By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
Angela Dodds wants people to remember her sister.
So in late July, Dodds and family members staked out 200 signs along U.S. Highway 101 and Highway 20 in Lincoln County and handed out 2,000 posters.
The message was simple: “Justice for Kelly Disney. 36-year-old murder case.”
The date the signs went up is significant for Dodds and her family. Some 26 years earlier police were handed the only evidence in the March 9, 1984 disappearance of 17-year-old Kelly Disney – her skull.
“I felt she had been forgotten,” says Dodds, 49, of Prineville. “I wanted to get her name out there.”
Homicide investigators are usually loath to have family interfere in their cases. But that’s not how authorities feel about this case.
“It’s been a really good response,” says Linda Snow, one of two cold case investigators in the Lincoln County District Attorney’s office. “People have responded, even some people we wanted to talk to.
“We think we’re close … we have a good idea what happened,” Snow told YachatsNews.
Tumultuous relationship
Kelly Lynn Disney grew up in Siletz, the oldest of Stan and Betty Disney’s four children.
Before her senior year in high school she fell for 20-year-old Robert Ellis of Newport. Disney threatened to run away if her parents didn’t give her permission to move into his apartment on Hurbert Street. They reluctantly agreed, but only if she promised to finish her senior year at Newport High.
“She would have been the first to graduate. That was her goal,” said Dodds.
Disney and Ellis’ relationship was a tumultuous one. Ellis, 20, liked to party; Disney less so. She was going to school and working at a pizza parlor; he was helping install carpets.
On March 8, 1984, there was a low-key party at their apartment with people coming and going. Ellis took off and Disney stayed behind. She soon got mad and left as well. It was about 12:30 a.m. March 9.
Ellis returned, but friends told him Disney was gone.
“This was their pattern,” Snow says. “They’d do this quite often.”
Ellis began searching for Disney and found her standing on Highway 20 just east of Highway 101. It’s a cold, drizzly winter night but Ellis can’t convince his girlfriend to get in the car.
“She’s still too hot,” Snow says.
Ellis left.
Two men on their way to their janitorial jobs are the next to see Disney. They stop, offer to give her a ride, but she refuses. The men stop at a convenience market in Newport where they bump into a policeman who calls dispatch. A Lincoln County Sheriff’s deputy takes the call and finds Disney still along the highway near what is now Southeast Moore Drive. She refuses help, saying she was going to a girlfriend’s house nearby.
“That was a lie,” Snow says.
It was 1 a.m. March 9, 1984.
“We know now that there was a 15-20 minute window … and she’s just gone.”
Disorganized responses
Most describe the searches for Kelly Disney as disorganized.
Ellis went out several times that night to look for his girlfriend, investigators say. Friends looked too.
The next morning Betty Disney came to their apartment looking for her daughter. Ellis thought Kelly Disney had wound up at her parents’ home in Siletz.
Stan Disney filed a missing person report with the Newport Police Department, but they considered her a runaway.
“Kelly wasn’t like that,” Angela Dodds says. “She knew it was dangerous. She wasn’t one to run away.”
Over the next few days Disney’s family organized several searches, Siletz Fire did one, and the sheriff’s office conducted another. But nothing was found and the case began bouncing back and forth between Newport police and the sheriff’s office.
“It didn’t get a lot of attention,” Snow now says.
10 years later, her skull
More than 10 years later – Monday, July 25, 1994 — a man walked into the Newport police department with a human skull.
Two days earlier he had been driving his ATV behind Big Creek Reservoir east of Newport and stopped at an abandoned car in a known party spot for locals. He found the skull wrapped or covered with carpet.
The man took it home, where his girlfriend advised him to turn it over to police. He tried taking it to the sheriff’s office, but only the jail was open. Jailers told the man to take it to Newport police. It’s Saturday and their office is closed.
The man returned home, cleaned the skull with dish detergent and put it atop his TV. Monday he turned it over to Newport police.
Dental records show the skull was Disney’s. The skull had evidence of head injuries, says Snow.
In reconstructing the case, investigators talked to kids who played in the car the day before the skull was found. The skull was also found days after investigators had gone to local media to drum up more interest in the case.
“We know absolutely the day before (it was found) the skull was not there,” Snow told YachatsNews. “We know that somebody placed that skull there.”
Finding Disney’s skull 10 years after she disappeared created a new push to find her remains and her killer. Detectives focused on Ellis, the boyfriend, but couldn’t make any headway.
The case goes cold.
Ellis, now 56, lives in Seal Rock.
Five Newport girls killed
While Disney was the first Newport girl to disappear, she was not the last.
On May 3, 1992, Melissa Sanders, 17, and Sheila Swanson, 19, vanished after leaving a family campout at Beverly Beach State Park. Five months later hunters found their remains 20 miles east of Newport near Eddyville. Their bodies were badly decomposed; the state medical examiner could not determine how they died.
