Murder of Martha Morrison

Martha Marie Morrison (1956 – September 1974) was a 17-year-old American girl who was murdered in 1974, and whose remains went unidentified for over 40 years after their discovery.

Born
1956
Eugene, Oregon, U.S.
Disappeared
September 1, 1974 (aged 17)
Portland, Oregon, U.S.^[1]
Status
Remains identified on July 13, 2015
Died
September 1974
Cause of death
Homicide
Body discovered
October 12, 1974
Vancouver, Washington, U.S.
Known for
Formerly unidentified homicide victim
Height
5 ft 4 in (1.63 m)
Morrison, a resident of Portland, Oregon, disappeared under mysterious circumstances in September 1974. On October 12, 1974, human remains of two women were found in Dole Valley near Vancouver, Washington.^[2] One was immediately identified as Carol Platt Valenzuela, but the other individual was unable to be identified at the time.^[3][2] In 2015, the remains were identified by means of DNA profiling as those of Morrison.^[4]
After Morrison’s remains were identified, law enforcement encouraged the public to submit tips, as the murder was still unsolved.^[5] In August 2017, a bloodstain on a pistol owned by a longtime suspect, Warren Leslie Forrest, was matched to Morrison through DNA testing.^[6] Prior to Forrest’s identification as a suspect, serial killer Ted Bundy had been considered a person of interest in Morrison and Valenzuela’s murders. Forrest was charged with Morrison’s murder in 2020.

ALERT **** Murderer-rapist Warren Forrest up for parole May 17, 2017

ALERT **** Murderer-rapist Warren Forrest up for parole May 17, 2017

DOC Number: 287319
Offender Name: FORREST, WARREN L
Location: Washington State Prison

The case in detail here

Please show your support by attending this parole hearing and notify all news media locally and nationally.

Washington news media outlets here

Parole hearing reveals killer may be responsible for more attacks

By Dan Tilkin On Your Side Investigator and KATU.com Staff Published: Oct 7, 2013 at 6:47 PM PD

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.

• Read Norma Countryman’s letter to the parole 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.

If you have a story for our On Your Side Investigators, we want to hear from you. Send us an email at investigators@katu.com.

Local woman speaks against killer’s possible parole

She suspects him in her sister’s 1971 disappearance

By Paris Achen, Columbian courts reporter

Published: October 7, 2013, 9:06 PM

A parole board is again considering whether a convicted killer suspected of slaying several Clark County women in the 1970s will remain in prison.

Warren L. Forrest, convicted killer

Warren L. Forrest, 64, of Battle Ground is eligible for parole on March 16. The Washington Indeterminate Sentence Review Board has until that date to decide whether he will be paroled.

As part of that process, the board’s four members on Monday heard from Forrest’s only surviving victim and family members of other girls he’s suspected of killing. All are opposed to Forrest’s release or a less-restrictive placement.

“There is no way a guy like that deserves to even think about leaving prison,” said Starr Lara, sister of one of the victims Forrest is suspected of killing. She spoke before the parole board on Monday.

Her sister, Jamie Grissim, was a 16-year-old student at Fort Vancouver High School when she disappeared Dec. 7 1971. She has never been found and hers remains the oldest missing person’s case in Clark County, according to the sheriff’s office.

Two parole board members are scheduled to meet with Forrest on Nov. 5 and then make a recommendation on whether he should remain in prison, said Robin Riley, assistant to the board chair. The board will decide no sooner than four weeks after his hearing, and the decision could take longer than that, Riley said.

The board denied him parole in April 2011 because of the brutality of the crimes and because he hadn’t met the standard of rehabilitation.

Nine people met with the board Monday at its headquarters in Lacey, Riley said.

“It’s very difficult, and I find the second time, I’m more and more angry with him because he has the chance to tell the truth,” Lara said. “I could forgive him a lot of things. I know he has a lot of mental health issues. But he knows the truth, and he’s deliberately withholding the truth because he thinks he can get out, and that I can’t forgive him for.”

Lara still can’t talk about her sister without choking back tears. They were removed from their mother’s home and placed in foster care together when Grissim was 5 and Lara was 3, Lara said.

