In September 1979, two hikers discovered human remains on a rocky slope above a little-used trail near Multnomah Falls. They found bones, a skull and a few personal belongings: gold-rimmed aviator glasses, a yellow cap with black felt letters reading “NT” and a chewed-up checkbook from First National Bank of Oregon. But there was no wallet or other identifying information.

Based on the bones and hair found at the scene, investigators determined the body likely belonged to a man, between 20 and 35 years old, with a thick, curly beard. A news brief that ran in The Oregonian noted that the remains “had been exposed to the elements for quite some time.”

Police sent the skull and mandible to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for an anthropological exam, which concluded that the person who died was likely African American.

But who did the remains belong to? Police had no leads. No one had been reported missing. For decades the bones sat in a box at the Oregon State Police medical examiner’s office in Clackamas.

Now, more than four decades after the remains were first discovered, John Doe 79-1862 has a name.

On Episode 5 of The Unidentifieds, hosts Regan Mertz and Dave Killen travel to Multnomah Falls and explore its labyrinth-like trail network. They talk to investigators assigned to the case in 1979 and to experts who explain how the cruel legacy of slavery has affected genetic genealogy efforts to connect Black families to lost relatives.

Listen to Episode 5 here:

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REGAN MERTZ: East of Portland, along the northern border of the state of Oregon, is the Columbia River Gorge. It’s a dramatic sight, one on par with some of the most impressive natural wonders in the world. The Columbia River, which divides Oregon and Washington, is more than a mile wide in places, and the cliffs it has spent eons carving out of the earth on either side rise, spectacularly, hundreds of feet into the sky.

It’s a beautiful, awe-inspiring place, and trying to list its highlights would take more time than we have here. But there is one that rises above all the others: Multnomah Falls.

DAVE KILLEN: Multnomah Falls is one of the most iconic sights in the northwest. It’s taller than any building in Portland. And at only about a half hour drive from the city, it’s a popular day-trip destination. But for a pair of hikers in the late 1970s, a trip to the falls took an unexpected turn when they discovered human remains on a rocky slope above a little-used trail.

[AUDIO MONTAGE]

SPEAKER 1: Absolutely it can be dangerous.

SPEAKER 2: It was a steep, almost free falling slope.

SPEAKER 3: He was a John Doe for us for the longest period of time.

REGAN MERTZ: I’m Regan Mertz.

DAVE KILLEN: And I’m Dave Killen.

REGAN MERTZ: This is The Unidentifieds, a podcast from The Oregonian and Oregonlive.

REGAN MERTZ: In the summer of 1979, Jeffery Pape was assigned to a Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office patrol that partnered with the US Forest Service. The partnership was meant to provide a police presence at the recreation areas throughout the Columbia River Gorge. Jeffery was a Navy vet, and had served in the Vietnam War. He was the responding officer when two hikers found remains near Multnomah Falls on September 14, 1979.

JEFFERY PAPE: The report came in that human remains had been found and it would be a hike. In any event, we went to a point east of Multnomah Falls a couple thousand yards and hiked right up the side of the Gorge. It was a steep, almost a free-falling slope, a talus slope of rock, only it was stabilized with trees and stuff. But still, it was a vicious scramble getting up there. And we got to the scene. Our temples were pounding, and our hearts were hurting, and this and that and the other. And we started to look around and found partial remains, bones here and there and a skull. And we looked around as best we could and gathered everything we could.

REGAN: A news article from The Oregonian archives states that the remains had, “been exposed to the elements for quite some time.”

REGAN: And just when you had seen the body, what were your thoughts on that? Had you ever been in a situation like that before? Was it maybe startling for you? Or was it just part of your job at the time?

JEFFERY PAPE: Never completely comfortable around human remains or recently dead people. I remembered the need to remain focused, remain functional and do objective work. Did the best I could. And I had no problems doing it. We had tissue materials in the shoes. And other than that, clean, dry bones. And it’s a rich biological area. Has every kind of critter you want to imagine out there. So, we were lucky to get as much as we did in the way of remains. And very few personal effects, never found a wallet.

