On October 1, 1974, a young woman shuffled down a dirt road near Lacamas Lake in Camas, Washington, repeating to herself: three steps, rest. She had been abducted, bound, raped, strangled, stabbed, shot with a dart gun and left under logs in the woods. She did not know where she was. She survived, and she 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-one years later, a speck of blood on that pistol would give a name to an unidentified girl and 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.
Little else about his early life has been made public. At a parole hearing in 2017 he described the period of his crimes as one of pressure: he was working two jobs, going to school and raising a family. "The only option I had was to distract myself," he said, "and I chose to live out those violent fantasies." In 2022 he told the board the fantasies had distracted him from feeling worthless and hopeless.
He drove a light blue Ford Econoline van. Retired investigator Doug Maas, who was first assigned to the case in 1974, said in 2024 that the abductions in the series shared features: girls and young women picked up on roads, several of them hitchhiking, and a pattern in how survivors and victims were treated and where they were left. "The disappearances in this string of cases ended on the day that he was arrested," Maas said.
The Clark County Sheriff's Office believes the series began in December 1971. Jamie Grissim, 16, lived in a foster home and attended Fort Vancouver High School. On December 7, 1971, she left school and never came home. Her sister, Starr Lara, said later, "I knew that day something really bad had happened." On May 1, 1972, Jamie's purse, school ID and other belongings were found beside Dole Valley Road east of Battle Ground. Her body has never been found.
In February 1972, Barbara Ann Derry, 18, of Goldendale, Washington, was staying in Vancouver. She often hitchhiked, and she was last seen hitchhiking along State Route 14. In March her body was found at the bottom of a wooden cistern near the old grist mill at Cedar Creek, near Amboy in northern Clark County, covered with boards and debris. Her death was ruled a homicide.
In May 1974 two more girls vanished from Vancouver. Diane Sue Gilchrist, 14, left her home downtown; her mother reported her missing after two days without word. She was last seen getting into a van driven by a man no one identified. She has never been found. Gloria Nadine Knutson, 19, disappeared that same month while walking home from downtown Vancouver. She had told someone that an unknown man was stalking her. Her remains were found near Lacamas Lake in May 1978.
Forrest has never been charged in any of these cases and has denied them. They are listed by the sheriff's office as open cases in which he is the suspect.
In July 1974, Norma Countryman, 15, was sitting by a road in Ridgefield on a hot day, smoking a cigarette she had just bought, when a blue van pulled up and the driver started talking to her. She has said he took her to Tukes Mountain, east of Battle Ground, tied her to trees and assaulted her. She struggled until she could get to her knees, she testified in 2023, chewed through the rope and got away. A man found her the next morning. She later identified Forrest. He was never prosecuted for her abduction; by the time the case could be connected, the statute of limitations had expired. At a 2014 parole hearing he admitted abducting a 15-year-old girl.
Krista Kay Blake, of Vancouver, was last seen on July 11, 1974, climbing into Forrest's van near downtown Vancouver. Reports give her age as 19 or 20. She was not found that summer. On July 11, 1976, two years to the day after she disappeared, her remains were found in a shallow grave on Clark County Parks property on Tukes Mountain, about 200 yards from where Norma Countryman said she had been tied up.
Carol Platt Valenzuela, 18 or 20, was married and the mother of five-month-old twins. Her brother-in-law, Larry Helige, who was 14 when she died, remembered her as the typical good big sister, the one who helped him with book reports and gave him advice about talking to girls. She went missing in August 1974 after setting out hitchhiking.
On the morning of October 12, 1974, three men went hunting in Dole Valley. Robert Matthews, 19, and his stepfather Don pushed through thick brush and came upon a raised log not far into the woods. Near it were human remains. About 100 feet away was a second shallow grave. One set of remains was identified as Carol Valenzuela's. The other, a young woman, could not be identified. Maas later pointed out that two women had been killed and buried within about 125 feet of each other within roughly four weeks. The site was about a mile and a half from where Jamie Grissim's belongings had turned up two years earlier.
