Preface: I don’t normally have to do this, as I don’t normally write about people that are still alive, but every member of Warren Leslie Forrest’s nuclear family is not only still with us, but (most of them) are going by their original surname. Because of this, I do feel the need to say that finding the information I did was just a quick Google search away, and it took me all of about three minutes to find most of it… I didn’t hire anyone to track them down or figure out their identities: it was all right there.

Introduction: Warren Leslie Forrest was born on June 29, 1949 to Harold and Dolores Forrest in Vancouver, WA. Harold Fred Forrest was born on November 24, 1917 in Moscow, Idaho and Dolores Beatrice Harju was born on June 20, 1925 in Eveleth, Minnesota. At the age of twenty-seven on September 16, 1940, Harold was inducted into active military service with the US Army in pursuant to the Presidential order of August 31, 1940 (also known as the Burke-Wadsworth Act), which required all men between twenty-one and thirty-six years of age to register with their local draft boards (when the US entered World War II, all men from eighteen to forty-five were subject to military service, and all males from eighteen to sixty-five were required to register with their local draft boards).

Mr. Forrest and Dolores were wed on July 3, 1944 in Vancouver, and he was honorably discharged from the military on January 27, 1945; they went on to have three boys together: James (b. 1946), Marvin (b. 1948), and their youngest, Warren. Growing up, his father worked at the Veterans Administration during the day and at night he was employed at a cold storage plant; his mother was employed at a cannery then later in retail. During an interview with a psychiatrist (after his arrest), Warren described his father as ‘stern’ and his mother as ‘overbearing and controlling,’ and claimed that she used to tease him about a piece of wood she used referred to as ‘one of his good friends’ (it was a 4×4 post that he talked to when he was a small child).

Background: As a child, Warren Forrest was a dedicated boy scout and worked his way all the way up to Eagle Scout. When he attended Fort Vancouver High School in the mid-1960’s he excelled at academics and was an exceptional athlete (even though he claimed he was a slow learner and had difficulty with spelling, reading, and writing): he played baseball, ran cross-country, and earned his role as the captain of the track and field team and was offered a track scholarship at Washington State University (he turned it down). Forrest later told one of his psychiatrists that he joined the military after high school because he didn’t think he was smart enough to do well in college, and in October 1967 he enlisted in the US Army (along with his brother, Marvin), and served as a missile crew service gunner and fire control crewman for the 15th Field Artillery Regiment in Homestead, Florida, reaching the rank of Specialist 5; later on when he relocated to Fort Bliss, TX he served in the 7th Battalion of the 60th Airborne Artillery, where he was a ‘senior gunner.’

It appears for the most part that the Forrest brothers all had completely normal childhoods, aside from one glaring thing: two of the three boys hit people with their cars when they were teenagers. On January 16, 1966 a six-year-old ran around a city bus and directly into the path of Marvin Forrest. The child was taken to Vancouver Memorial Hospital and thankfully only suffered some minor bruising and lacerations. Later that same year on May 26^th Rebecca Peterson was driving a car with her friend Marilyn Sutcliffe when they were hit by a vehicle driven by a then sixteen-year-old Warren L. Forrest. The impact of the collision caused Peterson (who had been pregnant at the time) to lose control of her vehicle, which subsequently jumped the curb and struck two young female pedestrians. The accident resulted in both vehicles being deemed ‘total economic losses,’ and afterwards Forrest was brought up on charges in juvenile court for passing a stop sign, failure to yield the right of way, and for having defective breaks. In September of the following year, he was taken to court by one of the two girls he hit, named Robin DeVilliers, who had suffered injuries to both of her legs, heels, thighs and back as a result of the accident. I was unable to find the ‘official’ resolution of the court case, but Forrest’s parents hired an attorney for their son, who advised him to enlist in the Army, and that it would ‘be in his best interest’ if he left town, and ‘the sooner the better.’

Forrest served a total of two years in the Army (including two and a half months overseas in Vietnam), and upon returning home to Vancouver he married his high school sweetheart, Sharon Ann Hart on August 16, 1969, and the couple had two children together: Leslie (b. 1971) and Lane (b. 1974). After they were married, the couple relocated to Fort Bliss, and according to her: ‘he got back, I met him. He said, I want to get married now because I’m going to Fort Bliss. And I said, but that’s like three weeks from now. So we got married in the small chapel and we packed up the car and drove to Fort Bliss, Texas.’ Sharon was born on January 27, 1949 in Omaha, Nebraska, however as her daughter Leslie pointed out in a semi-recent Facebook post, in every newspaper article about her and Warren’s engagement/marriage, her last name is Hart, but according to her high school yearbook, her full maiden name was ‘Sharon Ann Wilson.’ According to the 1967 Ft. Vancouver High School yearbook (she graduated in the same class as Warren), she performed in the yearly Christmas play and was a member of the marching band, Big Sister/Little Sister, the Future Homemakers of America Club, Pep Band, and the Health Careers Club.

