Authorities in Oregon are hoping that an underwater discovery may provide some answers as to what happened to a family that went missing nearly 70 years ago, in a case that gripped the nation.
Investigators with the Hood River County Sheriff’s Office announced on Thursday that they had received a tip from a diver who claimed to have found the 1954 Ford station wagon belonging to the Martin family, who vanished in 1958.
After matching a partial plate, authorities say they are now 99 percent sure it is the car the Martin family was driving in when they went missing more than six decades ago, KOIN reports.
Ken and Barbara Martin had told family members and their neighbors in Northeast Portland they were taking their daughters – Barbara, 14; Virginia, 13 and Susan Margaret, 11 – to the Columbia River Gorge to collect greenery to make Christmas wreaths on December 7, 1958.
The family would never be seen again, and their disappearance sparked an intense search that led to national attention, with people across the country claiming to have spotted the family of five, according to the Oregonian.
But hope was lost one year later, when the bodies of the two youngest girls were found floating in the Columbia River, dead from drowning.
At that point, officials ruled that the five family members accidently drove into the Columbia River and died.
The case was declared closed – despite the discovery of a gun and a Multnomah County autopsy technician claiming there was a potential gunshot wound to the head of one of the girls’ bodies.
Even as the decades past, the mystery became a ‘deep obsession’ for Archer Mayo, the diver who found the vehicle, he told KGW.
The diver decided to begin his own search for the family back in 2018, and based on where the two girls were found dead in 1959 and using computer predictive modeling, Mayo started scouring in the Cascade Locks of the Columbia River.
‘I’ve almost quit so many times and kind of can’t believe I’m standing here today,’ he said.
The breakthrough came a couple of months ago when he located the vehicle ‘about 50 feet under the surface of the water [and] seven feet under the ground,’ he told the Oregonian.
‘As I went further on, I realized, “Oh my gosh, this is the car! This is a ’54 wagon,”‘ Mayo recounted.
He then alerted authorities, and together with the Army Corps of Engineers, they started to dig.
Soon, the car began to take shape out of the rubble.
It is upside down and there is debris lying on top of it, authorities said, but the vehicle is still mostly intact.
It remains unclear whether the three remaining family members bodies may be in the vehicle as authorities work to pull the car out of the river.
‘We want to preserve this vehicle the best that we can to ensure that any evidence that comes out is able to be saved,’ Sheriff Matt English said, noting that the case is ‘dependent on what’s in that car.’
He and Deputy Pete Hughes added that the Sheriff’s Department are treating the decades-old cold case as any other investigation.
‘We’re going in with the mindset of having any preconceived ideas about what happened,’ Hughes explained.
‘So we’ll have the crime lab, we’ll have detectives and they’ll be investigating this just like they would investigate any case, a known case at this point.’
In the meantime, English said he is keeping the surviving members of the Martin family ‘in the loop.’
‘Obviously, there has been a lot of speculation over the years,’ he noted, including foul play.
But Mayo told the Oregonian he believes Ken simply misjudged space and distance while driving in the Cascade Locks parking lot, and the car toppled into the water.
‘I’m really hoping the survivors of this, of the people involved, the Martins, can have some closure,’ he said.