DAVE KILLEN: The way the remains and belongings were found indicated they had been disturbed by animals. Among them, investigators found a chewed-up checkbook from the First National Bank of Oregon. It had no name, date, signature or account number. Jeffery said that at this time in Portland, a lot of retired detectives worked at the banks, so if a sheriff’s department put in a request, the detectives-turned-bankers got back to them quickly.

REGAN MERTZ: Even so, the checkbook didn’t offer any answers. Investigators also found large, gold-rimmed aviator glasses. They were missing the left nose plate, and a bandage was wrapped around the right temple bridge.

DAVE KILLEN: Investigators could tell the owner was right-handed, because the way they removed the glasses with their right hand left a telltale bend. The glasses also showed that the person’s left ear was higher than their right, and there was a white deposit on the temple pads, which is caused by sweat. Searchers also found clothes: a light forest green shirt, blue jeans, a size thirty-two, one-and a half-inch-wide leather belt, long johns, blue socks, a yellow ball cap with black felt letters reading “NT,” and a brown suede leather jacket. There were also a pair of light brown size 9 1/2, high-top hiking boots that were made in Taiwan. They had the word “insulated” on the inside and ripples on the bottom to give support when hiking. They were still laced up when investigators found them.

The teeth were in good condition, and investigators could tell that the third molar had not yet erupted, which helped determine age.

REGAN MERTZ: Bones and hair indicated that the remains were that of a 20 to 35-year-old male, about 5′11 to 6′1, and 160 to 180 pounds. He had a thick black curly head of hair and a beard. His belongings and remains were bagged, logged and put away at the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office property room.

[MUSIC PAUSE]

DAVE KILLEN: After Jeffery’s initial investigation, the case was turned over to Multnomah County detectives and the medical examiner. Jeffery’s only point of contact with the case after that would be bumping into detectives in the hallway at the sheriff’s office.

REGAN MERTZ: They would share whatever update they had at the time, and the two would keep moving in their separate directions. But Jeffery knew one thing for sure.

JEFFERY PAPE: It was pretty obvious that we ran out of ideas and leads pretty quickly. Exhaustive search of missing persons reports, I sent a teletype pretty broadly, indicating what we had, and seeing if it would ring a bell with any other agencies. And nothing came back there.

DAVE KILLEN: The skull and mandible, which is your lower jaw, were sent 2,800 miles away to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. since, at the time, the state of Oregon did not have an anthropologist on staff to do the examination.

REGAN MERTZ: Scientists there completed an anthropological exam, and the skull measurements showed the remains most likely belonged to someone who was African American. The Smithsonian also created a line art drawing.

DAVE KILLEN: The black and white drawing shows a man with a slight open-mouth smile surrounded by a beard. The portrait was accessorized with items found with his remains. The baseball cap with the letters “NT” pushed his hair out on either side.

REGAN MERTZ: And the thinly-rimmed aviator glasses rested on his nose. The drawing was widely publicized, but despite all of this, he could not be identified, and no one came forward with a name. He became John Doe 79-1862.

[REGAN AND DAVE PHONE CALL]

DAVE KILLEN: I’m at Multnomah Falls, the falls is roaring, you know, just tons of water coming over it, which I guess you know makes sense this time of year.

REGAN MERTZ: Yeah, I think I can hear it in the background.

[NARRATION CONTINUES]

REGAN MERTZ: The trail that leads to the top of Multnomah Falls, which is 620 feet tall, is a popular day-trip destination for many Portlanders. Dave was there on a cool, brisk day, but it was still packed.

[REGAN AND DAVE PHONE CALL]

DAVE KILLEN: Yeah I feel kinda like overrun here, definitely very different than anywhere else we’ve gone in terms of both the topography and just yeah the concentration of other people, which is high. There’s even some dogs.

[NARRATION CONTINUES]

DAVE KILLEN: At the base of the falls is a trailhead for a route that leads to an observation platform at the top. Other, smaller trails branch off as the series of 11 switchbacks climbs the face of the cliff.

