Crime Immemorial

On April 12th, 1946, three people who had been walking on the shore of the Willamette River not far from Oak Grove, Oregon found a burlap sack floating in the water not far from the bank. The bag had been bound tightly with wire and rope. Initially thinking someone had drowned a litter of kittens, the individuals opened the sack, only to find to their horror that it contained the torso of a human female. Several items of clothing, including a dark-colored sweater, an overcoat, and a pair of long underwear, were also stuffed into the bag with the remains.

The next day, fishermen found another, similar sack in the river about six miles from the first. This bag contained the woman’s arms and right thigh and had been wrapped in telephone wire. The bag had also been weighed down with sash weights. Police found footprints in the mud on the bank near where the sack was discovered and took plaster casts of them, but the clue failed to stir up any significant leads.

In late July of 1946, about three months after the first discovery, a left thigh was found floating in the water under the Oregon City Bridge. At around the same time, a bundle of women’s clothing was recovered in the Clackamas River, a tributary of the Willamette.

Several weeks later, in September, portions of a scalp were discovered near Willamette Falls, and in mid-October, the woman’s severed head was found in a package near the spot where the torso had turned up back in April. The victim’s hands and feet were never found.

The crime became known as the Wisdom Light Murder, as the torso had been found near the Wisdom Light moorage. The victim eventually came to be known as Oak Grove Jane Doe.

Though initial forensic examination suggested the victim was in her teens or early twenties, a more thorough investigation revealed that the woman was more likely middle-aged, probably around fifty years old. She stood about five feet three inches, weighed about one-hundred-forty-five pounds, and had light brown hair pinned up in curls. She also wore dentures.

The cause of death was determined to be blunt-force trauma to the head. Burn marks, possibly from a blowtorch, were found on the torso, indicating the victim had possibly been tortured before her murder. Her body had been somewhat neatly dismembered, likely with a saw, and dumped in several locations along the Willamette and Clackamas rivers.

Police investigated several leads in connection with the identity and murder of Oak Grove Jane Doe. Shortly after the torso was discovered in April, a man called from a phone booth in Milwaukie, Oregon, claiming to know who the woman was and where her body had been cut apart. This call, however, was soon determined to have been a prank.

Law enforcement then looked into a possible link to the disappearance of Marie Nastos, a forty-seven-year-old Seattle woman who had gone missing in August of 1945 while returning to her hometown after a trip to Wenatchee, Washington. Marie was a close match to the physical description of Oak Grove Jane Doe, but it appears this connection was never able to be made decisively.

Years later, in 1951, the FBI investigated convicted killer Roy Moore, who claimed from his prison cell that he had killed and dismembered a woman and thrown her remains in the Molalla River, another tributary of the Willamette. This avenue of inquiry also went nowhere, however.

Later crime writers speculated that the unidentified victim might be Anna Schrader, a married Portland woman who had been having an affair with a married police lieutenant named William Breunning. In 1929, Breunning reportedly tried to end the affair, leading to an argument that ended in a gun going off and a physical struggle in which Bruenning jumped on Anna and broke her ribs. Bruenning ended up getting fired, and Anna won a lawsuit against him for “alienation of affections.”

The case was a massive scandal at the time, made even more salacious by the fact that Anna claimed to have incriminating evidence against the Portland police department in the form of a “little black book.” It’s hypothesized that she might have been threatening to send this book to the media, especially after Leon Jenkins, who had been Chief of Police at the time of the scandal, returned to that position in the 1940s.

Interestingly, in April of 1946, right around the time that Oak Grove Jane Doe’s torso was found in the river, Anna Schrader disappeared, and an ad appeared in the Oregonian newspaper claiming to be looking for her. Anna’s physical description was quite close to the unidentified murder victim, and no records of Anna Schrader exist after 1946. Some researchers speculate, therefore, that Anna was possibly murdered by someone connected with Portland law enforcement because of what she knew.

The case was reopened in 2004, but the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office later revealed that much of the physical evidence, including the victim’s clothing, dentures, and jawbone, had been lost in the 1950s. The loss of the bulk of Oak Grove Jane Doe’s remains means that the case is unlikely to ever be resolved.