Has The Martin Family Been Found? Case Updates And Answering Your Darkly Curious Questions // My Mailbag
Has the Martin Family's car been found in the Columbia River? What happened to the Brazilian poisoner who tried to kill her husbands family? What is Hantavirus, the incredibly rare illness that killed Gene Hackman's wife? I'm opening my mailbag today to ask some of your burning darkly curious questions
TW: References but not descriptions of the following- Suicide, child abuse, sexual abuse, animal death
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SOURCES
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-56753-7_1
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/port-arthur-massacre
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, and welcome to Heart Starts Pounding! As always, I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
We have a lot to go over today, guys. hear from you all a bunch as I sit here in the rogue detecting society headquarters, i get letters and questions. I even hear about updates on some of the cases we’ve covered from. so today, I thought it’d be interesting to go through my mailbag and answer some of your burning questions on different darkly curious topics.
If you are listening to the ad supported version of the show–thank you, seriously, your support is why I get to make this show every week–sometimes even twice a week. And if you’re subscribed on Patreon or Apple Podcasts, I guess three times this week with the special Antarctic Mysteries bonus I’ll be putting out for subscribers Friday. There is a free trial on Patreon AND Apple Podcasts if you want to try it out. But for now, let’s reach into the mailbag, Paul Atreides style.
here’s a message that I got recently that I knew I needed to address on the podcast. This listener asks:
Hi Kaelyn, I was wondering if you saw the update on the Martin Family disappearance. I think they found the family’s car in that river in Oregon. What do you think?
Yes! I am so glad this was asked because I really wanted to talk about this update, and thank you to everyone who sent me the articles about this, that’s how I first found out about what was happening!
So, I’m sure many of you have listened to our episode on the Martin Family disappearance, it’s episode 48: Beneath the Icy depths: the Mysterious Disappearance of the Martin family, for those of you who haven’t listened yet. It is now believed that their car was found in the river along the highway they disappeared on.
let me give you a quick reminder of what happened.
On December 7th, 1958, The Martin Family, that is Ken Martin, his wife Barbara Martin, and their three teenage daughters, all loaded into their red and white ford station wagon and drove down highway 84 in Oregon to go get a christmas tree.
Their last sighting was at a snack bar along the highway on their way home, and the waitress noted that the only people in the snackbar that day were the Martins, and two ex convicts, Roy Light and Lee Pearce. As the Martin family left the snack bar, so did the ex-cons, right behind them.
A later report from a witness who was driving on the highway said that two men were seen under a bridge at cascade locks, along high way 84, talking to someone inside of a station wagon
The next day, the family was reported missing, after the kids never showed up to school. and also that day, a white chevy was found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition on the side of Highway 84, near cascade locks,. The same spot where the men were seen talking to someone in a station wagon. And stranger yet, The abandoned car was tied back to Lenny Pierce, one of the men who was in the snack bar with the Martin Family.
But police didn’t think there’s any foul play at that point, they didn't even know if the family was dead or if they ran away to start a new life, or they had a vacation planned no one knew about. But a few months later two huge clues were found.
The first was a set of Tire Tracks behind an aluminum plant along highway 84. The tracks lead straight off a bluff into the river, there was white paint on some of the rocks, and it looked like it matched the color of Martin's car. But the strange part was how far away this area was from the highway. It didn’t look like you could just accidentally swerve off of the road, you had to drive there intentionally.
Another clue that was discovered was back over by cascade locks, where the car was abandoned and the conversation happened. There was a gun found under a rock, with one bullet that had been discharged. It had actually been jammed in the gun like someone was holding onto the gun when it was fired, preventing the shell casing from ejecting. And in a surprise twist, the serial number on the gun, was tied to the Martin’s son.
See, the Martins had an older son, Donald, who was 28 and away in the military when his family disappeared. Donald was reportedly gay, which his parents were not supportive of, and it was suggested they didn’t have a great relationship.
One of the leading theories then became that Donald maybe hired the two ex-cons, one of which he had a mutual friend with, supplied them with a gun, and then inherited the over $300,000 dollars in today’s cash when his family died.
But again, there was no proof that the family was even dead. That is, until May 2nd of 1959, when two of the daughter’s bodies were seen floating down the river. The day before a large boat was dropping an anchor in the river when it hit something that felt like a car, they said. Perhaps they hit Martins’ vehicle, and that allowed the daughters’ bodies to float to the surface.