[REGAN AND DAVE PHONE CALL]

REGAN MERTZ: And this would have been the trail most likely he would have taken on the way up there?

DAVE KILLEN: Yeah if you started at the Multnomah Falls Lodge, as far as I know the only, basically to get to any other of the trails you start on this one.

[NARRATION CONTINUES]

DAVE KILLEN: At the end of the first switchback, I paused at a sign that indicates the first departure one can take from the trail to the top: Gorge Trail 400.

[REGAN AND DAVE PHONE CALL]

DAVE KILLEN: And one thing I’ve thought about is that, you know, you could hear me kind of huffing and puffing just this first switchback segment, I can see getting to this point, realizing that it’s gonna be a lot more strenuous to get to the top than maybe one would think.

REGAN MERTZ: Mmm-hmm.

DAVE KILLEN: And coming to this junction in the trail and seeing that the you know gorge trail 400 which leads off to the east does not continue to gain elevation. I could definitely see changing your mind and heading down this trial instead.

[NARRATION CONTINUES]

REGAN: That’s exactly what Dave did, toward the approximate location where these remains were found more than 40 years before.

[REGAN AND DAVE PHONE CALL]

DAVE KILLEN: This is much more obscure, it’s much more isolated. And it’s just rock and dirt, there’s no asphalt here. It is you know directly uphill from Interstate 84, so it’s not exactly out in the backwoods, but I doubt I’m gonna come across anyone pushing their kid in a stroller on this trail.

[MUSIC FADES OUT]

CAT CARUSO: One of the unique things about the Northwest, at least the western part of the Pacific Northwest, is when you get west of the Cascades, we just have a lot of moisture that comes in from the Pacific, it falls, we’ve got rain forests here, which a lot of people don’t recognize. We’ve got these beautiful mountains, the Cascade Range, and so all of that moisture kind of runs up to the Cascades and then it kind of drops and it’s responsible for all of this really lush green scenery that I think people associate with this part of the country and which draws a lot of people to this part of the country.

DAVE KILLEN: That’s Cat Caruso, who we spoke to last episode about the Mount Hood National Forest. She works in the public affairs office for the Pacific Northwest Region Forest Service. She grew up back east, but towering conifers and misty tree canopies drew Cat west.

CAT CARUSO: If you travel not very far beyond Portland, you have a lot of really, sort of wild, natural places that are available for you to explore. What you will run into is the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. It’s this rugged, steep cliff channel that’s been carved out by the Columbia River over many, many, many eons. It’s this very vertical space with these cliffs and these, you know, and running water that just comes down. It’s a very peaceful place.

REGAN MERTZ: People go there to become one with nature. But from your point of view and the Forest Service’s point of view, do you think that it can be almost dangerous sometimes? Is the terrain dangerous? Are there precautions that people should take when they go into areas like this?

CAT CARUSO: Absolutely, it can be dangerous. And that is one of our greatest challenges is that this is an area that is accessible to a lot of people. And it’s a very popular place to visit. It’s very popular for recreation, in our community, and, but these are also in many ways, wild spaces. And it is really important if you’re going to visit any public lands, but especially national forest lands, to be prepared for all of the things that could go wrong when you’re visiting.

[REGAN AND DAVE PHONE CALL]

DAVE KILLEN: In none of these four cases do we know for sure exactly what happened, but some of them you can make a pretty strong inference that there was some kind of foul play. It certainly seems like Annie, the woman down off of the redwood highway was most likely murdered. We can be quite certain that someone put baby Stevie in that reservoir, it may not have been murder but obviously another human being put him there. And I think we can probably be pretty sure that Wanda also ran into someone who was up to no good up on Mount Hood. But my understanding is that there wasn’t really any sign of foul play in this case?

REGAN MERTZ: Yeah that is, pretty much I mean what they thought was he probably just took a break and died there on this log that he sat at. When they found his remains his glasses were still resting on the log nearby. So it doesn’t seem like there was any sort of trauma or disturbance that could have caused his death ultimately.