“I looked up to her (Grissim) like a mother and big sister, everything,” Lara said. “She was my protector. I was her admirer. She could do no wrong in my eyes. That must have been a big burden for her because she was so young.”

Among the group that met with the board Monday was Forrest’s only surviving victim, who is now 54 years old. It was the first time she had addressed the parole board, Lara said. The Columbian is not identifying her because she is a rape victim.

Forrest abducted her in July 1974 in Ridgefield when she was 15. He held her at knife point, assaulted her and drove her to the Tukes Mountain area. There, he hogtied her to a tree, just 100 feet away from the grave of Krista Blake, whom Forrest killed earlier that month. He then left her at the location, saying he would return later. She was able to chew through her bindings and escape.

He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the kidnapping and rape and spent three years at Western State Hospital near Tacoma.

Investigators have said they believe Forrest is behind the disappearance of at least six young women in Clark County between March 1972 and October 1974.

However, the parole board told family members that Forrest has reportedly confessed to his therapist that he had a total of 13 victims, only one of which survived the experience, Lara said.

He was convicted of only Blake’s homicide and received a life sentence in 1979. His conviction allowed for the possibility of parole.

All of the homicides and Grissim’s missing person’s case remain under investigation, according to the sheriff’s office.

Forrest is an Army veteran and a former Clark County parks employee. The graves of multiple victims were found in or near Clark County parks.

http://www.columbian.com/news/2013/oct/07/starr-lara-killer-possible-parole-warren-forrest/#.UlQQDSR4-eA

 

 

 

Suspected serial killer up for parole-Let’s give him NO HOPE EVER of getting out.

Here is the parole board information. Let’s give him NO HOPE EVER of getting out.

Someone has more information on at least one of these murders. Let us get him on another, so he can truly receive life without the possibility of parole ever!! Read this and you will see, he is convicted of one murder, leaving two teenage girls for dead. Count that, three he wanted dead. Not to mention my sister and the others that are dead.

______________

Indeterminate Sentence Review Board
PO Box 40907
Olympia, WA 98504-0907
360-407-2408 or 1-866-948-9266
Fax: 360/493-9287

Convicted killer Warren Forrest, seen in undated photos (Courtesy)

August 8, 2013

BATTLE GROUND, Wash. (KOIN) — Between 1971 and 1974, Warren Forrest worked for the Clark County Parks Department. During that same period, at least six different women disappeared.

Many of their bodies were found in shallow graves.

Jamie Grissim was last seen Dec. 7, 1971 after she left Ft. Vancouver High School in Vancouver. (Courtesy photo, May 8, 2013)

Jamie Grissim was 16 when she went missing after school on December 7, 1971. Her purse, ID and other possessions were found in the woods northeast of Vancouver, near the remains of two other people in 1972.

“She said, ‘I’m walking home and I’ll be home by 1:30 at the latest,’” her sister Starr Lara told KOIN 6 News. “So I got home and it’s 3:30 and she not home.”

Her body has never been found.

Then in 1974, two women’s bodies were discovered near Dole Valley, an area where Grissim’s ID was found — and where Warren Forrest frequented as a parks worker. One body was identified at Carol Valenzuelas. The other has never been ID’d.

“He lived out in this area,” Lara said. “It’s like three girls disappear from this area and then two from Tukes Mountain where one survived an attack.”

Then in 1974, two women’s bodies were discovered near Dole Valley, an area where Grissim’s ID was found — and where Warren Forrest frequented as a parks worker. One body was identified at Carol Valenzuelas. The other has never been ID’d.

“He lived out in this area,” Lara said. “It’s like three girls disappear from this area and then two from Tukes Mountain where one survived an attack.”

Starr Lara’s older sister, Jamie Grissim, was last seen on Dec. 7, 1971. The Vancouver woman still wants answers. (August 8, 2013, KOIN 6 News)

Authorities believe Jamie Grissim was the first of eight victims attacked by Forrest. Two managed to escape, but authorities were only able to connect him to one murder — the one with the most physical evidence.