For decades, Valenzuela's family lived with suspicion that fell on her husband, Robert. He died in 2024 without the case being solved. In 2025 the family spoke with investigators for the first time. Maas has said he believes Forrest, not her husband, was responsible.
On October 1, 1974, Forrest picked up a young woman at Washington Park in Portland and drove her across the Columbia River to Lacamas Lake Park in Camas. Reports describe her as 19 or 20, from Portland or Camas; court records identify her only by a letter, V. He tied her, raped her, strangled and stabbed her, shot her in the chest with darts from an air pistol, and left her for dead under logs. She regained consciousness and crawled nearly a mile to a road, where she was found.
Doug Maas was then a patrol deputy with the Clark County Sheriff's Office. He was the first to interview her. Maas said years later that if she had not lived, he doubted any of these cases would have been solved. Her description led detectives to Forrest, and the investigation took in his van and his home, where they seized the air pistol. He admitted using it in the attack.
The case went to trial in 1975. Forrest pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was acquitted on that ground. He was committed to Western State Hospital, where he spent roughly four to five years.
After Krista Blake's remains were found in 1976, investigators began to see the disappearances and killings as a single series. By 1978 Forrest was reportedly close to release from the hospital. Clark County prosecutors charged him instead with Blake's murder. Maas and Detective Davidson arrested him at Western State Hospital and drove him back. Forrest had quit smoking in the hospital, Maas recalled, but before they reached Interstate 5 he was asking for a cigarette. He tried to learn what evidence they had, and said nothing useful.
He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1979 and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. The Washington Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in an unpublished opinion in 1982. With Forrest in prison, the sheriff's office kept the other files open, but none produced charges.
The unidentified young woman from Dole Valley was sent between 1974 and 1977 to several experts, including the forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who said he returned the remains to the Clark County coroner in 1978. After that they were believed lost. Starr Lara kept pressing detectives to test them in case they were her sister, even after a dental comparison ruled Jamie out. When she was told the remains could not be found, she said, "I just felt like he kicked me."
In about 2011 the county medical examiner's office found them, filed all along under Carol Valenzuela's case number. The office blamed mislabeling and poor record keeping through several moves. In 2012 samples were submitted for DNA tests that had not existed in the 1970s.
The breakthrough also needed a family. Martha Marie Morrison, of Portland, was about ten years younger than her siblings. Her brother Michael described her as young, bubbly and musically inclined; she played guitar. She had no car and got around with friends or by hitchhiking. She went missing in the late summer of 1974, probably in September. Her father reported her missing, but that report was lost, and her disappearance went unrecorded for more than three decades. "It was unusual for her not to call," Michael Morrison testified. In January 2010 he contacted police in Eugene, Oregon, and filed a report. Using DNA from him, from a sister and from their father, whose body was exhumed in Arizona, investigators identified the Dole Valley remains as Martha 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, including evidence from the Blake murder, the Lacamas Lake attack and the Countryman case. On the air pistol from the Lacamas Lake case, scientists found a partial DNA profile from an unknown woman. Maas has said a colleague remembered blood spatter on a gun taken from Forrest. On November 23, 2015, the profile was matched to Martha Morrison. A forensic scientist later testified that the probability of a chance match was 1 in 30 billion. The Columbian reported the link in August 2017, calling it a huge break in some of the agency's oldest unsolved murders.
Prosecutors charged Forrest with first-degree murder in December 2019. He was brought back from the state prison at Walla Walla and made his first court appearance on January 6, 2020. Karen Gilchrist, Diane's sister, came to see him. "It was frightening," she said. "We made eye contact. It felt like he knew me." A judge set bail at $5 million. His arraignment was put off to February 7, 2020, when he pleaded not guilty.
The trial was set for April 2020 and then postponed again and again: first by the pandemic, then in September 2021 when the prosecutor on the case was appointed a judge and a new prosecutor had to take over. Defense attorney Sean Downs said Forrest might again plead insanity. Starr Lara, frustrated by the delays, said, "I knew in my heart that whoever killed Carol and Martha killed Jamie."
