7A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JANUARY 13, 2017
Mystery dead man now has a face WINGS: ‘Don’t
be afraid to do it’
A forensic
artist’s work
could generate
solid leads
Continued from Page 1A
By NATALIE ST. JOHN
EO Media Group
CATHLAMET, Wash. —
The dead man at Pillar Rock
had two intriguing items in
his pocket. For the last seven
months, Wahkiakum County
Prosecutor and Coroner Dan
Bigelow has been keeping that
fact hidden away like an extra
ace in his sleeve.
Despite Bigelow’s best
efforts, the identity of the skel-
etal remains, discovered on
the bank of the Columbia
River near Altoona in May,
has remained a mystery. So
now, Bigelow is revealing new
details and a Texas forensic art-
ist’s new rendering in hopes of
generating new leads.
“I had been keeping this
information private, both
because it may have been use-
ful in eliminating false claims,
which happens sometimes, and
because by releasing it, I might
be revealing the name of a rel-
ative of the deceased. But after
six months with almost no
movement in the case, I think
it’s time to lay all my cards on
the table,” Bigelow said in a
statement.
Bigelow’s glass slipper
When Bigelow first sought
help from the public last spring,
he described the middle-aged
man’s height, clothing and
shoes, and revealed only that
he carried a lens cloth from a
west Seattle optometrist in his
pocket. Bigelow knew from
previous experience that his
fairly broad description would
generate dozens of calls from
detectives, other coroners and
medical examiners, and regu-
lar people who were searching
for their missing loved ones. He
also knew it would be hard to
give all those people hope, only
to disappoint them later on.
“All these people are calling
in, and I know that at most, I can
give closure to one of them,”
Bigelow said in an interview.
Bigelow’s press campaign
did generate a flood of new
possibilities, but gradually, they
all dried up. By December, he
knew he needed to somehow
generate a whole new set of
leads, so he could start the win-
nowing process all over again.
If Bigelow is the Prince
Charming in this sad story, the
new forensic drawing is the
Wahkiakum County Coroner’s Office
This keychain fob may be a
valuable clue to the identi-
ty of a man whose remains
washed ashore near Pillar
Rock last spring.
GOT A TIP?
Wahkiakum County Coroner’s Office
Wahkiakum County authorities are seeking the public’s
help in identifying this man, whose remains were found
along the Columbia River. This is a facial reconstruction
based on his skull.
announcement for the ball, and
the dead man’s tarnished key-
chain and ring are Bigelow’s
version of a glass slipper.
Drawing the dead
A portrait on her website
shows Austin forensic artist
Natalie Murry sitting alone at a
table in a black room, using a
bleached skull to create a draw-
ing of a fully-fleshed man. A for-
mer dispatcher and police offi-
cer, Murry developed the skills
of a beat cop and investigator
— interviewing, evidence-han-
dling — before turning to the
evolving field of forensic art.
Now certified by the Interna-
tional Association for Identifi-
cation, Murry has trained with
the FBI, as well as a variety of
experts in her field. Forensic
artists have traditionally used
standard artists’ mediums, like
clay and charcoal pencils to
reconstruct faces from remains
and create time-progressions
of missing persons, but Murry
now specializes in using digital
media — especially a tablet that
allows her to turn drawings into
computer files.
Murry freelances for law
enforcement agencies all over
the U.S., often using technol-
ogy to interview witnesses and
victims and complete her com-
posites from a distance. She fre-
quently works with the Seattle
Police and King County Med-
ical Examiner’s Office, and it
was through this connection
that she was asked to create a
likeness of the Pillar Rock man.
Nameless in Seattle
Late last year, Washing-
ton State Forensic Anthro-
pologist Dr. Kathy Taylor —
who is working with Bigelow
on the identification effort —
asked Murry to help with five
unresolved Washington cases.
In December, Murry went
to Seattle, where she photo-
graphed the remains of each
person.
“As always, each had their
individual challenges and
interesting details,” Murry
wrote in a blog post. In addi-
tion to the Wahkiakum County
case, Murry’s Washington
cases included a mixed-race
woman found recently near
Highway 18 in King County,
and a middle-aged white man
found in a sleeping bag under
a tree in Pend Oreille County,
whose bone abnormalities indi-
cated that “he had lived with a
great deal of pain for some
time.” It was not the first time
Murry had worked on a local
case — in 2014, she created a
rendering of a Native Ameri-
can woman who was killed in
a fiery Cowlitz County crash
while hitchhiking with a truck
driver more than 20 years ago.