In 1979 he was convicted of killing Krista Kay Blake, a 19-year-old from Vancouver. Her body was found on Clark County Parks property in a shallow grave, partially disrobed with her hands and feet hogtied.

He was sentenced to life in prison — before mandatory sentencing laws took effect.

Now, Warren Forrest is up for parole.

In September, victims will provide statements to the parole board. It’s unclear what direction the parole board will decide.

“It’s scary and I just don’t want to give him that chance. I really hope someone can come forward,” Lara told KOIN 6 News. “He knows the truth and he won’t tell me, and that’s the part I can’t forgive him for.”

http://www.koin.com/2013/08/08/suspected-serial-killer-up-for-parole/      

Missing Persons’ Family Members React To Rescue Of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight

Posted: 05/08/2013 11:15 am EDT  |  Updated: 05/08/2013 5:07 pm EDT

Follow:

Amanda Berry Kidnapping, Dylan Redwine, Gina DeJesus Kidnapping, Jaycee Dugard, Jaycee Dugard Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight Kidnapping , Missing Persons, Missing Persons Families Speak Out Amanda Berry, Crime News

An undated photo provided by the La Plata County, Colo., sheriff’s office shows Dylan Redwine, who is still missing. His aunt hasn’t given up hope.

 

The three women rescued on Monday had been held captive as long as 10 years. For families of others still missing, the news evokes mixed feelings.

“It’s so great that their families have some answers. It’s just hard, for other parents, knowing their children are still gone,” Carolyn Johnson of Louisiana told HuffPost Crime.

“But this will give people new hope, and that’s what they need — hope.”

Johnson wept as she spoke of her son, Clinton Nelson, who vanished on Sept. 1, 2006, when he was 21.

Johnson said the rescue of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight in Cleveland is what the friends and family of every missing person wants.

Still, for some, the news tears open a scab — a reminder that their loved one is still lost.

Johnson joins many parents, friends and family members of missing people who have been watching horrifying new details emerge about the rescued girls’ confinement.

Starr Lara was 14 when her sister, Jamie Grissim, went missing in 1971.

On Monday, one of her co-workers told her about the Cleveland rescue in an attempt to cheer her up.

“The biggest thing with me is people approach me as though my sister is alive. I know she isn’t. It’s upsetting to me,” Lara told HuffPost Crime. “I’m happy [the rescue] gives people hope or they think that it gives me hope, but it’s really hard on me. I know in my heart what happened.”

Lara said she hasn’t given up finding her sister — but she expects to find her sister’s remains.

Grissim was 16 when she disappeared after school in Vancouver, Wash. Her purse, ID and possessions were found May, 1972 in the woods northeast of Vancouver, near where other homicide victims had been found.

Lia Howard — whose 14-year-old nephew, Dylan Redwine, went missing in Colorado on Nov. 12, 2012 — says the Cleveland case has rejuvenated her family in its quest to find her nephew.

“It shows that missing children can be found even years later,” she said Tuesday in a phone interview. “When you don’t know where somebody is you put his name out there, because you never know where that someone is.”

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also released a statement of hope, noting that recoveries of missing children are growing:

NCMEC has seen a growing number of recoveries of long-term missing children. Every story we hear offers hope to the families who are still searching, that their own children will one day come home.

On May 7, the NCMEC is celebrating this important message of hope by honoring Jaycee Dugard and her family at the 2013 Hope Awards. They were reunited in 2009 after Jaycee was abducted 18 years before.

This story like those of Elizabeth Smart, recovered after 9 months; Shawn Hornbeck, recovered after 4 years; Carlina White, recovered after 23 years; and Steve Carter, recovered after 34 years is the reason why we never forget any missing child.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/08/missing-persons-family-react-amanda-berry_n_3237247.html

Sister: Waited 42 years, don’t have 42 more

Starr Lara’s older sister, Jamie Grissim, was last seen on Dec. 7, 1971. The Vancouver woman still wants answers. (May 8, 2013, KOIN 6 News)

 

By Chris Woodard

Published: Wednesday, May 8, 2013, 4:53 pm

VANCOUVER, Wash. (KOIN) — For 42 years, Starr Lara has wondered what happened to her sister. Even though three women were found in Cleveland after being missing for a decade, Lara is not expecting her own miracle.

