by Ann Rule
It was probably the worst heartbreak any family could go through: not knowing. None of the Cowdens’ relatives slept well, and their minds kept returning to terrible imaginings about what could have happened to them. They tried to protect each other, and many suppressed their own feelings so that they wouldn’t hurt each other more.
A $2,000 reward for information was set up. Just before hunting season began, another plea for funds went out. The grieving friends and relatives of the missing family felt that deer hunters might be in a position to unravel the puzzle, which grew more inexplicable with each passing day.
On October 3, Richard Cowden’s sister wrote a letter to the editor of the Medford Mail Tribune, appealing to hunters to be on the alert for “anything that could be connected to a man, a woman, a five-year-old child, or a five-month-old baby. Even though we try not to let our hopes dwindle that they will be found alive, we ask that you will even check freshly turned piles of earth. We will truly appreciate any clue or help that some hunter may find.”
It was a tragic request, proving once again that there is nothing worse than not knowing. At the time, eight young women were missing in the Northwest; all of them had vanished completely in Washington and Oregon, but the concept that a whole family could disappear was incomprehensible. (The missing women were later determined to be victims of serial killer Ted Bundy.)
Two hundred concerned citizens wrote to Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, asking him to have the FBI actively enter the probe. But there was no evidence that the Cowdens had been kidnapped or taken across state lines. Senator Hatfield and Lieutenant Kezar stressed that every law enforcement agency asked to assist in the case so far had responded with full strength—but there was so little for any of them to go on.
The hunting season came and went, with no trace of the Cowdens. Christmas arrived, but no one in their family felt like celebrating. Richard and Belinda’s house sat dark and empty. Snow covered the hills where they had picnicked, and then the rolling slopes brightened with lupines, wild mustard, and wild iris, and a torrent of spring rains washed the snow and topsoil away.
On Saturday, April 12, 1975, two men from Forest Grove, Oregon, were taking advantage of the spring weather as they made a trip to the Carberry Creek area to do some prospecting for gold. They looked for the precious ore in the upper Applegate region, six and a half miles upstream from the campsite where the Cowdens had disappeared seven and a half months earlier.
Forest Grove is a long way north of Medford, and the men were not nearly as aware of the disappearance of the Cowdens as were local residents. Their thoughts were only of finding gold as they approached a steep, timbered, rocky hillside about three hundred feet above the old Sturgis Fork campground. But they soon forgot all about striking gold.
They found first one bone, and then another, and were horrified when they saw what appeared to be the skeleton of a human being. It was tied to a tree. Animals had scattered some of the smaller bones over a hundred feet in every direction.
The modern-day prospectors had no idea how long the remains had been there, but they noted bits of clothing, faded by weather, in the area, too, and were pretty sure they weren’t looking at the skeleton of a long-dead miner. They ran back to their vehicle and called the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.
It was 3:30 p.m.—and over seven months since the Cowden family had vanished.
Sheriff Franklin dispatched deputies and notified Lieutenant Kezar and the Oregon State Police team. The officers were fairly certain that they knew what they had—at least one member of the Cowden family. From the length of the femur bones and the configuration of the pelvis, the body would appear to be that of Richard Cowden.
Kezar knew that it would take extremely careful criminal investigation to preserve what evidence was left after almost eight months. He requested assistance at once from technical experts in Salem and from Dr. William Brady, the Oregon State medical examiner.
The troopers and deputies searched the hillside for the rest of the afternoon but had to quit as shadows began to fall. They had waited out the winter and the spring; they didn’t want to risk losing some vital clue because of darkness.
At dawn the next morning, they were back. At 9:30, they came upon a cave, a cave whose entrance was nearly obscured by an outcropping of rock above it. It had obviously been almost totally sealed up with rocks and dirt, either by nature or a human being. But the fierce Oregon winter rains had pelted the barricade, and a small rockslide had resulted, letting slices of light into the cave itself.
The officers looked into the opening, trying to focus as their eyes adjusted to the dark. There were bones inside, obliquely reflecting the filtered light of the forest. Carefully, sifting the debris as they worked, they unearthed a body inside. It, too, was the skeleton of an adult, this skeleton smaller, though, than the one tied to a nearby tree, and most likely a female with short, dark brown hair.
They lifted the decomposed form out and shone their flashlights into the dim interior of the cave. There were other bones. Small bones that would prove to be those of a small child, and the tender bones of an infant.
At last, they were looking at what they were sure was the Cowden family, buried away from all the searchers until Mother Nature herself revealed at least part of the answer to a terrible secret. The lost family had undoubtedly been here, seven miles from their campsite, since the previous fall.
Kezar, Franklin, and their men fanned out over the hillside. They went over every inch of ground, finding more clothing and a plastic baby carrier, its gay pastel coloring grimly incongruous to its grisly surroundings.
Everything found—no matter how small—was bagged and labeled; the Oregon State Police forensics laboratory would analyze all of it. Metal detectors were brought in, and the entire area was scanned in an attempt to find the murder gun and or bullet casings—with no success. For days Kezar and his men literally sifted the earth of the cave and hillside, but the killer had been meticulous in leaving no sign of himself behind.