Secrets behind the smile
Murry’s rendering shows
a man with wide-set solemn
eyes, a broad forehead, and
a slightly asymmetrical oval-
shaped face. In an email to
Bigelow, Murry explained
that for some reason, the right
side of the man’s jaw was
larger than the left side, giv-
ing his face its slightly crooked
appearance.
“The other thing that she
said was interesting — and
Oregon man dead from exposure
struggled with mental illness
Heartbreak for
his family
By MOLLY HARBARGER
The Oregonian
PORTLAND — A man
who died of exposure in the
woods near Southwest Bar-
bur Boulevard has been iden-
tified as Zachary A. Young, a
29-year-old from McMinnville
who was likely living there
before he died of hypothermia.
Young’s father, Vance
Young, said Thursday his son
dealt with mental illness that
fueled extreme paranoia for
most of his life. He hadn’t seen
or heard from his son for about
a year and a half before he was
notified of the death.
Zachary Young’s body was
discovered Tuesday on a steep
hillside, the fourth person to
die of exposure in Portland
this year.
His father said Zachary
Young had fallen off his skate-
board at 15 when he wasn’t
wearing a helmet. He under-
went brain surgery. He was
never the same, his father said.
“For me this was a heart-
break,” Vance Young said.
“Zach was a great kid. He had
all the other aspirations that a
kid would have — just a really
lot of promise.”
For years, Young was angry
at the world. He was fiercely
intelligent and could have
in-depth conversations about
all sorts of topics, his father
said, but he couldn’t quite put
words to what he was feeling.
‘For me this was a heartbreak.
Zach was a great kid.’
Vance Young
father of Zachary A. Young, who died of exposure in the woods
His paranoia and fear alien-
ated him from other students
at McMinnville High School,
and he spent time in a special
home for boys.
Young’s parents were
divorced, and his father said
that Young’s mother spent
hundreds of hours working
with him, trying to get him
help with his mental health.
But once Young turned 18,
they couldn’t force him to get
assessed to get the social ser-
vices he qualified for.
Young refused, saying
he didn’t think it was right
to apply for free programs
or get government help, his
father said. But he couldn’t
hold down a job to provide for
himself.
Eventually, he stopped
trusting his parents and chose
to live on the street. Vance
Young said he and his ex-wife
deposited money into a bank
account that Zach could
access. They kept tabs on him
that way, by tracking when
money was withdrawn.
They also paid for a storage
unit in Tigard for his belong-
ings. He lived in it off and on
for years. Occasionally, they
changed the locks to force him
to contact them.
That backfired when he got
so mad more than a year ago
that he stopped visiting and
withdrawing money.
Since then, Vance Young
said his son’s life was a mys-
tery to them.
Now, he said he wishes he
had looked into having his son
committed for mental treat-
ment. He didn’t try before
because Zach was an adult
and he didn’t seem like some-
one who couldn’t take care of
himself.
Young said it seemed like
an unreasonable step and
would have hurt his relation-
ship with his son, but wonders
if it would have kept him alive.
“I wish we had done some-
thing beyond what we did. You
can sit there and say I’ve done
enough,” Young said. “Yet, he
is an adult and once he hits that
point, he has to ask for them.”
AB6114
Safekeeping Storage Centers
3045 Hwy 101 N
Gearhart, OR 97138
503-738-6731
Intends to hold for public sale at
oral bid the following personal
property pursuant to its lien
rights for non-payment.
Bradshaw: # 160G
Neil: # 172G
Morse: # 156G
The sale will take place on
Saturday, January 28, 2017
at 10:00 AM. Cash only.
Published: January 13th and
27th, 2017.
Anyone with information
should contact Wahkiakum
County Prosecutor and
Coroner Dan Bigelow at
360-795-3652, or by email
at dbigelow@waprosecu-
tors.org.
Dr. Taylor confirmed this —
was that some of his dental
work, which was quite good,
had additional cavities, some-
times on the same tooth right
next to it,” Bigelow said. The
newer cavities seem like a pos-
sible indication that during the
final years of his life, the man
stopped going to the dentist.
“Maybe he lost his job.
Maybe he stopped caring,”
Bigelow conjectured.
