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County murders near all-time low Only homicide this year was Jan. 3 By JIM DAVIS It's been more than nine months since the last murder in Jackson County and, if the trend holds, 1999 would have the lowest murder rate on record. Police have investigated just a single murder this year -- and that was in early January, said Spencer Smith, Jackson County's chief deputy medical examiner. "We're on a good run right now," Smith said. Since police began keeping count in 1985, the county has averaged five to six murders per year and has never had less than two, Smith said. Even so, the murder rate is a crime statistic that can fluctuate greatly from year to year, police said. "You would tend to think that it's just a lucky year, it's kind of an anomaly," said Jackson County sheriff's Sgt. Rich Fogerty, head of detectives. The murder rate does not include criminally negligent deaths or manslaughter cases, which are generally traffic-related. Nor does it include justifiable homicides, such as police shootings. The last known murder in Jackson County occurred Jan. 3, when Russell Marvin Slack, 50, was shot in his Central Point home at 475 Freeman Road. He died in the hospital in Medford several days later. That murder is still unsolved. Smith has been keeping records on murders since the Jackson County Homicide and Major Assault Team formed in 1984. Jackson County usually sees between five and 10 murders a year, he said. The county had one of the highest murder rates in the state in 1995 and 1996 with 10 deaths each year. Medford police Lt. Tom Lavine said that he thinks a good strong police presence will keep crime rates down in communities. But he said that some murders -- crimes of passion that usually involve people who know each other -- are hard to predict. "It's clearly something that we don't have much control of," Lavine said. Fogerty, of the sheriff's department, said the single murder this year is low for a county with a population of 172,800. But he said that murder rates tend to fluctuate too greatly to put too much stock in it. "I don't think that most people who do crime-rate analysis really look at a murder rate in a county like this," Fogerty said. The longest time that Jackson County went without a murder was 18 months in the early 1980s, Smith said. "And we made up for it the next year with a vengeance," Smith said. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA