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The disappearance of five members of the Martin family in 1958 has become one of Oregon’s most baffling cold cases that has many theories & suspects involved & remains unsolved to this day. What began as a fun, Sunday holiday outing ended in mystery when the family vanished after they set out from their Portland, Oregon home on December 7, 1958 in their 1954 station wagon. That day, they intended to spend time together while gathering some greenery for holiday decorations, but they were never seen alive again. The detective who assisted in the investigation felt sure that the family’s deaths were not accidental, but instead, homicide.
The search for the Martin family became the largest manhunt the state had ever conducted. Despite the manpower & long list of potential suspects & clues, investigators were unable to solve this case.
The Martin family consisted of husband & father, 54-year-old Ensign Kenneth “Ken” Martin, his wife & mother of their children, 48-year-old Barbara & their four children, 28-year-old Donald, 14-year-old Barbara “Barbie”, 13-year-old Virginia & 11-year-old Susan. Ken & Barbara had been married since November 28, 1929 & had recently celebrated their 29th wedding anniversary.
The family of six lived at 1715 NE 56th Ave in Portland, Oregon in a two-story Tudor-style home on a street that came to be known as Candy Lane. It earned the charming nickname since during the Christmas holidays, the homes were often decorated & the neighbors enjoyed spreading Christmas cheer amongst each other. The Martin family were well-liked & active members within their community.
Each year Ken Martin played Santa Claus for the neighborhood children & handed out homemade candy cane decorations. The family was also known to organize summer activities such as Kool-Aid stands, parades & talent contests. By 1958, the family household of six had become five after Donald, the eldest of the Martin children, was stationed in the Navy in New York.
Concern for the Martin family’s well being began on the morning of Monday, December 8, 1958 when not only had Ken failed to show up for work, but his three daughters were noted to be absent from school. By nightfall, when no one had seen or had been able to reach the family, the Multnomah Police Department was contacted at about 9:30 pm.
Ken was a trusted & reliable employee at Eccles Electric Home Service Company where he supervised the repair department within the appliance company, so when he didn’t come in or contact his employer, they were immediately concerned. Ken was described as a cheerful, outgoing man who stood at 5’10” & weighed about 200#. When coworkers were unable to reach Ken or Barbara & later learned from extended family members that the three girls hadn’t gone to school that day, Ken’s boss, Taylor Eccles, reported him missing & a search for the family began.
Authorities began by tracing the family’s last known footsteps & learned that the Martins had attended a holiday party in Beaverton, Oregon on Saturday, December 6.
The following day, Sunday, December 7, Barbara’s cousins, the Evans family, stopped by the Martin home at about 10:30 am & invited them to Sunday dinner. Ken declined the invitation explaining that since the day was so beautiful, they planned to take a family drive through the countryside to gather greenery so they could assemble Christmas wreaths & other festive decorations for their house.
According to neighbor’s accounts, the Martin family left their home in their 1954 cream & red Ford Country Squire station wagon on Sunday, December 7 sometime between 1:30-2 pm.
When the Martin home was searched at 11 pm on the Monday they were reported missing, it was clear that the family hadn’t anticipated being gone for an extended period of time. There was no sign of a disturbance & a load of laundry remained in the washing machine while meat was thawing on the countertop. Dishes from the morning of the departure sat in a drying rack in the kitchen & a substantial amount of money remained in the Martin’s bank account.
Strangely, neighbors of the family reported seeing a black taxi parked outside the Martin home on Monday, December 8, the day after they vanished. After it pulled up at 7:20 am, it remained there for an hour & drove away.
Oregon State Police as well as Multnomah County Police began their search forty miles east of Larch Mountain after they were informed that the family would have likely gone to look for Christmas greenery in this location. However, two weeks after the family vanished, Ken’s sister Charlotte was at the Martin home checking the mail when she came across a letter. Inside she found a receipt from a gas station that runs along highway 84 & the Columbia River in Cascade Locks, 20 miles east of Larch Mountain, that proved that Ken had stopped to purchase 5 gallons of gas on the Sunday they went missing.
When an investigator spoke with Dean Baxter, an attendant from the gas station in question, he indicated that the family stopped for gas at about 4 pm.