In a December 2017 interview Sharon that did with Detective Lindsey Arnold and retired prosecutor Denny Hunter (both with the Clark County Sheriff’s Office Cold case task force): ‘Warren and I met when we were sophomores in high school, so we were fourteen. And, you know, I was a part of that family and I came from a very dysfunctional family. So, their family seemed like ‘Leave it to Beaver,’ you know, I didn’t know. But now looking back, she was very controlling. She ran the show. Now I think, I wonder how much did that play in Warren’s perception of Women.’

Forrest was honorably discharged from the US Army in September of 1971 right after his first child was born. After they left Fort Bliss they relocated to Newport Beach, CA, where Warren enrolled in classes at the North American School of Conservation and Ecology; he quickly lost interest in academics and dropped out at the end of his first semester. In late 1970, Warren and Sharon moved once again, this time back to Washington state, where they lived in the basement of his childhood home with their near infant child, who was a month old at the time. He quickly found employment with the Clark County Parks Department as a general maintenance worker (he officially began his employment on January 12, 1971), and for a while, everything appeared to be picture perfect for the seemingly happy young family… until suddenly it wasn’t.

According to Sharon, her mother-in-law was domineering and wanted to have a say in how to raise her grandchild: ‘and I go, please talk to your mom. He goes, it won’t do any good. I said, this is not working. We gotta get out of here.’ She said she later found out that her in-laws lived roughly a mile from the farmhouse in Minnehaha where Jamie Grissom and her sister Star lived, and that Warren was in town just two months prior to Jamie’s disappearance. By 1974, the couple had a second child and had managed to buy a house of their own. In her 2017 interview with Sherriff’s, Sharon said that at various points during their marriage, her husband was ‘often gone,’ but when she asked him where he went, he always had a good excuse to be missing.

According to Sharon, she said, ‘where were you? He said, I hit a female dog. I gotta go bury it. I gotta get a shovel. And I went, oh, I mean, that’s just the kind of guy that he was. He wouldn’t even go hunting because he didn’t want to kill animals. Sweet as gentlest man.’ She also said that he was a ‘loving and attentive father: He always changed diapers and took care of the kids. And he was a good father, a really good father, A good husband. Made meals. He cleaned the kitchen.’

Due to HIPAA laws, most of Warren Forest’s medical records are unavailable to the public, but some of them were recently released and in March of 1974, he allegedly suffered what would be described as some kind of nervous breakdown. After he was discharged from the Army, he signed up for the reserves on the weekends, and according to a court document, the supposed breakdown happened after drinking at the NCO club at the Vancouver barracks. After Warren’s incarceration, he told a psychiatrist that he left the club and began walking back to his in-laws house (who lived nearby), and during this walk, he began thinking about a painful war memory where he allegedly ‘killed a little girl with his M79 grenade launcher,’ and it was something that followed him throughout his entire life. Forrest told the psychiatrist that when he arrived at his in-laws he had a nervous breakdown.

Sharon’s family later told investigators that when he arrived he looked ‘wild,’ and he had been ‘combative:’ they called the police and he was taken to the VA Hospital, where he was admitted for a couple of days; he later claimed to have no memory of that night. After Forrest’s honorable discharge from the military he told friends and family about an event that he said took place when he was in Vietnam, where he was carrying a grenade launcher in a convoy and ‘somebody told him to shoot,’ so he spun around and did exactly that, and as a result killed a small Vietnamese child.

On October 1, 1974 Warren Forrest kidnapped twenty-year-old Daria Wightman after he saw her standing on a street corner in downtown Portland and pulled over to talk to her: he told her that he was employed at Seattle University and had been working on a thesis project for class and offered her money to pose for pictures for him. She accepted his offer and climbed into his van and accompanied him to the Washington Park area of Portland, and it was at that point that he pulled out a knife and threatened her, and bound her with tape. He then drove roughly 25 miles to Lacamas Park, a heavily wooded and sparsely populated area of Clark County, where he sexually assaulted her; when he was finished, he shot her in the chest with a hand honed dart (which refers to the process of sharpening or refining an edge manually using either a whetstone or steel) from a .177 caliber dart pistol then led her 100 feet down a path by a rope around her neck.

