Cascade Locks, Ore. – The authorities planned to take several vehicles from the Columbia River on Thursday, including a car that is believed to belong to a Portland couple that disappeared in 1958 while it was on a trip with its three daughters, including two whose bodies washed in a dam the following year.
The truck that is believed to belong to Ken and Barbara Martin was found the autumn past by Archer Mayo, an diver that had been looking for the car for seven years, said Mayo’s representative, Ian Costello. May identified the probable location and divered several times before finding the car upside down of about 50 feet (15 meters) deep, clay covered, salmon guts, tanks and mussels shells, he said.
“This is a great development in a case that has been in Portland’s mind for 66 years,” Costello told The Associated Press.
Martins took their three daughters on a car trip to the mountains in December 1958 to collect Christmas vegetation, the Oregonian/Oregonlive Informed. They never returned. The bodies of two daughters were found the next year near the Bonneville dam, but the rest of the family was never located.
“It has been a case of great public interest,” Pete Hughes, deputy of the Hood River County, told the AP. After Mayo provided part of the registration number and other vehicle identifiers, the Sheriff’s Office and the Columbia Gorge main crimes team, together with the Oregon State Crime Laboratory, organized the car that was withdrawn, he said.
“We are not 100% sure that it is the car,” said Hughes. “It is mostly locked in mud and rubble, so we don’t know what to expect when we get it out of the water today.”
Mayo directs a business that finds things that were lost in the river, such as watches and rings, but also helps with the recovery of drowned victims, said Costello. He had been looking for a research ship that sank in 2017 when he learned of the Martin family, Costello said.
May began to dig up material in the family and used modeling to identify the possible location, he said. May found other cars nearby, which must leave before the construction company took out the truck and the authorities obtain responses to a 66 -year -old mystery, Costello said.
There is a path near where cars were found underwater. The authorities have not said if they believe they could find the remains of other missing persons in any of the other vehicles that are removed from the river.
