A8
Region
Blue Mountain Eagle
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Riverbank skeleton an unsolved mystery
4,000 new unidentified remains are found every year in the U.S.
By Natalie St. John
EO Media Group
Wearing Levi’s, a red but-
ton-down shirt, gaiters and hik-
ing boots, the skeleton recently
found on the bank of the Co-
lumbia River looked like it was
dressed for a hike.
By the time a boater discov-
ered him in late May a remote
area near Pillar Rock, about
27 river miles upstream from
the Paciic, the unidentiied
man’s only possessions were
a 1999 penny and a lens cloth
in his jeans pocket. But he still
had his teeth, complete with
good-quality, modern dental
work.
To Wahkiakum County Cor-
oner Dan Bigelow, it seemed
like a decent starting point
for an investigation. But two
months later, he is still trying to
ind the man’s name. While his
list of possible identities for the
middle-aged man keeps grow-
ing, his list of promising leads
has dwindled to practically
nothing.
“Just about anybody who
disappeared anywhere in the
Columbia River basin could
credibly be this person,” Bige-
low said in early July.
Despite these setbacks, Bi-
gelow is still trying to ind out
who the man was, and how he
ended up in Wahkiakum Coun-
ty. He recently delivered the
remains to the state’s only cer-
tiied forensic anthropologist,
and he is taking a closer look
at missing persons cases from
across the Northwest and be-
yond.
“It’s a hell of a shame,” Bi-
gelow said. “I can’t help think-
ing there is somebody out there
looking for this guy.”
Bones on river banks
The source of so much life,
the Columbia’s deep waters
and swift currents are also im-
plicated in a lot of deaths. Ac-
cording to an ongoing Orego-
nian analysis, at least 36 people
have drowned in the Columbia
since August 2006.
The river also inevitably
tempts individuals faced with
the pressing dilemma of where
to dispose of a body. In Sep-
tember 2006, a couple found a
large bag loating in the river
near Portland. It contained the
dismembered remains of Doug
Adamson, 52. In August 2012,
Grant County, Washington,
deputies recovered 75-year-old
Toshio Ota, a missing Seattle
man. He was the victim of a
homicide by blunt-force trau-
U.S. Coast Guard/ Petty Officer 1st Class Levi Read
This March 21 file photo shows the Columbia River near Cathlamet, Washington, near Pillar Rock where
an unidentified skeleton was recently found.
ma. In January 2015, boaters
discovered the body of Jessica
Newton, 40, on Bachelor Island
near Ridgeield. She too had
died a violent death.
Bigelow knows all about
the misfortune that can wash in
with the tide. In 1998 — well
before he was elected — a local
found a dead woman on a small
island in the river. To his regret,
no one has ever been able to
identify her.
“I am going to keep it un-
til I can hand [the remains] to
her next of kin and they can
give them a respectful buri-
al. There’s someone out there
who’s missing that person,”
Bigelow said. But he acknowl-
edged that he has exhausted
all of his ideas for inding her
identity.
“I can’t think of a single
thing I can do to contribute to
that investigation,” he said.
In 2013, a beachcomber
discovered an accumulation of
bones strewn along the river-
bank. Some of them appeared
to be human, including a par-
tial skull with the upper row of
teeth still intact.
Bigelow sent the bones to
Washington State forensic an-
thropologist Kathy Taylor, who
determined which were human,
and sent them on to the foren-
sic laboratory at University of
North Texas. Experts there ex-
tracted DNA from the bones,
and entered the results into the
FBI’s Combined DNA Index
System, or CODIS, a database
of DNA records.
Nearly two years after the
discovery, Bigelow and Taylor
had an answer: The bones be-
longed to 44-year-old Molly
Newton-Waddington, a be-
loved but troubled Kelso moth-
er and wife who was last seen
in Kelso on March 14, 2012.
Kelso police continue to in-
vestigate Waddington’s death,
which they consider suspicious.