Once they reached his intended destination, he sat the young woman on a log and choked her to the point of unconscientious. From there, he stabbed her five times in the chest then laid her naked body next to a log and covered it with brush and leaves (at some point during the encounter her attacker had removed all of her clothes and taken them with him)… But by some miracle, she was not dead, and after struggling for about two hours finally made her way to a roadway, where she was able to get the attention of a passing motorist, who took her to a nearby hospital. Once she was stabilized, the woman was able to give detectives a description of her assailant along with the details of the very distinctive vehicle that he drove (a blue 1973 Ford van). She also told them that as he was driving through the park he slowed down on several occasions and exchanged greetings with several people, and investigators quickly deduced that their guy was an employee of the department.

After Forrest was finished attacking Daria, he drove home, cleaned out his van, stashed her belongings in his garage, then tossed a football around with his next door neighbor; when they were done, he went inside his residence, ate a TV dinner on the couch with his wife and young children (who at the time were one and three), then went to bed.

A look at employee records showed that Forrest owned a 1973 blue Ford van that closely matched the one the perpetrator drove, and that he had taken off from work on the day of the attack to ‘go to a doctor’s appointment in Portland.’ Detectives quickly got a search warrant for his home and vehicle, and while searching his residence found jewelry and clothing that belonged to the victim. In a footlocker discovered in his van, detectives found a gun, tape, and baling twine that was similar to what was used on one of his other victims. Also inside Forrest’s van, forensic experts found feather darts and the same Marksman repeater air pistol that Daria Wightman said her attacker used to shoot darts into her chest; forensic experts also vacuumed his van for evidence and collected pieces of twine as well as a Clark County Parks and Rec master key.  When the young woman was shown a picture of the young Park’s Department employee, she was able to make a positive ID, and was also able to identify the suspect in a lineup.

On the morning of October 2, 1974, Forrest was arrested on charges of kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder, and was held in lieu of $60,000 bond. When the moment finally came to arrest him, investigators came in, ‘guns a-blazing’ and  ‘woke the babies,’ and went ‘through everything;’ as he was handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car, he didn’t say a word to  anyone, including his wife.

After he was brough to the police station, detectives returned to the Forrest family residence, where they performed a second search. A short time after Warren’s arrest, Sharon visited her husband in jail, which was the first time the couple had spoken after he was arrested: according to her, ‘I remember asking him. It was at the old jail, the courthouse, in Vanda’s cage, where the inmates could go. This was like when he was first arrested. And I said, things, you do it. He looked at me and he goes, ‘I don’t know.’’ When they found the girls possessions in the garage, Sharon said she heard a detective say, ‘we found the girl’s possession. Yeah. It was one of those moments. And did. And, you know, I just. I don’t remember anything after that.’ On October 5, 1974 he was arraigned on charges of rape, assault with the intent to kill, and armed robbery (after he assaulted Wightman, he also took her watch and bracelets), and he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

At the time of his arrest, Warren Leslie Forrest was twenty-five-years old and weighed 155 pounds; he stood at 5’9” tall, wore his light brown hair at his shoulders, and had what was described as a ‘bushy mustache.’ Shortly after his arrest was made public, detectives were also able to link him to the kidnapping, rape, and assault of fifteen-year-old Norma Countryman, who had been attempting to hitchhike out of Ridgefield on July 17, 1974 when she got in Warren’s van after he pulled over and offered her a lift. From there, he raped and beat her, and when they reached the slopes of Tukes Mountain, he gagged her with her own bra then hogtied her to a tree and told her he would ‘return’ to her later… but, the petite young woman had a fierce will to live, and chewed her way through her restraints and hide in some nearby bushes until the sun came up, when she was able to flag down a Parks employee for some help. The suspect returned to the scene of the crime the following night and picked up what he had used to bind her to the tree as well as the bra he used to gag her. Despite Countryman’s powerful testimony in court, Forrest was solely charged with the kidnapping and attempted murder of the Daria Wightman.

Warren Forrest pled not guilty due to reason of insanity, and his legal team filed a motion for him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation; thanks to examinations by three local psychiatrists (that the state paid for), it was determined that he was criminally insane at the time of his atrocities against Daria Wightman. It’s also worth mentioning that the prosecution didn’t attempt to bring in their own experts to contest that these evaluations of mental insanity had any truth to them, and there were no state experts brought in at all: Forrest had an uncontested insanity acquittal. On January 23, 1975, a hearing was held and he was found not guilty of all charges against Wightman by reason of insanity, and a week later on January 31^st he was committed to the Western State Mental Hospital in Steilacoom, WA. According to investigators who visited the facility in the 1970’s, they described a place where the inmates seemed to be running the asylum, not the administrators, and it was hard to tell the staff from the patients. 

