PORTLAND, Ore. \u2014 Valerie Nagle spent decades wondering what happened to her older sister who was last seen in Oregon in 1974. She searched online databases of unidentified persons cases looking for her and sent DNA to a popular ancestry website in the hopes of finding a match.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That all changed in June when authorities in Oregon called Nagle \u201cout of the blue\u201d to ask about comparing her DNA to a cold case known as \u201cSwamp Mountain Jane Doe,\u201d she said. Nagle\u2019s DNA ultimately helped confirm that the remains of a woman found near a mountain creek in Oregon\u2019s Central Cascades in 1976 were that of her sister, Marion Vinetta Nagle McWhorter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oregon State Police publicly released the news this week after the remains were identified in June.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI was very surprised that they called,\u201d Nagle, a 62-year-old who lives in Seattle, told The Associated Press. She was 11 when her sister went missing. \u201cI was really glad that they found me through DNA.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
McWhorter was last seen at a shopping mall in the Portland suburb of Tigard when she was 21.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was the oldest of five siblings, and Nagle was the youngest. Their mother was Alaska Native of the Ahtna Athabascan people, Nagle said, and her big sister had been named for an aunt who died in a boarding school for Indigenous children in Alaska in 1940.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
High rates of disappearances of Indigenous people, particularly women, have festered for generations amid inadequate public safety resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nagle, who lived in New York with her parents and one of her brothers at the time of her sister\u2019s disappearance, said her mother may have contacted authorities but that she wasn\u2019t sure of the exact extent of the efforts made by her parents to find her sister.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI mean, there were, you know, efforts to search, but it was limited,\u201d she said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have that much to go on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She does know her sister had come from California to Oregon with plans to continue on to Seattle and eventually Alaska when she called an aunt who lived near the Tigard shopping mall for a ride in October 1974 \u2014 but the aunt didn\u2019t end up meeting up with her, Nagle said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nearly 20 years later, the aunt shared another detail with Nagle: When McWhorter called her that day, she told her that a man in a white pickup truck had offered to give her a ride. It was unclear why her aunt waited that long to share that information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nagle said that when she learned this puzzle piece, she \u201cstarted in earnest with more searching,\u201d including by checking databases with unidentified persons cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI remember spending a lot of time on those pages, just scrolling through and trying to look,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2010, a bone sample from McWhorter\u2019s remains was sent to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, and a profile was created in the national missing persons database NamUs, state police said. An additional bone sample was submitted for DNA extraction in 2020, allowing for a unique genetic marker profile to be produced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2023, Nagle did a DNA test when she signed up for Ancestry, a genealogy company with a DNA database, hoping it would yield a clue about her sister, she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the breakthrough came in April when a first cousin once removed uploaded their genetic profile to FamilyTreeDNA, another genealogy company with a DNA database, Oregon State Police spokesperson Jolene Kelley said in an email Thursday. That allowed genealogists to get a better idea of McWhorter\u2019s family tree and led them to find that Nagle was a surviving family member.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis case was cold for 49 years. That means that family members lived and died without ever knowing what happened to their missing loved one,\u201d State Forensic Anthropologist Hailey Collord-Stalder said in a statement, adding that McWhorter \u201clikely did not go missing voluntarily.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Linn County Sheriff\u2019s Office is working to determine the circumstances of McWhorter\u2019s death, state police said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Nagle, an important piece of the puzzle is solved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI never forgot about her,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n