A small crowd of spectators and journalists gathered at the viewpoint at Washington State Historical Marker 19 on Friday to watch a long-awaited moment: the recovery of the car that was believed to be carrying the Martin family when they disappeared in the Columbia River Gorge decades ago.
On the Oregon side of the river that stretched below them, a salvage crane’s cable began to slither upwards out of the depths of the Cascade Locks canal around 3:45 p.m., carrying a remnant of the missing station wagon and, hopefully, evidence that will help close the case that stumped investigators and journalists for more than half a century.
In December 1958, Portlanders Ken and Barbara Martin and their three young daughters headed east in the family’s cream-colored Ford station wagon to find a Christmas tree. They never returned.
An intensive search of the region followed, turning up nothing.
A year later, two of the girls were found in the Columbia River, dead from drowning, near the Bonneville Dam.
Archer Mayo, the White Salmon diver who discovered the vehicle after a yearslong search, was holding his breath Friday as he and Hood River County Sheriff Matt English watched from a footbridge crossing the canal where the car had been hidden for years.
The operation, which started Thursday morning, had been marked with false starts, but the finish line felt only seconds away.
“I was right next to the sheriff and he was super nice to me, and he actually loaned me his binoculars,” Mayo said. “Once it pulled up, we were standing next to each other and really holding our breath.”
But the object that emerged from the water was a piece of black twisted metal — not an intact car.
“I was so crestfallen when it came up like that,” he said. “I needed to find my people, and I needed to get out of there.”
For a few minutes, the twisted chassis and engine of the car — which sheriff’s officials are reasonably certain belonged to the Martins’ station wagon — dangled over the Columbia River before it was wrapped in a blue tarp and carried away on a flatbed.
The sheriff’s office said in a statement that they did not find any human remains during the recovery.
“If they would have brought the car out showroom fresh and they had put it on the truck and taken it away, I would have tied this whole thing up with a bow, and it would have been magical,” Mayo told The Oregonian/OregonLive hours after the recovery of the chassis. “But the reality is … the river has forever been our sustainer and our competitor. You know, the river is a complicated thing.”
Mayo said that a few factors could have contributed to the car’s cabin separating from the chassis: For one, the 1950s car was built before manufacturers galvanized the steel used in auto manufacturing, he said. Without galvanization, he said that it wasn’t uncommon for cars to rust before 100,000 miles.
“Already, cars (from that period) weren’t meant to last,” he said. “And now you’re putting it in this crazy environment.”
He added that the sediment encasing the car was so dense when he found it that it was like concrete — creating another obstacle to freeing it from the channel bed intact.
But Mayo said he doesn’t hold any ill will towards the sheriff’s office, who he said “played their best cards for what they understood,” and he remains hopeful that the cabin — and any evidence inside — can still be recovered.
Had half the car body come up, that would have been worse because the rest of the pieces would have been scattered, he said. “The fact that just the running gear, the engines and the frame got pulled off actually leads me to believe that there’s an intact vessel with the evidence still in it.”
But efforts to recover the rest of the car are uncertain.
Sheriff’s office spokesperson Deputy Pete Hughes said in an email that “plans have not been determined yet” on a possible salvage operation in the future.
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