Pierce County Reopens Case Of Missing Tacoma Reporter

Authorities have reopened a missing person case involving the disappearance 12 years ago of a Tacoma newspaper reporter. But now it has turned it into a suspected homicide investigation as possible reasons for her disappearance take a more sinister turn.

Jody Roberts, a journalist for The News Tribune who “ate, drank and breathed newspapering,” disappeared without a trace in 1985.

“She was not suicidal, no history,” said Capt. Gary L. Smith, head of the criminal investigations unit of the Pierce County sheriff’s office. “And, if she were, there was no reason for her to hide her own body. And no reporter would commit suicide and not leave a note. Their lives are words.”

Roberts, who was 27 when she disappeared, has not contacted family or friends or used her Social Security number - clues, investigators say, that show she didn’t just decide to start a new life somewhere.

Her case was reopened in January, after a sheriff’s office intern, Paul Myhre, conducted routine checks of 200 still-open missing persons cases.

After finding out that most of the people had either come home, died or been in jail, Myhre closed all but five or six of the cases. Only Roberts’ stood out as one that defied reasonable explanation.

Roberts failed to show up to work one morning the week of May 20, 1985. She was to meet a photographer to do a story on her alma mater, Pacific Lutheran University. The photographer, Bruce Larson, later became a Pierce County deputy sheriff and is helping in the investigation.

Investigators who took the missing person’s report found that Roberts had closed her checking account and withdrew $350 from a Federal Way branch of her bank. There was no sign of foul play at her office or her home in Gig Harbor.

The mystery deepened when her car was found two weeks later, parked in a stall at the News Tribune office. It’s unknown how it got there.

The case was eventually dropped when the detective working on it retired.

By all reports, Roberts appeared dedicated to her work and relentlessly covered city hall and courts.

“She ate, drank and breathed newspapering,” Smith said.

An occasional problem did crop up, Smith said. Roberts had had a dispute at work, but was denied a request to take the day off to spend time with her friends. Some who knew her said her behavior had changed and she was drinking more.

But checks on her social life and friends showed that “everything appeared normal,” Smith said.

She was also investigating several “volatile stories” that may have contributed to her disappearance.

“She was working on the Green River murders (serial killings of prostitutes in the Sea-Tac area),” Smith said. “She had interviewed some of the women in the area.

“In addition she had interviewed a Vashon Island man paroled for an Illinois murder but the story never appeared (in the newspaper) and was lost,” he said.

The Illinois parolee had appeared at the newspaper a couple of times, drunk, and had to be escorted off the premises. His name was lost when parole files were converted from hard copy to computerized records.

It took Roberts’ parents a long time to come to terms with their daughter’s disappearance. Thinking that Jody would return in a few days, the Robertses asked The News Tribune not to run a story when she disappeared.

“We thought she had gotten burned out on the job,” her mother, Marilyn Roberts, said Tuesday.