Dog Used To Track Missing Woman Searchers Find Slippers, Bed Sheet But Don’t Know If Items Are Martin’s

Investigators searching for a 74-year-old woman missing since Saturday have turned up a pair of slippers, two pillows and a bed sheet.

But as of late Tuesday, they had yet to find Hazel Martin.

For that matter, they weren’t even sure the bedroom items they uncovered belonged to her or if they were some of the scores of items washed down the Potlatch River in this year’s floods.

“There’s junk all over the place,” said Latah County Sheriff’s Lt. Vern Moses.

Martin was last seen Friday night playing cards at the local Grange Hall, where she reportedly won $7 before driving home alone about 10 p.m.

Alerted by relatives who couldn’t find her Saturday afternoon, sheriff’s deputies found no signs of a struggle but noticed two sheets had been stripped from her bed. Martin lived alone.

As many as 174 volunteers coordinated by Latah County Search and Rescue helped search for Martin on Sunday. By Tuesday, that number was down to seven, in part to avoid contaminating the area with scents before a search dog was brought in later in the afternoon, said search coordinator Marv Pillers.

Searchers on Tuesday morning did uncover a heavily stained bed sheet about three miles upstream, but Moses said it was unclear if the stains were mud or blood without forensic testing.

Relatives of Martin have not been able to positively identify any of the discovered materials as belonging to Martin, he said.

Investigators spent much of Tuesday inside Martin’s cordoned-off home, a tidy white-clapboard house with a faded starsand-stripes windsock above the porch and an assortment of lawn art - ducks, a skunk, a gull and a wide-eyed raccoon.

The investigators took several items from the home and dusted the trunk of a late-model Taurus for fingerprints. But while the Moscow Police Department and the Idaho Department of Law Enforcement’s Criminal Investigation Bureau are assisting the sheriff’s department, Moses insisted they are still treating the matter as a missing person case.

“We don’t know at this point where she’s at, whether she’s been abducted, whether she’s deceased. That’s why we’re investigating it,” he said.

Residents, meanwhile, spoke grimly at the Country Gas Mart about hoping Martin is found soon to minimize the strain on her relatives. A photocopy of Martin and her husband Alvin, who lives in a retirement center, was taped to the counter with the words, “Missing: Hazel Martin wt 135, ht 5’ 5” green eyes, mole on nose.”

Across from Martin’s home, Quenteen Bidlake drew on a cigarette and looked over in bewilderment.

“I don’t know what the motive could have been,” he said. “… You just come up blank.”

, DataTimes