Clara York, a waitress who worked at the Paradise Snack Bar in Hood River came forward & indicated that she served the family mostly hamburgers & french fries sometime between 4-4:30 pm. This location was about 60 miles (96 km) east of their home in Portland. She clearly recalled her interaction with the family since business had been slow on that Sunday afternoon.
According to Clara, other than the Martin family of five, there were only two other customers in the restaurant at the time, two men who sat in a booth not far from the family. She noticed that when the family left, the men followed closely behind & headed in the direction of Portland, the same direction the Martin family had gone.
Investigators also heard from Kelsey & Doris Knutson, who were a middle-aged couple out sightseeing that day, recalled seeing what they believed to be the Martin’s station wagon at about 4:30 pm driving west from the area of the Paradise Snack Bar. They later passed the same car at dusk & told investigators that it was parked under the Bridge of the Gods in Cascade Locks. They indicated that two young men were standing next to the car, speaking with the passengers inside. They continued on in the direction of Portland & didn’t see the car again.
Two other witnesses saw two cars near each other, one was a light colored station wagon with a Christmas tree in the back & there was a darker colored car parked beside it. A truck driver reported seeing two cars & indicated that the following day, December 8, he also noticed an abandoned white Chevy.
Police received additional phone calls on December 8 regarding the abandoned white Chevy along highway 84, just east of Cascade Locks, near where the Martin family had gotten gas, parked along a small area that jutted out over the Columbia River known as Trotter Point.
Authorities found the 1951 Chevy sedan with the keys in the ignition & gas in the tank. It was eventually towed away on December 18 & was later determined that the car had been stolen by ex-con, Lester Kenneth Price, who had stolen it from a friend in Venice, California.
Police thought back to Clara York’s statement about the Martin’s visit to the Paradise Snack Bar when she reported that two men had been in the restaurant at the same time & departed shortly after the Martins left. The restaurant owner just so happened to recognize the men & identified them as ex-cons, Lester Kenneth Price & Roy Light. They later learned that Roy Light was an alias for Richard Allen Hunt.
Investigators began to wonder if the two men were involved in whatever happened to the missing family. They were in the same diner as the family, left shortly after they left & headed in the same direction. The car they’d stolen had been abandoned on the road where the family had seemingly vanished. At this point, investigators were unable to find a connection between the men & the Martin family.
Sometime in early January, about a month after the family went missing, an amateur sleuth named Donald Bain found a vital clue in the investigation. Bain was walking between Highway 84 & the Columbia River in The Dalles, the largest city in Wasco County, Oregon, when he noticed tire tracks that led straight off the bluff & dropped 20 feet down to the river that at this point, had a depth of 100 feet.
Not only did investigators determine that the tracks matched those from the Martin’s car, but they also located cream colored paint chips on the rocks below. After the paint chips were sent off to the FBI crime lab, it was confirmed that they were from the same make, model & paint scheme from the Martin’s car.
Because the location was isolated & far-removed from the road, it’s highly unlikely that the tracks suggested an accident.
Efforts to search this portion of the river failed when two officers, Fred Pearce & Ard Pratt, made the decision that the area was too dangerous to send divers in. Detective Walter Graven with Multnomah County found this odd after he was told by divers that the area was actually no issue for any experienced diver.
Evidence made Walter Graven fully believe that the Martin family had been met with foul play while other investigators concluded that the family likely plunged off the side of the bluff in nothing more than a tragic accident.
Only a few weeks after the tire tracks were discovered, a man named Theodore Hellyer was in the area where the Chevy had been abandoned when a silver glimmer under a rock caught his eye. As he looked more closely, he found a bloodied .38 automatic pistol. Of the 9 chambers, only one bullet had been discharged & the casing remained in the gun which can happen if someone holds the top of the gun while it’s fired. The dried blood on the butt of the gun suggested that someone had likely been beaten with it.
When Hellyer handed the gun over to investigators, they didn’t believe it had any connection to the Martin family. After it was cleaned, the gun was handed back to Hellyer, never being processed as evidence.
It wasn’t until later that investigators realized the gun’s significance when, in an uncanny twist, after the gun’s serial number was traced, investigators determined that it was connected to the lone surviving member of the family, Donald Martin. The gun originated from the Portland department store, Meier & Frank & had been the very gun Donald was accused of stealing from the store when he worked in the sporting goods department in 1954, four years before his family vanished.
