Posted Friday, January 29, 2016 9:22 am

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office cold case squad has resolved a 47-year-old mystery of a Tacoma man who went missing in the Olympic Mountains.

Skeletal remains found in 1975 turned out to be those of the 21-year-old, who never returned from a camping trip in the summer of 1968. He had committed suicide with a rifle, according to evidence found at the scene.

Identification was determined in October 2015. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office made the news public Jan. 28, 2016.

Bob Gebo, a part-time JCSO employee and leader of the cold case squad of veteran investigators, spoke with the missing man’s three older brothers.

“There is a sense of relief, but also the idea that they accepted a long, long time ago that he was not coming back,” Gebo told the Leader. “Even so, it brings back a lot of pain. They know their mom and dad went through a lot of anguish.

GOING CAMPING

Here’s the story: On June 12, 1968, David C. Corak, 21, a resident of Tacoma in Pierce County, stopped at the Hamma Hamma Ranger Station north of Hoodsport in Mason County and reported that he was going to go camping in the Boulder Creek area. Corak appeared to have appropriate camping equipment and had a "tote goat" to carry the equipment. Other hikers in the area at the time reported seeing him at the Boulder Creek trailhead heading into Olympic National Forest.

A few days later, an automobile registered to Corak was located at the Boulder Creek trailhead by U.S. Forest Service personnel. Corak's wallet and other personal items were found in the vehicle. The ranger contacted the Mason County sheriff, who in turn contacted the man's family in Tacoma and learned that he had not returned from the camping trip.

An extensive search in the area was conducted, and no trace of the man was found, according to information the JCSO cold case squad assembled.

REMAINS FOUND IN 1975

On Oct. 1, 1975, a group of hikers came across a set of human skeletal remains in an off-trail area above Cliff Creek in the Duckabush River drainage in the Brothers Wilderness Area, which is within Jefferson County. A .22-caliber rifle was found with one discharged casing in its chamber, according to the JCSO investigation. The skull bore evidence of a single gunshot wound consistent with a .22-caliber bullet. The arrangement of the rifle supported by a stick with a string used to pull the trigger strongly suggested the manner of death to be suicide.

The hikers notified the JCSO, and a deputy accompanied them back to the site. Found with the remains was clothing in new condition at the probable time of death. A nylon comb, a pocketknife and about two dozen .22-caliber shells were found at the site. No identification of any kind was located, nor was any evidence of a camp or camping equipment found. The scene is a rugged hike from where Corak entered the forest in 1968.

A pathologist estimated the probable date of death to have been from six to nine months prior to discovery.

A complete dental exam revealed some extremely fine dental work and some older dental work; two dentists were apparently involved. Dental charts were circulated to the Washington State Dental Association and the American Dental Association for a possible identification, without success, according to the JCSO cold case squad investigation.

PROGRESS BY 2000

Fast forward to 2000. Bob Gebo had retired as detective sergeant with the Seattle Police Department in 1999 and went to work for the Washington State Attorney General’s Homicide Investigation Tracking System (HITS) unit. He embarked on a number of projects with local agencies regarding unidentified remains. Jefferson County was in his area of responsibility, and the missing camper case rose to the surface.

First, the remains had to be located. During earlier investigations, the remains had been sent to an anthropologist who had since retired; he did locate them, and they were returned to JCSO custody, Gebo said.

No such luck with other information. Apparently, JCSO files went into the trash when the jail was relocated from the county courthouse. The rifle found at the scene was missing from evidence storage and never recovered.

“When we began working on this set of unidentified remains, there was no JCSO report,” Gebo told the Leader. “One had been written, as we had the incident number attached to the remains and we found excerpts from a report in old newspaper articles, but the actual report had gone away. So, using what we could learn from the articles, we re-created the incident report. From that very basic information, we began our investigation.”

Once in contact with the Corak family, investigators learned that the family’s mother saved communications with Mason County law enforcement and USFS rangers, so that information was gathered.

In October 2000, the unidentified remains were delivered to Dr. Kathy Taylor at the King County Medical Examiner's Office to complete an osteological exam of the bones. She contacted Natalie Murry, a forensic artist, to prepare artistic sketches of the unidentified remains based upon the actual skull. Her two sketches were incorporated into a bulletin that was circulated among law enforcement agencies and other recipients via the Internet, Gebo reported.

CONTACT IN 2010

On May 10, 2010, a woman in Whittier, Alaska, contacted the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney's Office with information regarding a member of her husband's family who disappeared in 1968. She had been doing family genealogy research and had seen the information on the Internet regarding the unidentified remains, and expressed hope that the mystery of what happened to her husband's relative might be resolved, Gebo told the Leader.

She identified the missing man as David C. Corak. A check of all the available databases could not located any information regarding a missing-person report for someone with that name.

Using information supplied by this woman, the JCSO's cold case squad contacted Corak's three surviving brothers and obtained family DNA samples for reference; those samples were compared with the DNA profile produced by the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS) Program at the University of North Texas in Fort Worth.

Unfortunately, due to the condition of the remains and other factors, a positive match could not be made, investigators learned.

“In this case, the remains had been out in the wild for a long time, and there were problems because the three remaining brothers don’t share the same father, so the [DNA] comparisons yielded an inconclusive result. So we went the old way: dental records,” Gebo told the Leader.

Investigators learned Corak has been in the U.S. Navy in the mid-1960s. Obtaining old military dental records can be difficult, Gebo noted, so special help was sought.

Forensic dentist Dr. Richard Scanlon, a consultant for NamUS, obtained Corak's dental records from the military’s national archives in St. Louis, Missouri, and compared them to the dental charts from the unidentified remains. Scanlon was able to make a positive match. The same charts were then examined by Dr. Gary Bell, the Washington state forensic odontologist. He verified Dr. Scanlon's findings that the unidentified remains were those of David C. Corak, Gebo said.

COLD CASE SQUAD

Jefferson County Sheriff Mike Brasfield took office in 2003 and formed a “cold case squad” of retired or semi-retired law enforcement personnel. Active members include Dennis Cowan, retired California Department of Justice investigator; Jim Myers, retired, Mercer Island Police Department; Gordon Barnett, retired detective, Seattle Police Department; and Bob Gebo, retired detective sergeant, Seattle Police Department, and former senior supervisory investigator analyst with the Washington State Attorney General's Office.

Past members include Bill Haverstick, retired ATF supervisor; Bob Schamay, retired special agent, FBI; Charles Saunces, retired special agent, FBI; and Jason Greenspane, sergeant with the Port Townsend police.

Jefferson County Undersheriff Joe Nole is the JCSO representative.

The Corak case ranks as one of the most successful in JCSO cold case squad history. There are about six cases being worked, including missing-person reports from the 1960s and 1970s.

Cold case research now could lead to breakthroughs in the future, Gebo noted.

"The good news is, most of the things we’ve been able to find locally are up to modern standards, so the case files can be read and there is information in them that can be compared to things that come up from other parts of the country,” Gebo said. “It's rewarding in that regard. And then there is something like this one, where you can say, our work got this done. It's a painful thing for a family to live with, but on the other hand, they know. And that's better."