50 years after Ferris High student Laurie Partridge went missing, answers are hard to find

In the 50 years following her sister’s disappearance during a walk home from Ferris High School, 56-year-old Taryn Chambers always thought there would have been some answers by now.

Maybe she’s been held captive all these years, Chambers thinks to herself. But she pushes away the thoughts, because hope can be a difficult emotion, Chambers said. And it takes hope to believe that her older sister, Laurie Partridge, is somehow still alive, even though her family and police believe she was abducted all those years ago on Dec. 4, 1974.

“We didn’t feel like she was coming home. When we moved back to California, I asked my mom, ‘What if Laurie comes back home?’ She says, ‘They would find us. They would tell us.’ ”

That call never came.

Partridge, 17, left Ferris High School about 12:30 p.m. complaining of cramps. It wasn’t too cold, and there was a slight drizzle falling from the sky, Chambers recalled.

At the time, Partridge reportedly believed the 2-mile walk to her parents’ house on South Custer Street might make her feel better. A neighbor remembered seeing her on Havana Street between 43rd and 49th avenues, according to previous reporting from The Spokesman-Review. She was last seen wearing a navy blue coat, a tan sweater and tan plaid pants. She had blue denim shoes on and a brown leather purse with a blue flower on the front.

When she didn’t come home or show for her job at a Lincoln Heights movie theater, her father and the other children went looking for her. But it was like she had disappeared off the face of the earth – no usable clues, no DNA.

“It’s cold because there was nowhere else to go,” Spokane County Sheriff’s Office Det. Mike Drapeau said Tuesday.

Law enforcement thought Partridge could be a runaway because she missed living in California, which is why they “didn’t take her case seriously at first,” Chambers said. But that perception eventually changed.

Drapeau said the totality of the circumstances – the fact that Partridge was a young girl walking down the road, that she has never spoken to anyone she knew again, that she didn’t leave anything behind, that she had a family she loved and a fiancé she planned to marry – tells law enforcement that she was likely abducted and killed.

“I’d like to think she’s living somewhere happy,” Drapeau said. “But I would say she met with foul play.”

Chambers said police were able to discover whoever abducted Partridge used her Beach Boys concert ticket she had in her bag at the time.

It was also reported a green Ford Pinto station wagon with California plates followed Partridge in the days before her disappearance, Chambers said. She believes it could have been her ex-boyfriend who was still living in California. The relationship did not end amicably, Chambers said.

“He wasn’t a nice guy. He said, ‘No one else can have you but me,’ ” she said. “And he had a blue or green car like that.”

Chambers has since reached out to him to glean any information about her sister, but he refuses to speak to her, she said.

Another neighbor around Partridge’s age at the time came forward years later and believed she saw Partridge in a nearby horse-riding field that day with a man and a white truck. The woman claimed the man was holding a rifle, Chambers said.

Serial killer Ted Bundy, notorious for abducting young women in the ’70s, was also questioned about Partridge’s disappearance. But he was in Salt Lake City at the time, Drapeau said, possibly committing other crimes.

“That’s the one suspect we can actually rule out,” he added.

Occasionally, tips will still come in about Partridge. One came in two weeks ago from a woman who wants police to match an unidentified woman from a database to Partridge’s description. Drapeau isn’t ruling it out just yet, he says, because any tip in a cold case is usually worth following up on. Another thought was not ruling out Keith D. Lindblom, who kidnapped and raped a young girl the same year that Partridge went missing. He also was determined by DNA to be responsible for the abduction, rape and murder of Krisann Baxter in 1978. Investigators later learned he died in a house fire in 1981.

Drapeau said although Lindblom had a similar modus operandi to Partridge’s suspected abductor, he didn’t drive or own any of the cars that detectives believe could be involved in her case. The best bet of finding her, Drapeau said, is to continue to work with the medical examiner to determine if there are any unidentified bodies that could match her description and test to see if it’s her DNA.

“Sometimes we find people we were looking for the whole time. We may have her remains. Maybe in California that have yet to be identified,” he said. “It’s why genetic DNA is so important.”

But time still isn’t on anyone’s side, Chambers said. Her mother died in 2004, her father died in 2022 and another sister died in March, all never knowing what happened to Partridge.

Chambers remembers Partridge as a lively, kind, family-oriented sister who spent a lot of time with her, as a 6-year-old girl.

“I just loved her,” she said.

When Partridge disappeared, her room stayed the same. Her Christmas presents did, too, with no one to unwrap them. Before their mother died, Chambers was given all of Partridge’s belongings and the rest of her things. Now, Chambers is the keeper of all of her sister’s case files. She continues to work the case herself, she said, making unrelenting phone calls and scouring over pages of reports and various clippings of Partridge. She would be 67 years old.

“We need somebody to come forward and help us solve this for our family,” she said. “This needs to be resolved.”

Anyone with information about Partridge is encouraged to call the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office at (509) 477-2240 and ask for Det. Mike Drapeau.