After serving prison time for molesting children, Roy Vernon Mathews returned to Lane County in the late 1990s and spent the final few years of his life drifting from place to place, occasionally running into trouble with the law.
He disappeared in April 2005, when his girlfriend filed a missing person report with Springfield police.
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“It’s not uncommon, or illegal, for an adult to just take off, and there weren’t a lot of red flags at the time that suggested anything (suspicious) had happened to him,” Springfield police Sgt. David Lewis said Wednesday.
Mathews’ case finally gained serious police attention last month. That’s when authorities learned that DNA extracted from skeletal remains found in January east of Mapleton had matched a DNA sample that Mathews provided to state officials after a Lane County jury found him guilty in 1987 of first-degree sexual abuse and first-degree sodomy.
Lane County sheriff’s detectives announced Wednesday that they’re treating Mathews’ death as a homicide because evidence — some of which they’re not ready to publicly disclose — suggests that someone killed him before apparently dumping his body in a remote, forested area off Siuslaw River Road.
Investigators now want to hear from anyone with information regarding Mathews’ associates and activities in the months before his disappearance. At this point they have few details regarding that part of his life.
“We’d like to get a good idea of what he did from the time he got out of prison until the time he went missing,” sheriff’s Sgt. Cliff Harrold said. “So far we haven’t been able to find anyone who knew much about him in his last few years.”
Court records show that Mathews, who was 54 when his missing person report was filed, lived at a number of addresses in the Eugene-Springfield area in the early 2000s. He may have been “a little bit of a couch surfer,” Harrold said.
Those years were marked by several brushes with police, who arrested him for felony drug possession in 2003 and for failing to register as a sex offender in 2001 and again in January 2005, about three months before he disappeared.
Harrold said investigators have interviewed the woman who filed the original missing person report, but that the discussion “was not very productive.”
Detectives aren’t counting on the woman to be able to provide additional details that might help them learn more about the circumstances that ultimately led to Mathews’ death, Harrold said.
Citing the ongoing investigation, Harrold declined to say whether bullet holes or other signs of physical injury were apparent from an examination of the skeletal remains, which were discovered by a logging crew that had been working in the woods last winter.
But the remote location in which the bones were found raises suspicions, as do “other indications that (Mathews’) death was a result of foul play,” sheriff’s officials said in a news release.
Anyone with information is asked to contact sheriff’s Detective Aaron Hoberg at 541-682-4312.
