Tigard's mystery man

OSP forensics scientist hopes to bring closure to cold case

By Christina Cooke

The Times, May 14, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

On a Sunday evening in early October 2001, a drifter passed out drunk on the train tracks in Tigard and was hit by a southbound train.

After an investigation failed to turn up clues to his identity and nobody stepped forward to say ‘he’s mine,’ the mangled body was sent to the freezer of the Oregon State Medical Examiner morgue, where it has remained ever since.

Until a few months ago.

Oregon State Police forensic scientist Dr. Nici Vance recently reopened the case, relaunching a public effort to identify the transient she believes was passing through Tigard on his way somewhere else.

“I wanted to jumpstart awareness because he’s one of the older cases we’ve got in the cooler right now,” she said. “We want to close the case and bring closure to the family.”

Vance sent a sample of the man’s DNA to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification in Fort Worth, which maintains two databases, one containing the DNA sequences of unidentified bodies and the other of people with missing relatives. The effort produced no matches.

Last week, a forensic artist drew a composite picture of the man based on photos taken at the scene of the accident and measurements taken – eye orbits to nose and nose to mouth – on the frozen cadaver.

Vance hopes someone will recognize the man in the picture and step forward with clues to help solve the case.

“I have a feeling his family still believes he’s alive,” Vance said. “It’s profoundly sad to me that nobody knows he’s dead.”

The Tigard Police Department is spearheading the investigation at the local level. After distributing the drawing of the man online and through local news media, the department has received about 25 tips from people who think they might have known him.

“Our investigators are working through all these bits of information the public is providing and trying to work on the pieces that seem to closely match the information we already have,” said Jim Wolf, police department spokesman. “We’ve had a very strong response.”

The mystery man

At the time of his death, the man was wearing jeans and carrying three receipts from Ashland, a TriMet ticket stub, a schedule from the Sellwood area and an Oregon Trail Card issued by the state’s food assistance program. And his blood alcohol content was .22, almost three times the legal limit for driving.

“He was jacked up, let’s put it that way,” Vance said.

According to the medical examiner report, the conductor and engineer operating the train saw a figure lying in the tracks around 9 p.m. on Oct. 7 as they neared a wooden trestle between North Dakota Street and Tiedeman Avenue in Tigard. When they sounded the horn, the figure tried to get up, but fell back down on the tracks.

The train hit the man running at 20 to 30 miles per hour, breaking his legs, lacerating his abdomen, amputating his right arm, breaking his jaw and fracturing and lacerating his face.

“He’s in a terrible state,” Vance said.

From what examiners can tell, the man in his 40s or 50s, stood about 5’9”, weighed about 180 pounds and was slight of build. He had dark brown curly hair, a thick beard and long eyelashes, and his nose was wide with a knob at the end, “like Kris Kringle,” Vance said.

Tigard police say the most promising piece of evidence they have is the Oregon Trail food assistance card found with the body. Though it is ripped in half and missing some numbers, detectives hope to piece it together with the numbers on the receipts and track down the man’s purchase transactions.

“That’s pretty much it at this point,” said Leigh Erickson, a detective for the Tigard Police Department helping with the case. “That’s our best option.”

The department has received a number of phone calls and e-mails from people who say they recognize the man.

A transient man in Tigard said the composite drawing looked like a man named Ray he knew in Medford, and Pastor Dean Epperly of Willowbrook Free Methodist Church in Sherwood said the drawing resembled his friend Danny, who he had been imprisoned with in his younger years .

“Danny always had a big bushy beard and big cheeks,” Epperly said. “When he gets gray, I imagine he’ll make a good Santa Claus.”

Detectives determined, however, that the unidentified man was neither Epperly’s long-lost friend nor an acquaintance of the other tipsters.

“I felt it was my duty to contact them and clear something up if it was him,” Epperly said. “Being incarcerated, after I got done and got clean, I have never been afraid of the police, and I try to be a good citizen.”

Erickson said police are still hoping a tip from a friend or family member will help them solve the case.

In the freezer

Right now, the morgue freezer at State Medical Examiner office in Clackamas contains eight bodies, including the body of a red-haired hiker found near the Pacific Crest Trail in 2002, a female with a steel surgical rod in her left femur found in Marion County in 2004 and a tall man in his mid-30s who washed up on the beach in Lincoln County in 2007.

Some are victims of homicide, and some, like the Tigard man, died of unfortunate accidents.

Vance plans to launch investigations on all the unidentified bodies, starting with the ones that have been around the longest.

“In the homicide cases, it’s really catalyst for investigation,” she said. “If we know who they are, we can know who they associated with and who might have motivation to kill them.”

In the less controversial cases, Vance said, she hopes to bring closure to families who don’t know where their relatives are.

“It would be terrible to not know where your loved one is and have them be in a place like the morgue,” she said.

Vance said of the 1,200 cases her office processes each year, fewer than 1 percent result in unidentified bodies. In the vast majority of cases, investigators are able to identify the deceased, locate their next-of-kin and send the bodies off to funeral homes and burial, she said.

“With these contemporary forensics cases, we tend to get investigative leads on them quickly,” she said. “I think bad guys tend to talk a lot about the things they end up doing.”

Vance hopes to begin the identification process on the rest of the bodies after she gets further with the first.

“We’d love to get them identified,” she said.

But until Tigard’s unidentified man has a name and identity, his body will remain in the freezer, right where it’s been since 2001.

Have information?

If you have a tip that could help Tigard Police identify the mystery man, contact the department at 503-718-2576.