Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: 1958 MYSTERY SOLVED! The Martin Family Disappearance
Episode Date: May 24, 2026The Martin Family took a day trip on a beautiful December day to gather greenery for Christmas decorations. The All-American Family led by father, Kenneth Martin, 54, Mother, Barbara,48, and their thr...ee daughters, 14-year-old Barbara - they called her "Barbie", 13-year-old, Virginia, and 11-year-old Susan. An older son, Donald, 28, was not with the family as he was serving in the US Navy stationed in New York. While out on their family day of fun, something strange happened..... the Martin family vanished. Searches were launched, interviews conducted and a reward was offered, but no luck, the Martin family was gone. Six months later, two of the girls bodies showed up in the river, but they were so decomposed dental identification was used. Were the Martin's murdered? Hunted for Sport? Was it a tragic accident? Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack take a ride with Doc and Marty back to 1958 to uncover the mystery of the Martin Family disappearance. Transcribe Highlights00:00.16 Introduction - Travel 02:17.35 Family vanishes in 1958 05:12.31 Martin Family outing 10:47.78 River could move car a long way 15:18.32 First bodies found after 6 months 20:05.82 Looking for bullet track 25:14.77 Diving expert finds car 30:17.46 Expert understanding of vehicle 35:29.27 Getting vehicle out of the water 39:46.01 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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This is an I-Heart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
I haven't traveled everywhere in the U.S. that I would like to go to.
I'm a shame to say that I've never been further north in the northeastern corridor than Boston.
And I love Boston.
But I've always wanted to go to New Hampshire and Vermont and Maine and take that trip.
I've been to most of the western states with the exception of Montana.
And there are other places I'd like to go to in the U.S. that I have yet to make it.
We love to travel, Kimmy and I both too.
One thing that I have borne witness to, though, that really stuck with me was many years ago,
I got to pay a visit to Oregon.
and literally did an entire circle around the interior, around the interior of the state.
While I was there, I got to experience something that was quite remarkable.
It's what's referred to as the salmon run.
And it's when the salmon are moving up and down the Columbia River.
Now, first off, being an old Southern boy and, you know, thinking about rivers,
in terms of the Mississippi River.
You know, you think about, you know,
kind of slow-moving, old man river, that sort of stuff.
Columbia River's nothing like that.
As a matter of fact, just standing on the shore of the Columbia River,
and this is going to make me sound very unmanly,
it was a bit terrifying because of the current, the rapids issue.
Now, beautiful it is, but I got to see the movement of the water
from the interior all the way to the mouth where it dumps in to the Pacific Ocean.
Today on Bodybacks, I want to discuss a case that started all the way back in 1958.
And it's not about a disappearance or a homicide of a single person.
It has to do with the disappearance of an entire family that just vanished.
But you know what?
We now have answers.
And we now have all that remains of that family.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body bags.
Dave, I know I came to you with this case.
a week and a half, maybe two weeks ago, I've been wanting to cover it, and for a number of reasons.
First off, we've never covered anything like this.
And secondly, of course, that's going to be at the forefront of what I'm going to say,
this is courtesy of our dear friends at Othrom.
And it just goes to show you that I think that you never can tell where information is going to pop up.
and not just in the sense of incoming data from a report or something like that.
I'm actually talking about where you might recover a human remain.
That might be the key to a great mystery.
A mystery that certainly impacted the Portland, Oregon area low these many years.
Again, since 1958, if my math is right, I think that's 67 years ago, Dave.
you know the shocking part about this show is from 1958 i think about um christmas vacation
and how they go the os of the griswolds go out to find the grisvall family christmas tree
and that's kind of what the martin family was doing you know they were actually together
now kenneth martin and his wife barbara kenneth is 54 barbara is 48 and they have three daughters
Barbie, who is 14, Virginia is 13, and Susan is 11.
They do have an older son, but he was not with them on this Christmas opportunity.
