Washington investigators have relaunched an intensive cold case probe of a 75-year-old convicted killer in the suspected murder of at least five young women stretching back 50 years.
The Clark County in Washington team is reexamining blood and hair collected at various scenes using more sophisticated forensics techniques than existed when the teenage women were killed.
Suspect Warren Forrest is already serving two life sentences for the murders of two women. He was convicted in 1978 in the death of 20-year-old Krista Kay Blake and found guilty last year in the murder of 17-year-old Martha Morrison.
He’s now suspected in the murder of at least five teenagers between 1974 and 1978, who were killed or vanished in Clark County.
Forrest worked for the Clark County Parks Department at the time and lived in the nearby community of Battle Ground with his wife and two daughters. He was first arrested in 1974 after a 19-year-old told police that Forrest had kidnapped, raped and attempted to murder her near a lake.
“All I had in mind was a distraction and the distraction was, you know, deviant fantasies,” Forrest reportedly told officials. “And the deviant fantasies distracted me from my everyday life. But then it led me to my crimes.”
Each of the cases of the missing or murdered women “share common characteristics, including similar victim profiles, the locations of the disappearances and the methods involved in the crimes,” said a statement from the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.
Besides reexaming physical evidence collected when the victims vanished or were killed, investigatos are “also trying to track down additional witnesses or leads that were never fully developed during the decades of investigation … to see if there’s additional information out there,” investigator Fred Neiman Jr. told Portland’s KOIN-TV.
“This is by far the most complicated of our cold cases that we have,” he added.
Starr Lara was a young teen when her sister, Jamie Grissim, disappeared in 1971. She still struggles with the loss and fights to keep her sibling’s memory alive.
“I was 14 and I had no idea what happened,” she told the TV station. “I used to write her letters. I’d buy her birthday presents, Christmas presents, you know, I want to make sure she knew I hadn’t forgotten about her.”
