Seventeen-year-old Martha Marie Morrison disappeared from Portland, Oregon, in late summer 1974 after leaving the apartment she shared with her boyfriend following an argument. Morrison, a White teenager who had run away previously and spent time in foster care near Eugene, had recently returned from Arizona where she was in the Job Corps and had met her boyfriend. She was last seen in September 1974.

On October 12, 1974, skeletal remains of two young women were found in a densely wooded area of Dole Valley in Clark County, Washington. One set was identified as 18-year-old Carol Platt Valenzuela; the other remained unidentified for decades. That second set of remains was eventually identified as Martha Morrison after reexamination of lab material and DNA comparison with surviving relatives and her father’s exhumed remains.

Investigators later linked a bloodstain on an air pistol belonging to Warren Leslie Forrest to Morrison by DNA testing, and Forrest has been the focus of the investigation into the two deaths. Authorities also sought to speak with Morrison’s 1974 boyfriend, described as a slender African American man who worked as a welder in the Portland shipyards, for information about her final days.