Few cases in True Crime Case Histories ended on as uneasy a note as Joshua Webb’s. He’s the man from Volume 14 who, on Mother’s Day in 2017, beat and decapitated his mother, Tina Webb, inside their home in Colton, Oregon — then drove to a grocery store in nearby Estacada, walked in carrying her severed head, and stabbed an employee. The chapter closed on a fear shared by both victims’ families: that Webb might one day be released if doctors decided his mental illness was sufficiently controlled. That fear has now been partially realized.

In June 2018, Webb pleaded guilty except for insanity and was committed to the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, under the jurisdiction of the state’s Psychiatric Security Review Board. The commitment was described as being “for life” — but Oregon’s insanity statutes don’t work like a prison sentence. The board, not a judge, decides where a patient is held and at what security level, and the law requires a hearing whenever the hospital’s clinical team believes a patient can be safely managed somewhere less restrictive.

That request came in the summer of 2024. Hospital staff testified that Webb had been stable for years, took his medication willingly, avoided conflict with other patients, and had earned privileges that included work in a greenhouse on the hospital grounds. On October 9, 2024, the board granted him a conditional release, approving his move from the state hospital to Lifeways McNary Place — a 16-bed secure residential treatment center in Umatilla. It’s a locked facility, staffed around the clock, but a clear step down from Salem.

The decision came over strong objections. Lawyers for the Clackamas County District Attorney’s Office and the Oregon Department of Justice pointed to Webb’s lack of demonstrated remorse, the brutality of the crime, and reports that he had been watching television programs about serial killers — including John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer — while at the hospital. As a condition of the release, the board imposed restrictions on his media consumption.

It’s worth being clear about what this is and isn’t. Webb has not walked free. He remains in a locked, supervised facility, still under the board’s jurisdiction, still required to take medication and follow a treatment plan. But it’s exactly the kind of incremental step the families dreaded back in 2018 — the first loosening of a system they were told would hold him for life. For Tina Webb’s family, and for the grocery store employee who survived that day, it reopens a wound that was never going to fully close.