RIDDLE, Ore. (KOIN) — Seven years ago, an avid cyclist from Portland vanished without a trace, disappearing one night in Riddle while volunteering for a Cycle Oregon event.
On the day of his disappearance on September 16, 2011, Mark Bosworth was last seen at Riddle High School at 11:30 p.m. Investigators said he left almost everything behind, including his clothes, bike and bags.
A frantic search by volunteers, local firefighters, a search and rescue team and K9s yielded nothing in the days that followed.
“It’s one of those things where he just kind of vanished,” Douglas County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Sgt. Brad O’Dell said.
Sgt. Odell said the case is unusual.
“Some of the volunteers that had been working with him stated that they had noticed some behavior that was concerning,” he said. For instance, they said he would fail to show up to volunteer shifts, would stare into the distance by himself and had difficulty following signs.
“Family also indicated that he might be suffering from a medical event of some sort,” O’Dell said.
Bosworth is 6 feet tall, around 180 pounds, with gray hair and blue eyes. He is also a cancer survivor.
“At this point, there’s no indication that anything sinister took place, however we can’t completely rule that out,” O’Dell said.
In the years that followed, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office received no verifiable sightings and no credible leads. That was, until July 2017, when a woman turned in a backpack she found.
“In July of 2017, we received a call from a citizen, who called and said they found a backpack. There were items in the bag that we knew Mark had, and there were also things in there that stated they belonged to Mark,” O’Dell said.
“There was a debit card, a bank card with his name on it, and so we were able to look at that and also we knew he had an iPad, and that iPad was found in the bag as well.”
That debit card has not been used since 2011, he said.
Sgt. O’Dell said the woman actually found the backpack months before she turned it in. He wouldn’t say why there was a delay in reporting what she found, citing the active case.
“Based on the information we have, we believe that Mark Bosworth has died,” O’Dell said.
O’Dell hopes someone out there has information they’ve been holding onto. Now is the time to come forward, he said.