Vanished Innocence:Mona Rae Minyard·Joseph Walton Holmes

Mona Rae Minyard was born in Portland, Oregon, on April 21, 1956. In 1962 she was six years old, lived in the Rockwood area east of the city, and attended Rockwood Elementary School. She had two brothers, and her mother Joyce’s partner, Sam Lane, intended to adopt all three children.

In the last days of December 1962, Mona left home on an errand to a neighborhood store and did not come back. Her disappearance set off a search in the community just after Christmas. On December 31, 1962, her body was found. She had been sexually assaulted and killed. Detectives looked closely at a neighbor, Joseph Walton Holmes, but no one was ever convicted of her murder.

Mona was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Gresham, in the section set aside for children. Her family chose to put the surname Lane on her grave marker, the name she would have taken after the adoption. Decades later, a woman who had been a seven-year-old classmate in the same neighborhood wrote about how the killing changed the way local families watched their children. The case was never solved.