Disappearances | Missing Persons
Who is Behind America’s Oldest Active Missing Person Case?
The Unsolved Disappearance of Marvin Clark.
An Oregonian man mysteriously vanishes while en route to visit his daughter over the Halloween weekend many, many years ago. An accidental discovery made decades later only proved to add another layer of mystery to what’s become the oldest active missing person case in U.S. history.
Marvin Alvin Clark was born circa 1852 in Marion County, Iowa, to parents originally from New York. A ‘highly educated’ man, Marvin graduated from two different universities before eventually moving to Oregon with his wife, Mary, as early as 1910. Together the couple had 4 children, including a daughter named Sidney. According to census records for 1910, Marvin resided in the community of Holbrook and, at one point, served as the town Marshal of Linnton, a district that later became Portland, Oregon (a city that had a population of roughly 300,000 by 1930). At the time of his disappearance, Marvin stood at 5'8" (or 1.73 m) tall, suffered paralysis¹, did not have full use of his right arm, and had a “halting gait” for which he sometimes used a cane.
On October 30, 1926, at around 1 p.m., Marvin, now approximately 75 years of age², left his home in Tigard to visit…