With this discovery, Detective Walter Graven speculated that Donald may have somehow been involved in whatever happened to his family. He never traveled back to Oregon from New York to help assist with the search efforts, claiming that his aunt Charlotte had discouraged him from doing so. However, when Charlotte was spoken with, she denied this claim & admitted that she herself found it odd that he never went to help find his family.
It wasn’t until March 1959 that Donald traveled back to Oregon to settle the family estate & meet with Detective Graven. Being the sole living member of his family, Donald was the sole beneficiary of the estate which included a $14,000 double indemnity life insurance policy, meaning the policy would pay out double the face amount if the insured died in an accident. With the addition of several other life insurance policies, Donald received a payout that amounted to somewhere around $36,000 which in 2025 would be equivalent to just under $400,000.
Donald informed investigators that while he was getting the estate in order, he noticed that some important documents had been missing such as income tax returns & a bank ledger book. When he spoke with detective Graven he indicated, 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.
During his investigation, detective Graven came to learn of Donald’s troubled past which tied into the gun that was located near the abandoned Chevy. Four years earlier he had been fired from his job at Meier & Frank for stealing over $2,000 worth of merchandise which in 2025 is equivalent to just under $22,000. This included a .38 Colt Commander pistol, the very pistol that Theodore Hellyer found.
After Donald confessed to his crime back in 1954, he told his boss that he’d taken the money because he had been going through a difficult time. His strained relationship with his parents only further deteriorated after he confided in them about his homosexuality.
Donald had allegedly referred to his mother as a fat slob & voiced that his father wasn’t much better. He vocalized that he was worried his sisters would follow in their parent’s footsteps. Detective Graven’s report indicated that Donald’s issues continued after his move to New York where he was again accused of theft. He was also actively seeing a psychiatrist in the city.
Later review of Walter Graven’s notes showed that he’d written, had to be planned by —. The last word had been scratched out while his notes continued to read, no one else with motive. After computer enhancement was utilized, it was determined that the name scratched out within the notes was Donald. It’s unclear as to why he would have scratched the name out. Despite his beliefs, Graven had few resources to further investigate the Martin family’s disappearance as other members of law enforcement believed that they had likely met their demise after accidentally driving off the side of the cliff. Within his notes, Graven wrote, Even though I can get no cooperation from anyone, there is no murder that can’t be solved.
On May 1, 1959, nearly five months after the Martin family seemingly vanished, a barge was anchoring in the area of the bluff in The Dalles where it’s suspected the family’s car plummeted off the side. After the anchor was dropped, deckhands realized it was hooked on a heavy object. A deckhand reached down into the water with a pole & struck a large metal object. Despite the fact that the men on board were unaware of the Martin family, they speculated that they likely hooked a car.
As the anchor was raised, it unfortunately became dislodged from the object before it could lift it to the surface. After the heavy object broke free, the deckhands saw two objects floating to the water’s surface that they described as bundles of clothing.
At 6 am on the following morning, May 2, Ellery Colby & his wife were fishing near the Cascade Locks when they noticed what appeared to be two small bodies floating down the river in a location 40 miles from where the barge hooked the large metal object.
Over the course of the next two days, authorities went on to recover both bodies. On May 3, the body of 11-year-old Susan Martin was recovered in Camas Slough west of the Bonneville Dam near Cascade Locks & the following day, the body of 13-year-old Virginia Martin was recovered further upriver. Dental records proved their identities.
Authorities believed that the barge hooked the Martin’s car which caused it to overturn & dislodged one of the doors or broke a window which caused Virginia & Susan’s bodies to surface. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were said to have lowered the level of the lake behind the Bonneville Dam by five feet while utilizing sonar technology, but found no sign of the car.
Their bodies were said to have been relatively well preserved due to the frigid temperatures of the deep depths of water that had become their resting place for five months. The autopsies proved that both girls had consumed a hamburger & french fries within two hours of their deaths. Since they left the diner at about 4:30 pm, they would have died no later than 6:30 pm.
Their cause of deaths were listed as probable drowning. However, a report was located from a Multnomah County identity technician, Russell Bissett, who took fingerprints & photos of Virginia Martin’s body. In regards to photograph six, he noted, Showing head with hole in head. This was later disproved when the medical examiner, Dr. Waterman’s report stated that no such injury was present.