Who is Debbie?
It’s both tempting, and dan-
gerous, for an investigator to
imagine a narrative about their
subject, but it’s hard not to
think that this man somehow
fell on hard times, or became a
stranger in his own life before
he died — and the two items
he kept in his pocket seem to
play right into that theory. The
first is a small, rectangular key-
chain with a tarnished brass
finish. Engraved on its surface
is a simple cartoon drawing
of a smiling girl with pigtails,
and one word: “DEBBIE”. The
second is a ring with a cheap
black stone set in it that appears
to have belonged to either a
small woman or a child. The
snapped-off top of the key-
chain and the scratches on the
ring’s stone suggest that the
man carried the items for sen-
timental reasons, and had been
doing so for a long time.
“It’s important not to read
too much into things,” Bige-
low said in his statement, “But
it doesn’t seem like a giant leap
to imagine the decedent knew
and cared for someone named
Debbie, maybe a daughter.”
A crucial step in her jour-
ney, she said, was a one-
day event she attended last
year: The annual WINGS
(Women Interested in Going
to School) conference,
designed for women look-
ing to get their GED, attend
college, acquire job skills or
find a career. It is for women,
like Hartman, who want to
tear down barriers prevent-
ing them from pursuing their
education and taking control
of their lives.
This year’s conference
will be held 8 a.m. to 3:30
p.m., Feb. 11, at the commu-
nity college’s Columbia Hall.
“Going back to school is
basically, in this day and age,
the answer, I think,” Hart-
man said. “If you don’t know
what you’re doing, you don’t
really know where you’re
going, and you have kids,
and you want to have a bet-
ter future, go back to school
— that’s it.”
WINGS — which is free
and open to the public —
offers breakfast, lunch and
child care. Attendees hear
stories from past partici-
pants and take part in work-
shops on the community col-
lege’s degree and certificate
programs, securing financial
aid and scholarships, over-
coming math anxiety, career
planning and more.
State Sen. Betsy Johnson
is scheduled to kick off the
conference with a motiva-
tional speech.
Getting unstuck
Before she escaped a dan-
gerous relationship and relo-
cated to the North Coast,
Hartman aspired to become
a preschool teacher and stud-
ied early childhood educa-
tion at Clark College in Van-
couver, Washington.
Through her experiences,
she discovered that Colum-
bia-Pacific communities have
a shortage of organizations
— outside the state Depart-
ment of Human Services —
that can arrange supervised
visits between children and
family members.
Last summer, she served
at a VOCA (Victory Over
Child Abuse) camp, which
provides support for chil-
dren who have been sexually
abused.
Combining her back-
ground and expertise, Hart-
man’s goal is to start a busi-
ness that provides supervised
visitations in an early child-
hood education-type envi-
ronment. “That’s where I’m
hoping to be able to make a
difference,” she said.
This chapter of her life,
in which her dreams seem
achievable, is the product of
persistence, of little personal
victories leading to bigger
ones. “Each quarter is a new
achievement,” she said.
The largest barrier for
many women who want to
go back to school, Hartman
said, is child care. She recalls
a friend, another mother, who
attended WINGS and had not
made it past eighth grade.
“Once you get a kid,
and you don’t have your
high school diploma, you’re
stuck,” Hartman said.
WINGS — a partner-
ship among the commu-
nity college and the Sea-
side and Astoria branches of
the American Association
of University Women — is
set up for women like that
mother, empowering them to
get unstuck.
“These women that are
running the WINGS confer-
ence, it’s good to know that
we have them,” Hartman
said.
Part of something big
It has been a year since
Hartman attended WINGS,
which helped her secure a
$4,000 entrepreneurial schol-
arship at Clatsop Commu-
nity College. She takes one
to three classes per quarter,
and is finishing the nuts-and-
bolts classes, like math and
English.
She has noticed some-
thing interesting about
self-confidence: It tends to
build on itself, until a person
who previously felt hopeless
realizes she has succeeded
in turning her life around —
and a fear of failure is no lon-
ger operative.
“It’s a snowball effect, for
sure,” she said. “Each class,
and I get another A, I’m like,
‘Yeah, I’m doing good!’”
And an event like
WINGS, she said, makes
people feel as if they are
part of something big,
whether going to college or
otherwise authoring their
own destiny.
