On Dec. 7, 1958, Ken and Barbara Martin of Portland, Ore., took their three daughters on a family trip through the mountains en route to collect Christmas greenery. They stopped at a gas station near Cascade Locks, Ore., on the banks of the Columbia River, but were never heard from again.
The case of the Martin family’s disappearance has bewildered local residents and investigators for more than 66 years — until Friday.
Acting on a tip from a diver, the authorities spent two days dredging up parts of a car in Cascade Locks that they believe is the Martins’ 1954 red and off-white Ford station wagon — potentially bringing at least part of the mystery of their disappearance to a close.
Shortly after the family’s disappearance, the authorities speculated that their car might have gone over a cliff near the city of Cascade Locks, plunging into the Columbia River in an isolated area, The Associated Press reported at the time.
But there were no immediate answers, even in 1959, after the authorities recovered the bodies of two of the three Martin daughters in the river: Virginia, 13, and Sue, 11, who were found 25 miles apart. Barbara, 14, and her mother and father, ages 48 and 54, were nowhere to be found.
The investigation eventually stalled, and little happened over nearly six decades. Then, in 2018, Archer Mayo, a diver from across the river in White Salmon, Wash., who is obsessed with recovering items from rivers and solving mysteries, began searching for the Martins’ Ford. Two years ago, after becoming interested in the case, he started looking in the area of the obsolete 19th-century Cascade Locks, which had once allowed steamboats to pass through the river about 40 miles east of Portland.
After constructing a diorama of the locks and modeling water displacement using rice, Mr. Mayo said, he had a solid hunch that a pit at the base of the locks was the car’s final resting place.
In November, he dived 50 feet into the river and found several cars there. Using a vacuum dredger, he dug out one car that matched the Martins’, Mr. Mayo, 56, said in an interview.
Mr. Mayo alerted the authorities about that car two weeks ago. The Hood River County Sheriff’s Office led a recovery operation. On Thursday and Friday, commercial divers hired by the county used a crane to recover the frame, engine and other parts from the car, which was lodged upside-down in the pit.
The car parts will be sent to a state crime lab to confirm that the car is indeed the Martins’, according to a sheriff’s deputy, Pete Hughes.
“It’s encased in rock and debris from the river for 66 years,” Deputy Hughes said.
Even if the authorities confirm the car is the Martins’, it is still unclear what happened to the family. Did the car end up in the Columbia River because of an accident? Was foul play involved? And what happened to Ken and Barbara Martin and their daughter Barbara, whose bodies were never recovered?
“It won’t be quick,” Deputy Hughes said of the investigation. “Our biggest goal here is to try to bring some closure.”
Relatives of the Martins, who were contacted by investigators, are not interested in speaking to the news media about the investigation, according to Deputy Hughes.
“It’s big local lore around here,” said Ian Costello, Mr. Mayo’s spokesman, adding that onlookers stopped along the riverbanks to watch the dredging operation. “It is certainly well remembered around here, and in the last couple days, at the top of everyone’s mind.”