A WOMAN has finally found answers after her older sister disappeared without a trace 50 years ago.
Valerie Nagle, 62, spent decades searching online databases in hopes of finding clues — but everything changed with a DNA test.
School photos of Marion Vinetta Nagle McWhorter, who disappeared in 1974 in Oregon[/caption]
Valerie Nagle, whose DNA helped identify her sister’s remains in June[/caption]
Nagle was 11 when her sister, 21-year-old Marion Vinetta Nagle McWhorter, disappeared from a shopping mall in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon.
Her family searched for McWhorter, but Nagle said her parents felt helpless and overwhelmed with the disappearance.
Their mother was Alaska Native of the Ahtna Athabascan people, which also led to more concern in the case due to the high rates of Indigenous people, specifically women, who go missing each year.
“I mean, there were, you know, efforts to search, but it was limited,” Nagle told the Associated Press.
“We didn’t have that much to go on.”
Then Nagle sent her DNA to a popular ancestry website in hopes of finding a match to her sister.
In 2023, she signed up for Ancestry, which has an entire DNA database to match customers to their genealogy.
She hoped it would produce a clue about her sister, but Ancestry didn’t have any results available.
However, the breakthrough came with another popular genealogy website.
The family’s genetic profile was uploaded to FamilyTreeDNA, which put Nagle on the radar of the Oregon State Police.
In June, officials called Nagle “out of the blue” and asked her to compare her DNA to the case known as Swamp Mountain Jane Doe.
“I was very surprised that they called,” Nagle told the AP.
Swamp Mountain Jane Doe was found near a mountain creek in 1976.
In 2010, a bone sample from her remains was analyzed and used to create a profile for her in the national missing persons database NamUs, OSP said.
Nagle holding a picture of her sister[/caption]
A family photo of Marion Vinetta Nagle McWhorter, whose remains were found in 1976[/caption]
Ten years later, another bone sample was sent for DNA extraction, which revealed a whole new layer of her genetic profile.
Comparing McWhorter’s remains to Nagle’s helped confirm that Swamp Mountain Jane Doe was her older sister in June.
“I was really glad that they found me through DNA,” Nagle told the outlet.
While little is known about McWhorter’s death, Nagle knows that she called her aunt to pick her up from the mall, but then said a man in a white pickup truck had offered her a ride.
Police are still working to investigate what caused McWhorter’s death, as State Forensic Anthropologist Hailey Collord-Stalder said she “likely did not go missing voluntarily.”
“This case was cold for 49 years. That means that family members lived and died without ever knowing what happened to their missing loved one,” Collord-Stalder said in a statement.
Nagle said about her sister, “I never forgot about her.”
The murder rates of Native women are 10 times higher than the national average, according to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.