According to a court document, the term of Forrest’s commitment could be for ‘any period up to and including natural life,’ but he would be eligible to petition the court for a conditional discharge if staff at Western signed off that he was no longer a danger to society. It’s important to note that, according to an article published in ‘The Columbian’ on January 30, 1979, evidence was lost in early 1975 when Sharon was allowed to go through a box of her husband’s things after the Clark County prosecutor and sheriff’s department deemed the entire case to be ‘disposed of.’ Amongst the items that were taken were a master key to the Clark County Parks Department, twine, a knife, adhesive tape, a victims clothing, and the ‘forensic vacuum sweepings’ that were taken from Forrest’s 1973 Ford van shortly after his arrest. About the incident, Clark County Detective Frank Kanekoa said that ‘Sharon Forrest was allowed to rummage through a box of evidence and take what she wanted sometime in early 1975 because Warren had already pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.’ In addition to what Sharon took, after Warren’s acquittal all evidence related to the case was either released or thrown away, aside for some pictures and the marksman repeater air pistol… all of which may have played a major role in Forrest’s later trial in January 1979 for the murder of Krista Kay Blake.

Upon arrival at Western State Hospital, Forrest was assigned to the ‘Omega’ group, which consisted of similar patients that had been committed to the facility for criminal insanity; it contained a variety of individuals that had been charged with a wide range of charges, ranging from minor offenses all the way up to serious ones. Clinical psychologist Dr. Brent Trowbridge was the director of the program, and described the group as follows: ‘a therapist who generally had a master’s degree in the field of social sciences, would lead the omega group. Omega was designed as a confrontational group therapy, which meant that the patients in the group were supposed to help each other with their treatment.’

While at Western State Hospital, WLF was able to keep a car in the parking lot that he was also allowed to ‘work on.’ Shortly after her husband was committed to the facility, Sharon sold their home and moved her and their children closer to the prison: ‘we used to go on Wednesdays to visit him, and then we used to go on weekends and spend, like, the whole day with him and, you know, pack the kids up. And I used to bake meals and take to him and get things that he wanted from the store and stuff. We had birthday parties, you know, for the kids there at the hospital and for him. I remember we celebrated one of our anniversaries there.’ Sharon planned on standing by her man and was going to wait for her husband to be released… until December of 1977, when she found out he was having an affair, and: ‘and I noticed that there was just a change in him. Something was different. One night I was there, and the phone rang, and it was for him, it was a payphone. And he was back whispering on the phone and just acted different. So when he got off the phone, I said, who is that? He goes, none of your business. I said, what’s going on? Nothing. It’s time for you to leave now. So me and the kids left. I was like, wow. Well, come to find out, he was seeing somebody at Western State.’

According to her, it was most likely a hospital employee, and that one time his therapist called her for a meeting between the three of them, who in the beginning prompted her husband: ’Warren, is something going on that you need to tell Sharon? You seeing someone?’ He goes, ‘yeah.’ The therapist said to him, he goes, you’re an asshole. And Warren goes, ‘yep, I am.’ And so I stood up and I said, I’m done. I’m not coming back. I moved here to be close to you, to try to keep our family, and you’re being able to see your kids, and this is how I get remained. And I walked out, and I didn’t go back.’ When police later interviewed a friend of his, he confirmed that Forrest had told him he was seeing an employee at the hospital named ‘Nancy.’

In an interview with forensic psychiatrist Dr. Sidney Pollack in 1978, Forrest described how he worked eight hours a day ‘all over the hospital:’ in the ceramic and sewing rooms, kitchen, greenhouse, and at one point he even worked as a janitor inside the facility and around the hospital grounds. Dr. Pollock questioned Forrest about the loose security protocols which would have ‘made it easy for him to escape:’ he replied with, ‘yeah, I had the opportunity. That’s what I was saying. I had the opportunity and the thoughts.’ At one point during his time there he also got hired to paint a staff member’s house.

A year and a half went by after Warren Forrest was sent to Western State Hospital. On July 16, 1976 two foragers were out picking mushrooms and wildflowers on some Clark County Parks Department property in Tukes Mountain near Battle Ground when they noticed a small brown shoe sticking out of some bushes: when they gently tugged on it, they realized it was attached to a human foot and immediately notified LE, who discovered the half-skeletonized body of a young woman that had been (poorly) buried in a shallow grave. Forensic examination of the victims mandible led the ME to determine that the remains belonged to Krista Kay Blake, a hitchhiker that vanished without a trace from the area of 29th and ‘K’ Street of Vancouver on July 11, 1974. 

