Sunday Showcase: Port Angeles missing-person case revived 33 years later — with high-tech FBI equipment

PORT ANGELES — Bertha Louise Burke was 29 years old and a mother of three when she disappeared on a Friday night in early 1970.

She tucked her young children into bed at their East 13th Street home on Feb. 20 and was never seen or heard from again.

She left behind her purse, her clothes and all other belongings.

The case was quickly classified a homicide.

But investigators could never find a trace of Burke, and the homicide fell into Port Angeles police annals as an unsolved mystery.

With advances in technology and evidence that indicates Burke’s body may still be in the area, police have reopened the case in hopes of answering the mystery of the woman’s death.

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