DAVE KILLEN: And I think one thing that we can say for sure is that this is a pretty isolated area. If you did have a medical event here, despite being able to see the freeway and hear the freeway, you know, just a stone’s throw away, kind of like we’ve talked about on some of these other cases, the odds of someone coming by are pretty slim I think. So there’s not going to be any way to get help, at least not immediately.

REGAN MERTZ: Yeah.

[NARRATION CONTINUES]

DAVE KILLEN: Oregon’s state forensic anthropologist, Nici Vance, re-inventoried the remains in 2005 as part of her human identification program that we’ve discussed in past episodes. She re-examined them in 2006, and in 2007, the bones were sent to a federally funded lab in Texas. There, DNA was extracted, and the data uploaded to CODIS, but no match was found.

NICI VANCE: We had had him for so long, he was found in 1979. And there had been so many people that had worked on that case. We knew he was an African American male. And we knew based on that Smithsonian composite picture, that he was fairly distinct looking. There were other things that were found with his remains, there was a ball cap that was found, some eyeglasses that almost tell the story about who he was, but I still didn’t know who he was, I wasn’t, I wasn’t privy to his name at that point.

So he was a John Doe for us for the longest period of time. And his DNA had been uploaded into that CODIS database, had churned around for again, decades, and wasn’t hitting or associating with any missing persons DNA profiles. And so we again, once again, knew that someone wasn’t necessarily looking for him. So when we realize things like that, we realize that maybe this person was marginalized or maybe hadn’t been in contact with family for a while. And that’s, it’s a way to investigate or to research an actual case, but it still doesn’t get us very far.

REGAN MERTZ: In 2019, the Oregon State Police medical examiner’s office received a $402,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice. It was the first of its kind. The grant paid for Nici and the Medical Examiner’s Office to use DNA phenotyping and genetic genealogy to solve unidentified remains cold cases.

DAVE KILLEN: Nici believed the case of the remains found near Multnomah Falls was solvable, so it was an ideal candidate for the grant. In 2020, the state’s Medical Examiner’s Office enlisted the help of Parabon NanoLabs.

[MUSIC FADES]

REGAN MERTZ: During a video interview with forensic sketch artist Joyce Nagy, I noticed a skull sitting on her desk in the background. So I had to ask about it. She picked it up and told me:

JOYCE NAGY: On the side of his head is written Jim Lamb. And so we’ve always called him Jim. And and it says 1898. So Jim Lamb might be the guy who had him as a specimen skull. This was this was obtained from a doctor’s estate. So what had happened is, the doctor’s estate was, part of his tools, or part of the estate was donated to the museum here in Clackamas County. And the museum said, hey, there’s like human remains in this box of stuff. And we really don’t want human remains. So we came in and collected it. And at the time, which was either the 70s or 80s. At the time, there really wasn’t anything to do with him, other than put him in a box on a shelf, which is where he remained for several years.

So when I came and found him, I took them to Dr. Vance. And she looked him over to make sure he wasn’t Native American, because if he’s Native American then we will, you know, would give him back to them so they can put him to rest properly. But she, she saw that he is mostly African American, he probably was African.

REGAN MERTZ: It’s possible, if not likely, that the skull now known as Jim came from a man who was enslaved. The difficulty of tracing the familial history of Black Americans is just another example of slavery’s lingering impact. African American profiles are underrepresented in the GEDMatch database.

DAVE KILLEN: And genetic genealogist CeCe Moore says that building family trees for Black Americans is more challenging since there aren’t a lot of records available before Emancipation.

CECE MOORE: You know, we have a reverse bias in our genetic genealogy databases, where the majority of the people in those databases have deep roots in the United States. And those are the easiest cases to solve then, if somebody, either a perpetrator or a Jane or John Doe has deep roots in the U.S., then we’re much more likely to be able to identify those individuals. So it’s like a double-edged sword, right? We can’t, we, it’s harder for us to identify a perpetrator of color, but it’s also harder for us to identify a person of unknown identity, a Jane or John Doe, also. And so, you know, it’s it’s a little inequitable, which is really sad. And we hate to see it. But there’s no easy answers to resolve that.”

DAVE KILLEN: Dr. Nici Vance has also seen this phenomenon play out.

