It was a call forever burned into Lori Merriam’s memory.
It put to rest questions she had been asking all her life about who she was.
The 50-year-old Idaho woman had started searching for her father more than three decades ago and quickly discovered his name.
She put ads in the newspaper. She created a Facebook page. She reached out on Craigslist. But she never got a response.
The reason why became clear only recently in Oregon.
The call that tied it all together for Merriam came in August from an investigator at a forensic genetics company working on a cold case out of Coos County.
“I knew right away who she was once I looked her up,” Merriam told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “And if she’s calling me, that’s probably not the best news.”
She learned that unidentified remains found in 1971 in a Coos Bay marsh were those of her long lost father: Winston Maxey III, who was 15 when he disappeared.
He was identified through new DNA technology and genealogy detective work through a collaboration between the state Medical Examiner’s Office and the private genetics firm.
Merriam’s father had died just a few months after arriving in Oregon from Boise to look for work. His family hadn’t reported him missing, local detectives said. He never knew he had fathered a child, Merriam said.
The details have helped Merriam piece together the beginnings of her life.
“I hope (detectives) are able to help other families or other people out there, to bring closure to them to,” she said.
GROWING UP WONDERING
Merriam knew from a young age that she had been adopted as an infant. She grew up in Idaho, the oldest in her adoptive family with a brother and sister.
In 1988 when she was 17, Merriam took money she had saved for a ski trip in the European Alps and instead hired a private investigator to locate her birth parents.
In less than 24 hours, she tracked down her birth mother.
“When we met, everything kind of clicked and fell together,” Merriam said. “It was then she went, ‘I need to let you know who your dad is.’’”
Merriam learned she resembles her father. She has the same vibrant red hair and matching freckles. The shape of their mouths is similar.
Kaye, Merriam’s birth mother who asked to be identified only by her first name for privacy reasons, said she became pregnant after spending one night with Maxey.
Kaye was only 14 and didn’t think he would help her, she said. She decided to have the baby without telling him that he was the father and contacted an adoption agency.
She left the space blank on the birth certificate where it asked for the father’s name.
But when Merriam contacted her, Kaye told her that Maxey was her father but she had no idea where he was.
Merriam next found Maxey’s parents but they also didn’t know where their son was.
“She wanted to find her dad,” Kaye said. “I just told her all I knew about him and that he left somewhere. I didn’t know where he went.”
Merriam then spent years off and on posting classified ads in local Idaho newspapers looking for Maxey. She put her father’s disappearance on Craigslist with her contact information
In 2016, she created a Facebook page entitled, “Where in the world is Winston Maxey,” hoping someone would reach out. She posted inspirational quotes on the page and mulled where her father might be, if he had a family of his own and what he might be doing for work.
Merriam listed Maxey on a Facebook advocacy page for Idaho cold cases, with over 35,000 likes. In 2017, she was able to get Maxey listed with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
A year later, the Coos County Sheriff’s Office and the county medical examiner used a grant from the Oregon State Medical Examiner’s Office to exhume the remains of a young man found in Coos County. The state has been working to combat the backlog in cold cases over the years.
The DNA was registered through the NamUs database, a U.S. government database for remains and missing persons. The DNA was analyzed by Parabon Nanolabs of Reston, Virginia.
FINDING A FAMILY TREE
CeCe Moore, chief genetic genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs, received the DNA from Oregon officials and went to work.
The Coos County case is among 20 successful identity confirmations and six likely “solves” pending DNA confirmation handled by Parabon in Oregon, Moore said. Some of the cases have sprung from the company’s partnership with the Oregon Medical Examiner’s Office and Oregon State Police. Others have come from contract work directly with local police agencies, she said.
Moore has not only identified remains but also tracked down suspects in homicide cases.
Oftentimes, like in this case, the DNA is degraded or contaminated with bacteria. Parabon’s bioinfomatics scientists analyze the DNA to help develop a profile for Moore to use.
They then upload the profile to GEDmatch, a global DNA database that allows Moore to see hundreds of people who share segments of DNA with the profile.
It’s almost impossible to get an exact match with parents or siblings on the first run, so Moore uses the data to identify distant cousins and create a series of family trees to figure out possible links between them in a long process of elimination.
She built a little over two dozen family trees to try to pin down relatives of the Coos County case.
A big part of her role is to scour public records — obituaries, census records, marriage records, birth announcements and more — to locate common ancestors and track their descendants.
“The DNA is just a guide that points us toward certain families,” Moore said. “Most of the work is done in public records that everyone has access to.”
The young man found in Coos County appeared to have relatives from Tennessee and also a family of German descent, Moore said. From there, she noticed a route of family members moving to small towns in Idaho.
She discovered a Maxey couple that seemed promising – the mother had German ancestry and the father had connections to Tennessee.
“I started looking at all the sons of that family and the only one I couldn’t find today with a current address was Winston,” Moore said.
After a quick Google search of his name, Moore found him listed on the Idaho cold cases Facebook group. She saw comments Merriam had left mentioning Maxey as her father and discovered Merriam’s own Facebook page looking for her father.
Moore called Merriam. She told Merriam that she might have a match.
Merriam had done DNA testing many years ago and was able to email the results to Moore while they were on the phone. A quick upload of Merriam’s DNA provided the confirmation: Maxey was her father.
BIRTH FATHER REMAINS A MYSTERY
Coos County sheriff’s officials are now working with Maxey’s family in Idaho to produce a death certificate and return his remains to the family in Idaho.
They tracked down Maxey’s sister through Moore and the sister provided a DNA profile to legally confirm his identity.
Maxey’s family didn’t respond to a request for interviews for this story.
Merriam, now a counselor who works as a care navigator connecting clients with community resources, still is left with unanswered questions of how her father died. She has three children of her own, two biological and one adopted.
Merriam still is left with unanswered questions of how her father died.
Law enforcement officers found his body. He was partially dressed, with other clothes nearby. Police records from 1971 estimated he had been dead between five weeks to five months.
They could tell he was a teenager but that’s all, said sheriff’s Capt. Gabriel Fabrizio.
“As far as if it is a homicide or not, without further information, there’s really no way we can rule cause of death at all,” Fabrizio said.
Maxey apparently was estranged from his family and no one appeared to file a formal report of his disappearance, said Jason Patterson, the lead detective on the case.
That complicated the search for his identity as did the lack of Maxey’s name on Merriam’s birth certificate because she didn’t have a legal relationship with him. Local authorities didn’t accept Merriam’s standing to report her father as missing, despite having DNA records and her birth mother’s word, she said.
An official police report would have helped investigators find Maxey more quickly because it would have pointed detectives to Coos Bay and given a parent-child DNA match.
Despite all of this, Merriam has gotten a chance to build a relationship with her birth mother, Kaye. The two try to talk often and have met a few times in person.
Merriam also hopes to help others in a situation like hers by monitoring cold cases in Idaho, sharing her experience and advocating for authorities to more easily accept missing persons reports.
“There needs to be a way that someone like me or other people in similar circumstances can reach out to the police and say, ‘Hey this person is missing,’” she said.