“Don’t be afraid to do it,”
Hartman said, “because once
you’re in there, you’ll feel so
much better, just knowing
that people care.”
Lottery: Decision could be appealed
Continued from Page 1A
Commissioner
Terry
Graff said he had not voted
for the brew pub in May. “It
was obvious you didn’t have
a business plan,” Graff said.
“Now what you’re doing is
coming up with gambling
to make this fly. To prop up
your whole business, and I
can’t support that. It’s not a
bar. It’s not a tavern. It’s not
a place you can gamble.”
Commissioner
Russ
Taggard suggested that
video lottery could open
the door for gambling
machines in other down-
town locations.
“I don’t believe it’s any-
body’s business to tell me I
AB6115
Skipanon Water Control District
Board of Directors Meeting
Noon, January 25, 2017
Pacific Grange
Hwy 101 and Cullaby Lk Ln
Proposed Agenda
Call to order,
welcome & Introductions
Agenda review
Minutes review
Public Comment, for items NOT on
the agenda, (3 min limit please)
New Business:
Ownership of District structures
Response to Request for Records
(CoW)
Report of Skipanon Water Level Log
District Elections
Old business:
8th St Dam concerns and response
Treasurers Report: (Gail)
Open forum/Member Reports
Public Always Welcome
For info contact: Tessa Scheller
503-861-3669
Published: January 13th, 2017
should sell or anything else,”
Lowenberg said in rebuttal. “I
cannot afford to keep money
pumping into this. If we can’t
keep it alive we have to close
it.”
Commissioners Virginia
Dideum and Jeremy Davis
supported the video lottery
proposal.
“You’re trying to make a
business in a small seasonal
community,” Davis said. “I feel
there’s a need there, and still
consistent with the use we’ve
already approved.”
Dideum praised the brew
pub’s design and said potential
profits from video lottery could
help the restaurant survive.
AB6113
PUBLIC NOTICE
CITY OF SEASIDE
CITY COUNCIL
POSITION - 2017
THE FOLLOWING ARE QUALIFI-
CATIONS AND GENERAL IN-
FORMATION:
A position is available for
Councilor - Ward 1,
Precinct 37
Deadline:
Last date to submit filing for City
Council Ward 1 is February 3,
2017, 5:00 PM
Qualifications:
A City Councilor shall be a regis-
tered voter in Seaside and shall
have resided in the City during
the 12 months immediately before
being appointed to office. (this is
a volunteer position, there is
no pay)
To qualify for Council office, the
candidate must reside in Coun-
cil Position Ward 1, and must
continue to reside there through
the term of office for which the
Councilor is appointed.
To apply: City Council Position
Ward 1, packets can be picked
up from Seaside City Hall, 989
Broadway, Seaside, Monday - Fri-
day, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.
If you have questions, contact
Kim Jordan, (503) 738-5511.
Published: January 13th, 2017.
Acting on a recommenda-
tion from City Planner Carole
Connell, commissioners Graff,
Taggard, Carl Anderson, David
Smith and Richard Owsley
voted to deny the application.
Dideum and Davis opposed the
denial.
Lowenberg could appeal
the decision to the City Coun-
cil. Approval for the brew pub
remains unchanged.
AB6104
Notice to Interested Persons
(No. P09069)
In the Circuit Court of the State
of Oregon for the County of
Clatsop,
Probate Department.
In the Matter of the Estate of
Patricia M. Weirup,
Deceased.
Notice is hereby given that Ste-
phen D. Weirup has been ap-
pointed as the personal repre-
sentative of the above estate.
All persons having claims
against the estate are required
to present them to the under-
signed personal representative
in care of the undersigned attor-
ney at: 851 SW Sixth Avenue,
Suite 1500, Portland, OR
97204-1352, within four months
after the date of first publication
of this notice, as stated below,
or such claims may be barred.
All persons whose rights may be
affected by the proceedings in
this estate may obtain additional
information from the records of
the Court, the personal repre-
sentative or the attorney for the
personal representative.
Dated and first published January
6, 2017
Stephen D. Weirup
Personal Representative
Melissa F. Busley, OSB# 040266
Dunn Carney Allen Higgins &
Tongue LLP
Attorney for Personal
Representative
851 SW Sixth Avenue, Suite 1500
Portland, OR 97204-1352
Published: January 6th, 13th,
and 20th, 2017