A10
REGIONAL
Wallowa County Chieftain
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Oregon State Police to examine Finley Creek site
By DICK MASON
The Observer
UNION COUNTY —
The Oregon State Police are
turning up the heat on a local
cold case.
OSP offi cers and OSP
crime lab personnel will soon
reexamine a site near Finley
Creek, 18 miles north of La
Grande, where the remains of
an unidentifi ed woman were
found in August of 1978.
The OSP team, which will
have human remains detec-
tion dogs, will be searching
for anything connected to
the unidentifi ed woman who
was found there in a shallow
grave more than 40 years
ago.
The OSP will go to the
site after all the snow there
has melted. Detective-ser-
geant Sean Belding of the
OSP said his agency will be
facing a big challenge.
“It will be a little like
looking for a needle in a hay-
stack,” Belding said.
Melinda Jederberg, of La
Grande, a member of the
Finley Creek Jane Doe Task
Force, is more hopeful.
“We are very optimistic,”
said Jederberg, who founded
the task force in 2019.
A big reason for the confi -
dence is that task force mem-
bers went to the Finley Creek
site where the woman’s
remains were found twice in
2021 with cadaver dogs. The
task force brought a single
dog once and two on another
trip. Each of the two dogs
indicated they found ground
under which there are human
remains at the same site at or
near a tree.
“One dog pawed at the
ground near the tree,” Jeder-
berg said.
The task force members
did not dig at the site because
it is a crime scene and thus
it would be illegal to dis-
rupt it. They instead noti-
fi ed the Oregon State Police
who later decided to investi-
gate the site and possibly dig
there.
Suzanne Timms of Walla
Walla, Washington, who is
assisting with the search as a
volunteer, is glad that highly
trained OSP investigators
will soon be examining the
Finley Creek site.
“They know how to col-
lect evidence without con-
taminating the site. I can’t
wait,’’ Timms said.
A daughter’s search
Timms is elated that the
OSP will be investigating the
Suzanne Timms/Contributed Photo
Cadaver dog Brynn and a team of volunteers including
Suzanne Timms, seated, in August 2021 investigate the area
where the Finley Creek Jane Doe was discovered near Elgin in
1978. Timms believes the unidentifi ed woman is her mother.
With Timms are her relatives Jennifer Harringten, center, and
Wenda Parr, left, plus Karin Anderson of Dallas, Texas, who is
a member of a Reporter’s Notebook group that is producing
podcasts about the search for the identity of Jane Doe.
site since she is certain the the Finley Creek Jane Doe
Finley Creek Jane
group, and the image
Doe is her mother,
he created look very
Patricia “Patty” Otto,
similar to that of
of Lewiston, Idaho,
Timms’ mother.
who has been miss-
Other
details
ing since Sept. 1,
have contributed to
1976.
Timms’ belief that
Timms fi rst sus-
the Finley Creek
Jane Doe
pected that the Finley
Jane Doe is her
Creek Jane Doe was
mother. The remains
her mother in 2021 when she were was found with a
saw an image created by a white shirt and red pants,
forensic artist in Massachu- which is what Patty Otto
setts, Anthony Redgrave, was last seen wearing before
the operator of Redgrave disappearing.
Research Forensic Services.
As part of the investiga-
Redgrave was assisting tion in 1978, Lewiston police
believed the Jane Doe could
be Patty Otto, and Timms’
grandparents
Thomas
O’Malley and Ardys O’Mal-
ley were fl own from Lew-
iston to La Grande to iden-
tify the body. Timms said
they were sure the remains
were those of their daughter,
because the white shirt and
red pants were found with
the remains at Finley Creek.
“I found records indicat-
ing that they told the Lewis-
ton police that the white shirt
and red pants looked very
similar to what my mother
was wearing before she dis-
appeared,” Timms said, who
discovered this information
earlier this year.
Timms believes that her
mother was murdered in
Lewiston by her father, and
then taken to Finley Creek
where he buried her in a
shallow grave.
The OSP’s autopsy
records for the Finley Creek
Jane Doe, however, do not
match those of Patty Otto.
Timms believes the dis-
crepancy is due to an error
made by the OSP’s medi-
cal examiner while doing
examinations of the skeletal
remains for two Jane Does in
his offi ce at about the same
time in 1978. She suspects
he assigned his reports to the
wrong Jane Does because his
report for the second Jane
Doe matches her mother’s
autopsy photos and dental
records.
“It appears that he had
the two Jane Does confused
based upon documents he
wrote himself,’’ Timms said.
A cash award
Timms said she is excited
about the OSP’s plans to
examine the Finley Creek
site because if bones are
found their DNA tests could
prove that they are the bones
of her mother. Currently,
there are no known bones of
the Finley Creek Jane Doe
because they are believed to
have been cremated by the
state after they were found,
Timms said.
A recent cash award for
information on the Finley
Creek Jane Doe also off ers
hope that new evidence may
come to light.
Interest in the Finley
Creek Jane Doe has picked
up since Crime Stoppers of
Oregon announced in March
that it was off ering a cash
award of up to $2,500 to
help identify the murdered
woman.
