In the late winter of 1974, nineteen-year-old Donna Gail Manson was a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Described as a "free spirit," she was also known to be introverted and was reportedly experiencing a period of depression around the time of her disappearance. Donna was a white female with brown hair and blue eyes. On the evening of March 12, 1974, she left her dormitory with the intention of attending a jazz concert on campus.
She waved goodbye to her friends and was last seen walking between the dorms and the library. She never arrived at the concert.
Initially, Donna's absence didn't raise immediate alarm among her friends. She was known to be independent and had a habit of hitchhiking and sometimes disappearing for a few days at a time. Consequently, she wasn't reported as a missing person for six days. However, her parents did not believe she would have left without notice, especially since she had recently made plans with her mother for a spring break trip. As the days turned into weeks with no word from Donna, concern grew, and an official investigation was launched. Law enforcement and volunteers searched the heavily wooded 990-acre college campus and surrounding areas but found no trace of the missing student. All of her belongings were found undisturbed in her dorm room.
The investigation into Donna's disappearance would eventually become linked to a string of disappearances and murders of young women throughout Washington and other states. The name that would come to be associated with these horrific crimes was Ted Bundy. Before his execution in 1989, the notorious serial killer confessed to the abduction and murder of Donna Gail Manson. Bundy's confession, however, provided little solace or closure for Donna's family. He gave conflicting accounts of what he did with her remains, at one point claiming he had buried them in the mountains, and at another, stating they were on Taylor Mountain. In a particularly gruesome detail, Bundy claimed to have burned her skull in his girlfriend's fireplace.
Over the years, there have been discoveries of unidentified remains that were thought to be Donna's. In 1978, a human skull and other bones were found in the foothills of Mount Rainier, along with a multi-colored shirt similar to the one Donna was last seen wearing. Despite the potential link, a positive identification was never made, and the remains were reportedly mishandled and eventually lost by authorities, a fact that added to the tragedy of the case. While Ted Bundy was executed for his many crimes, the full truth of what happened to Donna Gail Manson and the location of her body remain a painful mystery. She is still officially classified as a missing person, one of the many victims whose lives were cut short by a predator who terrorized the Pacific Northwest.