He's in the U.S. Navy at the time and was stationed in New York.
But what they were doing, the family actually went to go out together to gather up greenery.
Right, yeah.
To decorate their home for the Christmas holidays.
And I thought, I mean this, Joe.
This is like something out of a fairy tale or a fairytale or a tree.
book. I mean, this is
what
movies get done, you know,
the romance of a family and this
togetherness of going out. I mean, all
I could think of is, I wish I was
like that. You know, I should have done that with my
kid. It's almost, it's almost
a hallmark
like movie type thing
only without the hidden romance
thing. It is, it's
probably, it's Norman Rockwell, what
it is. You know, and they go out
in their, in their old
old family car, which essentially looks like, well, it's, it looks like a wood panel,
yeah, a wood panel station wagon. And it's exactly, you know, in a few years, a few years after
this, you know, the beach boys, you know, with Woody, you know, and it kind of looks like that.
And you think about, you know, the safety of that and how, and what this, what this pretends,
I think, relative to the family going out together. And so the family would have had to have been very
comfortable together. This is the area that they knock around in. But you know, the thing about it is,
is that not only did they disappear, Dave, their car disappeared. Lots of times where we'll cover
cases where we have a missing person, you might find a car, right? And there's always like,
you know, something like, yeah, well, we found the car, can't find the person, but there's blood
inside of the car, or it looks like something has gone on inside of the car. That's not the case. We're
not talking about, we're not talking about just a family disappearing. We're talking about a vehicle
that certainly back then is several thousand pounds. And then all of a sudden, they go out
to collect greenery and they're never, ever seen again. I can't do the arithmetic off the top of
my head. But I can tell you, it's nothing to sniff at. When, you know, Dave, when, when the family,
turned up missing, there was almost immediately, like, and this is 1958, there was like, you know,
a thousand dollar reward offered. I think that for many people, that's like back then, I might
be misspeaking. I think that's like half a year salary, essentially on average. It wasn't it like
$2,200, $2,400 per year that some people were making in like the middle class range? They offered
a thousand bucks, you know, for information.
And, and nothing, nothing presented.
However, if I'm not mistaken, it was just a bit after the initial disappearance where
we actually have a bit of evidence and not just evidence.
We have bodies.
Didn't, didn't they find a couple of the family members not too long after they had
disappeared?
Joe, the way this worked out, May 1st, 1915,
50 month 9 this is happening i want to back up for a second because during the search for the family
they tire tracks were found that led to belief that the family um had been near a drilling rig
um along this area and on may 1st 1959 this drilling rig hooked something of substantial weight
to its anchor
It became dislodge before it could be pulled to the surface.
And in the early morning hours of the next morning,
a fisherman and his wife reported seeing what appeared to be two bodies,
floating downstream near Cascade locks.
They later encountered the bodies near Bonneville Dam.
So what the thought is here is that this drilling rig hooked on to the car.
that the Martin family vehicle went in the river, submerged,
and when it got hooked on this rig,
it moved it around enough that two of the bodies came out.
On May 3rd, Susan's body was recovered first.
It says on the north bank of the Columbia River near it,
is it Camus or Camus, Washington?
Do you know?
I think it's Camus, yeah.
Okay.
You know why I know a lot of these names?
It's from Anne Rule books.
Anne Roots in the Pacific Northwest.
That's right.
Yeah.
And now that that area is about 70 miles west of the area they were actually looking at the time.
Can we pause just a moment?
Because I can tell you, Dave, I don't want to keep beating this drum.
But this goes to how ferocious this current is.
and this river.
I mean, it's absolutely brutal.
When you're talking about,
if you've got a single entry point for a car,
and can I submit something to you,
it would not take this river,
this river could take a car,
the size, and easily move it along,
even subsurface.
It's just going to kind of be rolling along,
almost like it's in a tumble dryer, man.