Krista had been partially unclothed and had been missing her bra; her hands and feet were ‘hogtied’ behind her back with baling twine (which was discovered around 100 feet from her gravesite), and because her clothes and skeleton showed no signs of stab wounds or bullet holes, the ME concluded that she had most likely been strangled. Nineteen-year-old Blake was known to hitchhike, and at the time she was killed was living on NE 119th Street in Vancouver. After she disappeared two eyewitnesses came forward and told detectives that they observed her and the suspect that had been ‘driving the blue van’ together around the Lewisville Park area sometime prior to the day that she disappeared; other people came forward and reported they had seen the same van driving around Tukes Mountain on or around the date that Blake was last seen alive. It’s worth noting that Norma Countryman’s assault took place one week after the disappearance of Krista Kay Blake.

Because Warren Leslie Forrest owned the same van as the suspect and worked at the park where the victim had been found, he immediately became a person of interest in her death. Because of advanced age of the body a great deal of physical evidence had been lost, however a closer look at the clothing that the young woman had been wearing led to the discovery of incredibly small puncture marks in her T-shirt that forensic experts determined were made by a dart gun that was similar to the one that Forrest had used on Daria Wightman. 

Not long into the murder investigation, detectives realized that on the day Blake had disappeared, Forrest wasn’t at work because reportedly ‘had a doctor’s appointment,’ this was on top of the fact that he had no alibi: his mother said that he had spent part of the day at her house, but had ‘left early in the evening’ and did not return until the following morning. He was charged on this basis with Krista’s murder in October 1978, and despite already being detained inside of an institution, his attorney Don Greig filed a petition for a new psychiatric evaluation, claiming his mental state had greatly improved in recent years… he even wanted to represent himself at trial (a request that had been granted). In the initial stages, the four judges that had participated in WLF’s earlier trials were removed from consideration due to concerns about possible bias, however this decision was later overturned, and Justice Robert McMullen was ultimately chosen to preside over the case.

Warren Forrest’s trial for the murder of Krista Blake began in early 1979, however it wasn’t long before the judge declared a mistrial after his attorney erroneously allowed a second dart gun that had been unrelated to the case to be submitted into evidence. After that incident, his defense team filed a motion for a change of venue from Clark County to Cowlitz County, arguing that the media attention surrounding the case would prejudice the jurors against their client; the motion was granted and the trial resumed in April 1979 in Cowlitz County. In the beginning of the proceedings, Forrest pled not guilty and claimed he had been on vacation with his family in Long Beach at the time of Blake’s murder; this had been backed up by his mother, who said in open court (while under oath) that her son had been at her residence (with her) at the time investigators supposed Krista had gotten into the blue van. However, prosecutors said her testimony was unreliable, pointing out that she had originally told detectives that her son had left her residence in the early evening and didn’t come back until the following morning. In addition to Dolores, Sharon Forrest also testified on Warren’s behalf, although she told the court their relationship had been ‘rocky’ and her husband had at times ‘suffered from blackouts;’ she also insisted that he had been with her the entire time Blake was being abducted and killed, and that he never showed any signs of being violent towards women.

Multiple eyewitnesses testified against Forrest, and claimed he was a known acquaintance of Krista Blake’s and that the two had been seen together at multiple times before her murder; however, some of their claims were scrutinized by his defense team, as two of them had given a description of the suspects van that did not perfectly match the one that he owned. One day during the trial, he admitted guilt to the kidnapping and attempted murder of Daria Wightman, claiming he attacked her due to ‘untreated PTSD’ from serving in the military. However, when confronted, he absolutely refused to admit guilt for the murder of Krista Ann Blake and the kidnapping and assault of Norma Countryman, and because of this the prosecutor’s office insisted that he was guilty of all charges (as each crime matched his MO). Warren Forrest was ultimately found guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a chance of parole, and was sent to Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla; because he was convicted before mandatory sentencing laws he was eligible for parole for the first time in 2014. Sharon Forrest filed for divorce from Warren in June of 1980.

Multiple eyewitnesses testified against Forrest, and claimed he was a known acquaintance of Blake’s and that the two had been seen together at multiple times before her murder; however, some of their claims were scrutinized by his defense team, as two of them had given a description of the suspects van that did not perfectly match the one that he owned. One day during the trial, he admitted guilt to the kidnapping and attempted murder of Daria Wightman, claiming he attacked her due to untreated PTSD from serving in the military. However, when confronted, he absolutely refused to admit guilt for the murder of Krista Ann Blake and the kidnapping and assault of Norma Countryman, and because of this the prosecutor’s office insisted that he was guilty of all charges (as each crime matched his MO). Warren Forrest was ultimately found guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a chance of parole and was sent to Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla; he was convicted before mandatory sentencing laws and was eligible for parole for the first time in 2014. Sharon Forrest filed for divorce from Warren in June of 1980.

