Bio 

Scott Dean Harberts was born on November 1, 1962. He grew up in Oregon and Wyoming. Public reports described a difficult family background, including a volatile home life after his parents separated. Harberts was a high school dropout and worked as a welder. He had a history of alcohol use and drug use, including cocaine. At the time of Kristina Hornych’s death, he had been living for several months in an Oregon City home shared by Kristina’s father, Kevin Hornych, Kevin’s girlfriend Sylvia Mangus, and several children.

Harberts had known Kevin Hornych since school. In 1989, he moved into the home after separating from his second wife. Reports described him as unemployed at the time. Before the 1989 case, Harberts had a criminal record that included arrests for public drunkenness and convictions involving car theft, firearm possession, and assaultive conduct. He had also been accused of violence toward a child in an earlier incident.

Murder Story

On the night of July 13, 1989, Kristina Lynn Hornych was staying at her father’s home in Oregon City, Oregon. Earlier that day, her mother had left her there for an overnight visit. That evening, Kristina’s father and Scott Dean Harberts used cocaine together. Harberts had also consumed a large amount of alcohol.

At approximately 3:00 a.m. on July 14, Harberts said he woke up to use the bathroom and found Kristina lying naked on the bathroom floor. He woke Kristina’s father and Sylvia Mangus. Kristina’s clothing and diaper were found in the bathroom area, and blood and hair were found elsewhere in the home.

Emergency responders arrived after a 911 call. Harberts attempted to perform CPR and became upset when paramedics and police tried to move him away from the child. He was arrested at the scene on a harassment charge after interfering with officers.

Medical personnel determined Kristina had already been dead for some time. Court records described the child as having suffered sexual assault and fatal injuries. The cause of death was described as head trauma, smothering, or a combination of both.

After his arrest, Harberts denied killing Kristina. During questioning connected to a polygraph examination, he made ambiguous statements suggesting that if the test indicated he had killed her, he might have done it while drunk and not remembered. The admissibility of those statements became one of the central legal issues in the case.

Harberts was indicted for aggravated murder in July 1989. His trial, however, did not begin until July 1994. The delay was caused largely by repeated litigation over whether his statements connected to the polygraph could be admitted at trial.

In 1994, Harberts was convicted of three counts of aggravated murder and sentenced to death. The jury did not hear the disputed polygraph-related statements. Harberts appealed automatically to the Oregon Supreme Court because of the death sentence.

On September 14, 2000, the Oregon Supreme Court reversed his conviction and vacated the death sentence. The court ruled that the nearly five-year delay between arrest and trial violated Oregon’s constitutional requirement that justice be administered without delay. The court ordered the indictment dismissed with prejudice, preventing prosecutors from retrying him for Kristina Hornych’s death.

After the murder conviction was overturned, prosecutors brought separate historical sexual abuse charges involving children connected to the same household. In 2001, Harberts was convicted of one count of first-degree sexual abuse and sentenced to one year in jail and five years’ probation. The Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed that conviction in 2005.

Harberts became known as the only person sentenced to death in Oregon after 1984 who left prison alive. According to later reporting, he completed probation in 2006. Because the aggravated murder conviction was reversed and the case was dismissed with prejudice, the killing of Kristina Hornych should be described as an alleged murder case rather than a standing murder conviction.