OLYMPIA, Wash. – During a parole hearing Monday for a convicted killer, it was revealed he may be responsible for attacks on even more women than originally thought.
Warren Forrest told his therapist he attacked 13 women. He’s in prison for one murder. He was convicted of killing 19-year-old Krista Blake in the woods of Tukes Mountain just east of Battle Ground and has been locked up since the 1970s.
Clark County detectives think he’s responsible for the kidnapping or murders of seven women, including the disappearance of 16-year-old Jamie Grissim. Her body has never been found.
Forrest didn’t reveal any more details to his therapist. Coming clean is a requirement of his treatment, but if he reveals all of his crimes, then he can be prosecuted for them.
Meanwhile, family members of victims and one woman, Norma Countryman, who escaped being kidnapped by Forrest, pleaded with the parole board Monday to keep him locked up.
“I want him to admit to the others. I want him to give peace to the others,” Countryman told the board.
She was 15 years old and lived in Ridgefield when investigators say Forrest took her into the same woods he took Blake.
“He tied her head to one tree and her legs to another,” according to testimony from the trial quoted in The Columbian newspaper. “Later, she chewed through the twine and struggled out of a loop holding her legs. With hands and ankles still tied, she hopped away.”
Countryman implored the parole board to keep Forrest locked up to save other girls.
“I put my mother through hell,” Countryman said. “She didn’t know how to deal with a broken daughter. She was broken herself.”
Countryman picked Forrest out of a lineup, which connected him to Blake’s murder, the only murder that’s put him in prison.
Forrest tortured Blake. Several years ago, Forrest described the murder to the parole board.
“During the struggle, I choked her to death,” he said. “I dug a shallow grave and tied the body up and put it in the hole and buried her.”
For years the Clark County Sheriff’s Office has thought Forrest was responsible for attacks on seven women, though he may have seemed like an unlikely killer.
He was the captain of his high school track team. He served in Vietnam and was married with two kids. But detectives believe his first victim was Jamie Grissim.
In December of 1971, Grissim left the foster home she and her younger sister live at for Fort Vancouver High School and never came back. Months later Grissim’s student ID and other belongings were found along a remote Clark County road near the bodies of two other women.Grissim’s younger sister, Starr Lara, hopes Forrest will reveal Grissim’s grave in his effort to show the parole board he’s no longer dangerous.
“It’s something you never get over, the not knowing,” Lara told the board. “I want to be able to bury her before I’m gone.”
Forrest gets his turn in front of the parole board in a few weeks.Read more about this story from On Your Side Investigator Dan Tilkin.
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