnamed. “Screaming at the top of his lungs. Just out on the street exploding on people.”
In March 2023, after failing to buy the Review, Quinn and Kirchmeier, a former staff writer for Willamette Week, published the first edition of a new North Portland newspaper called North Peninsula Review. That appeared to draw Colvin’s ire.
In a voicemail Colvin left on Kirchmeier’s phone on March 30, 2023, Colvin said in a thick Alabama drawl: “Listen, sir, you better lawyer up.…I’m hiring an attorney now, and you better get yourself an attorney too, sir, because I’m about to sue you. Have a nice day.”
The rivalry festered in small ways. Colvin by that point had hired Scanlon as managing editor of The St. Johns Review. She wrote in a comment under a Facebook post in August about the latest issue of North Peninsula Review: “Plan to throw this paper in the trash.”
One day in September, Quinn says, Colvin called her 10 times in a row. She says Colvin berated her for starting another paper.
“He was just screaming and rageful. It was alarming. He was going to sue us personally, he was calling me names,” Quinn says. “He did not get obscene with Mark, but he got obscene with me. It was just gross.”
Chris McMurry, an artist who wrote a monthly column for The St. Johns Review at the time, says Colvin called him once that August to rant about Quinn and Kirchmeier. “I think he felt blindsided. He was upset, very upset,” McMurry recalls, “like someone had stabbed him in the back. I didn’t know what to say.”
Freelancers and delivery drivers for The St. Johns Review sensed financial troubles in late 2023. Virginia Harris, 77, who for 10 years delivered copies of the Review around town and later took on some managerial duties, said Colvin complained about “how much of his own money he was sinking into the paper.” Her paychecks weren’t arriving.
“I became increasingly aware of what I considered to be anomalies,” Harris says. “I determined that I would very much like to retire again.”
Plus, she says, Colvin unnerved her: “I had a feeling that there was a side to Richard that I didn’t want to know about.”
Sometime in early 2024, Colvin moved to Mobile to take care of his aging mother who was suffering from worsening dementia. Trouble soon followed.
Colvin was booked into the Baldwin County Jail on June 10 on criminal charges stemming from an alleged November 2023 phone call.
In the affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on June 5, FBI Special Agent Michael Burton wrote that Colvin had called the 77-year-old receptionist at the Christ United Church in Mobile and “threatened [the woman] by describing how Colvin was going to kidnap [her], put her in a cage and repeatedly rape her. Colvin then described how he would cut off his own penis and insert it into [her] vagina and anus. Additionally, anytime [she] attempted to speak, Colvin would call [her] a ‘motherfucking bitch.’”
Between December 2023 and February 2024, Burton wrote, Colvin repeatedly called the prayer line of the church, upset by the recent split in the Methodist Church over gay rights. Burton writes that in one voicemail Colvin says, “I can’t wait to come to church there and let you folks know just what I think about you busting up a 8 million member United Methodist Church over who’s sucking a fucking dick.” Colvin made similarly threatening calls to another Mobile church, too, the agent wrote.
Burton continued: “While living in Oregon, Colvin called and harassed the FBI Portland Field Office, the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, and the Portland Police [Bureau] who have all responded by blocking Colvin from calling them.” The FBI had blocked his number, too, Burton wrote.
In March, Burton added that the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office had “opened a matter to investigate Colvin for making threats towards a Jewish community center.”
On June 10, U.S. Magistrate Judge P. Bradley Murray ordered that Colvin remain in jail because he may pose a threat to himself or others. Colvin pleaded not guilty to the charges.
On June 11, another judge granted permission for Colvin to undergo a psychiatric exam, at the request of Colvin’s court-appointed criminal defense attorney, Jan Jones, who had written in a filing that Colvin has “a long-standing history of documented mental illness.”
In a three-page handwritten letter to Judge Murray on June 20, Colvin wrote that life at the Baldwin County Jail wasn’t so bad: “We are eating well, doing prayer groups, and singing.” He added that jail was a “vacation compared to caring for my mother 24/7.”
Jones declined to comment and told WW that Colvin is currently in transit to another facility. WW sent questions for Colvin to Jones, but Jones did not say if she had alerted Colvin to those questions.
McMurry the columnist resigned from the Review after hearing there would be no July issue due to Colvin’s arrest. The June issue was a mess: Text columns bled into one another and stories were sparse.
Scanlon, a longtime friend of Colvin’s whom he brought on to help with the paper in February 2023, says she’s awaiting arrival of the ownership transfer paperwork to make her the paper’s new owner and will resume printing monthly as soon as she raises the $10,000 to pay the bills past due. Scanlon says Colvin sent the paperwork already and she expects it to arrive “any day.”
Scanlon declined to talk about the allegations against Colvin but says she never saw a verbally aggressive version of Colvin.
“I can say that Richard is a very passionate person,” Scanlon says. “All members of humanity can get upset and people take it the wrong way. I don’t know about other people’s interactions with him.”