In the spring of 1980, Marsha Weatter, an 18-year-old woman from Fairbanks, Alaska, embarked on an adventure to explore the country. She was joined by her friend, 19-year-old Kathy Allen, also from Fairbanks. The two friends decided to hitchhike across the Western United States, a journey of freedom and discovery. They kept in touch with their families, promising they would be back home by the beginning of April.
But as March came to a close, their journey took a tragic and irreversible turn, leaving their families in a painful state of uncertainty for more than a year.
The last confirmed sighting of Marsha and Kathy was in March 1980 at a restaurant in Ritzville, Washington. When the agreed-upon date of their return, April 6, passed with no word, their worried parents began to take action. By May, with still no sign of the young women, their families hired private investigators to search for them. The search yielded no solid leads, and the mystery of their disappearance deepened. For seventeen agonizing months, their loved ones were left to wonder what had become of the two adventurous friends.
A grim discovery on October 10, 1981, finally provided a tragic answer. Pheasant hunters walking through grass and sagebrush about 150 yards north of Interstate 90 near Ephrata, Washington, stumbled upon human remains. Investigators soon identified the bodies as those of Marsha Weatter and Kathy Allen. An autopsy revealed that both women had been shot to death. Their bodies had been concealed for almost 17 months by a most unusual circumstance: a thick layer of volcanic ash from the cataclysmic eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, which had blanketed the region. This natural event had inadvertently hidden the crime, delaying the discovery and the start of a murder investigation.
For years, the case remained cold. The break finally came from an entirely different investigation in another state. In 1987, a truck driver named Martin Lee Sanders was arrested in Wyoming for the 1986 kidnapping and rape of two hitchhikers in Montana. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. While incarcerated, Sanders confessed to a cellmate, providing details about other, far more serious crimes. He spoke of murdering two teenage girls, 15-year-olds Rhonda Rima and Elizabeth Marks, who had vanished from a festival in Spokane in 1983. The details he provided were so specific that only the killer could have known them.
Based on this confession, Sanders was extradited to Washington in 1990 to face trial for the murders of Rima and Marks. It was during these proceedings that the full scope of his violence became clear. To avoid a potential death sentence for the Spokane murders, Sanders pleaded guilty. As part of his plea agreement, he also admitted his involvement in the 1980 murders of Marsha Weatter and Kathy Allen. He had been the one who ended their cross-country adventure so brutally.
Martin Lee Sanders was a serial killer who preyed on young women and girls between 1980 and 1983, with four proven victims. For the charges of kidnapping, assault, rape, and two counts of murder, he received a life sentence. The court agreed not to prosecute him for the murders of Marsha and Kathy as part of the plea deal that secured his conviction for the other killings. Sanders spent the remainder of his life behind bars and died of a heart attack in prison on April 4, 2022. For the family of Marsha Weatter, the resolution brought a painful end to a long and harrowing chapter that began with a young woman's dream of seeing the country.
