Echo of Distant Water – JB Fisher

Join us for a reading of Echo of Distant Water: The 1958 Disappearance of Portland’s Martin Family by JB Fisher!

Echo of Distant Water tells the true and largely forgotten story of Ken Martin, his wife Barbara, and their three young daughters—who vanished while hunting Christmas greens in the Columbia River Gorge on December 7, 1958. Despite one of the largest missing persons searches in Oregon history, the case remains perplexingly unsolved to this day. After discovering a stack of old newspaper articles about the case in his McMinnville garage, author JB Fisher obtained a wealth of first-hand and never-before publicized information including an intriguing trail left in the personal notebooks and papers of Multnomah County criminal detective Walter E. Graven. These provide fascinating insight into the question of what happened to the Martins—a path leading to abduction and murder, an intimate family secret, and civic corruption.

JB Fisher teaches writing at Portland Community College. He holds a doctorate in English Renaissance Literature and was a Shakespeare professor before returning to Oregon, where he is now researching some of the state’s most intriguing unsolved cases. He is author of Portland on the Take (2014, with JD Chandler) and Echo of Distant Water (2019). Currently, he is working on a project about Mount Hood’s Timberline Lodge in the 1950s when it was nearly destroyed through mismanagement by Portland vice figures.