Past a dirt driveway blocked by a single board nailed to fence posts, police and firefighters found the body of JoAnna Speaks inside a ramshackle barn strewn with trash and plastic sheeting.
In the unmowed front yard, there’s now a hand-painted cross noting the mother of three’s birthday. But mourners could only record the approximate month of her death.
Relatives believe Speaks had been dead for days or weeks before someone moved her body to the abandoned site east of the Interstate 5 interchange in Ridgefield, about 20 miles into Washington state from Portland.
About two weeks later, Multnomah County sheriff’s deputies discovered another woman dead, about 50 miles from the Ridgefield barn, in one of the two culverts running beneath the Historic Columbia River Highway just east of Ainsworth State Park. Her name was Charity Perry.
The longest culvert stretches about 50 feet along the bottom of a wildflower-dotted hillside. Crushed beer cans, cigarette butts and other debris are scattered nearby. On a recent day, the culverts were bone-dry, the only rushing sound from the highway traffic nearby.
The deaths of Speaks, 32, and Perry, 24, have drawn their families together as they come to grips not only with the women’s deaths but with public speculation about their demise. Speaks and Perry are among five women who died in similar circumstances over a three-month span this year, their bodies all found within a 100-mile radius.
Investigators have disclosed few details of how the women died. So far they have only confirmed that Speaks died of blunt-force trauma to the head and neck in a homicide. They’ve called the other deaths “suspicious.”
With so little information, Robyn Speaks, JoAnna’s older sister, and Diana Allen, Charity’s mother, have turned to each other for emotional support — and to make an effort to find answers. They were perfect strangers until just recently, unaware they shared the worries of caring for a family member who cycled in and out of homelessness due to drug addiction or mental illness.
Then, the women separately received a call they had long dreaded.
JoAnna Speaks was found April 8 and Perry on April 24. Police also are investigating the deaths of Kirstin Smith, 22, whose body was found Feb. 19 in a wooded area in Southeast Portland; Bridget Webster, 31, whose body was found April 30 in Polk County; and Ashley Real, whose body was found May 7 at a fishing pond in Eagle Creek.
The death of a sixth woman, found April 24 in a tent near Interstate 205, is not considered suspicious but has been publicized by authorities seeking to identify her and notify next of kin.
The string of unsolved deaths has raised the specter of a serial killer targeting women from vulnerable populations. Portland police officials have said such speculation is unwarranted, but a source close to the investigations told The Oregonian/OregonLive that authorities are examining connections in at least three of the cases.
Investigators believe Speaks, Perry and Webster all frequented the area of Southeast 82nd Avenue and Clackamas Town Center, according to the source.
More is known about Speaks and Perry because their families are speaking out, even if it means putting their loved one’s lives under public scrutiny.
“I want people to remember she is a person,” said Allen. “Telling the truth is the only way I’m going to get the truth back.”
Bodies found in secluded areas across Portland metro
Police told Allen that her daughter’s body had been in the culvert for up to two weeks before deputies found her.
Allen, 44, who lives in Longview, plans to visit the site after Perry’s burial. “I’m trying to get emotionally ready,” she said this week.
Robyn Speaks said she’s planning to meet face-to-face this weekend with Allen and another family for the first time. The property where her sister was found has been vacant since it was sold to a Colorado company in January 2021, the daughter of the former owners said. It was posted with “no trespassing” signs after JoAnna Speaks’ death.
Both JoAnna Speaks and Perry had been homeless in Oregon and Washington for years, with Speaks sometimes couch-surfing in Milwaukie and Gladstone and Perry cycling between mental-health hospitals, assisted-living facilities for adults with mental illness and Vancouver homeless encampments.
The families of both women struggled to keep track of them.
JoAnna Speaks had been battling methamphetamine addiction for the past decade, and there was “a good chance” she had started using fentanyl, her sister said. Her family knew she sometimes stayed with friends near Portland, and she stayed in touch primarily through her parents.
But the family stopped hearing from her about three weeks before her body was found, Robyn Speaks said.
Allen said she always tried speaking with Perry about every two weeks, often by calling the phone of a camper who her daughter shared a tent with in Vancouver. When she stopped hearing from her in January, Allen said she traveled to Vancouver, but the search was fruitless.
The Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office said Perry was known to visit an open-air fentanyl market in downtown Portland before police cleared it in April.
