Picture this, September 1974 and people are everywhere, living their lives as free spirits and nothing but a care in the air. A young girl who is 17 years old and goes by the name of Martha Marie Morrison leaves her apartment suddenly due to a fight with her boyfriend.
Morrison had been through foster care near Eugene, Washington all throughout her childhood. She had participated in the Job Corp's Program in Arizona. In addition, she had been an avid drug abuser and ran away a lot from her foster care parents and her real parents.
Unfortunately, Morrison had not been seen after that fight with her boyfriend. An unidentified body was found during a hunting party on October 12, 1974. Those remains were investigated at the University of Washington. Some of the things that came back from the investigation were that the remains of this girl had curly hair, dental issues, and at some point had given birth. The decomposition from these remains was so bad that it was very hard to identify who it was.
In the meantime, Martha Marie Morrison had still not been found allegedly. People were speculating that those remains could potentially have been her. DNA was obtained from her brother and sister for identifying purposes. The National Missing and Unidentified Person's System was used to try and identify Martha Morrison's remains.
Investigator Nikki Costas was the person who was named to her case. Costas was very driven and wanted to get this case solved. She never gave up and pushed to make sure this girl's remains had a name. These remains were sent all over the country to find a match. Finally, they decided to exhume Morrisons' dad's remains. There they did a DNA sample. The remains that had been all over the United States had also had a DNA sample. The DNA sample that they had received from Morrison's dad and the sample from the unidentified remains had matched. Finally, those unidentified remains had a name and that girl was named Martha Marie Morrison.
No one had yet been named a suspect until they came across a man by the name of Warren Forrest.
He was already in jail for another murder, but also a suspect for others as well. The patterns of how he left other women dead had given investigators questions about whether or not he was the main suspect in Martha Marie Morrison's murder. In August 2017, there was a blood stain on a gun from a childhood friend that matched Martha Morrison's blood.
Sean Downs, Forrest's attorney, claimed that there was no evidence that linked him to Morrison's murder. There had been at least 30 witnesses. Thankfully, the jury only took an hour to convict Warren Foster of Martha Marie Morrison's murder on February 4, 2023. May the Morrison family finally rest in peace now that there is closure with the conviction.
Written By:
Heidi Reilly
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