NICI VANCE: We know that African American populations aren’t necessarily uploading their DNA profiles into these public genealogy databases as much as say European populations. And that’s for a number of different reasons. I think African American cultures or families pass a lot of their heritage down through written records and through verbal stories and storytelling. Sometimes the classic ways that we define families don’t necessarily apply to other cultures either. And so you might call, you know, a family friend, your brother, or you might call your cousin, your sister. And so genetically speaking, you’re not related to them in the same way, as say a European family would define their family.

CECE MOORE: It’s unfortunate, because some of the underprivileged groups are less likely to be identified for those reasons. And, you know, we really hate to see that we, we put in a lot of pro bono hours, on those types of cases on my team, because there’s just no way to fund them, you know, they would be just exorbitantly expensive, but we don’t want to just give up on them once we’re out of the funded hours. So we just keep working and working and working on those. But it can be very frustrating. And very sad, when we are not successful or haven’t been successful so far on those cases.”

NICI VANCE: So we see those challenges with different populations. Our genealogists know how to tease out these genetic structures to look for family connections. And really, that’s what broke this case was the fact that there was a large family presence or family connection in the genealogy databases for this particular individual.

[MUSIC FADES]

[REGAN AND DAVE PHONE CALL]

DAVE KILLEN: (Falls down) I’m slipping… but the… this might be harder than I thought.

[NARRATION CONTINUES]

DAVE KILLEN: To get an idea of what it would have been like to get from the trail to the area upslope where the remains were found, I scrambled my way uphill.

[REGAN AND DAVE PHONE CALL]

REGAN MERTZ: No wonder like people don’t regularly climb up the side.

DAVE KILLEN: Yeah I think this is a pretty infrequently traversed trail to begin with, and those who do come down here, yeah, I doubt they’re climbing up the talus slope very often. It’s probably also not wise to do that.

REGAN MERTZ: If he had laid down on this log any certain way, could someone walk by and see him lying there?DAVE KILLEN: From listening to your interview with Jeffery Pape it’s hard to know exactly where he would have been, but I think, again just looking at what’s in front of me here, it’s really easy to imagine that you would not be seen from the trail. There are spots where you would be, like, if I look directly upslope right now it’s just rock, and I’m not 100% sure I would see a body lying up there a few hundred feet, but I probably could? But if you go just you know 50 feet in either direction, there’s more brush and some dead trees and stuff like that, and yeah if there were a log up there and he were behind the log, then no I would not see him. It would only be if I were to go up there myself. Which it sounds like is what happened, some people happened to go up there and found him.

REGAN MERTZ: And is that area shaded? Because it was the summertime, overheating is a very real danger, so would he have gotten necessary shade if he had laid down there?DAVE KILLEN: No, this is the one area that’s pretty much totally open.

REGAN MERTZ: Ok

DAVE KILLEN: Y’know, that is, that does strike me as a possibility, because we know it was the summer, I don’t know, obviously everything is hotter these days, but you still would have you know sort of abnormally hot days here and there.

REGAN MERTZ: Right.

[NARRATION CONTINES]

REGAN MERTZ: The family connections Nici Vance spoke about earlier were what ended up giving CeCe Moore some promising leads in this case.

DAVE KILLEN: Despite the hurdles she faced, she located DNA profiles of people who shared a great-great grandparent, and a great-great-great grandparent, with the Multhomah Falls John Doe.

REGAN MERTZ: After investigating those people and their familial connections on social media, she homed in on a subset of that group who showed an interest in online genealogy.

DAVE KILLEN: One of them, was Larry Jackson. Larry had never cared much for history in school, but now he’s curious about his own family’s history.

LARRY JACKSON: Well, as started, I guess, in 95, we went to our first family reunion on my mom’s side. And then every two years, we started going. So with my biological grandfather, he passed away in 1999. It was like, well, who was his family? How did he, uh, what his life was all about and stuff like that. So. So that’s basically when I started launching, started asking questions to my dad, my mom, other relatives to find out how, who my family was and where did they come from? And then from that, it just kind of exploded.