One officer who saw the bodies said it looked like the girls had bullet wounds in their skulls, but that never made it into the official coroner’s report. And Donald, who already looked like a suspect, looked even more like a suspect
he never went to go look for his family, he didn’t attend the memorial service, and he never went to pick up the ashes of his two sisters.
And so, despite all of the dives and searches of the river, the Martin family vehicle was never found, though it was always believed to be in the Columbia river. Perhaps in Cascade locks, or over by the area where the tire tracks were found.
That is, until just a few weeks ago, when a diver named Archer Mayo believed he found their car.
So Archer is a sculptor slash diver, who is really into recovering old items on his dives, and he had become OBSESSED with the Martin family disappearance a few years ago. He wanted to try and find them, but he knew it would be very difficult. The river is 100 feet deep in parts and there’s a lot of muck to comb through at the bottom.
He wanted to focus his search in Cascade Locks, where the Martins were maybe seen talking to the ex-cons on the side of the road. Back in the day, the locks were used for steamboats to pass through, But today, they’re an abandoned and unkempt offshoot of the river.
Archer spent some time building small models in his home to figure out where a car would end up in the river if it went off of the side of the bank and into cascade locks. And it seems like he figured it out, because in November of 2024 he dove into the river and found an area where there was 15 feet of thick mud that had some debris in it. He started digging, and I saw in one report from the New York Times, he actually found a couple of cars down there, but one of them was a Ford that matched the description of the Martin’s car. And what was left of the license plate matched the families. One sheriff said he felt 99% confident that it was the Martin Family car, but we won’t really know until the lab is done processing it.
On March 6th and 7th of this year, 2025, the car was pulled from the river in an operation led by the hood river county sheriff.
I did see a more recent update that confirmed no human remains were found in the car. That kind of makes sense. If the two young girls bodies had gotten free from the car within a few months of the disappearance, it makes sense the rest of the family may have floated away, or decomposed over the last 66 years. I don’t think they were actually expecting to find anyone in there.
Now the interesting part, is Archer filmed a youtube video about how he figured out where the car was in the river, and in that video, he says everything we thought we knew about the case is wrong. He’s apparently been working with a journalist to investigate the mystery, and though he didn’t say it outright in the video, I get the sense he believes the Martin Family accidentally drove off the side of the road into the river, I don’t think he believes there was any foul play
BUT in classic fashion, he’s writing a book about it, and we wont know what he really believes happened, or why he doesn’t think any foul play was involved until we read his book. Which, this wouldn’t be the first book written about the Martin family. The most famous one is Echo of Distant Water: The 1958 Disappearance of Portland's Martin Family by JB fischer, which is the book that we used when writing the episode. That book is based on the the note book of the lead detective on the case, Detective Graven. But Archer says that Detective Graven got it wrong.
However, I keep coming back to one piece of this case that makes me think this was intentional, there’s actually a few weird coincidences I keep revisiting like why was the gun the brother stole near the crime scene, as if it had been ditched.
And also, how a few years later, one of the ex cons that followed the martins out of the snack bar was arrested for sneaking into the backseat of a car, and carjacked the driver when they got back into the vehicle. Was that maybe his MO? Did he do that to the Martins that day?
So yes! The martin family car was most likely found, but there are STILL a lot of questions surrounding what happened, and personally, I feel like there were too many weird coincidences surrounding their disappearance for it to be an accident. you can check out episode 48 of our podcast: Beneath the Icy Depths, the Mysterious Disappearance of the Martin Family
Ok, our next question is actually also an important update on a case we covered this year. One listener writes
Hello! I’m a listener from Brazil and I’m so glad you covered the poisoning case. Did you see that the day you put out the episode, Deisi was found dead in her prison cell. It was self inflicted. I’m sad because I feel like the victims wont see justice now.
Thank you for the update, I actually received this update from Multiple listeners in Brazil, and I was really shocked when I read about it.
This was from episode 104: Lovesick, where I talked about a woman in Brazil named Deisi who was accused of poisoning 6 people around christmas, 3 of whom died. She did this by putting arsenic in flour that was later used to bake a cake. The people poisoned were all members of her husband’s family, and also her 10 year old son, who survived.