Forrest filed an appeal in early 1982, which was denied later that October; since then, he has filed numerous parole applications over the years (confirmed ones in April 2011, April 2014, July 2017, and May 2022), all of which have been denied due to the fact he is a suspect in many other heinous and violent crimes against women. It’s worth mentioning that during one of his parole hearings, both of his surviving victims took the stand and identified him as their assailant.

The Confession of Krista Blake/2017: Since his initial convictions, Warren Leslie Forrest has remained a suspect in multiple kidnappings, disappearances, and murders around Clark County that took place in the early to middle 1970’s… however, he has largely refused to help multiple policing agencies with their investigations. At a parole hearing in 2017, he finally confessed to killing Krista Blake, stating she had been severely depressed and stressed out at the time of her murder, and he ‘did not intend’ to kill her at first but was forced to after she attempted to get away from him. During that same hearing he also casually confessed to sixteen additional crimes against women that took place between 1971 and 1974, ranging from voyeurism to murder, and claimed he was ‘remorseful for his actions.’ Despite these ‘confessions,’ Forrest’s application for parole was denied and he was prohibited from filing another appeal until March 2022, as the board stated he ‘continued to pose a danger to society and made minimal progress in ameliorating his behavior.’ In an audio recording from one of his parole hearings, he recalled details of the horrific crimes he committed, and reiterated that he was ‘a different person’ now than he was forty years prior, and admitted he: ‘abducted a 19-year-old female stranger under the ruse of giving her a ride…forcing the victim to undress and during a struggle I choked the victim to death.’

In June 2017, Clark County investigators met with Warren Forrest and told him they were working to prove he killed five additional young women across Washington and Oregon: Jamie Rochelle Grisim (1971), Barbara Ann Derry (1972), Carol Louise Platt-Valenzuela (1974), Martha Morrison (1974), and Gloria Nadine Knutson (1974). During one of his hearings, when the parole board asked him about the other possible victims, the only thing he would say was that he ‘felt sorrow for those families,’ and that talk of other crimes was ‘not factually’ accurate; he also said that he only committed the crimes that he did because he was ‘stressed out’ from working two jobs, going to school, and being a husband and father, and: ‘the only option I had was to distract myself, and I chose to live out those violent fantasies.’

Martha Morrison: In December 2019, Warren Forrest was charged with the murder of seventeen-year-old Martha Morrison, who went missing from Portland, OR in September 1974; her skeletal remains were discovered on October 12, 1974 in Clark County close to those of Carol Valenzuela, only eight miles from Tukes Mountain (where Krista Blake’s body was recovered). Both victims were uncovered either behind or between logs and were fully skeletonized; additionally, neither one was wearing clothes and had any identification on them. At the time of the discoveries in 1974, Forest wasn’t considered a suspect in either murder even though the victims were discovered in a heavily wooded area that was ‘slightly upslope’ from a secluded side road that was close to Rock Creek Bridge. Unfortunately, authorities were unable to positively identify Morrison’s remains at the time she was recovered, and she was known simply as a ‘Jane Doe’ for many years. In 2010, Martha’s half-brother Michael submitted a DNA sample to police in Eugene, OR, and in 2014 investigators began re-examining physical evidence from Forrest’s criminal cases to determine if anything from them could be used to solve any unsolved crimes.

Forensic experts from the Washington State Police Crime Lab were able to isolate a partial DNA profile from some dried blood that had been left behind on Forrest’s dart gun, and cross-referenced it with Michael Morrison’s DNA, which lead to the positive identification of Morrison’s remains. In January 2020, WLF was extradited back to Clark County to await charges in Morrison’s murder, and on February 7, 2020 he pleaded not guilty. His trial was scheduled to begin later that year on April 6, 2020 but was delayed on several occasions thanks to the Covid pandemic; it eventually resumed in early 2023, and on February 1, 2023 a jury of his peers found Warren Leslie Forrest guilty of the murder of Martha Morrison. Only sixteen days later, he received another life sentence. He remains the prime suspect in the disappearances and murders of at least five more teenagers and young women, and in each case, the perpetrator exhibited a similar modus operandi to Forrest:

Possible Victims: On December 7, 1971 sixteen-year-old Jamie Rochelle Grisim was last seen walking home from Fort Vancouver High School; she was reported as missing by her foster mother the following day. During one of the searches for her shortly after she disappeared, detectives came across some of her personal belongings in nearby Dole Valley, including her purse and an ID card. It was initially believed that she ran away from her foster home and had left the state, but that theory was quickly disregarded. Since Martha Morrison and Carol Valenzuela were later recovered not far from where her belongings were found, local LE have reassessed their conclusions and now feel that Jamie was abducted and killed by Warren Forrest.

