Very important information pertaining to Joanie's disappearance is discussed in this news report.
Questions remain into what happened after 17-year-old Joanie Hall left Warrenton High School on the afternoon of Sept. 30, 1983.
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Questions persist 26 years after girl disappears
By Thom Jensen KATU News and KATU.com Staff
Published: Mar 16, 2010 at 2:31 AM PDT
WARRENTON, Ore. - A woman, who asked KATU News for help to find her sister lost and presumed murdered 26 years ago on the Oregon Coast, died two weeks ago, leaving her fight to find out what happened to Joanie Hall to others.
“It’s such a long time, and I would really just like her to come home,” Charlotte Hall said in an interview with KATU News in January. “I would just like to put her to peace is what I would like. That’s my ultimate goal.”
Joanie Hall was a 17-year-old senior at Warrenton High School who left school on Sept. 30, 1983 to walk to Warrenton Grade School a quarter mile away. A boy named Mike Moore told police he picked up Joanie somewhere between the two schools at about 2 p.m. and gave her a ride to a convenience store. And then she just vanished.
“Somebody knows something,” said Charlotte in January. “There’s a dirty little secret in that town that somebody knows, and I’m sure there’s more than one person that knows that.”
According to an initial police report that KATU News uncovered a year ago, three boys said they saw Joanie Hall in a Warrenton driveway the day she disappeared. They said she was in Mike Moore’s car at about 4 p.m. But later all three changed their stories and said it wasn’t Joanie Hall. It was someone else, a girl named Treesa Woods.
Maggie Perry, Joanie’s best friend at the time, showed a KATU News reporter a picture of Joanie and Treesa. She said Treesa looked nothing like Joanie. Perry said she never knew someone reported seeing Joanie after 2 p.m. the day of her disappearance until she saw KATU’s report last year.
“Someone is really holding back,” Perry said. “There’s a group of kids that know what happened that night, and I wish they would come forward and deal with what they did.”
Treesa Woods was murdered 15 years ago in Minnesota in an unrelated case, but her best friend and brother said she was never with Mike Moore the day Joanie Hall disappeared.
KATU News again tried to contact all four men who last reported seeing Joanie: Mike Basch, Jimmy Sears, Gary Leer and Mike Moore.
KATU News started with Basch because his father was the Clatsop County Deputy who took the second report from the boy’s when they changed their stories.
Basch moved to California just days after Joanie disappeared and still lives there today. By phone he said he thought it was Joanie in the car that day but Leer or Sears told him later that it “must have been Treesa Woods.” He asked the reporter how he could get a hold of Jimmy Sears.
Sears has a MySpace page and is on Facebook. After several back and forth e-mail messages Sears said by phone: “I can’t remember anything about that day. It was just too long ago.”
According to that first police report, Sears told Police Moore told him: “He had to drop Joan off.”
What about Gary Leer?
Leer and his wife now own a bagel shop in Seaside. At the shop Leer’s wife said her husband knows nothing about it. She took a reporter’s business card and said her husband would call him. He never did.
The reporter then went to the home of Mike Moore, near Astoria. Moore’s wife said her husband wasn’t home and then told the reporter to leave.
Follow-up phone calls were not answered but later a Clatsop County deputy called the reporter and told him the Moores wanted to file a telephonic harassment complaint against him for phoning their house.
Current Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis said he is still bothered by the fact that a father of one of the witnesses handled the investigation and didn’t make obvious follow-up calls to verify the stories of his own son and his son’s friends.
“You never should have police officers who are related to witnesses or people of interest engaging in interviews,” Marquis said. “The questions that were not asked: The case is pregnant with those.”
Maggie Perry said she hopes someone will finally come forward so the rest of the Hall family can lay Joanie to rest.
It was the same thing that Charlotte Hall said she wanted.
“I would say anonymously just tell us where she is at. Just let us go get her and bring her home,” Charlotte said.
Marquis said, “All I can do is try to ensure people that if you come forward we will grant you as much anonymity as we can.”
Charlotte will be buried on Tuesday next to her parents who died shortly after Joanie disappeared.
Meanwhile, another witness has been found who said she saw Joanie get into a car at the Warrenton minimart. But like Sears, Leer, and Basch, she changed her story when she was interviewed by Deputy Gerald Basch.
Tammy Crites said by phone from Medford that Basch bullied her into changing her story.
Basch, who now lives in Washington, did not return calls for comment.