Jamie Grissim was 16 when she went missing after school on December 7, 1971. Her purse, ID and other possessions were found in the woods northeast of Vancouver, near the remains of two other people in 1972.

Jamie Grissim was last seen Dec. 7, 1971 after she left Ft. Vancouver High School in Vancouver. (Courtesy photo, May 8, 2013)

“I believe someone knows something that could help,” Lara told KOIN 6 News. “It just takes the right person.”

Lara is Grissim’s younger sister, and though decades have passed, the grief is still raw.

“I think about it almost every day,” she said. “I have hope that I will find her. I’ve waited 42 years, and I don’t have another 42.”

The remarkable discovery in Cleveland this week of the three women does give her some hope for some kind of resolution.

“I was really happy for the victims and their families to finally be rescued,” she said. “People want to give you the hope your sister is alive, but in my heart I know she isn’t.”

Now she just wants to find her older sister’s remains.

“I think it’s really important because no matter how much time goes by, it can be solved,” she said. “It happens all the time.”

http://koin.com/2013/05/08/sister-waited-42-years-dont-have-42-more/

40 years later mystery of missing girl still unsolved

Published: Dec 2, 2011

CLARK COUNTY, Wash. – Starr Lara’s sister, Jamie Grissim, left Fort Vancouver High School and vanished with hardly a trace 40 years ago.

Starr will mark the tragic milestone Saturday with a candlelight vigil and says she’s trying to come to terms with more bad news she recently received in the murder investigation.

Jamie was Starr’s big sister. She left their foster mother’s house, went to Fort Vancouver High School and never came home. That was Dec. 7, 1971. Starr was told Jamie simply ran away.

“I just kept staring out the picture window,” Starr said during a recent interview.

Jamie was 16.

Six months after she disappeared, Jamie’s identification was found by a neighbor picking up trash on Dole Valley Road in a very remote part of northeast Clark County. Then two years later, another neighbor walking up a nearby logging road discovered the remains of two women. One was identified as Carol Valenzuela. The other woman has never been identified.

Clark County detectives have long thought suspected serial killer Warren Forrest is responsible for the deaths of those two women. A sheriff’s office document says they also suspect that “Jamie Grissim is the first victim” of Warren Forrest, but they’ve never been able to match Jamie to the unidentified remains.

Starr was excited to learn a detective was trying again to match DNA to Jamie on hair found where the bodies were dumped.

When Starr recently got the news the crime lab couldn’t get usable DNA to make a comparison, she urged the detective to re-examine the skeleton itself. Starr says she was told Jamie’s dental records – that were compared years ago to the remains and used to rule Jamie out as a match – were incomplete. Starr hoped new technology would reveal more clues.

“He finally called back and tells me, ‘Starr, there are no remains.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘They lost them.’ And that was a huge shock to me. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘You got to understand things were different back then.'”

“He finally called back and tells me, ‘Starr, there are no remains.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘They lost them.’ And that was a huge shock to me. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘You got to understand things were different back then.'”

The Clark County Sheriff’s Office wonders if the remains were sent to the task force investigating the Green River Killer, were given to an anthropologist who used to teach at Clark College, or maybe they were lost when the medical examiner moved its offices.

“In my mind, that girl was connected to Jamie. I don’t know if it was her or not. I can’t prove it either way now,” Starr said.

Now she has to hope for a break in the case from an unexpected source.

The medical examiner’s office says its last record of the remains was in 1978. They were sent to a nationally renowned forensic anthropologist in Oklahoma. Staff there told KATU News it is checking records to see if they still have the remains.

The candlelight vigil for Jamie Grissim will be Saturday at Fort Vancouver High School. It begins at 4:30. The public is encouraged to attend.

   http://www.katu.com/news/local/134954333.html?embed   VIDEO

Link to Story on KATU   http://www.katu.com/news/local/40-years-later-mystery-of-missing-girl-Jamie-Grissim-still-unsolved-134954333.html

Vigils planned for Wash. women long missing, presumed murdered

Families find unity in sorrow that’s endured for years

November 26, 201

Friends and family members of two missing Vancouver women are planning a vigil on Saturday, Dec. 3, at Fort Vancouver High School.

