Remains found in Oregon identified as 19-year-old missing for 50 years

Nearly 50 years after a logging crew discovered a skull and scapula near Williams, Oregon, Oregon State Police announced on Tuesday that investigators had identified the remains as a Montana teenager who disappeared in the 1970s.

Mark Smith, 19, of Billings, Montana, went missing while traveling in 1974. Loggers found the partial skeletal remains four years later, police said.

When a forensic pathologist and odontologist examined the skull and scapula, they came to the erroneous conclusion that they belonged to a 16- to 18-year-old girl, police said.

With few viable leads to identify the remains, the investigation largely went fallow for more than 40 years — until Oregon’s Medical Examiner’s Office decided to try taking advantage of new technology and sent the bones to a lab at the University of North Texas for DNA extraction in 2020. This led to the discovery that the remains belonged to a male.

Despite the revelation, it took an additional six years for the medical examiner’s office, the Josephine County Sheriff’s Office, scientists at DNA Labs International and other investigators to identify Smith’s family as a potential match and then confirm through cheek swabs with Smith’s siblings that they were in fact related to the bones found in 1978, police said.

Police said that Smith’s sister told the medical examiner after her brother was identified that she and her family had thought of Smith every day since his disappearance.

There’s no evidence of foul play in Smith’s death, police said, but the investigation into what happened to him remains open.

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