By RAELYNN RICARTE
News staff writer
April 2, 2008

Hood River County Sheriff Detective Bob Davidson said a DNA profile will determine if human remains found in the Willamette River could be those of Kim Forbes.

“It would be nice to give the family and friends of Ms. Forbes some closure after more than three years,” he said.

“There are similarities between this find and our case but there are also differences. We will just have to see what the DNA tells us.”

The Forbes case remains an unsolved mystery for the sheriff’s office and Davidson said it would be a relief to know what happened to the Jeanette Road resident. The 48-year-old woman went missing on Oct. 31, 2004. She was supposed to have shown up at the home of a friend for a 9 a.m. breakfast before heading off to Portland for a shopping trip.

Deputies searched for Forbes’ vehicle along area roadways and waterways. Davidson said no sign of an accident was found and her cell phone has never been turned on. In addition, he said there has been no activity on either her bank accounts or credit cards.

About two weeks after Forbes disappeared, her burgundy-colored 2000 Ford Explorer was located in a Gresham parking lot. The right rear side window had been broken out and items stolen from inside the vehicle. Multnomah County and Hood River detectives determined that the SUV had probably been abandoned shortly after Forbes vanished. They believed the subsequent vandalism of the Explorer was unrelated to the owner’s disappearance.

Davidson said there is one key difference between the newly activated Multnomah County case and the cold case in Hood River. He said the body of “Jane Doe” recovered from the Willamette shows evidence of a hysterectomy, a surgery that Forbes had not undergone.

He said identification of the remains has been made more difficult with the head and hands missing. He said that has eliminated the matching of dental records or fingerprints.

Davidson said DNA testing should still be able to decide within eight weeks if the remains belong to Forbes. He said the body could also be that of a Portland woman missing since 2001.

“We just have to wait and see,” said Davidson.

The grisly find was made in December after strong winter rains apparently brought the submerged corpse to the surface of the river behind the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Law enforcement officials believe the body had been in the water for at least one year and possibly five years or longer.

According to reports, the internal organs of the torso were intact due to protection provided by a “body briefer” and synthetic pantyhose.

For the past several weeks, officials from the state Medical Examiner’s Office and Multnomah County have been working to come up with a profile from the largely decomposed remains.

They have concluded the body belonged to a woman 45 to 55 years old, between 5-foot 5-inches and 5-foot 11-inches tall. Forbes stood about 5-feet 9-inches tall.

Investigators have no idea how “Jane Doe” might have died; whether she drowned or was the victim of a homicide.