‘They’re compassionate and determined’: Investigators use new technology to keep pursuing Clark County’s cold casesSubscriber Exclusive

Investigators use new technology to keep pursuing Clark County’s cold cases

Clark County sheriff’s deputies walked into the Minit Mart Quick Shop on Mill Plain Boulevard in the early hours of Jan. 18, 1982, to find the night clerk gagged, bound and executed.

The clerk, a 27-year-old mother of three young children, was working through the holidays to earn money for Christmas gifts. More than 40 years later, the slaying of Catherine Dawes remains a mystery.

Today, a team of volunteers is pulling her file and dozens of others out of the dark. For these Clark County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit investigators, the files stacked in their office are not just paper, and the victims are not just ghosts. They are open questions demanding answers, whether the perpetrators are dead or alive.

In 2024, Sheriff John Horch reestablished the specialized squad, which consists entirely of retired detectives and federal agents who operate outside the frantic triage of active major crimes. This six-person, unpaid team applies 21st-century forensic science to solve decades-old homicides and missing-persons cases that most departments don’t have the budget to staff.

Dawes’ case — one of 28 Clark County cold cases — now sits on the desk of Michael Ramon, a retired U.S. Marshal and volunteer investigator.

“This case has haunted me over the years,” Ramon said. “Every time I go into a mini mart and see a woman working alone, I just cringe.”

Ramon said the latest break in the investigation comes from a witness report that the Gypsy Joker Motorcycle Club is somehow related. He said a witness recalled members who frequently harassed Dawes while she worked at the Minit Mart. Ramon suspects they may be key witnesses to her homicide.

Dawes began closing up shop at 1 a.m. and warned the men lingering around the Ms. Pac-Man machine it was time to go. Two walked out into the cold, while an unidentified third man headed toward the back of the store.

Somewhere between then and 1:05 a.m., a customer seeking change for a pay phone rattled the locked front door and spotted a blue motorcycle helmet and black leather gloves resting on the counter. The gloves had white stitching wrapping around the thumb and fingers, an elastic wrist and cloth accented with a shiny metal material going up the elbow.

“I’m hoping someone will recognize them, because they seem homemade and unique,” Ramon said.

By the time deputies arrived to check on the store at 1:28 a.m., the killer — or killers — had slipped away.

For decades, boxes of case files on victims like Dawes sat in storage facilities, gathering dust as the perpetrators continued their lives and families endured an agonizing silence.

Slow, methodical

In law enforcement, time is the ultimate enemy. Witnesses’ memories fade, perpetrators die and physical evidence degrades. But time also allows technology to catch up, transforming even microscopic remnants of a 40-year-old crime scene into a road map to a killer.

Clark County’s cold-case investigators are doing work that most American police departments simply cannot afford to do.

Across the country, the odds of getting away with murder have fluctuated wildly. In 2022, the FBI reported the national homicide clearance rate plunged to an all-time low of 52.3 percent. The rate has since improved. In 2024, the FBI estimated a 61.4 percent national clearance rate. But that still leaves nearly 4 out of 10 homicides unsolved nationwide.

Jurisdictions in Washington fight to beat that average. Recent data from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs showed an 18.8 percent drop in statewide murders in 2024 compared with 2023, with state clearance rates hovering around 62 percent.

Clark County and its cities saw overall rates of serious crimes dip in 2024, mirroring Washington’s overall crime-rate drop, according to a statewide crime report. Washington’s statewide rate was 56.21 crimes per 1,000 people in 2024. In 2023, it was 62 per 1,000.

While the overall crime rate dipped in Clark County in 2024, the number of homicides in Vancouver rose. The Vancouver Police Department, which handles cases only in city limits, historically has seen periods when clearance figures hovered near 46 percent. Conversely, the Seattle Police Department reported an 86 percent homicide clearance rate in 2025, outperforming the national average.

But for every case that is closed quickly, others slip through the cracks. According to a study from the RAND Corp., a nonpartisan global policy think tank, only 7 percent of surveyed law enforcement agencies have a dedicated cold-case unit, and roughly 10 percent have dedicated cold-case investigators.

“Most departments rely on their homicide detectives to investigate cold cases. When I was a detective, I wanted to work cold cases, but when you’re always getting called to a new, fresh homicide, serious assaults, those are going to take priority and the cold cases get kind of pushed back,” said Sgt. Fred Neiman Jr., who supervises Clark County’s unit. “That’s what’s great about having these volunteers come in. They can be that focus and intensity and work just a few cases at a time and keep some progress being made on those cases, not always getting pushed to the side.”

Unlike standard patrol or active major crimes divisions, a cold-case unit requires a unique investigative rhythm. It is a slow, methodical process of reevaluating thousands of pages of digitized and physical files, tracking down surviving witnesses and searching for any detail that early investigators might have lacked the technology to process.

Given that Clark County borders Oregon, it helps to have Kim Timeus on the cold-case unit. She spent nearly 30 years working on homicides at the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office. When her position in that Oregon county was eliminated due to a budget crisis, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office immediately offered her a volunteer role, given her deep knowledge of the Portland metro area’s criminal networks.

“It’s not about the money at all, of course, because we’re all volunteers, and it keeps my mind busy,” Timeus said.