“It has generated a lot of
calls about the case,” Jeder-
berg said.
Jederberg, of the Finley
Creek Jane Doe Task Force,
said she hopes the reward
and increased interest will
encourage people to step
forward.
Snowpack melting faster than expected
Meet Rudy
& Frosty!
By ALEX WITTWER
EO Media Group
Sleek black Mini Panther sib-
lings born approximately the
end of October 2021. They are up-
to-date on vaccines, dewormed
and litter box trained. Rudy is a little
shy but if he sees that his sister loves you,
then he does too! These 2 were nursed back
to health after being found together very sick.
We’d like them to be adopted as a pair.
Available for Adoption
Contact Julia at 541-398-0393
$110 adoption fee
http://www.wallowacountyhumanesociety.org/
Brought to you by,
LA GRANDE — East-
ern Oregon’s snowpack is
melting faster than expected,
worsening
an
ongoing
drought and pointing to a
very dry year if conditions
continue.
Scott Oviatt, a hydrolo-
gist and snow survey supervi-
sor for the Natural Resources
Conservation Service Ore-
gon, a member of the U.S.
Department of Agricul-
ture, said snow started melt-
ing almost two weeks earlier
than usual, and many sites
across the state hadn’t even
reached their peak avail-
able snowpack levels before
melt off begain in the lower
elevations.
“Once the snowpack starts
melting out, it’s hard to stop,”
he said.
The information comes
weeks after many Eastern
Oregon snowpack levels
were reported to be in good
shape. The dramatic decline
in snowpack levels coupled
with the ongoing drought
has caused concern among
experts who are watching the
snow water equivalent levels
closely.
“The fact that we didn’t
reach a peak value and the
fact that we’re melting out
early is a concern because
we are losing the available
water content in the snow
pack (earlier) than we nor-
mally plan on,” Oviatt said.
“Depending on location and
elevation, we’re about two
or three weeks early, and we
didn’t achieve our peak, and
now we’re at 70% for the
Grande Ronde/Powder area
and we’re dropping rapidly.”
Those who rely on water
irrigation channels should be
especially concerned about
the rapidly melting snow.
While snowmelt is gener-
ally expected to hit its zero
point sometime in mid to
late spring, having the water
runoff begin and end ear-
lier means that resources
will become scarce as sum-
mer drags on — and a heat
wave event can further
impact water supplies and
leave farmers and agricultural
industries dry.
Last year’s heat wave
depleted water supplies and
caused some farms in Ore-
gon to run out of water
entirely by late June, weeks
ahead of schedule. In one
instance, Plantworks, a nurs-
ery in Cove, had to purchase
new water storage containers
and fi ll them with city water
in order to keep their crops
alive.
“Essentially, folks that
rely on irrigation water will
have less available, and
there will probably be some
restrictions applied depend-
ing upon where they get
their water and their water
rights,” Oviatt said. “There
will be less available sur-
face water for instream fl ows
to support things. There will
be less available groundwa-
ter storage because we’re not
recharging our system with
our ground soil moisture and
because we’ve been in a long-
term drought and we didn’t
really recover from that over
this winter.”
Union County watermas-
ter Shad Hattan agrees, stat-
ing that if the area doesn’t get
signifi cant spring rain, “it will
be hard on everything. Agri-
culture, stream fl ows. If we
don’t get moisture for April
and May, that’s (going to be)
hard on everybody.”
One silver lining to the
early melt off and continua-
tion of the drought? Fire sea-
son might be milder com-
pared to last year.
“The biggest thing is how
fast the snow we have right
now comes off ,” said Trevor
Lewis, assistant fi re manage-
ment offi cer with the Wal-
lowa-Whitman National For-
est. “If we lose our snow real
quick, and it dries out fairly
quickly then our grass growth
isn’t as high, so we generally
see lower rates of spread with
our fi res, even if we do have
signifi cant fuel moistures that
are dryer. It really depends on
how this snow comes off .”
Lewis said that last year’s
slow runoff allowed for
above average grass and
brush growth — primary
fuels for wildfi res that were
primed by the heat wave
that pushed temperatures to
record highs in most of Ore-
gon. That grass growth meant
that fi res spread more rapidly,
and in the case of the Boot-
leg Fire resulted in one of the
nation’s largest wildfi res for
2021.
“It’s kind of a catch-22
for us,” Lewis said. “Does it
come quickly and we have a
drought? Or does it come off
slow and we end up getting
the grass growth?”
Despite being a La Nina
year, the Eastern Oregon
snowpack wasn’t enough
to start turning around the
drought conditions in the
area. As of March 31, most
of Eastern Oregon remains in
severe or moderate drought,
and conditions are expected
to worsen over the summer.
“In order to recover from
that long-term drought we
need successive years and we
need excessive amounts of
precipitation, and we’re just
not getting it,” Oviatt said.
“It’s not going to happen this
year. We’re going to have to
make some sacrifi ces in terms
of surface water and available
water.”