DAVE KILLEN: When he was a kid, Larry Jackson had an uncle he was fond of.

REGAN MERTZ: A kind, intelligent man who liked to playfully tease his nieces and nephews. But at some point, this uncle had disappeared. No one in the family had heard from him in decades. His name was Freeman Issac Asher Jr.

CHRISTINA ASHER JONES: He was very smart, kind of like a genius type person.

REGAN MERTZ: That’s Christina Asher Jones, Freeman’s niece, and Larry’s cousin. Christina’s mom was Freeman’s older sister. She doesn’t remember a lot about her uncle, but said he was known as a joker.

CHRISTINA ASHER JONES: You know, as a child, for me, he just teased a lot, you know, because I had this blondish reddish hair. And it wasn’t like anybody else in the family kind of. So, he teased me a lot about that.

DAVE KILLEN: Christina’s cousin, Larry Jackson, never actually submitted his DNA to a genealogy company, despite his interest in his family’s history. He didn’t feel he needed to, since his dad and sisters had both done so already. But the online family tree they’d helped create led to Larry just the same, and in October of 2020, he got a call from a detective regarding his uncle Freeman.

[MUSIC FADES]

REGAN MERTZ: The same detective had called Christina, so the two cousins contacted one another to talk about what they remember about their uncle. It was the first time anyone had asked about Freeman in a while. When Freeman’s brother died in 1988, his family tried to get in touch with him to let him know. Freeman was a Navy veteran, and they contacted the Red Cross, which helps families of veterans find missing relatives. They learned that Freeman hadn’t tried to access any veteran’s benefits. Still, they didn’t think he was dead, and they never reported him missing.

CHRISTINA ASHER JONES: Because the way they made it sound, it was like he has to kind of give his permission to be contacted, so we just thought he didn’t want to be contacted. You know, it’s kind of one of those things where you feel the person doesn’t want to be bothered, so you don’t bother ‘em.

DAVE KILLEN: At an 80th birthday party for Larry’s grandmother, who was Freeman’s mom, some relatives thought Freeman was either in Oregon or California.

REGAN MERTZ: Eventually, a friend of Larry’s from church put him in contact with a private investigator. But the P.I. could not find any information on Freeman. It was like he had fallen off the face of the earth. That is, until those calls from the detective in 2020.

Around that same time, police had also tracked down a woman in San Fernando, California, again using social media and online genealogy. She gave investigators a DNA swab sample.

DAVE KILLEN: This confirmed that she was the sister of the man whose remains had been found, and proved definitively that he was Freeman Issac Asher Jr. Here’s what we now know about him:

REGAN MERTZ: Freeman lived in Arizona until high school, when he dropped out to join the Navy. Once he completed his military service, which included time spent as a postal clerk at the rank of petty officer 3rd class, and serving in the Vietnam War, Freeman returned to Arizona.

DAVE KILLEN: Christina has a photo of Freeman in a Navy uniform, with a white sailor’s hat known as a Dixie Cup hat, because it looked like the paper drinking cup. His family would post on social media for Veterans Day and Memorial Day to honor him.

REGAN MERTZ: Family said Freeman always excelled at math. He enrolled at Phoenix College once he got back home, and an old yearbook photo shows him as a student with a collared shirt and mustache in 1969.

DAVE KILLEN: In the 70s, a time filled with turmoil between Watergate, the Vietnam War and unrest over civil rights, Freeman worked as a youth supervisor at the Maricopa County Detention Home in Phoenix.

REGAN MERTZ: But he wanted to move to Portland to be closer to one of his sisters. Sometime after Freeman got to Portland in the late 1970s, he decided to do what Oregonians do – go on a hike in the Columbia River Gorge east of Portland. Christina recalls one of the last memories she has of her uncle before he left for Oregon.

CHRISTINA ASHER JONES: One of the last times I saw him he was singing “Easy” by Lionel Richie.