She’s working on the 2007 homicide of 39-year-old Donald James Brown. During the early-morning hours of Feb. 4, Brown was discovered stabbed to death in his home in the 9700 block of Northeast 104th Court. Brown’s girlfriend found his body upon returning home late that night. Investigators believe he was ambushed in his bedroom after being jolted awake. He was scheduled to start an early shift at Frito Lay just hours later.

Ramon followed a less direct path to Clark County’s cold-case team. He worked as a U.S. Marshal for 25 years before becoming a professor of criminology at Washington State University for a decade. He settled in the area with his wife to spend time with their grandchildren. He said joining the team was a welcome way to keep his mind sharp in retirement.

“My wife wants me out of the house,” Ramon said with a laugh. “More than once, I’ve gone to Sgt. Neiman and said, ‘I need another case.’”

Ramon has six cases assigned to him currently.

“The first thing I do is gather all the evidence, the evidence list, anything that was sent to the lab, lab results, and then I like to speak to one of the scientists in the Washington state lab,” Ramon said.

‘One shot’

The state crime lab is a cold-case investigator’s greatest weapon. Modern forensic genealogy and advanced DNA processing can pull a killer’s identity from a decades-old, degraded sample.

“A lot of times in the older cases, they would collect evidence, but they didn’t have the means to do the testing that we have now that may make a difference in solving a case or not,” Ramon said.

However, navigating the forensics of a cold case is a high-stakes gamble. Evidence collected in the 1970s and 1980s was not preserved with modern DNA extraction in mind. Furthermore, the physical act of testing a sample often destroys it.

“A lot of testing consumes a portion of our physical evidence,” Neiman said. “We have to pick and choose what we test. … We want to leave things for future testing or for court purposes later if needed, but some things you get one shot at, and then that’s it.”

Even if the evidence is viable, the science is only as fast as the bureaucracy allows. Severe forensic backlogs at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory Division have hindered investigators in the past. In late 2022, the State Patrol lab was sitting on more than 6,900 forensic biology and DNA cases pending analysis for more than 30 days.

“If I could make one change to the criminal justice system, it would be to give them more resources,” Ramon said. “They are responsible for every case for every department in the state, and it’s a lot.”

Thanks to federal funding and internal overhauls, the state lab recently turned a corner. According to a report by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the state lab achieved a 91 percent reduction in its DNA backlog by late 2025 to 581 cases after completing 16,000 DNA analyses. Evidence that previously sat in a queue for over a year can now be processed faster.

Yet, despite advancements in science and reductions in lab wait times, the clock is running out. Perpetrators from the 1970s and ’80s are aging and dying. Some of the unit’s cases, such as a 1962 double homicide in Battle Ground, are so old that multiple generations of the victims’ and perpetrators’ families already have come and gone.

The shadow of Warren Forrest looms over the cold-case team, which originally was established in large part to tackle open cases tied to the serial killer. Forrest is serving consecutive life sentences for two murders. He is suspected in the deaths, disappearances and assaults of seven other women and girls between 1971 and 1974.

Following Forrest’s 2023 conviction, a multiyear effort, the reformed team is now reexamining old files using new DNA technology. Timeus is investigating a case she believes is linked to Forrest while the unit places renewed focus on the 1974 homicide of 20-year-old Carol Valenzuela, whose remains were found in a densely wooded area of Dole Valley in eastern Clark County.

Jamie Grissim, who went missing some 50 years ago, is another of Forrest’s suspected victims. Her sister, Starr Lara, said she last saw Grissim in the kitchen of their foster home Dec. 7, 1971, while they were wrapping presents together in preparation for Christmas. Grissim was 16, and Lara was 14 at the time. It wasn’t until Lara was 19 that she learned Jamie’s ID card had been found in the woods.

“If they had told me back then, maybe I could have helped,” Lara said. “When they finally told me they found her things in Dole Valley, that’s when I knew she was gone.”

Authorities believe Grissim was the earliest victim of Forrest. Lara, now 69, has spent decades attending Forrest’s parole hearings and fighting for answers. Her advocacy led to the recovery of another victim’s remains. Today, she works closely with the Clark County Cold Case Unit’s lead detective, Doug Maas, who keeps her updated on the active search.

“They’re amazing to work on this case after all these years,” Lara said. “They’re compassionate and determined.”

Lara credits the unit with breathing new life into the investigation, which conducts searches in the Yacolt Burn area with dogs trained to sniff out human remains.

Like the retired detectives working the files, Lara feels the relentless pressure of time. Yet, she remains resolute that the unit’s “never give up” motto, combined with modern science, eventually will yield answers.

“I just want a part of her found so I can have a grave site for her,” Lara said.

Although the unit is working on tracking down Forrest’s suspected victims, it makes time for other cases.

“We are still working on Warren Forrest because we still have unsolved cases we believe he is connected to, but we don’t want an entire unit dedicated to Warren Forrest,” Neiman said. “It’s easy to get sucked into these bigger investigations, but we want to make sure we progress on the other cases as well.”

The team tightly guards specific details of its active cases — not to hide information from the public, but to ferret out false confessions and protect the integrity of future prosecutions. Investigators need the killer to be the only person who knows how many times a knot was tied or what specific caliber of weapon was used.

That way, when they bring the news of success, they can confidently say, “We got him.”

“The whole reason that we’re here is to try to resolve outstanding cases, mostly for the families,” Ramon said. “Just the idea of having served justice, having someone who’s committed a murder just wandering out free with no accountability is something I can’t stand the idea of.”