Desperate to do something, Sherry Fong ran a personals ad in The Oregonian. "DIANE Please contact me," it read. "Regardless of your present circumstances or anything you may have done, I'll help you all I can. Sherry."

Diane never got in touch. A road crew outside Washougal found the 16-year-old's body on February 27, 1954, a month after Fong's ad ran. The Lincoln High School student was wrapped in two blankets that had been tied up with rope. Her bra had been pushed off her breasts. She had pin curls in her hair.

Diane Hank's death shocked Portland. The subsequent murder case that played out in public proved even more shocking. Before the girl's body was even discovered, police arrested Sherry Fong and her husband Wayne. Diane had babysat the couple's two young children on Wednesday, January 6, the night before her disappearance. Through trials, appeals and retrials of the Fongs over the next four years, Portlanders heard about heroin and prostitution, miscegenation and violence, the alluring danger of Chinatown and the good-looking young soldier who loved the dead girl.

The Oregonian and the Oregon Journal followed the police investigation closely, especially during its first few weeks. Readers learned that Diane was almost six feet tall and "was shy about her height." They also discovered that the pretty blond teen had a baby "out of wedlock" and had "tried" marijuana. All of this was sensational enough that editors at The Oregonian pulled star reporter Wallace Turner off a blockbuster investigation into links between the mob, unscrupulous union leaders and government officials. Turner filed multiple stories about the Hank case.

Prosecutors and the press blamed Wayne and Sherry Fong for Diane's moral corruption. Which only made sense. Wayne (born Wey Him) was Chinese and Sherry (Marjorie Lovell) white. At that time an interracial couple was by definition suspicious. And, to be sure, Wayne was a known drug dealer, having pleaded guilty to a narcotics charge in 1948. Deputy District Attorney Howard Lonergan described Diane Hank as "a very ordinary teenaged girl until she met the Fongs."

The police quickly homed in on Sherry (the newspapers frequently referred to her nickname as an "alias"), believing she was more likely to crack than her husband. In February, after Diane's body had been found, detectives questioned Sherry for 16 hours, refusing to allow her to rest.

When that didn't work, they allegedly tried to be subtler -- and even more sinister. On May 3, according to the Fongs' defense attorney Irvin Goodman, detectives conscripted a "trusted friend" of Sherry's to drug her and take her to a motel. "I remember nothing about the ride except that occasionally I could see neon lights flash by," Sherry later related. "When I arrived at the motel I was thoroughly confused, and I put my head under the cold-water faucet in an effort to clear my mind." As Sherry stumbled around "in a stupor" and detectives supposedly eavesdropped from an adjacent room, the friend tried to get her to confess to killing Diane.

Det. Captain William D. Browne called Sherry's claim that the police had drugged her "ridiculous."

***

Despite the police's efforts, Multnomah County District Attorney John McCourt wasn't keen on trying the Fongs for murder. The couple had no obvious motive, and by all accounts Diane and Sherry were close friends. Plus, it wasn't even clear that the teen had been murdered. She had probably died from barbiturate poisoning, and one theory was that she had overdosed while at the Fongs' home and that the couple, in a panic, had dumped the body rather than calling the police. But McCourt was up for re-election, and the public wanted murder, not lesser, charges.

So murder indictments duly came down, and in 1955 the case went to trial, even though McCourt had lost his re-election bid. Wayne and Sherry, both 23, sat stoically during the trial, with Sherry occasionally craning her head to see if her sister Louella had brought Sherry's children, 6-year-old Katherine and 5-year-old Vince, to court.

The state argued that the Fongs murdered Diane because she knew about Wayne's drug-dealing activities.

"She was killed because she knew too much about the Fongs' business and was popping off," Deputy D.A. Lonergan declared.

Various stunning, mostly unproven revelations dribbled out in court and the press.

* Sherry told a bartender that her "girl friend" committed suicide. She told police that Diane had "contributed perhaps 75 percent to her own death."

* Diane called her mother from the Fongs' house the last night she was known to be alive and said "they were having a party, and they were going to have dinner, and she said she was high."

* Kenneth Martin, the father of Diane's baby, "threatened to kill Diane if he saw her with another boy," Goodman claimed.

* Diane was "sick and unhappy" about Martin, who she feared was losing interest in her. "If he stands me up again, I'll kill myself," she supposedly said. Martin later joined the Army. He testified that he loved her.

* Sherry doted on and bought presents for Diane. They were "like sisters," one of Diane's friends said. "They used to borrow each other's clothes. Sherry was always trying to help Diane," especially during the girl's unexpected pregnancy.