‘That was when I realized
the heartbreak’
Coroner duties constitute a
relatively small part of Bige-
low’s workload, but he takes
them seriously. By carefully
examining the latest remains,
he found a few clues: The man
spent at least a little time in
western Washington, died after
spring 2013, and had probably
been dead for about two years.
He was probably middle-class,
and middle-aged. He probably
died elsewhere, and his body
then traveled up or down the
river with the currents and tides.
Bigelow sent a detailed
press release to media outlets
and asked the public for tips,
just as he had done in 2013.
“With Molly Waddington,”
Bigelow recalled, “all we had
was a skull. We didn’t know
height, weight, gender, prac-
tically nothing. When I asked
for assistance, the world called
me. Everybody who was miss-
ing anybody. That was when I
realized the heartbreak — how
many people had people miss-
ing.” Bigelow began to feel
guilty about “giving so many
people hope of closure.”
“They have some particu-
lar person deeply at heart, and
they’re just scanning all the
time, looking, and when they
see one of these things, they
pick up the phone and call,” Bi-
gelow said.
This time, Bigelow was able
to provide more detail in his re-
lease.
“As a result, I got very few
calls, ” Bigelow said. People
are often slow to ile reports
about people who have tran-
sient lifestyles, but it’s rare for
a middle-class person’s disap-
pearance to draw so little atten-
tion.
“This guy seems like the
kind of guy that people would
be looking for,” Bigelow said.
“He had Vibram-soled shoes —
those things are like $20 a toe.
It’s odd.”
Getting to ‘maybe’
With small staffs and little
technology at their disposal, ru-
ral coroners research cold cases
on evenings and weekends, or
whenever they can borrow a
few minutes from the reams of
appeals, briefs and dense coun-
ty reports that continuously pile
up. And they seek help wherev-
er they can ind it.
Bigelow took the man’s
teeth to a dentist, who created
records and turned them over
to the Washington State Patrol.
WSP, in turn, entered them into
the National Crime Information
Center, or NCIC, an FBI data-
base. NCIC compared the Pillar
Rock man’s tooth charts to re-
cords going back to the 1980s,
and spit out a list of 141 men
who had gone missing in Wash-
ington during the time period
when he likely died. NamUs,
other databases, and tipsters
added still more names to Bige-
low’s ever-expanding list.
When investigators ran
Waddington’s DNA proile
through the CODIS database, it
quickly found her identity, but
such clear-cut results are fairly
rare.
“Sometimes, you can come
pretty close to knowing,” Bi-
gelow explained. “Other times,
depending on the quality of the
dental records or the remains,
all you can do is say, ‘I can’t
exclude this person.’”
After that, it was down to
Bigelow to igure out which
of the many missing men he
could cross off of his list. Hours
upon hours of reading, dialing,
researching, and waiting, wait-
ing, waiting on return calls, po-
lice reports and search results.
“There’s a lot of detective
work, even when there are oth-
er potential matches,” Bigelow
said.
Bones, everywhere
Bigelow again called on
Taylor, the forensic anthropolo-
gist, for help. In her lab, Taylor
will remove the man’s remain-
ing fatty tissue, then examine
and preserve the bones. Just as
with Waddington, she will send
samples to UNT for DNA test-
ing.
A Washington native who
earned her doctorate at the Uni-
versity of Arizona, Taylor has
worked out of the King Coun-
ty Medical Examiner’s ofice
since 1996. Though it’s a rela-
tively new ield, the demand for
her unique services is growing.
Taylor sometimes responds to
scenes when bodies turn up.
People regularly call on her to
examine bones, or photos of
bones found around the state.
“A lot of what I’m doing is
evaluating a bone and asking,
‘Is this human?’ Because there
are bones everywhere,” Taylor
said. In addition to using the da-
tabases, she works with police,
the media and other experts, in-
cluding a forensic artist. She also
spends a lot of time talking with
the families of the missing, en-
couraging them to do their part
to keep investigations active.
