After 26 years, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office believes the answers to Carla Owens’ 1981 disappearance could be buried in woods just west of Port Angeles.
Chasing a lead from Sequim resident Linnea Anderson, whose memory was jogged when reading a recent Peninsula Daily News article about the mystery, Jefferson County detectives hope to find Carla’s remains when they dig late this week or early next week, said Det. Joe Nole.
Carla was 14 years old when she took a babysitting job on June 30, 1981 at a trailer in Clearwater in west Jefferson County and was never seen again.
Found at the trailer was a broken, blood-spattered Galliano bottle.
Glass shards, also from a Galliano bottle, and what appeared to investigators in 1981 to be blood were found in a pickup truck that had been driven by a transient logger named Ken Berry.
Original and current investigators believe that Berry was responsible for Carla’s disappearance.
But the evidence was inadequate to charge him with a crime.
Berry dropped dead while at a logging site in Forks in 1987 after a car wreck that had seemed to leave him unscathed. The cause of death was never determined.
The cold case was revived at the urging of Sterling Epps of Carlsborg, who heard about it from a nurse during a routine visit to a doctor in the spring of 2006.
Epps, a retired senior special agent with the U.S. Customs Service who is a consultant for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, contacted the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, which had kept the evidence in the case for 26 years.
Samples of the blood found in both the trailer and the truck have been sent to a Texas lab for DNA testing, along with samples of Carla’s relatives’ blood.
If the testing confirms that the blood was likely to have been Carla’s, and that the samples in the trailer and the truck match, then investigators can tie her disappearance to Berry with more proof than was available in 1981.
Nole doesn’t know when the testing will be completed.
