Wife leads search for missing hunter
BEAVER, Ore. – As the first gray stains of dawn broke up the night Saturday, searchers gathered in the rugged Oregon Coast Range to try to trace the last known steps of Jeromy Childress.
At one time, some 300 searchers – including sheriff’s deputies from seven Oregon counties – combed the steep gullies and almost tropically dense undergrowth looking for signs of the elk hunter who vanished here Oct. 17.
On Saturday, on what would have been his sixth wedding anniversary, some 80 volunteers answered a call by the family to try once more to bring closure – good or bad – for Kristen Childress and the couple’s two small children.
As she related it, her husband, a 31-year-old industrial bridge painter and two others, made camp in the rugged area Oct. 15 and drove off to find firewood. They lost track of the camp and spent the night in the truck. The next afternoon, Childress headed into the woods on a hunch that he could find the camp. He had a rifle, a pocket knife and a half pack of Marlboros.
Kristen Childress, 28, said her husband probably kept moving on that foggy, rainy afternoon, even after dark, to stay warm. Deputies who searched the area called it some of the roughest territory in the Northwest.
“If he hunkered down behind a log, he might have lasted a couple of days,” said Tillamook County Sheriff’s Deputy Don Taylor.
“If he fell and had a compound fracture or was bleeding badly, he died that night,” he said.
Kristen Childress, meanwhile, was left to explain his disappearance to their 3-year-old daughter Kelsy. Their 8-month-old son Jesse was too young to understand what had happened.
“I tell her he is in her heart and in the stars,” she said. “She makes wishes to the stars and says ‘I love you.’ And that she has a flashlight to go up to the stars and look for him,” Childress said.
Childress said she has transitioned from “They can’t find him” to “He is not coming home.”
Oregon will not issue a death certificate for a missing person, so she cannot get insurance benefits, or sell her husband’s truck or boat to help with expenses. At some point, she says, she will have to go before a judge and have him declared deceased. She says she doesn’t know when she’ll be ready to do that.
“I’m OK,” said Childress, who works as an administrative assistant at the Salem-Keizer School District. “There are two memorial funds for the children. Money is still coming in and I haven’t touched it yet.”
Volunteers, mostly hunters themselves, were told to stay only a few feet apart. In the dense Coast Range, people can get disoriented and lost only a few feet off of the rustic roads, which are cut along precipitous hillsides.
“It seemed the right thing to do,” said Dan Nenow of the Portland suburb of Milwaukie, who like most of those who were combing the heavy brush did not know Childress.
People who knew Jeromy Childress said he would not have vanished on purpose. They said he adored his daughter and son. Kristen Childress dismissed the thought out of hand.
“Everybody we talked to said he loved his wife and kid. He loved his job,” Taylor, the sheriff’s deputy, said.