Jamie Grissim was a 16-year-old Fort Vancouver student who disappeared Dec. 7, 1971 while walking home from school.

Carolyn Killaby vanished on Nov. 11, 1995.

The vigil is scheduled from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the high school’s parking lot, 5700 E. 18th St.

“It will be the 40th anniversary of her disappearance, in December 1971,” said Starr Lara, Grissim’s sister.

“This will be her first vigil,” said Lara, who now lives in Hillsboro, Ore. “When she disappeared, I was her only family, and I was 14. I didn’t know what to do.”

Lara said she will speak at the vigil, adding, “This is kind of new to me.”

One of Grissim’s childhood friends is also scheduled to speak.

Though the Grissim and Killaby cases aren’t related, Lara said she has been a friend of one of Killaby’s sisters’ for more than 10 years.

An announcement for the vigil said that besides an opportunity for the families to remember Grissim and Killaby, it will be an expression of hope that someday “they can give a proper funeral service to their missing loved ones.”

The public, and other families with missing loved ones, are invited to attend.

Frustrating searches

Investigators have said they believe Grissim was the first victim of a Vancouver man suspected of killing at least six women.

Her remains were never found. However, sheriff’s investigators found her purse and her identification in remote Dole Valley, about a mile from where the remains of two other young women were found.

Warren Forrest, who was convicted of one of the homicides in 1979, is eligible for parole in 2014. He has not been charged with the murder of Grissim.

Killaby was 34 when she was reported missing in 1995. While her body was never found, Dennis Keith Smith was convicted of aggravated murder after traces of her blood were found in his vehicle.

Smith hanged himself at the Washington State Penitentiary in 2004.

http://www.columbian.com/news/2011/nov/26/vigil-planned-for-2-long-lost-women/

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2016868462_apwalongmissingvigils.html?syndication=rss

 

In Loving Memory of Carolyn Killaby

Carolyn Killaby

Details: On November 11, 1995, Carolyn Killaby vanished after her husband Dan left their Vancouver, Washington home. Two days later, Dan found her car in the parking lot of a local bar and learned from the bar maid that she had seen Carolyn on the night of November 11. A man named Dustin Johnson read the newpaper and learned about Carolyn’s disappearance and found that a man named Dennis was seen with Carolyn the night she vanished, and he believed that Dennis was his uncle, Dennis Keith Smith, who was on parole for the murder of Dustin’s mother Patricia. Dan called detectives and found that Dennis Keith Smith was the man that was with Carolyn the night she vanished, and Dan realized that his wife was probably dead.

A witness said that Dennis tried to make a move on Carolyn, but she was too drunk to realize what was happening, and the two walked out of the bar and vanished. Three days after Carolyn vanished, Dennis was interviewed, and detectives became suspicious. He claimed that a stranger threatened him and the man took Carolyn, but police didn’t believe it. When authorities looked at Dennis’s brand new truck, they found a giant hole in the passenger seat, which was probably lit by a torch. Also, the seat cover and carpeting was removed, and detectives believed that Carolyn was probably killed by Dennis in the truck, but they did not have enough evidence to prove it and he was let go. When detectives did find enough evidence to charge Dennis with murder, he had vanished.

Dennis Keith Smith

Suspects: Dennis Keith Smith

Results: Solved. Smith was watching Unsolved Mysteries with two people he had met while he was under the alias David Sanborn. Smith was arrested by the New Smyrna Beach Police in Florida after a traffic stop on February 4, 1997. During questioning, he tried to escape, he reached for the officers gun and was shot to the neck by another police officer. After dying and being revived twice, Smith survived and went to trial. He recieved a seventy year sentence and ninety years for parole violation. He committed suicide in prison in November 2005. Carolyn’s body has never been found.

Carolyn’s family has purchased a burial plot but her body is not buried here.