Eighteen-year-old Clark College freshman Barbara Ann Derry went missing on February 11, 1972, and was last seen on a Vancouver highway trying to hitchhike along State Highway 14 East and had been trying to make her way home to Goldendale. Tiny in stature, Derry was only 5’1” tall and weighed a mere 115 pounds, and at the time of her murder had been living on ‘W’ Street in Vancouver. Her remains were discovered by a woman searching for antique bottles the following month on March 29, 1972: she was at the bottom of a silo inside the Cedar Creek Grist Mill and she had been covered with boards and debris in a poor attempt to cover her up. The ME determined that she died from a single stab wound to the chest that had been inflicted by a ‘narrow-bladed instrument;’ she had been partially undressed and had been missing her bra. A positive identification was made thanks to dental records, and it was said (by LE) that she had ‘many male friends,’ and was known to hitchhike frequently. Oddly enough, Barbara’s body was found near the area where a large manhunt had been underway for ‘DB Cooper,’ an unidentified skyjacker that jumped out of a plane asking for a $200,000 ransom (his fate remains unknown to this day despite extensive investigations).

Either Forrest has some incredible self-restraint, or he has some victims that are unaccounted for (I suspect the latter): well over two years went by between the murder of Barbara Derry and the disappearance of his next unconfirmed victim, fourteen-year-old Diane Gilchrist. A ninth grader at Shumway Junior High School in Vancouver, Gilcrist went missing on May 29, 1974 and prior to her disappearance had never shown any problematic behavior: her parents said she had left their home in downtown Vancouver through her second-story bedroom window and vanished into the night, never to be seen or heard from again. As of February 2026, she has never been found, and her fate remains unclear.

Just days away from graduating from high school, nineteen-year-old Gloria Nadine Knutson was last seen by several acquaintances at a Vancouver nightclub called ‘The Red Caboose’ on May 31, 1974, after she turned down an invitation to attend a housewarming party. One eyewitness told investigators that the Hudson Bay High School senior had come to his residence and sought out his help that in those early morning hours, and that she had been claiming somebody had been tried to rape her, and that person was now stalking her; the acquaintance also reported that Knudson had asked him to drive her home, but he couldn’t because his car had been out of gas. Distraught and out of options, Gloria was forced to walk home; her skeletal remains were found by a fisherman in a forested area near Lacamas Lake on May 9, 1978.

On August 4, 1974 married mother of infant twins Carol Louise Platt-Valenzuela went missing while attempting to hitchhike from Camas to Vancouver; the twenty-year-old was not known to be involved in prostitution and had no criminal record. On October 12, 1974, her skeletal remains were discovered by a hunter in Dole Valley just outside of Vancouver, very close to those of Martha Morrison; because of this, detectives strongly suspect Forrest is responsible for the murders of both young women.

Lesser Discussed Possible Victims of WLF: In the first few weeks while he was at Western State Hospital in February 1975 Forrest resided at the same facility where a young woman had been murdered: twenty-five-year-old Karen Louise Wiles suffered from some form of diminished mental capacity and had voluntarily committed herself to the hospital three weeks prior to her death; because she wasn’t court mandated to be there she could come and go as she pleased. Wiles remains were found on February 21. 1975 in the flatlands in Tacoma, roughly eight miles away from the facility; she had been sexually assaulted and had been strangled, and had twine wrapped around her neck. The hospital staff greatly hindered the original investigation and refused to answer questions and help LE in any way.

There are a few additional possible victims of Warren Leslie Forrest that aren’t frequently discussed that do fall in his 1973 gap of inactivity: Rita Lorraine Jolly disappeared out of her West Linn, OR neighborhood while out on a routine nightly walk on June 29, 1973; her remains have never been recovered. It’s worth noting that West Linn is only a fifty-minute drive from Battle Ground, WA (where Forrest had been living at the time with his family).

On August 20, 1973 twenty-three-year-old seamstress Vicki Lynn Hollar was walking out of The Bon Marche in Eugene, which was her new POE (she has only been there for about two weeks, and was a transplant from Flossmoor, IL); she was last seen alive by her supervisor, when the two walked out to their respective vehicles together (Vicki drove a black 1965 VW Bug with the running boards removed). Hollar was supposed to show up at her residence to meet up with a friend, and the two were going to go to a party together, but she never arrived. Neither Vicki nor her vehicle have ever been recovered. It is slightly over a two-hour drive from Battle Ground to the Macy’s that Hollar worked at in Eugene, Oregon.

