Police have identified the remains of a family that crashed into an Oregon river in 1958, putting an end to a decades-long hunt for answers about their disappearance.
The Oregon State Medical Examiner’s Office identified Kenneth Martin based on DNA recovered from remains found in the Columbia River, while other evidence found at the site helped identify his wife Barbara and their daughter Barbie.
“The Hood River County Sheriff’s Office has concluded its investigation, having found no evidence of a crime,” police wrote in a statement on Thursday.
The Martin family disappeared in December of 1958 during a visit to the Columbia River Gorge to collect greenery for Christmas decorations, police said.
The bodies of two of their children, Virginia, 13, and Susan, 11, were found downstream months later, but the other three family members on the trip remained missing.
The case set off “one of the greatest manhunts in Oregon’s history,” the Associated Press reported the following year. A $1,000 reward was offered to aid in the search, which became a national news story.
Still, decades passed, and relatives were no closer to finding out what happened to the Martins.
“A gas receipt in Cascade Locks, and then there was a witness that said that they had seen them at a cafe in Hood River,” sheriff’s deputy Pete Hughes told Oregon Public Broadcasting of the status of the formerly cold case. “But there’s never been any real closure or anything.”
In 2024, diver Archer Mayo, who had taken an interest in the disappearance, found the family’s Ford station wagon submerged in 50 feet of water in a part of the river known as “the pit.”
“There was a big collapse in front of me, and it was completely dark, and I couldn’t see anything,” Mayo told KATU. “And when the water cleared slightly, I saw a tire, and I knew, you know, within a few minutes, I was able to figure out there was a balloon whitewall tire and that this matched it.”
That summer, he found human remains nearby.
“I really just ended up solving it with clues and theories, hypotheses, and eventually found them 10 feet under the bottom of the river, 50 feet from the surface,” he added in his interview with KATU. “So really, I came up with a theory of where they would be and started digging until I found them.”
The following March, police used a crane to remove parts of the buried car.
“Due to the extent to which the vehicle had been encased in sediment, only the frame and some of the attached components were able to be pulled from the water,” the sheriff’s office said in its statement. “Analysis of those items along with other items retrieved by the diver allowed investigators to conclude that this was in fact the Martin car.”
A DNA sample retrieved at the site was compared with living relatives of the Martins, allowing investigators to identify Kenneth Martin’s body. The other DNA recovered from the remains was too degraded to make a match, though investigators said the “totality of the circumstances in which the remains were recovered, and the anthropological assessment of the remains” made them confident that officials had positively ID-ed Martin’s wife and daughter.
In the river, investigators also found remnants of a shoe, plus a camera case with Kenneth Martin’s name and address on it, as well as camera film, according to Colby Lasyone of Othram, the DNA lab that assisted police in the investigation.
“Maybe there’ll be pictures published one day of what that is, because that’s a pretty cool piece to a mystery,” he told KOIN.
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