Clark County prosecutors’ case against suspected serial killer Warren Forrest hinges on DNA evidence found on the grip of a dart gun Forrest allegedly used in the 1974 slaying of 17-year-old Martha Morrison of Portland.
That dart gun might never have come to law enforcement’s attention if Forrest, 73, hadn’t allegedly used it to torture another woman nearly 40 years ago.
That woman — sexually assaulted, stabbed and left for dead — survived. And on Wednesday, the second day of testimony in what’s expected to be a three-week trial in Clark County Superior Court, she took to the stand to describe what happened to her.
The Oregonian/OregonLive is not identifying the woman because she was a victim of a sex crime.
“I was just amazed I wasn’t dead,” she said from the stand.
The woman’s testimony followed that of Norma Jean Lewis, 63, who took the stand Tuesday to describe how Forrest abducted and attacked her in July 1974 when she was 15. Prosecutors have set out to persuade a jury the brutal attacks fit Forrest’s pattern of luring young women and leaving them for dead in secluded, wooded areas of rural Clark County.
Forrest is already behind bars. He was convicted in 1979 and sentenced to life for the murder of 20-year-old Krista Kay Blake in 1974. But prosecutors contend they now have sufficient evidence to convict Forrest in the 1974 homicide of Morrison, a 17-year-old girl last seen in Portland by her boyfriend. Forrest has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in Morrison’s slaying.
In addition to Blake and Morrison, Forrest is suspected in the killing and disappearance of three other women in Clark County between 1971 and 1974: Jamie Grissim, 16, Barbara Derry, 18, and Carol Valenzuela, 18, court records show.
On the stand, the woman said she has physically not changed much since 1974. Her height and weight are about the same, and her long hair – now silver – is pulled into a braid trailing down her back.
But scars from five knife wounds – four on her chest and one on the side of her neck – are daily reminders of her encounter with Forrest, she said.
The woman said she was walking through Southwest Portland on Oct. 1, 1974, when Forrest approached her. He said he was a photographer and he offered to pay her $10 per hour to take her photos.
She agreed, and they got into his light blue Ford Econoline cargo-style van. Forrest started driving toward Washington Park but turned into a wooded area instead, she said. He asked her to help him get something out of the back of his van, where he jumped on top of her with a knife. The pair struggled for about a minute and Forrest tossed the knife aside.
“The next thing I remember is he was strangling me and I lost consciousness,” she said.
When the woman awoke, she was on her side in the back of the van, her pants were gone and her hands were tied behind her back. The car was moving.
Forrest noticed she was awake and trying to draw attention from other vehicles through the back window. He pulled off to the side of the road and bound her ankles, suspending them in the air by a rope attached to the van’s roof.
She could see from the windows that they were heading toward Camas, where her parents lived. He continued driving uphill on winding roads before turning into a wooden area, where he unlocked a swing gate and drove deeper into the woods, she said.
She would learn later he had taken her to Lacamas Park in Camas, an area where he sometimes worked in his job as a maintenance worker for the Clark County parks department.
He parked and entered the back of the van, where he ripped open the woman’s shirt, pulled a gun out of a box and pointed it at her. The woman said Forrest pulled the trigger repeatedly, but no bullets came out. Instead, darts flew into her chest and stomach.
“I must have been in shock because I didn’t feel a thing – I was just amazed I wasn’t dead,” she said.
Forrest pulled the darts off her, sexually abused her with a plastic bat and raped her.
He then tied a noose around her neck and pulled her deeper into the woods, where he sat her down on a log, yanked her onto the ground and pulled on the noose until she passed out.
When she awoke, Forrest was gone – along with all her clothes and the ropes around her neck and wrists. She was laying in a different part of the woods and was covered by narrow logs and branches. Blood was pouring from knife wounds in her chest and she could hardly breathe or move her neck.
The woman moved the debris and stood up, using wads of leaves to stanch the blood.
She stumbled uphill, stopping every few steps to catch her breath. She passed through the gate, which was now closed again, and made it up to the road where she collapsed. A car driven by two men stopped and rescued her and she was rushed to a Camas hospital.
Decades-old police photos of her injuries shown in court Wednesday depicted deep rope burns in the woman’s neck and wrists, injuries on her feet from walking shoeless through the woods, swollen and bloody eyes, bruises and scrapes over her body.
Police interviewed the woman at the hospital and later that day used her description to execute a search warrant at Forrest’s Battle Ground home where his van was parked, according to a probable cause affidavit by the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.
Officers found the woman’s purse and her photo ID, along with a plastic tube, rope and the dart gun.
Prosecutors charged Forrest with rape, robbery and first-degree assault in the Oct. 1, 1974 case. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and was committed to the Western State Hospital.
The dart gun remained in storage until June 2014, when the Clark County Sheriff’s Office conducted a review of unsolved cases and selected it for re-testing.
The pistol was delivered to a Washington State Patrol crime laboratory, where a forensic scientist tested a blood stain on the dart gun’s grip, in search of a DNA match. In November 2015, they had an answer.
The blood was Martha Morrison’s.
Forrest is suspected of killing Morrison in 1974 sometime between Sept. 1, when she disappeared from Portland, and Oct. 12, when a hunter found her remains in a densely wooded area of rural Clark County.
Sean Downs, Forrest’s attorney, said Monday that no evidence exists to indicate Forrest or Morrison knew each other or were ever seen together, and there’s no way of knowing, based on Morrison’s remains, how she died.
But Clark County prosecutors argue the DNA breakthrough – along with Forrest’s pattern of abducting and assaulting young women – is enough to prove he carried out a plan to kill Morrison.
The trial resumes Thursday.
