In 1983, the body of 21-year-old bartender Dana DuMars was found in Candy Cane Park in La Grande, Oregon. The case was never solved, though for years children grew up with scary stories about the park. An investigator for the district attorney’s office spent years looking into the case and finally narrowed in on potential suspects. But then, cuts from the federal Department of Justice to local law enforcement ended the investigation. Emma Goldberg wrote about this story for the New York Times and joins us to talk about it.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 1983, the body of 21-year-old bartender Dana DuMars was found in Candy Cane Park in La Grande. After a botched investigation, the case was never solved. But for a few years now, an investigator for the district attorney’s office has been looking into the case. He eventually narrowed in on some potential suspects, but this spring, cuts from the Federal Department of Justice forced him to put that investigation on hold. Emma Goldberg is a reporter for The New York Times. She wrote about this recently, and she joins us now. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.
Emma Goldberg: Thank you so much for having me on.
Miller: How did you first hear about this case?
Goldberg: Absolutely. The reason that this story came about and the case came on my radar is that I saw a notice that said that the Department of Justice was cutting grants that supported rural violent crime prevention and reduction. That just raised a whole bunch of question marks for me, because I wondered in rural parts of the country, in red parts of the country that had supported President Trump, how would people feel about these financial and federal cuts that were impacting local law enforcement? So I started calling around to different offices to ask about what the local law enforcement agencies were seeing.
As I started looking into this, what struck me is that it would be really interesting to find a specific investigation, one case that had been affected by these sweeping federal funding cuts, and that was when I found out about the Candy Cane Park case. I spoke with the Union County District attorney and some members of her office. They told me actually that there was this cold case from long ago, from the 1980s, that they had been getting close to solving, and then all of a sudden they lost the funding that supported their investigator.
Miller: Let’s hear a little bit about this case. What do we know definitively about what happened to Dana DuMars in La Grande in 1983?
Goldberg: It’s a pretty mysterious and scary case. Basically, there was one night in February, 1983 in this town called La Grande, where a bunch of people were out at a dive bar drinking, and two of them got in an argument. There was a man who said something threatening to another woman. Some of them knew each other, some of them didn’t. And then the next morning, the body of the bartender was found in a park called Candy Cane Park that is just in the middle of La Grande, and she had been struck by a hatchet seven times.
Miller: The police did eventually interrogate one suspect and they got him to confess, but you point out there are some serious issues here. What was, first of all, his interrogation like?
Goldberg: If you look at these old documents, it’s actually pretty crazy because they found this one guy, Bart Cochran, who was at the bar that night and who had had a dispute with someone else at the bar. The police interrogated him, and it seemed, I think, to some of the sources I spoke with, like a pretty botched interrogation.
They shined a light on his hand, and when he saw the glow, they said that was an indication of blood. They told him he had some gift where he could intuit things that he had seen but hadn’t, things that had happened but that he hadn’t directly seen. There were all sorts of strange and potentially untoward aspects of this investigation and interrogation, but pretty quickly Cochran ended up being convicted. It was only three years later that that conviction was overturned, when people started asking questions.
Miller: He still lives in La Grande. What did he tell you?
Goldberg: I was able to reach him. He still lives there and he basically just told me, I hope this case gets solved. That was as much as he would say.
Miller: What did you hear from longtime residents about how this unsolved murder still reverberates for them in the city?
Goldberg: It was fascinating. I just walked around town a bit. I walked around Candy Cane Park. I popped into some stores and a barbershop. Basically what people told me is that, especially if you’re of a certain generation, you just grew up in La Grande with this case sort of in your memory. Some kids remember being told not to play in Candy Cane Park when they were growing up. Some remembered almost hearing kind of ghost stories about it. It definitely is a case that has held local fascination, curiosity, and possibly even fear for quite some time.
Miller: So this gets us to the investigator with the Union County DA’s office named Mike Harris. When did he start looking into this unsolved murder?
Goldberg: Mike had been interested in and looking into this case on and off for years. There was a big question mark around it for him because it was pretty clear that some of the initial investigation and interrogation had been botched. There had been that conviction that was overturned, and to Mike, it just seemed like this is a solvable case. As he started looking into it, he came across all sorts of interesting threads. He was able to interview people who were in and around it or who were at the bar that night.
He found this box of evidence ‒ and I actually looked through it with him ‒ and in this box there were shoes that Dana DuMars had been wearing that night, her eyeglasses, an envelope with the contents of her stomach from that night, and an old rape kit. There was so much evidence that was still there and around. Then years ago, Mike also sent off some evidence where he was going to do DNA testing on it, and he still hasn’t gotten those results back. It just felt to him like there were a lot of leads that could potentially point to who had done it and get him to solve the case.
Miller: What did he find to be the problems with the initial investigation? You talked about some, but I’m curious what else stood out to him as an investigator himself?
Goldberg: There were pieces of evidence that were sort of picked up without gloves and then passed around, touched by a lot of people. In his mind, what he kept telling me is that rather than letting the theory fit the facts, they tried to get the facts to fit the theory. I think what he meant by that is that, for example, with Mr. Cochran, it just seemed to some people like maybe he had done it because he was at the bar that night and had made some threatening remarks. And so the interrogation was kind of botched, they rushed it, and then they convicted him. I think that upset Mike, as someone who is really interested in cold case investigations and interested in getting to the bottom, to the truth, and getting people a sense of justice for their family members.
Miller: What did he tell you about how close he eventually felt like he was getting to solving the case?
Goldberg: I think that he has developed a sense over the years that he knows who it was. He said a couple of times, he said he just thinks this is solvable.
Miller: But didn’t quite have the irrefutable evidence to actually bring the case?
Goldberg: I think just as much as I can say is that right now and where things were left, he has a sense, but that’s that’s probably as much as I can say.
Miller: OK. Then in April, and this is obviously, as you said, this is why you started looking into this in the first place, they got word that he was going to have to stop investigating. What exactly did the Union County DA’s office hear from the feds?
Goldberg: Basically they were passed along a message that said that their grant was being terminated, and there were hundreds of grants like this around the country that were cut off. They supported all different kinds of things. I talked with a bunch of different district attorneys’ offices or local law enforcement agencies that had different kinds of work supported through this grant. In Union County’s case, it happened to be being able to bring on an investigator, and that was Mike.
Miller: What did you hear from Mike and from his boss, the elected DA Kelsie McDaniel, about this federal budget cut?
Goldberg: What they told me is that they felt like this was a grant that was supposed to support rural violent crime prevention. And this is a rural small town. This is violent to them, murder is a violent crime, and they were trying to investigate, reduce, and prevent it. The Candy Cane investigation was just one small piece of a whole broad array of activities Mike was doing, including supporting people who had been affected by domestic violence, supporting drug task force investigations. I think they felt like these are the definition of violent crimes that he’s working on, and they weren’t sure why the grant was terminated.
Miller: So where does this investigation stand right now?
Goldberg: Right now, what Mike told me is that it’s “dead in the water”, but that being said, I think they’re still looking into whether there’s any other sources of funding they could get to kickstart it again.
Miller: Emma, thanks very much.
Goldberg: Thank you so much for having me on.
Miller: Emma Goldberg is a reporter for The New York Times. She joined us to talk about a murder that happened more than 42 years ago that remains unsolved in La Grande and the investigation into it that was put on hold, that is, in the words of the investigator, dead in the water right now, because of a federal grant to local law enforcement that was canceled.
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