Woman Dead Over A Year Before Anyone Noticed Neighbor Found Remains In Trailer Home; Officials Hoping To Contact Her Family

She kept to herself and was between jobs, so nobody noticed when Barbara Ann Dorian disappeared over a year ago.

It took that long before a neighbor finally looked into her trailer home and saw her body. Since then, the Clark County medical examiner’s office has been trying to find her family.

Before Dorian disappeared, “I saw her going in and out a couple times, but there was no eye contact, no wave,” said James Styres, whose property is next to hers.

So Styres didn’t think much about it when he stopped seeing her in the winter of 1995-96.

“I figured she moved on,” he said.

But on May 31, Styres was clearing brush on his property and noticed that the road into Dorian’s property was overgrown. Farther in, he found her 1971 Ford truck awash in overgrown weeds. A lawn mower was rusting near her home, a small camper set on concrete blocks.

Styres began to feel uneasy.

“In a way, I kind of knew. It just didn’t seem right,” he said.

When he looked through the camper window, he saw a body curled on the camper floor.

The medical examiner’s office estimates Dorian died 16 months ago. Her remains - clad in long underwear, two shirts and socks - were mummified and weighed just 17 pounds.

The cause of her death “probably will never be determined,” Brian Miller of the medical examiner’s office said Wednesday. “There was no sign of trauma.”

Dorian was 52.

A report on the case published Tuesday in the Columbian newspaper of Vancouver triggered a flood of calls from people who knew her.

Acquaintances say she had a sister in Arkansas, though “it’s been so many years ago they don’t know her name,” Miller said.

A report from a Portland credit union found in the home indicated Dorian had two brothers in Chicago - Tom and John - but efforts to find them have so far been unsuccessful. Listings under those names reached so far are not related, though some calls have not yet brought a response, Miller said.

In the camper, Clark County authorities found Dorian’s Seafirst bank credit card, Washington driver’s license and a Social Security card.

They also found some memorabilia - a small sack of coins and an old snapshot of Dorian and another, unknown, woman.

She bought the 6.75-acre tract in 1977, according to county property records.

She got her mail at a Yacolt post office box she rented in 1988. The box was declared abandoned last year by Yacolt Postmaster Rhonda Reed.

“Nobody here even knew her,” Reed said.

Any mail that had accumulated apparently was sent to a dead-letter office, Miller said, so authorities found no leads there.

There were a few business cards in Dorian’s wallet, apparently job leads. She had a membership card for a Portland carpenter’s union.

Dorian worked for a cold-storage contractor in nearby Vancouver for a couple of years, until 1993.

“She was a real nice person and a good worker, but she kept to herself,” said Randy Asbury, president of IsoQuip in suburban Hazel Dell. “She didn’t share much with anybody.”

For now, Dorian’s body will stay at the medical examiner’s office. After so long, officials say they’re willing to wait another few weeks in hopes of locating her family.

If the body remains unclaimed, it will be cremated and placed in an urn alongside those of four or five other people whose families were never found.

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