Forrest for the Trees
In our story, the Pacific Northwest has been called a breeding ground for serial killers. A place where the wilderness itself seems to conspire in silence — concealing horrors beneath the evergreens, the names of those lost forgotten.
In the season finale of Stolen Voices of Dole Valley, we turn our attention to one of Washington State’s least-known but prolific predators: Warren Forrest. A hometown boy from Vancouver, Washington — quiet, well-liked, unremarkable. Until he wasn’t.
Between 1971 and 1974, Forrest used his charm and authority to lure vulnerable young women into his van. What followed was unspeakable — police outline a pattern of abduction, torture, and murder that spanned four years and left behind a trail of vanished voices.
Jamie Grissim. Barbara Derry. Diane Gilchrist. Krista Blake. Norma Countryman. Carol Valenzuela. Martha Morrison. Susan — “the Lacamas Lake victim.”
Their names echo through decades of silence.
Now, fifty years later, the ground beneath Dole Valley is giving up new secrets. Inside the Clark County evidence lockup sits a box — filled with vacuum sweepings from Warren Forrest’s van, collected in 1976 and never tested for DNA. Those fibers, hairs, and microscopic traces are being sent to the lab right now.
More than seventy hairs have been recovered. Some belong to people long dead. And one, investigators say, matches the length and color of Carol Valenzuela — whose remains were found in Dole Valley beside the body of Martha Morrison. A DNA match could link Forrest directly to Valenzuela’s murder or push him toward a confession in the five unsolved cases that have haunted Clark County for half a century.
But there’s more. A listener came forward after hearing our earlier episodes — providing contact information for a man who once claimed to have seen a woman tied to a tree in Dole Valley, bloodied and struggling, around the time Jamie Grissim vanished. He was never interviewed by police. Now, investigators are reaching out — and if his account can be verified, it could help give the K9 teams still searching for Jamie’s remains a location that will increase the chance she is found.
In addition, the case of Karen Wiles, a patient at Western State Hospital during the time Forrest was confined there, has been reopened. Her body was discovered ten miles from the hospital in 1975. For the first time since her murder, investigators have questioned Warren Forrest directly about her death.
Five decades later, the threads are tightening.
The van. The rope. The dart gun. The woods.
The evidence is still here — waiting to speak.
This is the story of what remains.
And the voices that refuse to stay silent.