And the wildest part of the story is after deisi poisoned her husband's family, people started to think back on all of the other people who fell sick around her, like her father in law who died of ‘food poisoning’ months before. After Deisi had brought him powdered milk that made him sick. Or her husband and son who had gotten horribly ill after eating her cooking twice before.
She was being held in a jail in Brazil while investigators were looking into these other suspicious cases around her, and CNN reported that her husband asked her for a divorce the day before she was found in her cell. Which, she killed three of his family members, potentially four if you count his dad, and attempted to kill his son. Asking for a divorce feels like it was on the kinder end of possible responses.
Her body was found I think the morning we put the episode out, if not just a few days after. I have read a few quotes from the family members of victims and they all seem pretty upset that Deisi will never have to face any actual consequences for her actions.
So, yea, it’s a horrible story. I had hope because they had at least found the perpetrator, often times poisoners dont get caught, but they knew pretty much right away that Deisi had done this. When the family asked if anyone hated them and would want them dead they ALL gave her name. I just feel for the family that they wont see justice in this way and hope they’re able to heal in some other way.
Next up we have a question that I got from quite a few of our Australian listeners after I did the episode on haunted Australian Prisons. It goes
“Kaelyn, how could you talk about the tragedies surrounding Port Arthur and NOT cover the Port Arthur Massacre! It’s one of the biggest tragedies Australia has ever faced and I’d love to hear you cover it.”
I’m so glad this was asked. So I didn’t mention the Port Arthur Massacre in my episode on haunted australian prisons. I actually thought about it a lot, whether or not to mention it in the episode, and ultimately I chose to not mention it. but there was a horrible tragedy that happened there. Let me give you the backstory on it and then I’ll explain why I didn’t talk about it.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, the port arthur massacre is the reason why there’s strict gun laws and a near ban on all fully automatic or semiautomatic firearms in Australia.
On April 28th, 1996, a 28 year old shooter opened fire on people throughout the Port Arthur Historical site. He started in the cafe, and then made his way through the gift shop, the car park, all the way to the toll booth at the entrance of the site. Killing 35 people in total and wounding 23 more. It was horrible, Port Arthur is pretty remote so it took the police 20 minutes to arrive after the first call, which gave the shooter time to make his way through a lot of the site.
The shooter had potentially been inspired by another mass shooting that had happened a month prior in Dunblane, Scotland. When a 43 year old shooter took the lives of 16 students and one teacher at a primary school. But it’s hard to know exactly why he did it. He was intellectually disabled and a lot of his musings didn’t make much sense.
I was listening to the Casefile podcast episode on the massacre, which came out in 2017. And at the time, the host said that this was the third worst shooting in the western world, but today it’s the 5th. The Christchurch attack and Las Vegas shooting both surpassed the death count, just awful, awful tragedies.
For as horrible, and tortuous the history of the prison is, the Port Arthur Massacre is typically thought of as the worst modern day tragedy to happen on the grounds, and it is a huge national trauma in Australia to this day.
So, a little background on me. I’m from connecticut, I was in college when Sandy Hook happened, and i remember when the conspiracy theories really started coming to the forefront of the conversation when people talked about Sandy Hook. I mean, I remember getting coffee with a girl I went to college with and she was trying to tell me about how some of the parents were crisis actors, and all the reasons the government would want a tragedy like this to happen.
And it seems like the Port Arthur massacre has really become an event that conspiracy theorists in Australia cling to. I was watching an interview with the shooter’s mother when I was doing research on the area and even she believes the conspiracy theories about it, this woman fully believes that her son was not even in Port arthur the day of the shooting. Simply because he told her he wasn't.
Even though her son was known to harm animals at a young age, had a fascination with guns, and would fire off shots at strangers without any regard. Her son who, after the massacre, kept asking police what the death count was so he could revel in it. I mean, five years before the shooting his therapist made a note that he kept talking about wanting to shoot people. But his mother still believes it wasn’t him.
A story like this felt like it was too big to be brought up in an episode that was about the prisons and the ghosts, and I didn’t want to make it seem like I was brushing it off by bringing it up as a side note in the episode. And part of me was worried it would sound like the madness that was infecting the prisoners and now people who visit the site was responsible for the tragedy, when in reality the shooter had suffered with really dark mental health issues for a long time, it had nothing to do with Port Arthur.