Wow.
that's that's scary you know i that's scary to think about but here's the other part joe is that
if you remember the first thing we see in that in may right is the husband or wife fishing team
where they spot two bodies in the water but these bodies are not found next to one another
the next day we're talking in one day's time to go from being seen together
floating downstream in one day's time they end up roughly 70 miles away and that was where
they couldn't even identify the bodies Joe and and that's why I was worried about because
when a body is submerged in water like this in a car with the windows rolled up as you would think
you know, if they all drowned inside the car,
the car would take a beating on the outside, I would think.
But if you were inside that vehicle,
would your body deteriorate the way it would
outside of the car?
You're not getting banged around by rocks and trees and everything else.
But I guess I'm trying to figure out,
how is it possible that in a couple of months' time,
they could not determine this was the body of Susan Martin
without dental records.
Well, okay.
So outside of the cabin of the vehicle,
your remains, or their remains,
would be subjected to not just the velocity
with which the river would move you along,
which is going to have,
you're going to have impact trauma,
post-mortem impact.
trauma on the on the bodies okay so you know how I told you about you know the the speed with
which this river flows any kind of subsurface rocks that might be there also anything that's
on top of the water you know rocks protruding out of the water you have to think about
the speed at which the water is propelling the bodies downrange you're not going to have
hemorrhage on the bodies however you can have bodies that are smashed in to
box. Okay. Now, here's
another thing, all right?
If the bodies go
subsurface and they're
along, you know, the river bottom,
now,
in addition to being
sustaining post-mortem
trauma, you're
going to have
you're going to have
crustaceans that are in these waters.
Did you know, I don't know if anybody has
ever seen
you know, we think
about Alaskan king crabs and they're really big.
We think about our blue crabs that we have down here in south and up to Maryland, you know,
that Maryland, of course, is famous for.
We have them all along Gulf Coast.
I'm talking about these are dungenous crabs.
Well, dungenous crabs have this gigantic body and these gigantic claws.
Guess what they like to eat?
Well, anything that can come across on the bottom of a river, all right?
There's actually a dungenous crab season that takes place on the Columbia River.
Okay, because you have to understand that Columbia River dumps into the Pacific Ocean.
So you've got crabbers that walk, that work all along this area.
These crabs are gigantic.
So if, I think probably the closer you get to the mouth, the more brackish the water gets,
and of course you're going to have these crabs that are there.
In addition to if there's any kind of indigenous crawfish or crayfish, as some other people say,
we also run into things like turtles.
Turtles are notorious for getting on bodies.
And I don't know what species they have up there, but you know, you couple all of that.
It makes it really different, difficult for the medical examiner, coroner,
when you recover a human remain that has been subjected to all of this.
And then on top of that, even though the Columbia River is very cool, it's very cold,
Remember, they went missing back in December.
They're now found, I think it's in May, right?
Yeah, and so we're moving down range to almost half a year.
All right, I guess in, what, July, it would be half a year since they had gone missing.
You're still going to have decompositional changes because you cannot slow, you can slow it,
But you cannot make it cease at a cellular level of the body breaking down.
So what are you relying upon?
Well, the teeth and the jaws many times are very, very resilient, Dave.
So with a body that you pull out of water, you can have like these huge dings on the head.
You're going to have horrible trauma to the face, bone fractures and everything, but guess what?
In this short period of time, the teeth would actually be.
be intact, you would still have enough there to do a dental ID on both these kids.
And I think that's what they wound up doing, wasn't it, Dave?
Yeah.
And that's the part that got me was that in my head, I was trying to figure out how it transpired that first of all, the girls were seen together, you know, in the river by the couple.
And then their bodies are found within 24 hours, but they're 30 miles of heart on the river.
Because you were talking about how rough the water is and how majestic this whole thing is.
But both of the bodies were so damaged that they had to use dental identification on the girls.
And yet they didn't find the other three.
You've got two girls, but not the other three people.
You've still got mom, dad, and Barbie and can't find them.
