Portland, Oregon. – Valerie Nagle spent decades wondering what happened to her older sister who was seen for the last time in Oregon in 1974. She looked for online databases of unidentified people in search and sent DNA on a popular Ascendance website in the hope of finding a match.
Everything changed in June when Oregon authorities called Nagle “unexpectedly” to ask to compare its DNA to a cold affair known as “Swamp Mountain Jane Doe,” she said. Nagle’s DNA finally helped confirm that the remains of a woman found near a Mountain stream in the Central Cascades in Oregon in 1976 were those of her sister, Marion Vinetta Nagle McWhser.
Oregon state police publicly published the news this week after the remains were identified in June.
“I was very surprised that they called,” said Nagle, a 62 -year -old man who lives in Seattle, at the Associated Press. She was 11 years old when her sister disappeared. “I was really happy that they found me through DNA.”
McWh bun was last viewed in a shopping center in the suburbs of Portland in Tigard at the age of 21.
She was the eldest of five brothers and sisters, and Nagle was the youngest. Their mother was from Alaska of the people Ahtna Athabascan, said Nagle, and her big sister had been appointed for an aunt who died in an Aboriginal children in Alaska in 1940.
High rates of disappearances of indigenous peoples, in particular women, have been adapted for generations in inadequate public security resources.
Nagle, who lived in New York with her parents and one of his brothers at the time of the disappearance of her sister, said that her mother may have contacted the authorities but that she was not sure of the exact extent of the efforts made by her parents to find her sister.
“I mean, there was, you know, efforts to search, but it was limited,” she said. “We didn’t have much to do.”
She knows that her sister had come from California to Oregon with plans to continue to Seattle and finally in Alaska when she called an aunt who lived near the Tigard shopping center for a trip in October 1974 – but the aunt did not end up meeting her, said Nagle.
Almost 20 years later, the aunt shared another detail with Nagle: when McWhser called her that day, she told him that a man in a white van had offered to take a look. We did not know why his aunt waited so long to share this information.
Nagle said that when she learned this puzzle piece, she “started seriously with more research”, including checking the databases with cases of unidentified people.
“I remember spending a lot of time on these pages, scrolling and trying to look,” she said.
In 2010, a sample of McWhorter’s Remains OS was sent to the Northern University Human Identification Center, and a profile was created in the national database of missing persons, the state police announced. An additional bone sample was submitted for DNA extraction in 2020, which makes it possible to produce a unique genetic marker profile.
In 2023, Nagle did a DNA test when she signed up for Ancestry, a genealogy company with a DNA database, hoping that this would give a clue to her sister, she said.
But the breakthrough occurred in April when a Germain cousin once withdrawn his genetic profile on Familytreedna, another genealogy company with a DNA database, said Oregon’s police spokesman Jolene Kelley on Thursday. This allowed genealogists to have a better idea of McWhser’s family tree and led them to note that Nagle was a member of the surviving family.
“This case was cold for 49 years.
Linn’s County Sheriff’s office endeavors to determine the circumstances of McWhorter’s death, the state police announced.
For Nagle, an important piece of the puzzle is resolved.
“I have never forgotten it,” she said.