On November 5, 1973 Suzanne Seay-Justis was last heard from when she called her mother from a pay phone outside of The Memorial Coliseum in Portland; she told her she would be home the following day so she could pick up her young son from school, and despite having her own car Justis hitchhiked to Portland. It’s worth mentioning that the Memorial Coliseum is only a half hour drive from the Forrest family home on SW 18th Street in Battle Ground.

Washington state detectives have never stopped looking into Forrest in regard to the murders that he stands accused of committing, and in December 2025 they were able to locate a long-lost witness in relation to the murder of Jamie Grisim. Additionally, they’re working with the ‘Washington State Search Team and Rescue’ as well as ‘Clark County Search and Rescue,’ and have plans for another coordinated search in the Dole Valley area, this time using dogs that are highly trained in locating human remains that could be decades old and buried deep underground.

Conclusion: Warren’s brother James Allen Forrest died at the age of thirty-four on November 24, 1980 after succumbing to ‘a lengthy illness.’ According to his obituary, he was unmarried at the time of his death and was ‘formerly a member of the Junior Odd Fellows;’ he was also the Past Chief Ruler of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows No. 3 at St. John’s Road. Warren’s father died of leukemia at the age of seventy-three on October 13, 1991 in Portland, and per his obituary, before he retired Harold was the foreman of the labor force at the Vancouver Veterans Hospital for thirty-five years and was a member of the Washington Gateway Good Sam Travel Club (as he was an avid traveler). Dolores Beatrice Forrest died at the age of seventy-seven on Christmas day in 2002 in Walla Walla.

Marvin Forrest married Diane Steigleman at the age of forty-eight on July 23, 1996, and sadly not even four months later on November 23, 1996 he was killed in a plane crash above the Pacific Ocean roughly forty miles outside of the Northern California coast; his body has never been recovered. According to his obituary, he worked at the Portland Air Base as a civilian mechanic, and was a proud member of the Air Force Reserve; he was also a member of the First Church of God. Marvin and Diane both liked old cars and were looking forward to retiring in 2002 and traveling together. He had a son and a daughter, and his widow is now happily retired and living in Lake Havasu City, AZ.

Warren’s younger child Lane has been married to his wife, Monica for almost twenty years and the couple have three children together; he works at Boeing Commercial Airplanes in Seattle as a mill operator. Forrest’s daughter Leslie is fifty-four and currently resides in Bullhead, AZ; sadly she is suffering from a plethora of health concerns, including three inoperable brain tumors.

As of February 2026, Warren Leslie Forrest is seventy-six years old and is housed at Airway Heights Corrections Center in Spokane County, WA. He is still married to his second wife Hilda Ruchert, a nurse that he met while incarcerated and wed on June 20, 1983 that is fifteen years his senior. One of the only facts I was able to find out about the second Mrs. Warren Leslie Forrest is that she was born on September 12, 1934 and (according to an article published in 2017 on ‘koin.com’), she is in her 80’s and still residing in Walla Walla; I could find no record of her death. Sharon Ann Wilson/Hart-Forrest got remarried to a man named Jim Lochner on November 11, 2011, and the couple currently reside in Vancouver, WA; she is retired after a long career of working in the administrative part of a doctor’s office.

Works Cited:
‘Cold Case Team Analyzing Evidence that May Link More Women to Serial Killer Warren Forrest.’ (December 11, 2024). Taken January 6, 2026 from forensicmag.com
Fox 12 Staff. ‘Clark County renews search for missing Teen Tied to 1970’s Serial Killer.’ (December 5, 2025).
Iacobazzi, Ariel & Plante, Aimee. ‘Cold Case Team Revisits Death Linked to Warren Forrest Plante.’ (December 9, 2024). Taken January 6, 2026 from koin.com
Morgan, Branden. Pie in the Sky Media: ‘The Forgotten Serial Killer.’ Taken February 17, 2026 from kslpodcasts.com
Nakamura, Beth. Warren Leslie Forrest Clark County murder trial begins. Taken January 6, 2026 from oregonlive.com
Osorio, Carolyn. (September 9, 2025). Stolen Voices of Dole Valley, Episode 5: The Good-Looking Stranger. Taken February 12, 2026 from https://pod.wave.co/
Varma, Tanvi. ‘Authorities believe multiple cold cases are linked to suspected Clark County serial killer.’ (December 10, 2024). Taken January 6, 2026 from katu.com
‘Warren Forrest.’ Taken January 6, 2026 from grokipedia.com/page/Warren_Forrest