It was the start of Labor Day weekend: Friday, August 30th, 1974. The Cowden family of White City, Oregon—consisting of twenty-eight-year-old Richard, twenty-two-year-old Belinda, five-year-old David, and five-month-old Melissa, along with the family’s Basset Hound, Droopy—decided to go camping near Carberry Creek in Copper, Oregon, a spot they’d camped at many times before.
The Cowdens parked their 1956 Ford pickup near the site and began setting up camp. The Friday and Saturday were evidently uneventful and at around nine a.m. on Sunday, September 1st, Richard and his son David were seen at the Copper General Store buying milk. Witnesses saw them walking back toward their nearby campsite, but this would be the last sighting of any of the Cowdens alive.
The family had planned to drive back home that evening and to stop by and visit Belinda’s mother for dinner, as she only lived about a mile from the campground. However, as the hours passed and the family didn’t show up, Belinda’s mother became alarmed and headed over to the campsite herself to see if the Cowdens were still there.
Eerily, the campsite was empty of people but otherwise appeared relatively normal. Belinda’s purse and the keys to the family’s Ford were lying in plain sight on a picnic table, as was the carton of milk that Richard had purchased that morning, still half-full. The camp stove was still assembled, and the baby’s diaper bag was undisturbed and lying in the open.
There were a few hints that something untoward may have befallen the Cowdens, though; Belinda’s mother noted that Richard’s wallet, which contained $21 (about $135 in 2024) was lying on the ground, as was his expensive wristwatch, and an opened pack of cigarettes of the same brand that Belinda smoked. When Belinda’s mother checked the family’s truck, she found all their clothes still there, other than their bathing suits, which were missing.
Belinda’s mother contacted the authorities, who began an intensive search. On the morning of Monday, September 2nd, the Cowden’s dog Droopy was discovered scratching at the door of the Copper General Store.
The investigation comprised hundreds of interviews and generous reward offers, as well as a massive search of the area surrounding the campground. Though the site from which the family vanished bore no traces of violence, police were on high alert, as eight women had recently been reported missing in the Oregon and Washington State area. It would later come to light, however, that these women were victims of serial killer Ted Bundy, and not related to the disappearance of the Cowdens.
Months later, on April 12th, 1975, a pair of gold prospectors were walking through the woods near Carberry Creek when they happened upon a decomposing body tied to a tree on a hillside. This turned out to be the remains of Richard Cowden. The bodies of his wife Belinda and his children David and Melissa were discovered in a small cave nearby. The site where the remains were found lay approximately seven miles from their campsite.
Because the location was somewhat remote, investigators theorized that the killer was likely someone very familiar with the area. It was also believed that Belinda and the children may have been murdered elsewhere and stashed in the cave later, as searchers claimed to have searched the same cave before and found nothing.
It appeared that both Belinda and five-year-old David had been shot with a .22 caliber firearm, while baby Melissa had died of blunt force trauma to the head. Richard’s cause of death was unable to be determined.
Once the bodies had been recovered, the investigation went into high gear, and a number of people who had stayed at the campground that Labor Day weekend were interviewed. One family from Los Angeles told police that as they were walking through the campground at around five p.m. on September 1st, they’d noticed a pickup truck containing two men and a woman who were acting so suspiciously that the family became nervous and hurried from the area.
The main suspect in the mass murder was a then-twenty-five-year-old man named Dwain Lee Little of Ruch, Oregon. When Little was sixteen years old in 1964, he raped and murdered a teenage girl named Orla Fay Fipps and was subsequently imprisoned. However, Little had been paroled only three months prior to the Cowden family’s disappearance, and he was known to have been in the Copper area over the Labor Day weekend of 1974.
Little’s girlfriend reported to police that Little was in possession of a .22 caliber firearm around Christmas of 1974, and his parole was revoked in mid-January of 1975. He was paroled again in late April of 1977, however, and a little more than three years later, he picked up a twenty-three-year-old pregnant woman named Margie Hunter whose car had broken down in Portland. He raped and beat her severely, though thankfully, both she and her baby survived. Little was then sentenced to three consecutive life terms.
Detectives hypothesized that the two men and one woman the Los Angeles family had spotted on the day of the Cowden disappearance may have been Dwain Little and his parents. Though all three denied being in the Copper area that day, a miner who owned a cabin in the vicinity said the three of them had visited his cabin on September 2nd, 1974, and signed his guest book.
Little’s one-time cellmate Rusty Kelly later told police that Little had confessed to him that he had killed the Cowdens, but as of this writing, Little has not been charged, and the multiple murder remains officially unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 