The investigators sought a gun—because the bodies of the woman and little boy in the cave appeared to have been shot. If, for whatever unfathomable reason, Richard Cowden had killed his wife and children, and then killed himself, the weapon would be there.
There was no death weapon in the area. If it was there, anywhere within the radius that a dying man could throw it, Kezar’s men would have found it.
No, someone had taken the family far, far upstream from their camp, probably at gunpoint and, once there, killed them. The woman and children were stuffed into the cave then, and sealed up like characters in an Edgar Allan Poe horror tale. Cowden’s body would have been too large to fit into the cave, and the killer or killers had left him where he was tied, helpless to protect his family.
Positive identification of the remains was made by comparison of their teeth with dental records. Dr. Brady performed the postmortem exams in an attempt to determine the specific cause of death. He confirmed that Belinda and David had succumbed to .22-caliber bullet wounds—Brady found spent slugs in their bodies—and tiny Melissa had perished from severe head wounds. But it was impossible to determine cause of death for Richard Cowden. He could have been shot, too, with a bullet piercing soft tissue that had disintegrated with the passage of time, but Dr. Brady could not be sure.
Without body tissue, lethal methods like strangulation and stabbing are often impossible to establish so long after death. Sometimes, .22-caliber bullets do little damage—unless they hit bones, which change their path within the body. Then, they can injure vital organs fatally.
They knew the weapon was a .22—rifle or handgun—but they weren’t able to do ballistics comparisons because they didn’t have the murder gun.
Lieutenant Kezar made a somewhat cryptic statement to the press, saying he believed the killer probably was a person who either lived in the area or had once lived in the area, because the bodies had been stashed in such a hidden, murky cave, a cave only a local person would
be likely to know about.
The $2,000 reward for information leading to the finding of the Cowden family was paid to the two gold prospectors who had found Richard Cowden’s remains. Another reward, totaling $1,697, remained for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer.
It seemed that Droopy, the family pet, might be the only living creature—beyond the killer himself—who knew what had happened. Campers had seen the basset four to six miles upstream on the creek, very close to where the bodies were eventually discovered. Questioned again, they shook their heads helplessly. That’s all they had seen—a dog.
Droopy had probably made his way back to the town of Copper, looking for his family.
One Copper resident recalled that he had talked to a young family on September 1. He looked at the Cowden family’s photo and shook his head. It wasn’t the missing family he’d seen; they were tourists who said they were from the Los Angeles area.
“I remember they said, ‘We’re camping right across from you,’ which would have meant the old campgrounds.”
The witness said that the couple were in their late twenties or early thirties, and very friendly. The man had said he was in the computer field—possibly as a programmer in Los Angeles. He’d had a beard.
The California couple were traveling with children. “They had three children,” the other camper said. “They all had biblical names. I can’t tell you just what they were, but they were old-fashioned, from the Bible—maybe Joshua or Jason, Sarah. I can’t recall. One of the kids was just a baby in one of those backpack things.”
The investigative team wanted mightily to talk to that family. It was possible that they had seen someone in the area on the fatal September 1, but the team’s requests for contact, published in Southern California papers, drew no response at first. The campers weren’t suspects, but they might have seen someone who was.
Eventually, the investigators did locate the California tourists. Yes, they had arrived at the campgrounds about five o’clock on the night of September 1. The Cowdens were believed to have been abducted about midmorning that day, so the Californians wouldn’t have seen them.
“Two men and a woman pulled up in a pickup truck, though,” the father of three recalled. “They acted like they were waiting for us to leave, and, frankly, they made us nervous—so we moved on.”
A man from Grants Pass contacted the state police after he heard that the Cowdens’ bodies had been found. He was puzzled.
“I was helping in the search last September,” he said, “and I searched that cave. There were no bodies in it.”
Kezar figured they were probably talking about two different caves. “I asked him to take us to the cave he meant, to make sure we were talking about the same thing—and he did.”
And it was the cave that had become a crypt. Was it possible the killer had begun to worry that someone would find the bodies, and he returned to where he’d originally left them, and moved them into the cave?
It wasn’t impossible. Murderers had moved bodies before for that reason.
For every answer, it seemed, there were more questions.
In the meantime, Lieutenant Kezar and Lieutenant Winterfeld, Sergeant Wilden, and trooper Erickson continued to wade through mountains of tips, clues, and speculations.
They checked out known sex offenders and psychiatric patients recently released from the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, and followed up on both known and anonymous informants’ messages. It seemed as if every small town in southern Oregon had a few “grotesques,” as novelist Sherwood Anderson described residents of villages who didn’t fit in. Most weren’t dangerous; they just marched to different drums.
One of the routine reports from the Oregon State Board of Parole turned out to be anything but routine. They notified the state police team that they might have a possible suspect for them, one who certainly seemed capable of such a brutal crime.
Dwain Lee Little, twenty-five, had been paroled from the Oregon State Penitentiary on May 24, 1974, less than four months before the Cowdens vanished. Little was somewhat of a felon celebrity as, at sixteen, he had been the youngest prisoner ever received into the prison system.