* Sherry allegedly told a paid police informant that Diane was talking "too much" about the Fongs' drug dealing. As a result, the Chinese narcotics syndicate they worked for "had wanted to get rid of her, and because of her association with Diane, she had wanted to save her and had offered to pay as high as $125,000 to get the syndicate off of her neck."

* A Lincoln High classmate believed she spotted Diane on a downtown Portland corner the day after her disappearance. Another classmate insisted she bumped into Diane at the downtown Meier & Frank department store more than two weeks after she disappeared and that they said hello to each other. Prosecutors dismissed the girls' accounts, a defense attorney said, because "they couldn't make [their stories] fit the facts" they wanted to present.

* An undercover police officer on the case allegedly told an acquaintance that the Fongs "were getting a dirty deal, that the cops were trying to pin the case on somebody so they could get rid of it."

* Wayne Fong pointed the finger at another couple, the Smalleys, alleged brothel proprietors who paid a mysterious call on Diane the night of her disappearance.

Despite this fog of conflicting information, the jury in the first trial quickly found the Fongs guilty of first-degree murder, and it reportedly voted 10-2 for the couple to die in the gas chamber. But the judge set aside the verdict, stating that the prosecution's case, entirely circumstantial, offered "no reputable showing of either malice or premeditation."

That hardly ended the matter. The couple was tried again, this time separately. Wayne Fong's two-and-a-half-week trial the next year featured more stunning accusations, including testimony that Wayne tried to have two state's witnesses killed. "He tell me to keep my mouth shut," said Pio ("King Kong") Reigo, a Filipino immigrant who had worked for the Fongs. "If I don't, he kill me or somebody else do."

But, again, the evidence of murder was weak. The trial's judge ultimately freed the Canton, China, native through a directed verdict.

"I'm just so happy and thankful, I just don't know what to say," Sherry said from Rocky Butte Jail, where she passed the time until her own retrial by designing curtains for the warden. "Gee, what can you say? The man was innocent, and he deserves to be free."

"And yourself?" the reporter asked.

"That'll come!" she declared with a smile.

Sherry's verdict did come, but the result wasn't the same as her husband's. The Texas-born woman, who had moved to Vancouver during World War II with her mother and two sisters, didn't have much luck playing to jurors' sympathies. After a mistrial, the state tried her for a third time -- and she was convicted of second-degree murder.

That still wasn't the end of it. The evidence against Sherry hadn't been any stronger than it had been against Wayne. In 1957, the Oregon Supreme Court overturned Sherry's conviction. She was finally acquitted later that year in yet another trial.

By this time, news reports about the case mostly skated over the teen girl whose sudden death had left an infant without a mother. Diane's parents and grandmother tried to remind people that she was more than a headline. And they relentlessly disputed the theory that she had committed suicide, insisting she was naturally happy, working part-time as a messenger for a downtown law firm and enjoying skiing -- a new hobby -- on weekends. (On Christmas 1953, Sherry had given Diane an expensive ski jacket that Diane wore everywhere.)

***

Wayne and Sherry Fong had finally been set free and the newspapers had moved on to other subjects, but police kept a close eye on them. In 1958, detectives arrested Wayne for dealing heroin, resulting in federal agents "uncovering the biggest narcotic operation yet exposed on the West Coast." Fong pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

He was paroled in 1970, returned to Portland and took up where he had left off, reportedly becoming the largest drug dealer in Chinatown. Three years later, he was convicted of heroin and cocaine possession. He died in prison in 1976, apparently after falling in the shower. (Portland police officer Bruce Gary Harrington, the husband of 1985-86 Portland Police Chief Penny Harrington, would be accused of protecting Fong and other drug dealers in the early 1970s. Harrington denied any wrongdoing, and Fong insisted his relationship with the officer was merely "social.")

The judge who hit Fong with the lengthy sentence in 1958 later became confused about that case, linking it in his mind to Diane Hank's death -- and highlighting why the Fongs' murder trials had held the city in thrall. "Toughest sentence I ever gave was to Wayne Fong," Judge Gus J. Solomon said in 1968. "Twenty years hard. That is 20 years without parole, and he is still filing petitions. Wayne Fong was a wholesale dealer in narcotics who was acquitted of the murder of a young blond woman who was his wife. He then entered a plea of guilty to the lesser charge of selling narcotics."

Sherry Fong, of course, was not the young blond victim in the murder case. She stayed out of trouble after Wayne went to prison and kept a low profile. She had been a part-time premed student at Portland State when Diane went missing, but she apparently never returned to her studies. In 1987, now called Sherry Lovell Johnson, she agreed to probation for tampering with drug records. She died later that year. She was 56.

The actual circumstances surrounding Diane Hank's death were never officially determined.

Lynne Palombo assisted with the research for this story.

-- Douglas Perry