KELSO, Wash. (KOIN 6) — Molly Waddington was last seen alive on March 14, 2012. In February 2013, some incomplete skeletal remains were found and were recently confirmed to be the 44-year-old woman.
Her daughter and sister donated DNA that helped confirm the identity, but her children still don’t know how she died or who might be responsible.
Kelso police Capt. Darr Kirk said last week police are going to treat the death as suspicious “until we don’t have any other direction to go, so we’re not ruling anything out.”
“Usually when people die, they die of old age and they have someone holding their hand telling them it’s going to be OK, you know?” said her daughter, Whitney Reavely. “Who was there to hold her hand? Nobody?”
Last Friday, they learned the remains found two years ago near the Columbia River west of Cathlamet, Washington were Waddington.
“She didn’t deserve to die. She didn’t deserve to have her remains found on the side of the river,” said her son, Christopher Jackson.
He said he has an image stuck in his head of “my mom’s skull laying on the side of the riverbank.”
Jackson said he thinks of her all the time. “She was one of the best people ever,” he said. “If you had met her for even five minutes you would never forget her.”
“As bad as it sounds,” Reavely said, “I just want to know what happened to her. I want to know what she went through.”
Molly Waddington was a wife, a mother, a grandmother last seen walking in a Kelso neighborhood about five miles from her home.
Family members said she struggled with a drug addiction, but loved her family and helped care for others.
The family believes there is someone out there who knows what happened.
Reavely said she feels “broken” and believes her mom died at someone else’s hand.
“My mom had a lot of life to live and they stole it from her,” she said.
“We can’t even bury her until somebody says something,” Reavely said. “The longer it’s dragged out, the longer we have to keep dying inside.”The Associated Press contributed to this report.