Forrest's life sentence for the Blake murder carried the possibility of parole, and he has been before the Washington Indeterminate Sentence Review Board several times. In April 2011 a two-member panel interviewed him at Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen, and the board denied release. In late 2013 the board took up his case again ahead of his parole eligibility date of March 16, 2014. Lara spoke against his release. Norma Countryman, speaking publicly for the first time, did the same.
At a hearing on February 19, 2014, in Olympia, Forrest admitted the abduction and killing of a 19-year-old woman, the abduction of a 15-year-old girl, and the abduction, rape and assault of a 20-year-old woman. He said his crimes were not about killing but about acting out his sexual desires, and he admitted choking one victim to death during a struggle. In therapy he had admitted sexually assaulting eight other women, but he never gave their names. The board denied parole and set his next review for 2017. That year he completed a sex offender treatment program.
He appeared again on July 18, 2017. When the board asked about the other victims, he said he felt sorrow for their families but that talk of other crimes was "not factually" accurate. In August the board found him "too high of a risk to release and not fully rehabilitated or a fit subject to release," and ordered him to serve about seven and a half more years before the next review. He was then held at the Monroe Correctional Complex. By then he had remarried: his second wife, Hilda, had been his prison nurse, and they had met about 40 years earlier.
The next hearing, in May 2022, came while the Morrison charge was pending. Forrest 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." He said that if released he would live with a daughter and her three children in Rainier, Washington. His lawyer at the hearing noted that he was to be evaluated as a possible sexually violent predator, which could mean civil commitment even if the board released him. Lara told the board, "There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of her," and a board member thanked her for having "hung in there for your sister."
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 his treatment, that he admitted continuing "fleeting thoughts of deviant fantasies," and that he remained a suspect in other killings. It added 10 years to his earliest release date.
Jury selection began on January 23, 2023, in the largest courtroom of the Clark County Courthouse because of the number of people summoned. A jury of seven women and five men, with three alternates, was seated the next morning, and the trial moved to Judge Robert Lewis's courtroom. Before trial, the defense had tried to keep out evidence of Forrest's earlier crimes. The judge ruled that the dart gun and other evidence from the Lacamas Lake case could come in.
The witnesses reached back half a century. Norma Countryman, now Norma Jean Lewis, described her abduction and escape; during a break she and Michael Morrison embraced. The Lacamas Lake survivor described the attack and her walk to the road. Robert Matthews described the morning hunt in 1974. Michael Morrison spoke about his sister and his search for her. Jurors heard the recording of Forrest's 2014 parole hearing, in which he described his motives. Crime lab witnesses explained the DNA work that identified Martha and matched her blood to the gun. In all, prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses over six days. Starr Lara traveled from Texas to watch, accepting that her sister's case would probably never be tried but hoping to see Forrest convicted of another girl's death.
Prosecutor Lauren Boyd argued that the DNA, together with Forrest's pattern of abducting young women, assaulting them 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. "There is no other explanation for that except that the defendant is her killer." Downs called Morrison and Forrest "perfect strangers" and argued that the state had not proved when, where or how she died. He pointed out that, unlike Blake's grave and the place where Countryman was found, the Dole Valley site had no connection to county parks land. "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. Norma Jean Lewis and Mollie Morrison held each other as the verdict was read. With two murder convictions, The Columbian noted, Forrest now met the FBI's definition of a serial killer. Lewis said she hoped he would be remembered that way, not as an "alleged or suspected" one.
On February 17 he was sentenced to a second life term. He appeared by video from custody. 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. One juror attended the sentencing and said that everyone on the jury had believed he was guilty.