And there was a report of a couple of different things along here, Joe.
And I wanted to ask you about this because as they were being, as the boss,
bodies were coming out.
A worker suggested that they noticed bullet holes, possible bullet holes.
And when it got to the autopsy, they didn't see any bullet holes.
Could there have been damage like that from rocks and things like that in the water?
I mean, I was just saying, okay, I mentioned the tire tracks that we're seeing.
There were tire tracks that we're seeing going off a cliff and some other things.
like that along this river.
And one of the things that was found in, uh, within the girls clothing, um, aluminum chips.
And that seemed odd until you go back and look at where that rig in the river.
Yeah.
Hooked onto something heavy duty.
And then the next day you've got there were, well, 12 hours later, you've got the bodies in
the river, okay?
Well, that rig right across the river from that, it was an aluminum, where they melt,
aluminum down. Wow. Yeah. And so you start putting these little things together and you're going,
okay, we know they were all, well, no, we can assume they were all in the car. Right. And,
but if, and assuming they were all in the car up until the time that that rig hooked it,
the heavy thing, nobody knew what it was. Two of the girls come out with the other three don't.
I mean, that's still really, in my head, I'm thinking, somebody killed those girls and still
the, you know, in my head, I mean, thinking like that in 1958 and 1959, because again, you mentioned the months here, Joe, December 7th, 1958, they go out looking for greenery. The girls were found the first week of May, 1959.
You think about that. And yeah, I think that any reasonable, listen, nothing would be off the table. Can I go back to the bullet hole, a comment just for a second?
in no report that that I write or have written in the past and those that I train,
I encourage people never, ever to use the term bullet wound or bullet hole because
you're painting yourself into a major corner here because there are many things out
there that can insult a human body that will leave behind
say for instance, there is no perfect circle, but a perfect to the unaided eye, a perfectly
circular hole. And I've actually seen people that will see holes in bodies, defects in
bodies, and I'm talking about cops, they'll say, that's a 9mm or that's a 38 special, or that's
a 22. There's no way to tell by merely eyeballing. So, Dave, one of the reasons I stay away from that
is because I don't want to be painted into a corner.
You know, when you talk about, from the forensic standpoint,
when you're talking about trying to remain scientifically accurate,
I will always use a circular or a regular defect until I can prove it otherwise.
And I'll allow the forensic pathologist to finally make that determination,
because if you've got a bullet hole, say, for instance,
you're going to have to have a bullet track.
Well, if you've got a hole that just punctures into the surface of the skin, okay, is there an underlying track?
Where does it go?
And, oh, by the by, is there also a lead core projectile that's embedded downrange in that bullet track?
Well, if there's not, and you've got, say, a bullet hole that's only maybe half an inch deep, you're really sticking your fanny out in the air there.
I mean, you're going to look like a fool at the end of the day.
So you have to be very, very careful.
But I can tell you this.
When it comes to a family who is missing along with their vehicle, nothing, and I mean nothing, should be taken for granted.
The answers should always rest in the science.
So, Dave, let me get this straight.
We've got within less than six months, we've got two bodies.
of this family, the Martin family.
And just so folks understand, the two bodies that were found were the two youngest members of the family.
Right.
I have thoughts about that.
You're talking about Virginia, who was 13, Susan, who was 11.
Right.
How did they get out of the car?
And understand, I don't necessarily believe they got out of the car in a sense of they got out of the car.
they got out of the car in order to swim to shore.
I think that probably,
particularly if they were the diminutive of the family,
the two diminutive members of the family,
it is within reason that if that car broke up in some way,
if it even went into the river,
that those bodies could potentially float free of the vehicle, all right?
And so, but that,
that still leaves us with a huge mystery here.
You've got two, where the three, is the car in the river, or did dad get rid of these two for whatever reason and wanting to go start a new life?
Is it, I don't know, little green men, I have no idea, but it is, I can only imagine that back in 59, when these two young children were found, the rest of the community is sitting there thinking,
And where in the world is everybody else?
