Human Remains Found on Willamette Island are Female

The remains appear to be of an elderly female with a height between 5'3" and 5'6".

Salem-News.com

(SALEM, Ore.) - Deputies learned May 11th that human remains were discovered on an island in the Willamette River. Commander Jason Myers with the Marion County Sheriff's Office, says the human skeletal remains were located by a kayaker who stopped on the small island that occupies a section of the river between Salem and Independence, Oregon.

Deputies confirmed that the remains were in fact human, and now the initial forensic testing has revealed new information.

The primary part of the discovery that yielded the information according to Myers, was a femur bone. The limited amount of remains recovered did not reveal any cause of death.

"At this juncture I can only say that we had enough information to determine that it is a female and get an approximate age."

Myers says the remains, "appear to be of an elderly female with a height between 5'3" and 5'6". This information was obtained by State Medical Examiner's Office Forensic Anthropologist through measurements of a femur bone."

Like many cases, the discovery at this point has led to more questions than answers, about how the woman may have ended up there. Myers says the testing by the anthropologist did not confirm the nationality on the person, "Sometimes they can tell, unfortunately with this case they couldn't," he added.

"There are further forensic tests being conducted with the remains, but at this time there is no additional identifying or cause of death information available."

I asked Myers if there are missing person cases involving women in that age category that they are looking at. "A detective is working on that right now. We don't know, there are several missing person cases that he is looking at, and a lot of leads are coming in that Detective Myers is investigating."

One place journalists and other people spend time to get familiar with missing persons cases, is the doenetwork.org which is a fantastic local, national and international resource for missing people and for the identification of discovered remains.

Another valuable resource for police and the public is found at coldcasecenter.com/cold_cases.htm. On this site like the Doe Network, you can also contribute information. In this particular case, any persons or agencies having information should direct questions to Detective Mike Myers with the Marion County Sheriff's Office at 503-540-8007.

To see the work that is being conducted locally, an ideal Website to visit is the page for the Marion County Cold Case Team. Along with Detective Mike Myers and others in the County Homicide unit, these dedicated professionals who hail from a variety of law enforcement backgrounds, (see: From the files of the Cold Case Squad) have made serious breakthroughs in the resolution of old murder cases in the local area, demonstrating that the statute of limitations on capitol crimes does indeed have no limitations.

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It is brief, but you can also see the original release from May 12th 2008: Skeletal Human Remains Found on Island in Willamette River

Here are links to Salem-News.com articles about the Marion County Cold Case arrests:

Edward Jeffery case, published February 13th 2007: Suspect in 1986 Salem Murder Arrested Sherry Eyerly case, published December 18th 2007: Suspect Arrested in 25-year old Disappearance of Sherry Eyerly