In early 2024 Sheriff John Horch reestablished a cold case team for the cases, and in June 2024 Maas came out of retirement to join it. In December 2024 the sheriff's office asked the public for help. Maas said he had found about 70 hairs taken from Forrest's van in the 1970s, some described as shed after death, and that investigators planned to send them to a private lab 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," because so many investigators had worked it over the decades. Maas has spoken with nine families and both survivors. Investigators are also looking at a possible link to Rita Jolly, 17, who disappeared from West Linn, Oregon, in 1973, working with Clackamas County.
In 2025 detectives sought a man, now 72, who they believed had seen something relevant in 1971. They stressed that he was never a suspect. Found late that year, he told them he had come across the body of a young woman in the woods near Rock Creek around the time Jamie Grissim vanished. The Seattle office of the FBI joined the investigation. On April 4, 2026, search and rescue teams and dogs trained to find old human remains searched near the Rock Creek Campground and the Dole Valley Bridge, about 1,500 feet from where Martha Morrison and Carol Valenzuela were found. They found nothing. "Over the years, I can't remember going much longer than a week or two without it on my mind," Maas said. The sheriff's office said its cold case team was weighing its next steps.
As of October 2026, Forrest, 77, is serving two life sentences. No further charges have been reported, Grissim and Gilchrist are still missing, and the sheriff's office asks anyone with information to call its cold case tip line at (564) 397-2036.
Forrest has been convicted of two murders, Krista Blake's in 1979 and Martha Morrison's in 2023. He admitted the Lacamas Lake attack but was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He admitted abducting Norma Countryman at a parole hearing but was never charged. The deaths of Barbara Derry, Gloria Knutson and Carol Valenzuela and the disappearances of Jamie Grissim and Diane Gilchrist are suspicions held by investigators, based on timing, geography, the victims' profiles and the blue van; he denies them. Estimates of the total toll vary by source, from six to nine.
Starr Lara has put the families' position plainly. "I do forgive him for killing Jamie," she said in 2015. "But I won't forgive him for withholding the truth."
June 29, 1949: Warren Leslie Forrest born.
December 7, 1971: Jamie Grissim, 16, disappears after leaving Fort Vancouver High School (suspected).
February 1972: Barbara Ann Derry, 18, last seen hitchhiking; found in March (suspected).
May 1, 1972: Grissim's belongings found along Dole Valley Road.
May 1974: Diane Gilchrist, 14, and Gloria Knutson, 19, disappear (suspected).
July 1974: Norma Countryman, 15, abducted from Ridgefield and escapes.
July 11, 1974: Krista Kay Blake last seen getting into Forrest's van.
August 1974: Carol Valenzuela goes missing (suspected).
August or September 1974: Martha Morrison, 17, disappears.
October 1, 1974: Lacamas Lake attack; the survivor helps identify Forrest, who is arrested that month.
October 12, 1974: hunters find the remains of Valenzuela and an unidentified young woman in Dole Valley.
1975: found not guilty by reason of insanity in the Lacamas Lake case; committed to Western State Hospital.
July 11, 1976: Blake's remains found on Tukes Mountain.
1978: charged with Blake's murder and arrested at Western State Hospital; Knutson's remains found near Lacamas Lake in May.
1979: convicted of Blake's murder; life sentence (affirmed on appeal, 1982).
January 2010: Michael Morrison reports his sister missing to Eugene police.
About 2011: the Dole Valley remains found, misfiled under Valenzuela's case number.
April 2011: parole denied.
February 19, 2014: parole hearing at which he admits three 1974 attacks; parole denied.
July 7, 2015: remains identified as Martha Morrison.
November 23, 2015: Morrison's DNA matched to blood on the air pistol.
July 18, 2017: parole hearing; denied in August.
December 2019: charged with Morrison's murder.
February 7, 2020: pleads not guilty.
May 2022: parole hearing; denied in June, with 10 years added.
January 23, 2023: trial begins.
February 1, 2023: convicted of first-degree murder.
February 17, 2023: sentenced to a second life term.
2024: Sheriff John Horch reestablishes the cold case team; Doug Maas joins in June.
April 4, 2026: search for Jamie Grissim's remains near Rock Creek finds nothing.