On Jan. 27, 1995, Jennifer Esson, 15, and Kara Leas, 16, left a friend’s house in north Newport and headed into town. More than two weeks later their bodies were found north of the city near Moolack Beach covered with brush. They had been strangled.
Police wondered if there was a serial killer at work.
“It was big,” said Rob Bovett, an attorney in the county counsel’s office when Esson and Leas were found. “It was another in this stack of killing of teenage girls in Lincoln County and across the nation.”
The county activated its major crimes team to attack the Esson and Leas case, but could never get enough evidence to indict anyone. Momentum waned, detectives began to retire, and the investigation stalled.
Bovett became district attorney in 2009 and within weeks reactivated the major crimes team to have another look at the five suspected homicides.
“We needed to have a second look at all of these,” he told YachatsNews.
There were new detectives, major advances in DNA technology and national criminal databases that might help solve old cases, Bovett said.
Ron Benson is the district attorney’s investigator used for trial preparation. Bovett told him to take one day a week to work on the three cold cases. Snow had moved to Lincoln County two years earlier after retiring as a legal assistant for the Deschutes County district attorney. She heard about the effort and offered to volunteer.
They first focused on the Disney case. They re-compiled all the reports, Snow said, and interviewed more than 200 people that first year.
Then, reports broke that a drifter named Bobby Joe Fowler might be connected to dozens of killings across Canada and the West. Benson and Snow were re-directed to the Esson/Leas case for several years until it was determined that Fowler was in an Arkansas jail shortly before the girls disappeared.
Their deaths remain unsolved.
As for Sanders and Swanson, authorities now believe they were picked up and killed shortly after they left their campsite by John Ackroyd, a state highway worker who worked in the Santiam Canyon but regularly traveled Highway 20 to the coast.
In 1993, Ackroyd was convicted of killing a woman jogger in Camp Sherman and is firmly connected to other deaths, including the two Lincoln County girls. He died in prison in December 2016 without telling officials of any connections to other killings.
Ackroyd’s serial killings were detailed by The Oregonian newspaper last year in its “Ghosts of Highway 20” series.
That leaves the Disney, Esson and Leas homicides as Lincoln County’s unsolved cold cases.
Posters, signs leads to more calls
The posters and sign campaign by Angela Dodds has given the two Lincoln County cold case investigators a boost.
Snow and Benson are following up on at least 20 calls. Because there is no body and the skull was cleaned, it is highly unlikely the case will be solved through DNA evidence. That means someone will have to talk.
“Some people who were reluctant to talk in the past have had a surge of conscience,” Snow said of calls since late July.
Investigators have a good theory of what happened the night that Disney disappeared.
One or two people Disney knew picked her up along Highway 20.
“My guess is they said ‘We’ll give you a ride home’,” said Snow.
Investigators think there is a strong connection to the Siletz community where Disney grew up.
Investigators believe Disney ended up with a group of men who took her somewhere, sexually assaulted her and then killed her. A number of men have told others they were there when Disney was assaulted and wished they had stepped in to stop it, Snow says.
“We do have this consistent line of stories … that they were there and that she had been killed,” Snow says. “There’s a single path that all these stories fall into.”
Investigators have no idea where Disney’s remains might be. They’ve chased rumors and spent a year pursuing a tip she was buried in a well. But none checked out, says Snow.
Ellis, the focus of the Newport and sheriff’s detectives for 25 years, refuses to talk to cold case investigators.
“We have never interviewed him. He won’t talk to us,” Snow says. “But my gut, and everything we’ve found, says he didn’t do it.”
Disappearance destroys family
Angela Dodds says her sister’s disappearance destroyed her tight-knit family.
The Disneys divorced the same year the skull was found, Stan Disney moving to Oregon City where he died in 1997.
Betty Disney, 73, now lives near Dodds in Prineville, and has had two nervous breakdowns and no longer can talk to investigators.
Danny Disney, who was closest to Angela Dodds, went with his dad to Oregon City and now lives in Yamhill County.
Todd Disney, who was closest to Kelly, has spent much of his life in and out of jail and addiction treatment. He also lives in Prineville.
At age 13, Dodds was sent to live with her grandmother in Iowa, then bounced between other relatives. She married, then divorced and married again. Her two daughters have Kelly’s first and middle name.
Dodds said the idea of placing signs along the two highways and posters in hundreds of stores came as the result of three factors — it had been 26 years since the skull was found, Dodds had stabilized her own life, and there was a lack of movement in the case.
“I just think we needed to start fresh,” Dodds said. “I wanted to get her name back out there. I wanted there to be a shock factor.”
Snow and her boss, Lincoln County District Attorney Jonathan Cable, say the signs are helping move the case.
Cable said Disney’s family needs closure and authorities want to bring someone to justice. And, while death investigations become more difficult with time, Cable says, “There is no statute of limitations on murder.”
That’s what motivates Snow as well.
“We want the public to know is that there are people out there who know what happened. They need to get ahold of us.”
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To reach Lincoln County cold case investigators, call Linda Snow at 541-265-0284 or Ron Benson at 541-265-0271.