REGAN MERTZ: The Commodores released “Easy” in March 1977. That June, the Portland Trail Blazers won the NBA title, and delirious fans met the team on Broadway in downtown Portland for the championship parade. Sometime thereafter, Freeman headed east toward one of Oregon’s most famous places – Multnomah Falls. We don’t know what led Freeman to those cliffs or even when he set off on his hike. Investigators believe that once he reached a log lying across the forest floor, he placed his aviator glasses on the wood and laid down to take a break.

He never got back up from that log.

[MUSIC FADES]

[REGAN AND DAVE ON PHONE CALL]

DAVE KILLEN: One thing sort of unique in your reporting is that this is the one case where you actually were able to talk to family members. You generally haven’t been able to see these beyond what’s on a police report or through the eyes of investigators, but being able to talk to actual family must have been a pretty significant difference for you?

REGAN MERTZ: This is a story that needs those types of voices, that needs those family voices. Talking to Larry it was just kind of like, being more connected to Freeman in a way, being more connected to these cases. Whole lives have passed, like Jeffrey Pape for example, I think he was in the first few years of his career, and Freeman wasn’t identified until after he had retired. So just the fact that like Larry was still keeping Freeman’s story in mind, and you know connecting through genetic genealogy and family trees, it was just kind of full circle for me as an outside perspective

DAVE KILLEN: Yeah you get to have little details, gives you a little bit more of an impression of what someone was like, just fills in their identity

REGAN MERTZ: Yeah, I mean you can read what someone looks like all day long, or what they were wearing, or y’know, how they got these samples, but it’s definitely not the same as having someone directly related to them

DAVE KILLEN: Yeah, that sort of oral history.

REGAN MERTZ: Yeah.

[MUSIC FADES]

DAVE KILLEN: Getting to know Freeman’s family was a gratifying experience for the investigators, too.

REGAN MERTZ: After they kept digging into his history, they learned that he had not been forgotten.

NICI VANCE: And the story that emerged was just this rich family history of a really tight knit wonderful family that had come from different portions of the US. But what emerged was that there was one brother that just hadn’t been heard of for a while, and our genealogists, again, were just stellar in finding all of this corroborating information. A lot of it is science, but a lot of it is, as you said, humanity, we’ve got people reaching out to family members talking to them compassionately over the phone, you know, giving them really tough information, like we think perhaps your brother might be in the morgue, you know, in Portland. But we’ve got to be able to confirm that somehow. And you know, and Freeman Asher Jr.’s case, that entire family just stepped up to the plate and said, what can we do to help? And so we did collect some DNA samples from a couple of the family members, we were able to confirm that this was in fact, their sibling.

REGAN MERTZ: In January 2021, Freeman finally returned to his family.

NICI VANCE: So we were able to give that back to the family. And it’s a very small thing. And it’s a sad thing to be able to, to give that back. But I think of it as dignity also. Here’s this man who just needed his name back and needed to be back with his family. And we were able to do that. So it’s it’s a small victory, but I think a victory nonetheless.

DAVE KILLEN: Although it’s one victory out of many cold cases, investigators could not answer all the questions the case posed: Why was Freeman hiking in that spot? Exactly when had he died? What did the letters “NT” mean on his hat? Freeman’s case is officially closed since there was no evidence of a crime.

REGAN MERTZ: Too much time had passed to determine a cause of death, and his bones revealed no trauma. Freeman never married or had children. But he got his name back. And his family knows his fate.

[MUSIC FADES]

REGAN MERTZ: Next time on The Unidentifieds we take a final look at the cases we’ve explored in this podcast, talk more with Freeman’s family, and wonder what the future may hold for genetic genealogy and unidentified remains cases in the state of Oregon.

DAVE KILLEN: The Unidentifieds is a production of The Oregonian and OregonLive. Regan Mertz reported remotely from Missouri. The podcast was edited by me, Dave Killen, alongside Andrew Theen, Teresa Mahoney and Karly Imus.

Thanks to Makenna Bach for the theme music. You can find more Oregonian podcasts at oregonlive.com/podcasts. If you liked this project give us a 5-star rating in Apple podcasts and leave us a review. Thanks for listening.

[MUSIC FADES]

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– Andrew Theen and Regan Mertz