‘Swamp Mountain Jane Doe’ Identified Nearly 50 Years After Disappearance

For nearly half a century, the mystery of a young woman’s remains discovered in the Oregon wilderness haunted investigators. Now, through the painstaking work of forensic genealogists and advances in DNA technology, authorities have finally put a name to the victim once known only as “Swamp Mountain Jane Doe.”

Officials confirmed the remains belong to Marion Vinetta Nagle McWhorter, a 21-year-old who vanished in October 1974 after being seen at a shopping mall in Tigard, Oregon. The identification comes 49 years after she was first reported missing.

Her younger sister, Valerie Nagle, now 62 and living in Seattle, recalled being just 11 when her sister disappeared. “I was very surprised that they called,” Nagle said. “I was really glad that they found me through DNA.”

McWhorter’s remains were first discovered in 1976 when a moss hunter stumbled upon a skull with several teeth near Wolf Creek by Swamp Mountain in Linn County. Investigators later uncovered more bones alongside personal items: a pair of Levi’s jeans, a frayed leather jacket, a beaded leather belt, two metal rings, and a clog-style shoe. Despite these clues, her identity remained a mystery for decades.

The Oregon State Police said the case slowly advanced over the years as technology improved. In 2010, a bone sample was analyzed by the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification and entered into the national missing persons database, NamUs. More comprehensive genetic testing followed in 2020, but a definitive match was still elusive.

In 2023, Nagle submitted her DNA to Ancestry in hopes of helping crack the case. The breakthrough finally came in April 2025, when a first cousin once removed uploaded genetic data to FamilyTreeDNA. That new information allowed genealogists to refine McWhorter’s family tree, ultimately leading to her long-awaited identification.

The case, once considered cold, now carries both closure and lingering questions for McWhorter’s family—who after decades of uncertainty, finally have answers about what became of their sister and daughter.

Officials confirmed McWhorter’s identification in June 2025 and made the findings public this week.

In an interview with CBS, her sister Valerie Nagle said she later learned that on the day McWhorter disappeared, she had called an aunt from near the Tigard mall to ask for a ride. The two never connected. Nearly two decades later, the aunt revealed that McWhorter had also mentioned a man driving a white pickup truck who had offered her a ride.

That detail pushed Nagle to intensify her efforts. “I started in earnest with more searching,” she said, recalling how she combed through online databases of unidentified persons. “I remember spending a lot of time on those pages, just scrolling through and trying to look.”

McWhorter was the eldest of five siblings; Nagle, the youngest. Their mother, an Alaska Native from the Ahtna Athabascan people, had named Marion after an aunt who died in 1940 at a boarding school for Indigenous children in Alaska.

For Nagle, her sister’s disappearance is not just a personal tragedy but also part of a larger pattern. She told CBS that McWhorter’s case reflects the wider crisis of missing Indigenous people, particularly women, whose disappearances too often go uninvestigated due to limited public-safety resources.

Oregon State Forensic Anthropologist Hailey Collord-Stalder noted in a statement that the case had remained “cold for 49 years.”

“That means that family members lived and died without ever knowing what happened to their missing loved one,” she said, emphasizing that investigators believe McWhorter “likely did not go missing voluntarily.”

The Linn County Sheriff’s Office continues to investigate the circumstances surrounding her death.

For Valerie Nagle, the identification marks the end of a painful, decades-long search. “I never forgot about her,” she said.