On the afternoon of 17 July 1974, 15-year-old Norma Jean Countryman was sitting by the side of the road in Ridgefield, Washington, smoking a cigarette. She was dealing with abuse at home and needed to get away. A blue van pulled up. The man inside started chatting with her. She thought about leaving, but eventually accepted his offer of a ride home.

The driver was Warren Forrest, a 28-year-old employee of the Clark County Parks Department. Once she was in the van, he abducted her at knifepoint and drove her into the forests of southern Washington, where he hog-tied her in the back. He bound her with coarse rope, gagged her, and strung her between two trees like a human hammock. Norma Jean said she knew she was going to die that day. She recalled learning every prayer she knew and repeating them over and over in her head.

Forrest left her there and told her he would be back. Instead of waiting, Norma Jean chewed through the ropes binding her and hopped through the dark woods all night, hands and ankles still tied, until she reached help.

She went to the police and gave them everything: his name, his face, his van, the ropes, the weapon. No one believed her. Unbeknownst to investigators at the time, 20-year-old Krista Blake had been kidnapped by Forrest a week before Norma Jean, and her body was already buried in the same patch of woods, just feet from where Norma Jean had been tied.

In the silence that followed Norma Jean’s unbelieved report, more girls would vanish. Forrest is believed to be connected to a series of homicides from the early 1970s, though he was not apprehended until later that same year, after kidnapping and raping a 19-year-old woman near Lacamas Lake. She survived and helped identify him.

Forrest was eventually found guilty of killing 20-year-old Krista Blake. In 2023, nearly 50 years after Norma Jean’s abduction, he was convicted of killing 17-year-old Martha Morrison, also from 1974. Investigators continue to examine other unsolved cases linked to him, including the murder of 20-year-old Carol Valenzuela, whose remains were found near Martha’s.

It would be nearly 2” years before Norma Jean Countryman publicly shared her story. She lived with the trauma her entire life and was never offered therapy. She has since testified at multiple parole hearings. She said she was there not only for herself, but for everyone affected by Forrest’s crimes, including people she had no awareness of when she sat in his van, and the children of his victims.