In October 1974 a 19-year-old woman was abducted near Lacamas Lake in Clark County, Washington, raped and left for dead. She survived and helped detectives find the man who had attacked her. He was Warren Leslie Forrest, a Clark County Parks Department worker who lived in Battle Ground with his wife and two young daughters. Investigators took an air pistol from his home that month. Forty years later, that pistol would put him on trial for a second murder.
Forrest was born on June 29, 1949. The Columbian has described him as a Vancouver native and an Army veteran. In the early 1970s he worked for the county parks department, and according to The Chronicle he had explored the remote Dole Valley in eastern Clark County many times. When he was arrested in 1974, he was married with two daughters, a fact a parole board member confirmed with him at a hearing in 2022.
Retired investigator Doug Maas, who was first assigned to the case in 1974, told KPTV in 2024 that "the disappearances in this string of cases ended on the day that he was arrested."
Krista Kay Blake, of Vancouver, was last seen on July 11, 1974, climbing into Forrest's light blue Ford Econoline van near downtown Vancouver. Reports give her age as 19 or 20. Her remains were found in 1976 on Tukes Mountain, east of Battle Ground.
By then Forrest had been tried on the Lacamas Lake attack. KOIN reported that he pleaded insanity at that first trial, and he was later a patient at Western State Hospital. It was there, in 1978, that detectives arrested him and charged him with first-degree murder in Blake's death. He was convicted in 1979 and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.
At parole hearings he has since spoken of kidnapping and killing her. He has denied killing the two young women whose remains were found in Dole Valley in 1974.
Two women who survived Forrest are part of the record. One is the 19-year-old from Lacamas Lake, identified in court records only by a letter. The other is Norma Countryman, now known as Norma Jean Lewis. In July 1974, at 15, she was sitting by a road in Ridgefield when a blue van pulled up. She has said Forrest abducted her and tied her to trees on Tukes Mountain, and that she broke free. Forrest was never charged over her abduction. In 2023 she testified against him. "So many of those young girls, their parents died without knowing what happened to their daughters," she told KOIN.
On October 12, 1974, a member of a hunting party found human remains in densely wooded Dole Valley. Nearby, about 100 feet away, were the remains of Carol Platt Valenzuela, who had been missing for about two months after setting out hitchhiking. Valenzuela was identified. The second young woman was not.
She was Martha Morrison, a 17-year-old from Portland who had gone missing in the late summer of 1974. Her father had reported her missing, but the report was lost. Her disappearance went unrecorded until January 2010, when her half-brother, Michael Morrison, contacted police in Eugene, Oregon. Using DNA from him, from a sister and from their father's exhumed body, investigators identified her on July 7, 2015. Ted Bundy and Randall Woodfield had both been considered at one time as persons of interest in her disappearance.
In 2014 Clark County cold case investigators sent physical evidence from Forrest's earlier cases to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory. On the air pistol from the Lacamas Lake case, scientists found a partial DNA profile from an unknown woman. In November 2015 it was matched to Morrison. A forensic scientist later testified that the probability of a chance match was 1 in 30 billion. Forrest had admitted using that weapon in the Lacamas Lake attack.
Prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder in December 2019. He was returned from the state prison at Walla Walla in early 2020, and a judge set bail at $5 million. The pandemic pushed the trial back several times.
The trial opened in Clark County Superior Court in January 2023 before Judge Robert Lewis. Prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses over six days. Prosecutor Lauren Boyd argued that the DNA, together with Forrest's pattern of abducting young women and leaving them in rural Clark County in 1974, proved the killing was planned. "It's not a mistake that Martha's blood is on the grip of this gun," she told the jury. Defense attorney Sean Downs called Morrison and Forrest "perfect strangers" and argued that the state had not proved when, where or how she died. "It's just unknown, so we're left to speculate," he said.
On February 1, 2023, the jury found Forrest guilty of first-degree murder after about 90 minutes. On February 17 he was sentenced to a second life term. Michael Morrison said his mother had asked him on her deathbed to find Martha. "This isn't about just killing Martha," he said, "it's about all the rest of us that have had to deal with this for years and years." He told Forrest it was time to let the other families know where their daughters are.
Forrest became eligible for parole long ago and has applied repeatedly. In 2017 the Indeterminate Sentence Review Board denied release and added years to his term. At a hearing in May 2022, while the Morrison charge was pending, he said "deviant fantasies" had distracted him from feeling worthless and hopeless and had "led me to my crimes." He said such thoughts had dwindled to "next-to-nothing" and apologized: "I'm sorry for all the pain that I've created." Asked about other killings, he said his attorney had told him not to comment on "unadjudicated crimes."
In June 2022 the board found that he "does not appear to have good insight into the reason why he committed the murder." It noted that he still scored as a high concern for sexual assault despite completing a sex offender treatment program in 2014, and added 10 years to his earliest release date. Starr Lara, the sister of Jamie Grissim, took part in the 2022 hearing, and a board member thanked her for having "hung in there for your sister."
The Clark County Sheriff's Office lists Forrest as the suspect in five more cases from 1971 to 1974. He has not been charged in any of them, and he denies them.
Jamie Grissim, 16, left her foster home in December 1971 to go to class at Fort Vancouver High School and was never seen again. Her wallet and school identification were found in May 1972 beside a road in Dole Valley. Barbara Ann Derry, 18, was last seen hitchhiking on State Route 14 in February 1972; her body was found the next month in a silo at the Cedar Creek Grist Mill. Diane Gilchrist, 14, left her home in downtown Vancouver in May 1974 and has never been found. Gloria Nadine Knutson, 19, went missing that May while walking home from downtown Vancouver; her remains were found near Lacamas Lake in 1978. Carol Platt Valenzuela was found beside Martha Morrison in Dole Valley in October 1974.
In 2024 Sheriff John Horch reestablished a cold case team for these cases, and Maas came out of retirement to join it. Maas said he had found about 70 hairs collected from Forrest's van in the 1970s and that investigators planned to send them for DNA testing. "We can finally say Warren Forrest is a serial killer," he said. Sgt. Nieman, who heads the unit, called it "by far the most complicated of our cold cases." Grissim and Gilchrist are still missing. The sheriff's office asks anyone with information to call its cold case tip line at (564) 397-2036.
As of October 2026, Forrest, 77, is serving two life sentences. No further charges had been reported.