Allen said investigators told her Perry had been rushed to Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center on March 6 due to an overdose from an unknown drug. Perry left the hospital on foot after being treated with Narcan, an overdose-reversing drug, Allen said investigators told her.
What happened to her daughter over the next seven weeks remains a mystery, but one thing is pretty clear, Allen said: Due to her schizophrenia, Perry — who didn’t drive and was unfamiliar with east Multnomah County — would not have been able to travel by herself to the remote culvert where her body was found.
“She did not get where she was on her own. Somebody put her there,” Allen said. “One hundred percent there is a murderer out there.”
JoAnna Speaks remembered: ‘A bright light’
JoAnna Speaks grew up in Oregon City, the middle child of eight. She stood out: bold, loud and funny.
“She was larger than life and witty and stubborn. She was basically a big kid,” Robyn Speaks, 35, said. “She was a bright light that made everything fun.”
JoAnna Speaks loved singing, pulling pranks and making people laugh. Her friends and family knew her as “the funny one,” who was always quick to pull someone onto the dance floor, her sister said.
“Even when she went into labor with her first son, we laughed the entire way (to the hospital),” she said.
As she got older, JoAnna Speaks’ friendly and trusting nature worked against her, as she fell into a string of ill-advised relationships, leading her to fall into drug addiction, Robyn Speaks said.
Trouble struck in 2013, when Speaks — then 23 — was sentenced to more than three years in prison for her role in a robbery near Clark County’s Vancouver Lake, The Columbian reported.
According to her sister, JoAnna Speaks left prison “clean and sober” and eager to be reunited with her children.
“She repaid the debt to society and busted her butt in prison to get all the positives she could and get back on the right track,” Robyn Speaks said. “We got her back to be the best version of her.”
The upward trajectory didn’t last. JoAnna Speaks eventually lost her housing and started using meth. Her daughter went to live with the girl’s father and her stepsister adopted her sons, now 12 and 13.
Robyn Speaks said her sister’s children wanted their mother back in their lives.
“They’d held on to the possibility of seeing her return to herself,” she said. “That’s taken away from them now.”
Charity Perry dedicated to family: ‘She really loved’
From the very beginning, Charity Perry loved bubbles and butterflies.
Her favorite food was dessert, her favorite color was purple and she loved animals, especially her Daschund mix, Princess, Allen said.
In elementary school in Longview — where classmates sometimes called her “Char Bear” — Perry started a fundraiser for people devastated by hurricanes in Haiti and collected dog food for the Cowlitz County Humane Society, her mother said.
But her behavior started changing at about 7 years old, when Perry began exhibiting symptoms of a mental illness. Her behavior “escalated” as a teenager, and when she reached adulthood, Perry started speaking to an invisible person who wasn’t there, Allen said. She was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Perry’s mental illness made it almost impossible for Allen to keep track of her. Allen would sometimes get calls notifying her that police had picked up her daughter and taken her to jail, or had transferred her to psychiatric hospitals or care facilities around Washington. But those places wouldn’t disclose much more about Perry due to privacy laws, Allen said.
January was the last time Allen said she was certain she knew where her daughter was.
Amid the chaos, Allen said Perry’s devotion to her 10-year-old brother remained constant.
“No matter how mentally sick or unstable that she was, she always had it that she was going to go get a job and she was going to take care of me and her little brother,” Allen said. “She really loved him.”
The investigation continues: ‘Where do we start?’
Diana Allen and Robyn Speaks recognize they might never know what happened to their loved ones. They might never learn if the deaths are connected.
The troubled, chaotic nature of JoAnna Speaks’ and Charity Perry’s lives makes the investigations into their deaths especially difficult.
“If a person is houseless and they bounce around from place to place, where do we start?” Portland police Sgt. Kristi Butcher pointed out in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. “Without a cell phone, think about all that information that’s potentially missing. We have to figure out the pieces to the puzzle.”
Detectives are trying to figure out those pieces for all five women whose deaths they’ve deemed suspicious. It’s time-consuming work, chasing threads, and threads of threads.
Allen and Robyn Speaks, meanwhile, compare notes in hopes of being able to help. And they wait, leaning on each other.
“Knowing other people that are going through the same thing — it’s unfair,” said Robyn Speaks. “But it also brings a sort of connection or comfort knowing that they might know how you feel, and being able to be there for them has been wildly helpful for us in healing.”