How do you just vanish?
And I would assume that all eyes would have gone to the Columbia River at that point in time.
There was a there was a huge investigation, obviously.
And I was looking over some of the reporting at the time, you know, the newspapers and things like that.
And there were a number of reports being written up about evidence found in the area suggesting
that a gun with dried blood was found near the river,
and it was the same gun that was stolen two years earlier
from a sporting goods store where the oldest son of the Martin family
who was in the Navy stationed in New York at the time of this,
that he had stolen this from the sporting goods store he was working out at the time.
Those were the type of reports that were coming out of the area
because they had no answers, Joe.
There were no answers.
When they find the two girls' bodies,
I go back to that big, the rig hooking onto something in the water.
And then within 12 hours of this big thing being hooked,
the two bodies are found in the river.
They're seen together, but they're found 30 miles apart the next day.
I mean, which I'm so glad you pointed out the strength of this river
because that's where I start looking at this.
And all of a sudden, Joe, if you think about a car that has,
been at the bottom of a river.
Let's just say it's been sitting there undisturbed.
And now it gets hooked and gets disturbed.
And the two smallest somehow end up outside the vehicle and floating down the river.
The story ended because that's all that was found, two bodies that had to be identified by dental records.
this mystery became the stuff of campfire stories.
You know, the guy with the hook.
And you have to go forward so many years now.
You've got to go, what, 67 years?
Yeah, well, yeah, 67, 66.
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
There's one guy, a diver.
And this is not a river you're going to dive for leisure.
If you're going to get into this water, you're looking for something,
and you better have an expertise or you're not coming back up.
No, no.
You wouldn't.
And there was a guy who had an idea, Joe.
There was a guy.
I know a guy.
I got a guy.
Yeah, I got a guy.
I got a guy for this.
Yeah, and listen, this type of diving, a good friend of mine, I recommend to check him out.
Bobby Chaconne, he originally set up the,
The FBI dive team, evidence recovery team.
I know that's redundant, but Bobby is just this incredible person as a professional and just an all-around great guy.
I mean, I've gotten to know Bobby.
And I've talked to Bobby about the incredibly incompatible environments he's had to go into,
incompatible with like life that he's had to go into.
And I'm not just talking to, you know, it's not like you go diving in like the crystal
clear waters of the Caribbean.
He's gone into very austere environments, areas where there's a lot of sewage and area
where, you know, you're getting into these rough waters where you literally have white water.
And that's a very specific type of skill set.
And just to try to understand the topography in an environment like,
is where, by the way, it can change at the drop of a hat because of the fury of this water that's
rushing over this.
And you begin to get things like snow melt that's going to be back, you know, back to the east
where it's running off of the mountains.
And the fury of the river just, it doubles at that point in time.
So, and this happens every year.
It's gone on for eons.
So you think about who would have this kind of skill set.
and have the ability.
And also, who would have the want to to be able to go down there?
Because it takes a very special person to go subsurface in this environment.
And here's one thing I'm thinking about, particularly in a river.
It's not like, you know, I talked about the Caribbean where, you know, maybe you're floating around
and you're looking down, you see the beautiful fish.
Oh, look, there's a shark over there.
I'm going to swim over here.
I'm going to stay away.
Dude, you can't see anything.
Most of these rivers that these guys go into, it's done by feel.
You kind of climb or crawl, rather, along the bottom, kind of touching surfaces to see what's there and what you can appreciate.
And can you imagine trying to work a crime scene underwater like this where you're doing it by field, Dave?
And I'm so glad you pointed that out because you can't see anything.
You're actually having to go down and look for something based on, in the way.
this particular case, I think the guy's name is Archer Mayo.
And Mr. Mayo had been researching this case for a long time.
And he went back to the Columbia, to the Cascade locks in the Columbia River where that hook, where they had hooked something big.