Yellowed newspaper photos published in the midsixties showed Dwain Lee as he looked at the time. He had a sweet baby face then, and a sweeping pompadour with one unruly cowlick that brushed the middle of his forehead. He was five feet, eight inches and weighed only 150 pounds. Those who kept up with crime had found it was almost impossible to picture Dwain Lee carrying out the act for which he was convicted: first-degree-murder.
The Little family was living in Lane County, Oregon, in November of 1964, on rural property. Orla Fay Phipps was sixteen, a pretty neighbor girl who lived on nearby acreage. Dwain Lee might have had a crush on her, but thus far he hadn’t indicated it to his family or mentioned it to any of his friends. He was also said to have had a thirteen-year-old girlfriend.
Dwain was a poor student who had a serious reading problem, failing grades, and an IQ between 89 and 94. He was not developmentally disabled, but he was at the lower end of normal. Even so, he was captain of the eighth-grade football team and president of his class.
He could be charming and polite. He said “sir” and “ma’am.” He was a pretty good-looking kid who was popular with the girls at the Springfield Junior Academy near Eugene. He made a positive first impression, and teachers tried to help him. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t know Orla Fay Phipps very well at all.
Dwain Lee spent a lot of time in an orchard near his home. He was a loner who usually went there with his dog. He called this orchard his “second home,” and he explored animal trails, hunted, and watched birds. He did hang out in the orchard sometimes with an older cousin whom he idolized, and the two of them had a trap line together.
“Dwain Lee would rather have had a quick-draw pistol,” his cousin said, “than anything in the world.”
The teenager had a few male friendships, but he terminated those he did have abruptly. He and Orla Fay’s brother were close for a while, but Dwain walked away from that relationship.
Orla Fay Phipps was a well-developed and very pretty blonde. She often wore shorts—which Dwain’s sister, Vivian,* thought were too provocative—when she rode past the Littles’ property.
“Dwain always went to his room when she showed up,” his sister said.
On November 2, 1964, Orla Fay left to ride her horse, and her family became concerned when she didn’t return home, although her horse did.
Orla Fay couldn’t come home. She had been brutally murdered, although it was clear she had put up a tremendous fight to live. She had been struck on the head with a blunt object, sustaining skull fractures, and then her throat had been slashed and stabbed several times with a very sharp knife.
Autopsy results proved that Orla Fay had been raped after death.
At the time she died, Dwain Lee was only fifteen, but both physical and circumstantial evidence indicated that it was he who killed Orla Fay.
The legal question after his arrest for first-degree murder was whether he should be tried as an adult or as a juvenile? After his arrest, he was placed first at the Skipworth Home—a juvenile detention facility—as psychiatrists and psychologists prepared to evaluate his mental status and look at his background.
The elder Littles distrusted mental health professionals, feeling that they had been betrayed by them in the past, and Dwain shared their apprehension. His attorney and Juvenile caseworkers asked Dwain to get to know the doctors scheduled to evaluate him before he made his judgments.
The doctors looked first at the Little family’s background and interpersonal dynamics.
And it proved to be a checkered background for a boy of fifteen. His entire life had been one trauma after another. The Little family was far from ordinary.
When Dwain was seven, he was accidentally struck in the head with a baseball bat, and it left a depression in his skull that remained visible. He was hospitalized
for a few days and had to wear a protective helmet for five months. For several years after that, he was forbidden to participate in contact sports. He also had headaches, and there was some question that his injury had caused his extreme difficulty in spelling and writing.
In an effort to help him learn, his parents had placed him in a Seventh Day Adventist school. Sometime later, his mother and sister were baptized into that religion. Dwain, however, often gave the impression that he was the most religious member of his family, attending church services and reading his Bible.
The elder Littles—Stone* and Pearl*—were a curious pair. From the time Dwain was born in 1948, their lives were marked by paranoia, going way over the edge of people who “saw a glass half empty.”
Dwain’s father alleged that he had been threatened by a man named Si Hopkins,* and Hopkins intended to kill his whole family. Stone’s brother, Jackson,* had told him that Pearl was cheating on him with Hopkins, and that Hopkins would happily kill him if he could have Pearl.
Despite frail health, Pearl was a good-looking woman and so was her daughter, Vivian. While Si Hopkins had lusted after Pearl, Stone’s brother, Jackson, was besotted with Vivian—his stepniece. The objects of their lust had found both of them “coarse, vulgar, and repulsive” and had never wanted anything to do with them.
Afraid of both Si Hopkins and Jackson, the Littles had lived in virtual hiding. The children were taught to shoot a gun by the time they were five or six. A loaded gun was kept in the house at all times, they hauled water in because they were afraid their water supply might be poisoned, the children were never allowed very far from the house unaccompanied, and they occasionally lived for as much as a year under assumed names.
Shortly after Dwain was born, Pearl Lee Little was charged with arson, accused of burning down a friend’s house. She was jailed temporarily, but the charges were later dropped. Two years later, the Littles’ own house burned down and they lost everything. Apparently, there were no arson investigators who correlated this to the earlier fire.