Donald Martin was not in attendance at his sister’s memorial services on May 23, 1959, claiming that he’d gotten the dates confused. Virginia & Susan went on to be cremated but their remains sadly remained unclaimed for another decade despite the fact that they had family in the area. In 1969 someone finally claimed them, but it’s unclear who.
Graven’s reports often mentioned the name Wayne, whose last name was never released to the public. Wayne & Donald Martin met in 1953 while they worked together at Meier & Frank, formed a friendship & became roommates.
During an interview in 2008, Wayne indicated that Donald’s parents were unaware of the fact that their son was gay, but then contradicted this with another story. He indicated that while Ken & Barbara were out, Donald invited another man over to the family home & his parents came back early & caught them together. Because Ken & Barbara were unhappy with their son’s sexual orientation, they made the decision to send Donald to a Christian college in Connecticut but Donald joined the Navy instead.
According to Wayne, he knew the Martin family very well. During his time working as a PE teacher at Cascade Locks High School in 1958, Wayne became acquainted with later known ex-cons, Lester Kenneth Price & Richard Allen Hunt. Because Wayne was acquainted with the men, Donald was also familiar with Price & Hunt. Now with a known connection, it’s been theorized that Donald supplied the men with the gun he’d stolen from Meier & Frank & provided them with information of his family’s whereabouts in order to facilitate murder.
Another theory was that 14-year-old Barbie was pregnant at the time of her death & Graven speculated that perhaps Wayne was the father since he spent a lot of time with the Martin family. During the fall Barbie saw a doctor in Vancouver, Washington rather than visiting her standard pediatrician. Shortly after the family vanished, Wayne got married & moved away.
Walter Graven retired in 1966 & until his death in 1988, he remained haunted by the Martin family investigation. He fully believed that had the family’s car as well as the remains of Ken, Barbara & Barbie been located, the case could have been solved. Graven wrote in his notes that the case will be solved if I live long enough for the car & bodies to be found.
According to Gloria Graven, Walter Graven’s daughter, her father assumed that Ken had likely been shot while Barbara & the three girls had been knocked out before the family car was pushed over the side of the cliff into the deep depths of the river. This theory is based on the gun that was located which indicated it had been fired at least one, the handle bloodied as if from striking a victim or victims.
Donald Martin passed away on October 8, 2004 after he married & had four children of his own in Oahu, Hawaii. His children indicated that he rarely if ever spoke of his family or the circumstances around their disappearances.
Richard Allen Hunt went on to be placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for unrelated charges of robbery, assault & check forgery. He was ultimately arrested in Wyoming & waived his right to a trial before a grand jury. In 1959 he was sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted of an assault with intent to kill. This charge was later vacated after it was deemed to be too severe a punishment for the crime committed. He was resentenced to fourteen years in prison but released in 1968.
Nearly seventy years have passed since the Martin family vanished, their car somehow plunging over a cliff yet there are still no answers as to what happened on that fateful day that led to the deaths of the five members of the Martin family.
Greg Graven, Detective Walter Graven’s grandson, is following in his grandfather’s footsteps & is now the chief of the Yamhill Police Department. Greg grew up surrounded by the Martin case & his grandfather’s case notes.
Before his passing, Graven gave his notes to Jay Waterbury with The Dalles PD & it is his goal that the Martin car be recovered & processed for potential evidence. With the recovery of the car, the hope is that Ken, Barbara & Barbie’s bodies will also be recovered. Perhaps the car & the remains of the three missing family members may hold the answers as to what happened on the fateful evening of December 7, 1958. Was it a tragic car accident or something far more sinister?
References:
- Newspapers.com – The Palm Beach Post: Martin family disappearance still has Portland baffled
- nwLaborPress.org: Let me say this about that
- KOIN: Martin family’s 1958 disappearance remains a mystery
- Wikipedia: Martin family disappearance
- Heart Stops Pounding: Beneath the icy depths: The mysterious disappearance of the Martin family
- Reddit: Fair play or foul: The unexplained deaths of the Martin family (December 1958)
- Medium: The Martin family disappearance: Oregon’s most baffling cold case
