Jamie Rochelle Grisim

• Missing Since 12/07/1971
• Missing From Vancouver, Washington
• Classification Endangered Missing
• Sex Female
• Race White
• Date of Birth 11/11/1955 (69)
• Age 16 years old
• Height and Weight 5'4 - 5'5, 125 pounds
• Clothing/Jewelry Description A red and white horizontally striped blouse with a round neckline and puffed sleeves, blue hip-hugger jeans, white sneakers with handmade drawings and the words "peace" and "love" handwritten on them, and possibly a long brown corduroy coat and long, dangling earrings.
• Medical Conditions Jamie has hearing loss in one ear. She also suffers from dermographia, a skin condition that causes itchy red lines to appear on the skin after the person scratches.
• Distinguishing Characteristics Caucasian female. Brown hair, brown eyes. Jamie's hair was bleached blonde before her disappearance; at the time she went missing her hair was in the process of turning back to brown and was a reddish color. She wears eyeglasses for reading. Her ears are pierced and one of her teeth is missing. Jamie's last name is spelled "Grissim" by some agencies.

Details of Disappearance

Jamie left her residence in the vicinity of the 5300 block of northeast 58th Street in Vancouver, Washington on the morning of December 7, 1971, and went to Fort Vancouver High School, about two miles from her home.

It is established that she arrived at school. She had only two classes that day, and she did attend them. She told her foster mother she would walk home from school and would arrive at 1:00 or 1:30 p.m., but she did not appear as scheduled. She has never been heard from again.

Jamie's purse, identification, and other possessions were found in May 1972, five months after her disappearance, in a wooded area alongside a road in the Dole Valley area of Northern Clark County, northeast of Vancouver.

Authorities initially believed Jamie had run away from home, and as a result, she was not officially declared a missing person until January 1972. Her loved ones never thought she left of her own volition. She and her sister had been wards of the state since they were toddlers. Their father was in prison and they had been taken from their mother.

Jamie was a good student, got along well with her foster mother and was close to her sister in 1971; she was also a talented artist and writer, and a member of the 4-H Club. She had a savings account at the time of her disappearance, but the account has not been used since she went missing.

Police eventually decided Jamie had probably not run away; she is now believed to be the first victim of a suspected serial killer, Warren Leslie Forrest, who is thought to have raped and killed at least six young women in the Vancouver area. In 1978, he was convicted of murdering nineteen-year-old Krista Kay Blake and received a life sentence. He is a person of interest in the 1974 disappearance of fourteen-year-old Diane Gilchrist.

He attended the same high school Jamie had, albeit several years before she did, and was popular and a good student. It's possible he and Jamie knew each other slightly. A photo of him is posted with this case summary. Forrest is still incarcerated and was denied parole in 2017.

The bodies of three other women have been recovered in rural Clark County. Two of them were located within a mile of where Jamie's possessions were found: nineteen-year-old Carol Platt Valenzuela and seventeen-year-old Martha Marie Morrison. Martha was not identified until 2015, however. In 2017, authorities discovering Martha's DNA on a dart gun which Forrest admitted he'd used to attack another woman. In 2010, they announced they plan to charge him with murder in her case.

Forrest has never been charged in connection with Jamie's or Diane's cases or in the other murders suspected of him. It is worth noting that most of his other presumed victims were hitchhikers and Jamie does not fit that profile, although she had the same physical characteristics as the other women.

Jamie remains missing and foul play is suspected in her case. A death certificate was issued for her in March 2009.