Woman’s Remains Were Found in 1976. Now ‘Swamp Mountain Jane Doe’ Has Been ID’d 49 Years After Disappearance

Nearly five decades after she vanished, the remains of Marion Vinetta Nagle McWhorter have been identified through DNA.

McWhorter was 21 when she was last seen at a shopping mall in Tigard, Ore., in October 1974, according to CBS News. Her younger sister, Valerie Nagle, now 62 and living in Seattle, said she was 11 at the time her sister disappeared.

“I was very surprised that they called,” she said. “I was really glad that they found me through DNA.” 

McWhorter’s remains were found in 1976 when a moss hunter spotted a skull with several teeth near Wolf Creek by Swamp Mountain and alerted Linn County authorities, per CBS. Investigators later recovered additional skeletal remains along with Levi’s jeans, a frayed leather coat, a leather belt with beadwork, two metal rings and a clog-style shoe. 

Oregon State Police said the case of the “Swamp Mountain Jane Doe” advanced in stages over many years.

In 2010, a bone sample went to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification and a profile was added to NamUs. Additional testing in 2020 produced a more detailed genetic marker profile. In 2023, Valerie Nagle submitted her own DNA through Ancestry, hoping it would help.

The breakthrough came in April 2025, when a first cousin once removed uploaded a profile to FamilyTreeDNA, allowing genealogists to refine McWhorter’s family tree and identify Nagle as a surviving relative, the agency said.

Officials confirmed the identification in June 2025 and publicly announced it this week. 

Nagle told CBS she later learned that on the day her sister disappeared, McWhorter called an aunt for a ride near the Tigard mall, but they didn’t meet. Nearly 20 years later, the aunt disclosed that McWhorter had mentioned a man in a white pickup truck who offered her a ride.

With that new piece, Nagle said she “started in earnest with more searching,” including combing online databases of unidentified persons.

“I remember spending a lot of time on those pages, just scrolling through and trying to look,” she recalled. 

McWhorter was the oldest of five siblings; Nagle was the youngest. Their mother is Alaska Native of the Ahtna Athabascan people, and the family said McWhorter was named for an aunt who died in 1940 at a boarding school for Indigenous children in Alaska, per CBS.

Nagle told the outlet her sister’s disappearance reflects the broader crisis of missing Indigenous people, particularly women, amid limited public-safety resources. 

In a statement, Oregon State Forensic Anthropologist Hailey Collord-Stalder said the case was “cold for 49 years.”

“That means that family members lived and died without ever knowing what happened to their missing loved one,” she said, adding that McWhorter “likely did not go missing voluntarily.”

The Linn County Sheriff’s Office is continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding her death. 

For Nagle, the confirmation closes a decades-long search: “I never forgot about her,” she said.