And, you know, nothing came of that in 1959, except for two bodies found down the river.
but they couldn't put two and two together on that.
And so when Archer Mayo,
who is an expert diver and researcher apparently,
because he went back to the Cascade locks, Joe.
He got in the water.
And as you said,
he had to find his way the best he could.
But 50 feet below the surface,
Joseph Scott Morgan,
at the Cascade locks,
Archer Mayo found something.
He was able to,
to bring up parts off the something.
Not the whole thing, but parts.
And it was enough for them to go, hey, wait a minute.
This is the station.
This is a vehicle that matches the station wagon that the Martin family was driving.
At the time, they vanished.
And based on the information from before.
Right.
They decided to approximate it.
Yeah.
You know, here's one of the interesting things when you're working in
old case like this involving physical evidence. With motor vehicles, there are certain locations
where serial numbers are stamped, where there are specific markers with automobiles. Now,
you might not necessarily recover like a VIN number plate, but there are certain areas, and there
are people out there in forensics, Dave, that deal with nothing but cars, period. Okay. Well, motor
vehicles.
Yeah.
And if you think their information is limited to modern vehicles, it's not because they can
go back in time and they understand the structure of vehicles.
They understand how they're built.
And they also understand the little bitty unique characteristics of people, just where a
certain turn of the metal has taken place that makes that vehicle unique to that particular
brand.
Think about that.
and then think about all of the changes that have taken place with this motor vehicle over a long period of time.
From what I'm understanding, the vehicle actually came to rest and what they are referring to as a pit beneath the surface of the water.
And so you have containment in this area, and I would imagine that there would be somewhat of a debris field that's around whatever is left of the superstructure.
of the vehicle, you know, it's there, whether it's the frame itself.
You can imagine the wood paneling, you know, that may have been on the sides or whatever
it or the faux wood paneling, tail lights, all that stuff.
It's probably, you know, probably gone.
So now you're just merely staring at a metal skeleton, skeleton being the functional word here,
Dave, because, you know, they came up with initial pieces of the car.
Is that what you said?
Yeah.
And, you know, and that it was enough, the diver was able to bring up enough of the vehicle to get more help.
Because what they ended up having to do, they used a vacuum dredge.
And I only know about these because I've watched these, I watched some crazy TV shows of the gold guys, you know.
Come on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Using a vacuum dredge of the bottom of a river anyway.
And that's what they used.
And by the way, they found several vehicles.
there wasn't just one.
They found several in the search for the Martin's vehicle.
They were able, they being the experts, once they realized we do have a vehicle down here, that was in 2024.
They arranged to start pulling out.
It's a dangerous effort.
So they do use vacuum dredge.
They pull out rocks, silt, and everything else.
And they're able to get the frame and the, oh, I'm trying to remember.
they uh what do you call it come on dave they were able to get the the frame of the vehicle and the
motor and um other parts of the vehicle out of the river and they sent it to the Oregon state crime
lab to be examined um yeah the axle and the engine that's what it was i was trying on guys
more than just the frame because the frame you know is not going to be the whole thing and it's going to be
parts of it. Same thing with the axle and the engine, but enough of it that they were able to
take it back to the crime lab and break it down and say, yep, this was a Martin family vehicle.
Well, one of the other problems that they, that they had when the sheriff's office got involved,
and I'm not disparaging the sheriff's office, I'm just saying when you start to get all
hands on deck for this thing, they did use a crane to pull, to begin to pull this thing up.
But unfortunately, as they're pulling up, you know, kind of the superstructure of this thing, they don't get everything.
Some of the stuff kind of falls back down.
And it left, I get the impression that the vehicle is inverted.
So it's on its roof, essentially.
And it left the passenger cabin of the vehicle upside down in this, you know, this pit that I'm referring to.
