When Sandra Kalander heard a knock on the door of her coastal Oregon home, she figured someone was trying to sell her something. The 85-year-old never expected the woman in jeans and a sweatshirt was an FBI agent.
The agent asked her if she had any missing relatives.
“Who wants to know?” Kalander, who lives in the wooded hills of Astoria, recalls asking with a laugh.
FBI Special Agent Meagan Sharp told her a sample from an ancestry test her son Robert, who had died over a decade ago, had used linked him as a family match to a body found in 1972 in the woods of Bandon, Oregon. The FBI was now looking for a closer family-tree match.
That day in the spring brought the work of several tenacious investigators – with the assist of genetic genealogy – closer to identifying the remains. They were of Armas Henry Lahti – a World War II Navy veteran turned commercial fisherman who was a second cousin of Kalander’s husband, John. Finding Lahti’s family was the latest step in a half-century long effort to solve the riddle of what led to the veteran’s death from two bullet wounds to the head.