“We really try to explore ev-
ery avenue,” Taylor said. “If you
know of somebody that’s miss-
ing, you have to report them,
and you have to be vigilant to
make sure that somebody is get-
ting them into the system.”
‘Everybody should
get a name’
Taylor cautions that DNA
testing is “not the magic bullet
everyone thinks it is.” Frus-
tratingly, sometimes there’s
just not enough to work with,
especially with old, weathered
remains.
“What we have to do then is
put it on the shelf and wait for
the technology to get better, and
then you resubmit it,” Taylor
said. “You never give up.”
It’s too soon to say whether
this man’s bones will provide
usable DNA, or other clues to
his identity. Without a name, in-
vestigators are unlikely to ever
igure out how he died. Some-
times, though, families do get
answers against all odds. Taylor
and her collaborators recently
solved a seemingly hopeless
cold case from 1989. When she
inally met the victim’s sister,
Taylor’s irst words were, “I
have been waiting 20 years to
talk to you!”
“Every one of these people
that are in my care have fam-
ilies and are loved by some-
body. It’s excruciating not to be
able to igure out who they are.
You know that they are being
missed. You just don’t know by
whom,” Taylor said. “You want
to return them to their families.
Everybody should get a name.
They came into this world with
a name. They should leave it
with a name.”
Authorities remove explosive device from Wallowa Lake
Federal, state and coun-
ty law enforcement oficials
converged at Wallowa Lake
on Friday afternoon to re-
trieve and disable a small de-
vice that was discovered un-
der water near a public beach.
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or Leslie at 541-620-0442.
Wallowa County Sheriff
Steve Rogers said a group of
off-duty search and rescue
members was diving near the
area at the north end of the
lake “about two weeks ago”
and found the device during a
recreational dive.
The divers identiied their
discovery as a possible explo-
Debbie Ausmus
245 South Canyon Blvd.
John Day, OR 97845
OPEN WED. & THUR.
9 am - 5 pm
541-575-1113
24 hrs/7 days wk
debbie.ausmus@
countryfinancial.com
- N ote of T hanks -
I would like to give a huge
heartfelt thank you to the
Northside Ambulance Crew for
their many years of dedicated
service. You have all gone above
and beyond to save the lives of
others. May God bless you for
your kindness and compassion.
Sincerely, Nancy Morgan
sive device and reported it
to the sheriff’s ofice, which
notiied state and federal au-
thorities. An FBI dive team
was then assembled and
tasked with removing the de-
vice.
Members of the Ore-
gon State Police also were
brought in to handle the de-
vice once it was removed
from the water. OSP Explo-
sives Specialist Dennis Wag-
ner from the Hermiston ofice
described the pipe bomb as a
cylinder “about 1 inch in di-
ameter and 8 inches long and
wrapped in black tape.”
Wagner and another OSP
trooper took the device to a
safe location outside of Jo-
seph and detonated it soon
after it was removed from the
lake.
Wagner said it was difi-
cult to estimate how powerful
the pipe bomb was since other
explosives were used to initi-
ate detonation. However, he
agreed that it certainly was
more powerful than an M80
and closer to a stick of dyna-
mite.
“In my opinion, it proba-
bly was some teenagers who
made this and left it there,”
Sheriff Rogers said. “Our
main concern was the safety
of the public. There was con-
cern that this thing would be
dragged out onto the bank,
dry out and then detonate.”
The device was discovered
just east of the public beach
and boat launch area at the
north end of the lake. It was
in the small channel that feeds
into the Wallowa River.
Your Rural Fa mily Health Clinic
Grant County
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528 E. Main, St. E,
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Monday - Friday
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By Scot Heisel
EO Media Group
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Grant County Health Department does not discriminate against any person on the basis of race, color, national origin,
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888-443-9104
or 541-575-0429