Willamette Week | By Lucas Manfield | September 18, 2022
The harassment began five years ago with a piece of hate mail, sent to Kenneth Fandrich’s Oregon City home. It was disguised as a letter from his union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
Then, someone broke into Fandrich’s truck and left a condom wrapper under a pair of his wife’s work gloves.
By the time the Clackamas County bomb squad arrived to remove a large suspicious device from underneath his truck, Fandrich, 56, claims he was well aware of the identity of the culprit.
He filed for a series of stalking orders against 55-year-old Steve Milner, an animal surgeon. In court filings, Fandrich says Milner is responsible for all the incidents, which followed the end of an affair Milner was having with Fandrich’s wife.
Fandrich’s attorney filed a lawsuit in Multnomah County Circuit Court on Sept. 12 for $245,000, and police have filed criminal charges against Milner in Clackamas County for allegedly planting a GPS tracker on Fandrich’s truck, again, and violating the stalking order.
WW could not reach either man for comment. Milner’s attorney declined to speak about the case. Michael Fuller, who represents Fandrich in the civil lawsuit, provided WW with legal documents outlining both sides’ arguments. They were filed in court following Fandrich’s request for a stalking order.
The bizarre saga is noteworthy because of the reluctance of police to intervene. According to the documents, the latest legal actions are the culmination of years of threats by both men—and futile pleas for law enforcement to step in.
As recently as 2016, Fandrich’s wife worked with Milner at his Oregon City veterinary hospital. (Milner recently retired.) There, the two had an affair, according to a statement Fandrich made to police. It was documented in a report that was included in the legal filings. That affair ended, Fandrich said, and the stalking began.
That police report was a result of a 911 call made by Fandrich on March 2, 2022, after Milner allegedly followed him all the way from Oregon City to Cornelius Pass Road in Hillsboro.
After being pulled over by police, Milner admitted to following Fandrich, according to the police report. Milner told the officer that Fandrich beat his wife, and he wanted to “talk with him” about it. Milner was taking the issue into his own hands because the police weren’t doing anything about it, he told the officer.
The officer then talked to Fandrich, who sounded terrified, according to the report. Milner, he said, was going to “cut me up into little pieces because he is a surgeon.” Milner is a doctor of veterinary medicine and operates on pets. Fandrich told the officer that he and his wife did have marital problems, but that she had been arrested for domestic violence, not him.
Fandrich told the officer that he’d been trying to get the police to do something about Milner’s stalking for years, but they hadn’t. He claimed, according to the report, that “police [had] advised it was not against the law to place a GPS tracker on someone else’s vehicle.” (It is, if the owner does not consent.)
Neither the Oregon City Police Department nor the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office immediately responded to a request for comment.
The Hillsboro police officer noted that Milner did not seem “receptive” to the officer’s warnings that he’d end up in jail if he kept up the harassment. Milner was not cited or arrested.
A few weeks later, Fandrich applied for a stalking order against Milner, who he said “is trying to kidnap me and possibly kill me or disfigure me,” Fandrich wrote in his application.
Milner unsuccessfully fought the order in court. His attorney, Ross Denison, filed a legal document arguing that the conduct “was neither malicious nor undertaken in bad faith.” Milner, Denison argued, “engaged in the conduct with the sole motivation of protecting his intimate friend’s—[Fandrich’s] wife’s—physical safety.”
Denison played a recording for the court in which Fandrich threatened Milner. He used “multiple hateful racial slurs” and said he would “put a bullet in his head,” according to a legal filing that described the recording.
Even with the stalking order, the harassment did not end, prosecutors allege. Last month, Milner was finally arrested for an incident that prosecutors say happened in April. Milner was charged with violating the stalking order for “unlawful use of a global positioning system device.”
The complaint in Fandrich’s recent civil lawsuit includes a still image from a video, allegedly showing Milner “placing a tracking device” on Fandrich’s truck. The lawsuit accuses Milner of invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional harm, trespassing and negligence.
That video, reviewed by WW, shows someone crawling under the vehicle and then running away in the night.
Milner has been released from custody pending a Clackamas County court date next week. In the meantime, he’s been ordered to have no contact with Fandrich or Fandrich’s wife.