But thank you to the Australians that reached out to me about wishing I had included something about it in the episode, I can tell how much it still affects the country today, it’s honestly heartbreaking.
This next letter is going to double as a recommendation I have for you guys. I’ve seen a lot of you talking about the Ruby Franke documentary on Hulu, Devil in the Family, the Fall Of Ruby Franke.
And one person truly just wrote in to ask what I thought about the documentary. Well, lucky for you I have a LOT of thoughts on the documentary, but let me distill for you the most important ones, and also give you a follow up recommendation of something to read if you found the doc interesting.
A summary of the Ruby Franke case, Ruby franke ran the youtube channel 8 passengers where she filmed her husband and 6 children for years and amassed around 2 million subscribers. She was part of the church of latter day saints in Utah, she had kids in her late teens early 20’s with a man named Kevin, she didn’t work but wanted to find a way to make money and preach the lifestyle that came with being a good LDS wife and mother.
The documentary follows the rise of her channel, focusing on interviews with Ruby’s huband kevin and her two oldest children, Chad and Shari. They detail how during this time, none of the kids really wanted to be in the youtube videos but felt like it was the only way to get affection from their mother. Ruby was really mean and abusive when the camera wasn’t rolling, so all the kids just felt it was better for the youtube videos to be made.
One day, Ruby has her kids therapist, Jodi Hildebrandt, move into their house, and this is really when all hell breaks loose. Jodi is something else. She had lost her license as a therapist or at least had it suspended after she breached patient therapist confidentiality and got one of her patients fired from his job. She also ran these really strange workshops for men with addiction issues even though she had no real experience in that field. In the documentary you see some of these sessions and she's just telling these poor guys that are trying to deal with their addictions how horrible and embarrassing they are and how their wives have every right to hate them. Kevin, Ruby’s husband was in one of these groups.
But Jodi starts convincing Ruby that her youngest children are possessed by Satan. She also convinces Ruby to kick Kevin out of the house, as well as her two oldest kids. And I say convinces lightly because Ruby is horrible and I don’t think she needed to be swayed that much to tear her own family apart.
Eventually the police are called after her youngest son escaped through a window to get help from a neighbor. He was suffering the effects of starvation and had clearly been physically abused. But he was alive, and he saved his family by doing this, so it has a somewhat happy ending.
One of the most frustrating parts of the documentary is watching Ruby’s husband Kevin speak. He tries to frame himself as a nice guy that just wanted affection from his wife because he wasn’t popular growing up. He fell under her spell, he was brainwashed by her, he just wanted to make her happy. And to some extent, I’m sympathetic about the brainwashing, especially when it comes to the children, obviously.
But Kevin wasn’t brainwashed the whole time, and Ruby was abusive towards the children basically since they were born, and he watched and did nothing. And then, at the height of things starting to get scary in the house, he just leaves. Ruby tells him to leave and he does, and the children had no advocates in the house, and could not fend for themselves.
And on top of all that, I read Shari Franke’s book, which I cannot recommend enough for anyone who is interested in this case. She is a beautiful writer and she goes through the whole story from her perspective, which is just, she’s so brave to do that. But she explains that after kevin left the family, she started being abused by an older man within the church.
This man saw how Shari had no support. He was married, he had children, and so he weaseled his way into her life pretending to be a father figure. He said he could help her, and that he was the only one who cared about her because her parents obviously didn’t. And then he pressured her into sharing her location on her phone with him 24/7 so he always knew where she was.
And the abuse just got worse from there, it got so bad that Shari broke down and told someone at the church, and she was essentially suspended from her church for having a relationship with an older man, who denied everything and said Shari was crazy and trying to tempt him.
Please, read her book. Buy it if you can to support her financially, but if you can’t, please just try to get a copy from a friend or the library because I think there’s a lot of really valuable lessons in the book. I was amazed how she was raised in this chaos and was still able to poke her head up, look around, and realize something was not right.
But hearing her story just made me want to throw a chair at the TV even more every time Kevin was on screen. Your children are being abused, your daughter is being assaulted by a man your age, and you're nowhere to be found. I would have liked to have seen the interviewer push back on his answers a little bit more. Especially at the end when he’s asked if he still loves Ruby and he says yes. After almost killing his children because of her abuse, he still loves her..
