Crystal Jansen

Before a six-month internal investigation concluded that Deron McMaster had violated policies within the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office, he worked a stand-up career that included leadership positions in the jail and the detectives divisions. In 28 years, he’d never been investigated for a conduct violation.

But the internal investigation this year was damning, and included findings of lying to investigators and failing to properly report an allegation of domestic violence and an alleged rape. McMaster, who had risen to the rank of captain, was shocked.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I’d be sitting here … with my job on the line,” McMaster would tell Sheriff Shane Nelson. “I’m trying to do the right thing here but I end up in hot water, and that kind of bothers me.”

Now, McMaster, who resigned in September rather than accept demotion, says the internal investigation was a sham and will sue Nelson in federal court within three weeks for allegedly misusing his authority with the disciplinary process, according to his attorney, Randy Harvey.

McMaster believes his credibility was targeted after he learned damaging information about the sheriff. Specifically, McMaster alleges Nelson suppressed evidence that he had ignored years of child abuse and domestic violence in the home of another sheriff’s deputy. McMaster said Nelson did this “to prevent embarrassment to himself and his family.”

McMaster also claims to have witnessed instances of sexual harassment by Nelson against former deputy Crystal Jansen, who recently settled a gender discrimination lawsuit with the county for a half-million dollars.

An extensive account of the sheriff’s investigation of McMaster is contained in hundreds of pages of interview transcripts, emails, case summaries and other documents and audio files obtained by The Bulletin. The sheriff’s office has not disputed their authenticity.

McMaster, 54, declined to comment on the investigation, as did Nelson.

Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Jayson Janes said the office would release “further information at a later time.”

“The Sheriff’s Office disputes the claims being made by Mr. McMaster in the tort claim,” Janes wrote, referring to the document that in Oregon represents a person’s first step in suing a public body.

The DeMars matter

McMaster’s case is closely tied to that of former Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office sergeant Richard “Deke” DeMars, whose affair with a subordinate came to light in early 2020, followed by allegations of rape and domestic violence by his girlfriend of more than 10 years.

DeMars was investigated criminally by the Redmond Police Department and internally by the sheriff’s office.

In January 2020, DeMars’ longtime girlfriend learned he was having an affair with Allie Lamb, one of his subordinate deputies. After being confronted by the girlfriend, DeMars decided to admit the inappropriate relationship to his supervisors before they found out, according to the sheriff’s investigation.

DeMars went to McMaster’s home in Redmond late on the night of Feb. 9, 2020, and told him about the relationship with Lamb. The next morning, McMaster notified DeMars’ captain, Paul Garrison, and DeMars was placed on paid leave that day.

Why DeMars chose to tell McMaster and not Garrison was a mystery to McMaster, who as head of the detectives division was not in DeMars’ chain of command. DeMars hinted to sheriff’s investigators that he confessed to McMaster because of McMaster’s reputation for honesty.

“I wanted to be able to admit my mistake and I didn’t want it to be taken out of context,” DeMars said during the sheriff’s investigation into his behavior.

On Feb. 20, 2020, McMaster received a text from DeMars’ girlfriend stating that if anything happened to her, McMaster should know she was “not suicidal,” meaning she feared violence from DeMars, according to the sheriff’s investigation.

In response, McMaster notified Garrison and called Redmond Police Department. Redmond Lt. Aaron Wells conducted an investigation and advised the Deschutes County District Attorney’s office there was probable cause to arrest DeMars for harassment of the woman’s children, according to an official case summary. The children were then interviewed at a Eugene child abuse investigation center and afterward, Redmond Police forwarded another memo to the district attorney’s office, this one recommending charges against DeMars for allegedly sodomizing his girlfriend, as well as allegedly assaulting her children.

In May 2020, the Deschutes County District Attorney’s office transferred the DeMars case to the Oregon Department of Justice, citing a conflict of interest.

As of this past week, the justice department has yet to charge DeMars with a crime.

DeMars resigned from the sheriff’s office in April while still under independent investigation.

The sheriff’s office’s position, according to McMaster’s attorney, is that after receiving the “not suicidal” message, McMaster should have notified Nelson directly.

McMaster claims that’s not sheriff’s office policy. He claims what he actually did — reporting the woman’s statements to DeMars’ supervisor and then to an outside agency — was in keeping with the office’s current policy and standard practice.

“I was concerned about (DeMars’ girlfriend),” McMaster said in audio of a meeting June 17. “I thought there might be more going on here, and didn’t just let it go.”

Trouble next door

Nelson’s private investigators, Tim Moore and Matt Ellington, interviewed more than 30 witnesses in the DeMars internal investigation. One was Lisa Nelson, a former Bend Police officer and the sheriff’s wife. The Nelsons had been neighbors to the DeMars’ household for seven to eight years, she testified to Ellington.

According to a transcript of her interview in February 2021, Lisa Nelson said she knew of discord at DeMars’ home for years. She described several behaviors she felt indicated fear in the home, including a 2016 incident in which one of the children in DeMars’ household vomited on himself at the Deschutes County Fair.

When she arrived to give the boy a ride home, he was “frantic” that she not tell DeMars he vomited. Later, Lisa Nelson encountered the boy’s mother, and she too seemed scared DeMars would find out the boy threw up.

“(She) said, please don’t tell Deke what happened,” Lisa Nelson said. “It’s always kind of stuck with me. (It) was a really weird reaction.”

Lisa Nelson told Ellington she recalled several odd behaviors noticed by her and her husband.

“He was very controlling,” she said of DeMars.

On March 31, McMaster was stunned to receive written notice he was under internal investigation for alleged policy violations. That night, Nelson went to McMaster’s home to reclaim his gun, badge and work vehicle for the duration of the investigation.

