Crime Immemorial

On August 29th of 1960, a little girl in Oregon would disappear from a bean field, though her fate would not be discovered until weeks later.

Seven-year-old Alice Louise Lee was playing in a field of green beans on that summer morning in late August. The field was part of Swan’s bean yard, north of Pleasant Hill, Oregon, and both Alice’s mother and older siblings worked there seasonally as pickers.

At around ten a.m., Alice told her mother that she was going to put her dolls and other toys away where the workers kept their lunch boxes. She walked off to do just that, and subsequently vanished.

Though several workers later told police that they thought they had heard a scream at around eleven a.m., none of them had thought much of it, as there were several other children and teenagers working and hanging around the field, and they had thought kids were just playing games.

Police officers, other workers, and locals formed a search party and spent the entire day and night scouring the area for the missing child, but no clue to her whereabouts was found. Bloodhounds were deployed, though they were only able to track Alice’s scent to the nearby elementary school before it petered out. The ensuing aerial examination of surrounding areas and the dragging of nearby bodies of water also proved a fruitless endeavor.

In fact, little Alice’s body wasn’t discovered until three weeks later, on September 16th, after the bean season had ended, and it was pinpointed in a most gruesome fashion: by the sight of vultures circling overhead.

It appeared that Alice had been raped, and strangled with her own corduroy jacket. She was left naked and partially buried face-down in a wooded area, her clothes in a small pile beside her. She was found at a spot only about three-hundred-twenty-five yards from where the bloodhounds had lost her trail eighteen days earlier, though it is unclear why the dogs had been unable to locate her at the time. According to some sources, a blood-stained stick was also recovered lying on the ground approximately twenty feet away from the remains.

Investigators assumed the child had been taken by someone working in the fields the day she disappeared, and quickly drew up a chart of every picker who had been on the job on August 29th. Both male and female workers were interviewed, though of course the men were more intensely scrutinized, given that Alice had probably been sexually assaulted.

Though numerous persons of interest were questioned, none seemed a likely culprit for the nefarious child killer. The inquiry spread outward through the town, expanding the pool of possibilities to include other residents suspected of sexual abuse of children. Still, the murder of Alice Lee remained stubbornly unconcluded.

A thirty-five-year-old migrant worker named Donald Northey was arrested in Delano, California in December following a tip from Oregon police. Northey was apparently wanted on several charges, including larceny and non-support, as well as being a chief suspect in the murder of Alice Lee. However, Northey was cleared of the homicide charge only nine days after his arrest, though he was detained on the lesser charges.

The case languished for many years afterward, though a handful of individuals in Eugene, Oregon kept working doggedly to stir up leads and solve the crime. In 2011, former Register-Guard reporter Karen McCowan and former Oregon State Police trooper Al Wolfe tracked down a witness who claimed that the man who had killed Alice had confessed it to one of his relatives many years after the murder.

Though the suspected perpetrator has since passed away, there is some evidence to suggest that the killer’s grandson attempted to turn him in for confessing to the slaying in the late 1980s, though evidently no formal report of this was ever made.

Karen McCowan still writes occasional articles about the Alice Lee murder in the hopes that a relative of the killer will come forward and finally put the heartbreaking case to rest.