So you're pulling off the axle, the transmitter.
maybe the engine block and you're not getting that okay now I understand how come that came up okay
thank you for that I think it's inverted and so when you pull it up like this and it's a good thing
that they were able to pull it up because if you if you can go it's like it's like dealing with guns
with firearms where people have tried to eradicate you know like serial numbers and things like that
you've got to take this to a controlled environment you're there's no way you're going to
hey boys let's put it up on the bank and check it out no no no no that's why they took it to the state
crime lab there are certain applications that that can be used on metal surfaces to say for instance
if you're looking for serial numbers and certain serial numbers will match up with models okay
and also other features of the vehicle you want to try to examine these and Dave this thing is
going to have all kinds of incrustation all over the top of it all right everything
from rust to anything else that's silt that's settled on there.
It's going to stain it.
This is not something that's,
this is not an easy undertaking.
So with that,
if you get this out of the water,
you can confirm it that it's possibly the same vehicle.
Then you go back down and see what else you can find.
And Dave,
I've got to tell you,
when they went back down there contained within the cabin of the vehicle,
I'd be doggone if they didn't find the rest of these remains, Dave.
unbelievable that 60 something years later they're able to find three human bodies they found the remains and you know like everything else you cannot assume anything they the bodies that they were found inside the cabin of the vehicle had to be tested and they were and it came back positively identified yeah that's that's one of the really fascinating things about this and if I could
just talk about this just a wee bit.
If you have intact skulls, okay, on these bodies,
I don't know if the teeth would still be there.
If you can find sample from maybe one of the long bones,
but the skull is what I'm focusing on here.
Because Othrom, on unidentified bodies,
likes to harvest from two spots, okay?
They love to get a molar, all right?
They love molars.
The other place, you're going to like this.
It's inside of the skull.
So if you take the cap of the skull off, and if people will just imagine where your fancy terms,
what they call the external auditory meatus, which is the holes for your ears,
if you find out where your ear holes are, okay, your auditory canal and go slightly above that area inside of your skull,
just imagine you're going inside your skull,
there's like a ridge line that runs over the top of your of your auditory canal in there.
And it's a ridge and it's called the Petrus bone.
Petrus, okay?
Like Peter Petros, you know, who built my church on the rock, right?
Petrus.
And if you carve out that bit with a saw and you harvest it, it's really thick, really, really thick.
And so you take that sample and send it to where?
well, our friends at Othrom.
And the Oregon State Medical Examiner's office got involved in this case as well.
They should have, all right?
You've got three decedents here.
You've got remains that have been compromised.
Brother Dave, what, 67 years after the fact?
What's you going to do, man?
Well, we're going to turn to our friends at Othrum.
And after all of these years, they send this stuff downrange to the Woodlands, Texas.
And it's because of what the Oregon State Medical Examiner's office, the Hood County Sheriff's Office, decided to do with this and put this into the hands of the Middleman's, that they were able to get these bodies identified.
And they determined that it is, in fact, the Martin family.
My friends, let me tell you something.
We're in a brand new age.
unlike anything else we've ever seen in forensic science.
And if, if in fact you want to get involved,
if you think you would love to be a forensic scientist
and you're frustrated because you think you're too old
or it's too late to go back to school,
but you still want to help out, here's the way you do it.
You go visit dna solves.com.
And there, I just checked it out today,
and there are a whole list of images there
and they actually have the numbers of dollars that they are into each one of these cases that have been donated to date.
These are open cases.
Guess what you can do.
You can look this up by maybe the region that you live.
You can look it up or you can view it by virtue of something that really interests you,
maybe an unsolved sexual assault case or an unsolved homicide or just a skeleton that has been found.
You can make a difference in these cases.
All you got to do?
go to dna solves
dot com
and they're not asking for a million bucks
just throw a couple of bucks
their way every little
bit helps people
proud loan and on about well
they need closure
well you know Morgan
doesn't believe necessarily in that term
but what I do believe in
are answers
and those answers
in this particular case
rest in science
and science is currently being practiced at Othram Labs.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybacks.
This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.
