Kelly Disney, 17, was the first girl in a presumed series of five teenage girls to disappear under suspicious and similar circumstances. She apparently vanished on March 9, 1984, and was last seen alive on U.S. Highway 20, east of Newport along Oregon's scenic coast. Her skull was found 10 years later, in 1994, inside an abandoned vehicle near Big Creek Reservoir, a popular fishing area east of Newport. Kelly's cause of death has never been determined.
On May 3, 1992, Melissa Sanders, 17, and Sheila Swanson, 19, disappeared from the area of Beverly Beach State Park, where they had been camping. They had last been seen making a call from a pay telephone booth. Their bodies were found five months later, on October 10, 1992, by hunters in a wooded area near Eddyville, Oregon. As in the case of Kelly Disney, a cause of death for the two girls has not been determined.
Jennifer Esson and Kara Leas, both 16, were last seen at approximately 1 a.m. on January 28, 1995, walking along NW 56th Street toward Highway 101, also known as the Coast Highway, in an area near Moolack Beach. They had left from a friend's home on the north side of Newport, where they had spent much of the evening just hanging out and watching movies. They were believed to have been hitchhiking to another residence located near downtown Newport when they disappeared. According to Esson's father, the girls were initially planning to have a relative drive them to their next destination, but they decided to walk instead. Never seen alive again, their bodies were found by loggers weeks later in a wooded area, covered up with brush. Oregon authorities later determined that both girls had been strangled.
The most common elements in the cases appear to be the fact that they all involved young girls who disappeared while either walking alone or in pairs in the vicinity of the Central Oregon coast, either in or near Newport. Earlier this year, Lincoln County District Attorney Rob Bovett decided that the cases needed to be looked at again, and he called the past and present members of the Lincoln County Major Crime Team together to review the cases again.
"They haven't been looked at for a long time," Bovett said. "It was time to do a new, fresh look. We brought together the old major crime team from the mid-nineties, together with the current major crime team. There were about thirty people in the room."
Among the many things that investigators looked at during the review was the current state of DNA technology.
"Some of the crime lab technology has been massively upgraded," Bovett said. "We were doing DNA testing twenty years ago, but the advanced DNA technology that we have today eclipses what we had even a decade ago."
Bovett said that as a result of such advancements in DNA and crime lab technology, some of the evidence that had been collected during the original investigations had been resubmitted to the Oregon State Police crime lab for another look.
"That was the first exciting piece," Bovett said. "We can analyze some things now that we couldn't analyze back then, at a microscopic level. There are additional crime lab tests that can be run now that couldn't be run then."
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