I will say, after reading Shari’s book it seems like she’s working on forgiving her father and repairing that relationship, which everyones healing journey looks different and is totally up to them, and after all she’s been through I really can’t judge her choices. But I hope Kevin takes a good long look at himself in the mirror every night before he goes to bed.
Ok, I have one more for you guys, a listener recently wrote me:
Kaelyn, am I going to get Hantavirus? I read about Gene Hackman’s wife dying of Hantavirus and it reminded me of one of your Morbid Medicine episodes.
The short answer is no, you are most likely not going to get Hantavirus. About 30 people get Hantavirus in the US each year, and while the death rate is high, about 36 percent, that still means that only about 11 people die of this disease each year.
But it was devastating to read about Gene Hackman and his wife. On February 26th 95 year old actor Gene Hackman and his wife, 65 year old Betsy Arakawa were both found dead in their home in Santa Fe new mexico. One of their dogs tragically passed away with the couple as well.
And so immediately people started thinking it was carbon monoxide poisoning. It sounded like a classic case of a gas leak no one knew about, a family going to bed, and then passing away in their sleep. But the situation ended up being a little bit darker than that, because once authorities arrived on the scene, they very quickly figured out that it was not a gas leak.
One of the strangest things about the scene, was it looked like Betsy had died days before Gene, which is not common in gas leaks.
What was eventually discovered, was that Betsy had died of an incredibly rare illness known as Hantavirus, which comes from deer mice. Gene very tragically had a heart condition and alzheimers and wasn’t able to take care of himself after she passed away, and he died two days later.
Hantavirus does have kind of a spooky history in the US, because for a while no one really knew what it was. In 1993, a Navajo man and his fiance died suddenly near the four corners, that is where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet.
They had come down with something that felt like the flu. Trouble breathing, sniffles, chest pain. They started feeling better but within hours, took a turn for the worse and died of acute respiratory failure. One doctor started looking more into it, and he figured out that there were 5 other young people in the surrounding area that had also died from flu like symptoms recently.
They called it the Navajo flu because it was mostly Navajo people getting it, but no one really knew what it was. Was it a flu, or was it something else?
But over the following weeks and months, more and more people kept dying suddenly, all from respiratory failure that occurred after severe flu like symptoms. Many of them would appear to get better, and then would take a turn for the worse in the next few hours. It was so bad, that anyone who felt sick was told to have a family member monitor them 24/7 because they could take a turn and die at any moment.
Finally, virologists at the Center for Disease Control were studying tissue from the sick when they realized the virus had a link to a european virus known to cause Kidney failure. It had mutated, and somehow found its way into the deer mice population in the southwest. When the mice would excrete anything, like blood, saliva, pee or droppings, they would dry out in the desert air and particles would cling to dust. The dust would be kicked up into the air and inhaled by humans. This all had to happen within 48 hours though, that’s how long the virus could last outside of a host.
That outbreak near the four corners was estimated to have a 56% death rate.
And that’s not the only time there’s been a freaky outbreak in the states. In 2012, three people died and more became sick when a camp site had a mouse infestation. And it was a nice campsite too, these were tents that were built to look more like cabins in Yosemite National park. Well, it turned out that there was enough space in the tents walls for mice to crawl in and populate the area.
Many of the tents had mice infestations that the staff and the campers didn’t know about, and tons of Hantavirus was being kicked up into the air.
Today, Hantavirus has a 36% death rate, and Every now and then there will be warnings in areas if there’s a risk for Hantavirus. You don’t really hear much about it, though, which is why it's so surprising to hear of someone dying from it, let alone someone with a higher profile dying of it.
But yes, to answer your question, you will probably not get hantavirus, though I am a hypochondriac so I have been scouring my house for mouse droppings just to be sure.
Alright, that’s what I had in my mailbag this week, as always thank you so much to everyone reaches out, who sends me stories, who tells me about their own life experiences and how it relates to episodes, I love love love it.
And I’ll be back here in two days with another MorbidMedicine episode! I’m excited because I haven’t done one of those in a while and I love those episodes. This one is on Spontaneous Human combustion. So meet me here next week, and bring your fire extinguisher. I’ll see you then OOOoooOOOO