Months later, as part of the disciplinary process, McMaster and his attorney, Harvey, received copies of investigation materials from the sheriff’s office. Included was one brief reference to an interview conducted with Lisa Nelson. But there was no sign of her interview transcript in the documents, Harvey said.

In a memo included in the investigation documents, McMaster called that absence a clear attempt to suppress evidence Nelson and his wife knew about child abuse in the DeMars home.

“It is not reasonable to believe the transcript was inadvertently left out of the file,” McMaster wrote in the memo. “This is too coincidental. All other transcripts are in the case file and it is not reasonable to rationalize that the only transcript left out by accident or oversight was the interview of the sheriff’s wife.”

Neither Moore, nor Ellington responded to requests for comment.

Moore and Ellington

On the morning of June 17, Nelson and McMaster and their respective attorneys met in Nelson’s office so McMaster could plead his case before a disciplinary determination was made.

Until he was placed on paid leave, McMaster had been one of three captains reporting directly to Nelson. He told Nelson he was unaccustomed to being on the other side of the table, according to an audio recording of the meeting.

McMaster said he knew termination was a possible outcome. At various points in the recording he sounds confident, frustrated and nervous. He tells the sheriff there’s a lot he wants to say.

“Throughout this investigation, I feel like every time I try to explain my position, it just keeps getting worse for me,” McMaster said. “Moore and Ellington twist my words. They omit information. They assign meaning to things that are untrue and I’ve never been able to, throughout this whole thing, make them understand my thinking and my actions.”

He defended how he chose to report the allegations of domestic and sexual abuse in DeMars’ home and discussed his concerns with the accuser’s credibility.

McMaster and his attorney roundly criticized the investigative work of Ellington and Moore, whom the sheriff’s office has used for 17 internal investigations since 2015.

Moore, a retired captain of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, has been paid around $103,000 by the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office office since 2015. Ellington has been paid around $75,000 in that time, according to the sheriff’s office.

In the June 17 meeting, McMaster claims Moore and Ellington argued with him rather than listen, and read questions from a “script,” rarely deviating when new information was presented. But to friendly witnesses, like Garrison, the sheriff’s independent investigators asked “grossly” leading questions, McMaster said.

The veteran investigator expressed exasperation that the pair based their investigations on an inaccurate timeline of events, and when provided the correct information, didn’t follow up.

He told Nelson he had to stop reading Moore and Ellington’s report numerous times because it made him so mad.

“When I got that report and I saw the lying and dishonesty that’s going on, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to fight this.’ Because these guys, they’re horrible,” McMaster told Nelson.

Harvey told the sheriff that Moore and Ellington were “padding their retirement accounts” at the expense of local taxpayers.

“They’re basically guns for hire,” Harvey told Nelson. “They’ll stick their fingers in the wind and try to produce something that will make them more money.”

Harvey told Nelson the fact Ellington is an unlicensed private investigator could come back to haunt the office, and that Ellington had resigned as undersheriff of the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office in 2018 as a result of a lawsuit filed by a whistleblowing detective.

But Harvey spared particular ire for Moore, telling the sheriff he’d won favorable outcomes in other cases in the past because of major errors Moore made while conducting investigations.

“The guy can’t do an investigation, and it’s sad,” Harvey said in the meeting. “It’s really sad that a person the quality of Capt. McMaster here has been subjected to Tim Moore’s antics.”

Moore has been cited by the state for performing private investigative work without a license, a fact that came up numerous times in the recent jury trial of former Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office deputy Eric Kozowski.

Kozowski was fired by Nelson in 2018 as a result of numerous low-level conduct investigations initiated after Kozowski ran against Nelson in the 2016 election, critical of the sheriff’s leadership. Like McMaster, Kozowski had a clean conduct record prior to his investigations.

In August, a jury awarded Kozowski $1.06 million, and ordered Nelson personally pay him $10,000 in punitive damages for violating Kozowski’s First Amendment rights.

The Deschutes County government is responsible to pay an additional $1 million in attorney fees to both sides.

The sheriff’s office said last month that the county — and not Nelson — had already paid the $10,000 in punitive damages, “pursuant to the indemnity provisions of the Oregon Tort Claims Act.”

Shortly after the verdict in the Kozowski lawsuit, the county reached a settlement with former deputy Crystal Jansen, who’d filed a federal complaint alleging her career was derailed by Nelson after she raised concerns about gender discrimination in the office. At the time, she was the only female Deschutes County sheriff’s deputy in a supervisory role.

The Jansen complaint

Among Jansen’s claims, she alleged Nelson touched her on the shoulder in front of other officers and winked at her in what she took to be a “humiliating” act of dominance.

In a memo included in the McMaster documents, McMaster claims Nelson spoke of wanting to fire Jansen for reporting the alleged touching incident.

“A number of us had to work really hard to convince the sheriff not to take that course of action because the optics of that action would make it look retaliatory,” McMaster wrote in the memo. “The reality of it is it actually would be retaliatory. The fact that Jansen felt uncomfortable about the Sheriff touching her on the shoulder and was creeped out by it, are her own feelings and perceptions.”

There are currently eight active lawsuits involving the sheriff’s office in state and federal court, including two by current or former employees.

McMaster, an Air Force veteran, has started work as an aircraft mechanic for Horizon Air in Redmond.

He told the sheriff in their June meeting he felt hurt being targeted, given their long history as coworkers.

“You’re a person who knows my character. You know I’m a person of integrity. You know I’m honest. You know that I would never lie. You know that I would never lie to an investigator,” he said near the end of the meeting.

“We go down the hallway over here, and it says “FAMILY” on the wall,”’ he told Nelson. “And I believe in that stuff.”