Oregon cold case victim identified nearly 60 years after disappearance
BANDON, Ore. — Nearly six decades after a man disappeared from the Oregon coast, investigators have finally put a name to unidentified remains found in a wooded area near Bandon and they now hope that identifying him will help answer who killed him.
Armes Henry Lahti, a commercial fisherman and U.S. Navy veteran, lost contact with his family around 1965. His remains were discovered in August 1972 by a teenager in a wooded area behind what is now Ray’s Food Place along U.S. Highway 101 in Bandon.
At the time, investigators could not determine who the skeletal remains belonged to.
Chancy Fabrizio, a special deputy with the Coos County Sheriff’s Office and member of the Oregon Cold Case Collective, said Lahti's remains were found about 1,000 feet from the location of the current grocery store.
“The remains were initially skeletonized, so there was no form of identification as far as facial structure goes, and he had no ID on him,” Fabrizio said. “There was no vehicle found or nothing to indicate who this person was.”
Investigators later determined Lahti had likely been dead for roughly six or seven years before his remains were discovered, although Fabrizio said it is impossible to determine an exact timeline because of the number of factors involved in estimating how long remains have been exposed.
The area also looked very different in 1972.
“It was completely wooded back then,” Fabrizio said. “There were houses in the area, but at that time frame, they were quite a distance from that location.”
Investigators attempted to identify the remains by publicizing information about the case in newspapers, but no one came forward with information that could establish his identity.
Lahti also had not been reported missing.
“A big part of investigations now is we have databases where people can be entered in to see if anyone was reported missing, which he wasn't,” Fabrizio said. “So they put his information in newspapers and did a lot of legwork to try and find out who he was, but nothing ever came of it.”
Lahti was born in Astoria in August 1909 and was a first-generation immigrant from Finland. He served in the Navy from 1942 to 1945 and was proud of his military service, according to Fabrizio.
He later worked as a commercial fisherman and spent time fishing along the Oregon coast, including in the Charleston area of Coos County.
Although the case was never technically closed, it remained an old, unsolved investigation.
“Cases are never truly closed as long as they're not solved,” Fabrizio said. “But of course, current cases have to take priority, especially when you're considering that there could be a danger to the public.”
That changed when the Oregon Cold Case Collective began working with the Coos County Sheriff's Office.
The nonprofit organization, which currently has about eight members, was formed to help investigate cold cases. Its members include people with backgrounds in law enforcement and other government agencies, retired professionals, a genetic genealogist and handlers with human-remains detection dogs.
The group uses what Fabrizio described as a “solvability matrix” to determine which cases may have the best chance of being solved with modern investigative techniques.
Lahti's case stood out because investigators believed new technology could finally identify him.
The breakthrough came through investigative genetic genealogy.
Fabrizio said she had repeatedly pressed an Oregon State Police forensic anthropologist, who has since retired, about the case and what evidence was available from Lahti’s remains.
Eventually, the case was submitted for a grant that allowed the DNA to be converted into a single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP, profile.
Traditional DNA identification can be compared with databases such as CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database. Investigative genetic genealogy works differently, using a SNP profile to search genetic relationships and build family trees.
Oregon State Police worked with a laboratory to create the SNP profile, which was then used through an FBI genetic genealogy program.
Investigators were able to identify relatives in the Astoria area and ultimately confirm that the remains belonged to Lahti.
The identification also gave investigators new information about the man whose remains had gone unidentified for so long.
Fabrizio said Lahti was known by the nickname “Mousey,” despite being anything but timid.
“He was willing to stick up for other people and wouldn't take flack off of anyone, which is a very soldier and veteran trait,” Fabrizio said.
At the same time, she said family members remembered him as gentle and deeply devoted to his family.
“They always wondered what happened,” Fabrizio said. “Every time they'd come up to Coos Bay and drive through here they'd think about him because this was a place he loved to fish.”
But the identification also revealed that Lahti's death was likely not accidental.
Investigators found evidence that he had been shot twice in the head.
His remains were found with remnants of shoes, socks and clothing, along with the brim of a brown hat. Investigators nicknamed the unidentified man “Fedora Man” as a way of humanizing the remains and giving the public something tangible to associate with the case.
But the most significant discovery was the evidence of gunfire.
“Unfortunately he suffered two gunshot wounds to the head and a weapon was never recovered at the scene,” Fabrizio said.
Two separate bullets were recovered, and there were no exit wounds, she said.
“There were two slugs recovered so it wasn't a bullet that made two holes and there were also no exit wounds,” Fabrizio said. “So the likelihood of this being suicide is very slim.”
Investigators are now treating the case as a homicide and are trying to determine what happened to Lahti before his remains were discovered.
Family members told investigators that the last known account of Lahti alive involved an argument at a bar in Newport.
According to the family, Lahti's left the bar after the dispute carrying a rifle. They did not know the name of the bar.
That was the last time anyone in his family remembered seeing him alive.
Fabrizio said carrying a firearm into a bar would not necessarily have drawn the same attention in the 1960s that it would today.
“It was commonplace for people to come in a bar and carry their weapons,” Fabrizio said. “It was just a different world back then.”
Investigators do not know how Lahti got from Newport to Bandon, or whether he ever made the trip himself.
Fabrizio said there are several possibilities, including that Lahti drove himself to Bandon, that someone stole his vehicle, or that he was abducted and killed somewhere else before his body was taken to the wooded area where it was ultimately found.
“There are a lot of possibilities,” Fabrizio said. “We don't like to speculate as to what happened, but we definitely have to look at every possibility.”
Another unanswered question is what happened to Lahti’s vehicle and his boat.
Family members told investigators they never knew what happened to his vehicle after he disappeared. Lahti was also a commercial fisherman and owned a boat called the Carmen, although investigators are still working to confirm the spelling of the name.
Fabrizio believes the boat could become an important clue.
“If we can maybe find out what happened to that boat, that might help lead us to people who knew him,” she said.
That is especially important because of how closely connected the commercial fishing community was and remains along the Oregon coast.
Lahti knew other fishermen in Astoria and also spent time fishing in the Charleston area.
“He was a commercial fisherman, so he fished a lot in Astoria, but one of his favorite spots to come down was also to Charleston,” Fabrizio said. “The tight-knit community is just the fishermen themselves, so he would have known everybody in the Astoria fisher