A cold case mystery ends in sadness after identification of remains

For more than 40 years, the two questions lingered, together and apart: a disappearance and a gruesome discovery, never linked yet fatefully connected, the remnants of a family’s buried sorrow.

The first question began with a lost son, Tacoma resident David Corak, 21, who vanished in June 1968 after heading to the wilds of the Olympic National Forest for a camping trip.

The second question began with a set of skeletal remains discovered by a group of Jefferson County hikers in October 1975.

The skull was marred by a single wound, consistent with a .22-caliber bullet. Near the remains sat a weathered rifle, rigged with a stick and a piece of old string tied to the trigger.

It took 47 years of cold-case sleuthing to solve one mystery. The remains were the last traces of Corak, who seemingly ended his life in the wilderness long ago. Detective Bob Gebo, a cold-case expert with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, announced the news in January.

“It’s a long and twisted story,” he said.

Corak’s parents died without the answer. His surviving brothers were left to digest the truth.

They still have no answer to the second question: Why? Why did David end his life?

“I don’t see no reason why he would have killed himself,” said David’s older brother, John Corak, 72, who lives in Edgewood.

BEGINNINGS

In a photo taken around 1968, David Corak grins, looking a bit like a young Joe DiMaggio. He crouches on the beach at Dash Point, holding the tentacle of a massive, apparently dead octopus.

Corak’s little brother, Carl Malone, then 7, stands next to him in cowboy boots, eyes fixed on the spectacular carcass.

“He was my closest brother — my favorite,” Malone says of David. “I was the last one that talked to him when he left.”

Malone lives in Lake Tapps these days. He turns 55 in September. His mother, Eunice, died in 1996, still grieving over her lost son. Before the end, still seeking answers, she turned to psychics. They told her David was alive, possibly living on the East Coast. They were wrong.

The Corak family lived at East 34th and E streets, overlooking the area where the Tacoma Dome rose in 1983.

David had moved out by 1968, after a brief stint in the Navy, but he wasn’t far away. He lived next door, renting a room from an elderly woman. He mowed her lawn and ran her errands.

He worked days at Tacoma Tent and Awning, but he still found time for family, coming home to see his parents and play with little Carl, the boy sidekick.

“Me and him did everything — he took me fishing,” Carl said. “He was always a loner, but everybody liked him. He was really smart. Anything he had that was busted, he could fix it.”

David liked the outdoors; he regularly left Tacoma for weeklong camping trips, always on his own.

Sometimes he shared a dream with Carl: He talked of living in the mountains, alone, for good.

The outing on June 12, 1968, looked like another of David’s typical trips — but before he left, he spoke to his younger brother and shared a secret.

“He said, ‘This is it — remember I told you I was always gonna go live up in the mountains? Well, I’m going now,’ ” Carl recalled. “I said, ‘OK, Dave.’ ”

The family never saw him again.

THE VANISHING

Later that day, Corak stopped at the Hamma Hamma Ranger Station, north of Hoodsport in Mason County — one of the entries to Olympic National Park. He said he was going camping near Boulder Creek, farther north.

“He appeared to have appropriate camping equipment,” the account from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office states. “Other hikers in the area reported seeing Mr. Corak at the Boulder Creek trailhead, heading into the national forest.”

The hikers were likely the last people to see Corak alive. A few days later, U.S. Forest Service rangers found his car near the trailhead of the creek. His wallet and other personal items were inside.

The rangers alerted the Mason County Sheriff’s Office, which spoke to Corak’s family in Tacoma. The sheriff’s office learned that Corak hadn’t returned from his camping trip,and was missing.

A search followed. The wilderness was remote and vast. No traces were found.

The brothers, bystanders to their parents’ anguish, wondered what happened.

“Mom tried to find him all the time, through the cops, Social Security and stuff,” said older brother John. “My dad always thought (David) went to California for the hippie movement.”

Seven years passed before the next development. On Oct. 1, 1975, a group of hikers stumbled over skeletal remains in a section of the national forest above Cliff Creek, in Jefferson County.

The hikers, and later the investigators, saw the remains, the rifle with the stick and the string, and the skull with the bullet hole. The location was in a region known as the Brothers Wilderness.

“The arrangement of the rifle, supported by a stick with a string used to pull the trigger, strongly suggested the manner of death to be suicide,” the account from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office states.

Investigators called to the scene found a comb, a pocketknife and two dozen .22-caliber shells — but no identification and no indication of a campsite. At the time, a forensic pathologist guessed the death had occurred six to nine months earlier.

