Jennifer Lynn Tchir, a 15-year-old white female, left home in Gresham, Oregon, on July 3, 1987, and never returned. Witness accounts later placed her that day near the Mount Hood Community College area, a swath of fields and woods that would loom over the case for years. For more than twelve months her family and police searched without answers, until July 1988, when a biology student stumbled upon human bones in brushy fields on Gresham’s southeast side; Explorer Scouts combed the area over
the following week and recovered enough remains to form a nearly complete skeleton. The Multnomah County Medical Examiner ultimately identified the remains as Jennifer’s and determined she had died by asphyxiation.
From the outset, detectives suspected that whoever took Jennifer was familiar with her world. On the day she vanished, a young man was reported calling her by name at a convenience store, and composite details circulated: late-teens to early-20s, very dark short hair, heavy brows, wire-rim “military” glasses, a stud earring in the left ear, and a metallic-blue 1970s Dodge Charger. Investigators also learned that Jennifer had last been seen in the company of the then-girlfriend of a Portland man who would later be convicted as the “Forest Park Killer,” sharpening suspicions that her disappearance was not an isolated crime but part of a predatory pattern centered around the Gresham–MHCC corridor.
Those suspicions coalesced around Todd Alan Reed after his 1999 arrest for a series of strangulations in Portland; police publicly re-examined possible ties between Reed and two Gresham girls from the summer of 1987—Jennifer and 12-year-old Mindi Coleen Thomas—both last seen in the orbit of Reed’s girlfriend. Detectives retrieved clothing and other evidence from the 1987 cases to evaluate emerging DNA options, but they emphasized the original problem: an absence of physical proof strong enough to support charges. Even as Reed drew life sentences in the Forest Park murders, Jennifer’s case remained formally unsolved, with Reed described as an enduring suspect but not an arrestee in her homicide.
Time has not blunted the geography of the story. Jennifer’s remains were found only a few miles from where other victims surfaced near trails by the community college, reinforcing investigators’ belief that the offender used familiar ground and routine to mask violence. The official record holds that Jennifer Lynn Tchir was killed by strangulation, her life cut short on a summer day in 1987, and that no one has ever been arrested for her murder—even as the same names, places, and descriptions have echoed through the case files for decades.
