The Spooky Story Of The Martin Family Disappearance
McMinnville’s Third Street Books Some believe that Donald Martin (second from left) was involved in his family’s disappearance.
It was December 7, 1958, and Kenneth and Barbara Martin wanted to find greenery for Christmas decorations to furnish their home in Portland, Oregon. So, together with their three daughters, Barbara, Virginia, and Susan, they crammed into the family’s 1954 Ford Station Wagon and set out for the Columbia River Gorge. They would never be seen alive again.
The Martins had left home at 1 p.m. and planned to return by nightfall. They told their friends as much before leaving and were thus reported missing when they didn’t come back. While locals reported seeing the family at a gas station and a cafe before their disappearance, all clues led to dead ends.
A search of their home made the creepy story even more confusing. Police found laundry in the washing machine, dishes in the sink, and a lot of cash — signs that the family intended to return home again. So, when the Hood River Sheriff learned that Kenneth had stopped to get gas, and then spotted tire tracks leading from a parking area to a cliffside, he thought that Kenneth may have accidentally driven his car into the Columbia River.
But Multnomah County Detective Walter Graven kept investigating the spooky story. He found more tire tracks on a bluff leading into the Columbia River — and the tread was indeed a match with the tires on the family’s missing car. There were also paint chips on a nearby rock, which the FBI confirmed belonged to the same make and model of the Martins’ car.
However, unlike the Hood River Sheriff, Graven suspected that the family had been murdered. This is largely due to the fact that a local man had recently found a gun covered in blood near an abandoned stolen car — which was shockingly close to the area where the family had disappeared.
When cops found this stolen car, the thieves were identified as Roy Light and another man who wasn’t publicly named. And the owner of the cafe where the Martins dined that night said the two men were also there — and left at nearly the same time as the family. Incredibly, the thieves were never questioned about this. And the gun itself only complicated things further.
Graven was stunned to link the weapon to Donald Martin, the family’s son. While Donald had been living on the East Coast and working in the Navy during the time of the family trip, Graven soon discovered that Donald had been accused of stealing that gun from a store a few years earlier. And how it wound up near the site of his family’s disappearance was baffling.
It was also clear that Donald had a strained relationship with his family. He never rushed home to help find his missing relatives after they vanished, and he didn’t even drop by after the bodies of Susan and Virginia were recovered from the river in May 1959. (Disturbingly, Virginia had a hole in her head, but it was never confirmed by the coroner what caused it.)
Donald also skipped the memorial service for his sisters — and only traveled home in June to settle the family estate and meet with Graven. During the meeting, Donald said, “I know of no one who would murder my folks or no reason for it but I don’t see how it could have been an accident.” Graven saw Donald as a suspect, or at least a person of interest, but his bosses told him to leave the case alone — apparently sticking with the accident theory.
Privately, Graven remained obsessed with solving the case until his death in 1988 — in disbelief that the gun was never processed as evidence, the two men were never questioned, and Donald Martin never became an official suspect. And this spooky story remains unexplained to this day.