“It’s in really rugged country,” said Gebo, the cold-case investigator. “The folks that found him, they didn’t know how he would have been able to traverse from the forest on a trail to where he was found, because there was no trail.”

The remains were a long way from the site where David Corak had last been seen seven years earlier and where his car was discovered. No one linked the remains to him at the time. That would take another 40 years.

NO ANSWERS

DNA identification was a dream in the mid-1970s. Investigators had little to go on. They fixed on fine dental work in the remains, and sent charts to the Washington State Dental Association and the American Dental Association.

The inquiries went nowhere. Experts still couldn’t identify the remains, which stayed anonymous for decades. The case went dormant, along with the questions surrounding Corak’s disappearance.

The 1980s and 1990s came and went. Corak’s parents died, but family speculation didn’t. The story of David’s disappearance became lore, fed by suspicion.

The elderly woman who rented a room to Corak had died not long after his disappearance. Her will included a surprise: She left her home to Corak. A relative of the woman surfaced after that, Corak’s brothers say. She came from Seattle and brought a lawyer to contest the will.

“Here comes a daughter from Seattle,” John Corak recalled. “Never been around, nothing, until the old lady died. Found out she left the house to David, got a lawyer — my mom said it was a crooked lawyer — the next thing you know, David’s dead, gone, missing.”

In 2000, investigators, unaware of the Corak connection, tried again to identify the anonymous remains and sent them to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.

A pathologist conducted an exam and recruited a forensic artist to draw a rendering based on the recovered skull.

The drawing went to law enforcement agencies around the country and circulated online. More years passed. In 2010, a woman in Whittier, Alaska, called the Jefferson County Prosecutor’s Office with a question.

The drawing resembled a relative in her husband’s family, the woman said — a man who disappeared from Tacoma in 1968. His name: David Corak.

After 42 years, investigators finally had their link and a name.

THE LINK

Gebo, the cold-case investigator, had started his career with the Seattle Police Department in 1970. Following retirement, he hired on with the state attorney general’s office, working in a division that specialized in cold-case work, backed by a database called the Homicide Investigation Tracking System. He was assigned to Jefferson County.

“One of the projects we came up with, beyond all the other things we were doing, was to go to the agencies in our area and see if we could assist them in identifying unidentified remains,” he said. “This (the Corak case) was one of the older ones.”

Finally armed with a name, investigators started with DNA. They collected samples from Corak’s three surviving brothers and compared the results with a national database of missing persons.

Again, the results came up short.

“Inconclusive,” Gebo said. “There were problems with that. The remains were out in the wild for too long. The surviving brothers don’t all share the same father.”

Stuck again, investigators returned to the dental charts — but this time they had more to go on: a name and a family history.

Corak had served in the Navy and been kicked out for unknown reasons, his brothers say; but that was where he’d received his dental work, which explained why no civilian dental records had surfaced decades earlier.

Investigators sent the old charts to a forensic dentist and consultant with a national missing persons database. The dentist sought and obtained Corak’s records from the military.

“The military keeps very good records, but it’s very difficult to get them,” Gebo said. “By golly, he made a match. It was that simple, but it took a long, long time.”

Why did it take so long to draw the link between the anonymous remains and Corak’s disappearance? Circumstance, Gebo said. Incomplete information — just the way it played.

“Had we known, back in, say, 1975, ’76, that we could have done it this way, we could have done it this way,” he said. “We didn’t even know where to start.”

The notification to Corak’s brothers came this past December, along with the presumed circumstances of suicide. It’s closure of a sort, even if so much time has passed.

“It has been a long trip,” Gebo said. “I suppose there’s some great satisfaction to the family that finally they do know. I’m sure as Mom and Dad got older and finally died that there was a lot of pain involved.”

AFTERMATH

The surviving brothers, handed the answer to the old family mystery, still aren’t sure what to believe.

They knew David had been kicked out of the Navy. They never knew why. Family gossip suggested David might have been gay, at a time when society and the military held different views of such things.

Older brother John still doesn’t buy the suicide theory. He thinks of the old woman’s will and the house David had inherited, and old rumors, never verified, that another individual had been seen in the area where David disappeared.

Carl Malone, once the little brother who watched David leave and heard his whispered tale of living in the mountains, is equally unsure.

“The detective said he committed suicide,” Malone said. “I don’t know why he would do that, unless he was clinically depressed. But even if he was, why would he kill himself?

“The bottom line is at least we found him.”

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This story was originally published February 21, 2016 at 6:59 AM with the headline "A cold case mystery ends in sadness after identification of remains."