Efforts to recover a long-submerged station wagon belonging to an Oregon family who vanished nearly 70 years ago in the Columbia River are set to continue on Friday. The family of five, out on a quest for Christmas greenery, disappeared in a case that captured national attention and sparked speculation of foul play, accompanied by a $1,000 reward at the time for information on their whereabouts.
The recovery operation halted at dusk on Thursday without a clear timeline for retrieving the vehicle. The station wagon, believed to belong to Ken and Barbara Martin, was located last autumn by diver Archer Mayo, who had been searching for the vehicle for seven years, according to his representative, Ian Costello. Mayo, after numerous dives, discovered the upside-down car buried in mud and river debris around 50 feet beneath the surface. Costello made this discovery public on Wednesday, indicating its significance to a Portland mystery lingering for over six decades.
Nearby, Mayo also identified other vehicles that will need to be removed before the targeted station wagon, as mentioned by Costello. Hood River County sheriff’s deputy Pete Hughes confirmed that one car is known while another, a Volkswagen, remains unidentified. Hughes expressed uncertainty about whether bodies might be discovered inside these vehicles.
On December 7, 1958, Ken Martin and his family, including daughters Barbara, 14, Virginia, 13, and Sue, 11, set out to the mountains for holiday foliage. They never returned, and investigators refined their search focus when uncovering a credit card purchase by Ken Martin at a gas station near Cascade Locks. The AP at the time suggested the possibility of the family’s station wagon having plunged into a remote area or waterway. Five months after their disappearance, Sue Martin’s body was found in a slough, appearing to have been released from the wreckage by the river’s spring current. Her sister Virginia’s remains were discovered the following day further upstream. The remaining family members were never located despite ongoing search efforts.
The family’s son, Don Martin, a Marine veteran and Columbia University graduate student, expressed a somber belief in his family’s demise in conversations with the AP. The case has maintained significant public interest over the years. Following the partial recovery of the station wagon’s license plate and other identifiers provided by Mayo, law enforcement and forensic teams planned the vehicle extraction. However, uncertainty persists about the vehicle’s identity due to mud and debris covering it, as Hughes pointed out.
Mayo, who operates a business focused on recovering lost river items and assisting in drowning victim recoveries, turned to the family’s case after studying a research vessel sinking in 2017. Through extensive research and modeling, Mayo pinpointed the potential vehicle location near a road, leading to this significant, though cautious, recovery endeavor.
Authorities have not disclosed expectations about discovering the remains of other missing individuals in the river’s submerged vehicles.