Crews this week pulled the partial remains of a station wagon from the Columbia River Gorge — a vehicle that may have belonged to a family of five that disappeared while out looking for Christmas greenery nearly 70 years ago.
The car fell apart as the salvage crew pulled it out of the water on Friday, leaving on the chassis and the engine, which they hope will be enough to identify it as the car that was carrying Ken and Barbara Martin and their three young daughters when they disappeared in December 1958.
Hood River County Sheriff’s Deputy Pete Hughes told the Oregonian that the car was full of rocks — but no human remains — which caused the body of the vehicle to separate from the frame. He said investigators are hopeful they’ll be able to find the VIN number stamped on the engine and confirm that it belonged to Martins.
“Everything matches,” Hughes said, according to The Associated Press. “It appears to be the color, make and model of the Martin vehicle.”
The Martins loaded up their three daughters — Barbara, 14; Virginia, 13; and Sue, 11 — in Portland on December 7, 1958, for a ride into the gorge to find a Christmas tree. They never returned.
Officials narrowed their search to the area around Cascade Locks, a small community some 40 miles from Portland, after learning Ken Martin had bought gas at a station near there with a credit card. A waitress at a diner recalled a family that could have been the Martins nearby, just before sunset. They said they’d been out looking for a Christmas tree and ate hamburgers, fries, milk, and desert.
But no other signs of the family were found, until five months later when Sue’s body was found in a river slough near Camas, Washington. The next day, Virginia Martin’s body was found 25 miles upstream from that location, but the parents and oldest daughter were never found.
Then, in 2018, a diver who helps people find lost items in rivers became interested and began studying the case and doing exploratory dives, The Oregonian said. Archer Mayo found an area in the Cascade Locks canal that was full of debris and concluded that nearly anything — including a car — could be in the area.
He bagan dredging the debris until he uncovered a wheel, and then another. When he realized that certain features matched the Martins’ 1954 station wagon, he alerted authorities in February, and the attempt to raise the car came about.
The operation began on Thursday and concluded on Friday when the vehicle was wrapped in a tarp and taken to a warehouse for the next steps of the investigation. Police said the remainder of the vehicle will stay in the river for now.
Don Martin, the family’s surviving son, was a US Navy veteran who was living in New York at the time of his family’s disappearance. He later moved to Hawaii and raised a family. He died in 2004.
