When Sandra Kalander heard a knock on the door of her coastal Oregon home, she figured someone was trying to sell her something. The 85-year-old never expected the woman in jeans and a sweatshirt was an FBI agent.
The agent asked her if she had any missing relatives.
“Who wants to know?” Kalander, who lives in the wooded hills of Astoria, recalls asking with a laugh.
FBI Special Agent Meagan Sharp told her a sample from an ancestry test her son Robert, who had died over a decade ago, had used linked him as a family match to a body found in 1972 in the woods of Bandon, Oregon. The FBI was now looking for a closer family-tree match.
That day in the spring brought the work of several tenacious investigators – with the assist of genetic genealogy – closer to identifying the remains. They were of Armas Henry Lahti – a World War II Navy veteran turned commercial fisherman who was a second cousin of Kalander’s husband, John. Finding Lahti’s family was the latest step in a half-century long effort to solve the riddle of what led to the veteran’s death from two bullet wounds to the head.
Kalander’s memories rematerialized despite the decades. Lahti, also known as Mousy despite being anything but meek, would come by the house after the peak fishing season. The “jolly and outgoing” man would get on the floor to play cards with Kalander’s then-toddler Robert, the same person who ultimately connected them through a DNA sample.
But sometime around 1965, Lahti vanished from their lives, Kalander said.
His disappearance had been shrouded in mystery for decades, punctuated with rumors of a bar dispute he had walked away from one evening, rifle in hand. The mystery has now deepened as investigators try to determine how he ended up in the woods off Highway 101 more than 60 years ago.
“It was shocking to find out, finally after all these years, what happened,” Kalander said.
With time dissipating memories of Lahti’s final days, there are few living people left to put into context the rumors of the bar fight, and even a less likely chance that the assailant is still alive. Despite the challenges, a deputy and other volunteers continue to push for answers in the hope of bringing a family closure.
The long road to an identity
When Chancy Fabrizio started working on the case in 2024, there wasn’t much to work with.
There wasn’t a missing person report that matched the body’s description. The body itself was badly decomposed after spending an unknown amount of time exposed to the elements, with animals, bugs and rain, plus 50 years in storage. Still, it showed “marks indicative of homicidal violence,” the Coos County Sheriff’s Office said.
Investigators shared a drawing with the public that recreated what the victim most likely looked like but got no hits.
Detectives for decades had been trying to find something, anything, to push this case forward, but it seemed like every road was a dead end.
Little did they know their victim was a fisherman, constantly traveling from one place to the next, according to Kalander. Lahti’s wife had died years before he went missing around 1965, when he was in his 50s, and he didn’t have any children, Fabrizio said. His independence made it hard for investigators to track down who their victim was.
“(He) did a lot of stuff on his own. He ran his own boat by himself,” said Fabrizio, who volunteers as a special deputy at the Coos County Sheriff’s Office. It’s not that his family didn’t notice him gone; they just figured he was doing his own thing, she said. On top of that, it was commonplace not to report people missing at that time, Fabrizio added.
In 2024, there wasn’t much left of Lahti in the world either. Old newspaper articles show glimpses of his life – a 1942 article announcing Lahti’s enlistment as a boatswain’s mate, him and his wife participating in a wedding, his mother’s obituary. Some spellings of his name appear as Armes, an adjustment to the Finnish spelling Armas preferred by his family.
Kalander said their remaining possession of Lahti is a photo in his Navy uniform, showing him proudly wearing his regalia.
John Kalander, now 87, remembers fishing with Lahti in his youth, slowly getting to know him over the seasons. Sandra Kalander said Lahti was a family-oriented man who was “just a heck of a nice guy.”
Over half a century later, Fabrizio was left with only two viable options: use the serial code on the victim’s denture plates to try and find an identity or persuade someone to do a costly DNA test.
While previous investigators had gone to great lengths to look into the victim’s dentures, cold case procedure requires the investigator to start the case fresh. So instead of relying on the previous work investigators did, she started calling denturists in the area and kept going until she could find an answer.
She had suspicions that the victim might be a veteran because of a series of numbers on the denture plates, a practice often associated with military medical care. After many calls, she found a denturist who told her the code – her only lead – was actually just the size, shape and hue of the dentures.
The discovery was disappointing for a case with so few investigative options, Fabrizio said. The only option left was to pursue DNA testing.
DNA becomes crucial to solving the case
The investigation’s best hope was utilizing investigative genetic genealogy, which uses DNA technology to test different genealogical platforms available to law enforcement to find a relative with a comparative match, and then track the missing family member by building out the family tree.
The practice was used in cases like the Golden State Killer and Bryan Kohberger, who previously pleaded guilty to killing four University of Idaho students, but is also frequently used in to identify unknown remains in cold cases. While it can open new possibilities in an investigation, it is also expensive and can take a long time to narrow down a match, Fabrizio said. The deputy had previously tried to pursue genetic genealogy through one grant process, but the results didn’t pan out. So, the deputy ultimately asked the FBI for help.
Most people imagine the process to be simple, Fabrizio said – upload the DNA and find a match. But the reality is much more complex, she said.
The FBI requires the case to be a violent crime with no match in their Combined DNA Index System, Fabrizio said. The DNA also has to be converted into a specific form called a single nucleotide polymorphisms profile, also known as a SNP, according to Oregon State Police.
The DNA profile in 2025 was submitted to genetic websites that cooperate with law enforcement. If a match is made, often with someone distantly related, investigators have to build the family tree through investigative measures and try to identify who might be missing, she said.
Fabrizio had gotten updates from the FBI on their process, sharing little pieces of progress over time. First, they found out the victim was 100% Finnish, and then they discovered matches with second and third cousins.
But one day she got an email saying, “Give me a call when you get a sec,” and she knew they struck gold. “The feeling never gets old,” she said, excitement ringing in her voice.
After speaking with the family, investigators were able to test another living relative closer on the family tree to confirm Lahti’s identity in June.
It took four months to identify Lahti, with two other agents helping to build his family tree after work and on weekends on top of their full-time jobs, Meagan Sharp, an FBI special agent with the Portland division, told CNN. They combed through publicly accessible genealogy services, birth certificates, obituaries and census records to try to put the puzzle together.
Everyone seemed to be accounted for, until they came across Lahti’s name.
“We found documentation of Mr. Lahti’s early life, but essentially nothing about him after the 1950s,” Sharp said.
That’s when Sharp visited the Kalanders.
“It seemed to take a little bit to get Sandra’s buy-in, but once I told her how much I knew about her family, or the family she married into, I think she really understood why I was there,” Sharp said.
Their chat illuminated “the kind of stuff that we don’t find in our law enforcement databases” – family stories, Sharp said.
Speaking with Sharp and Fabrizio, Sandra Kalander noticed their discernable sincerity in wanting to identify the victim and recognize their humanity, despite the time that had passed.
“They act like they really care,” Sandra said. “In fact, one of them got tears in her eyes when we were talking about it.”
Just the beginning of the investigation
Despite all the work that has been done so far, there are still many unanswered questions and barriers to overcome to solve the case.
When Fabrizio met with Lahti’s family, someone told her they had heard rumors he was involved in a dispute at a bar in Newport, Oregon, and left with a rifle. But it’s not clear what happened after that, or how he ended up in the woods over 100 miles south.
One of the biggest hurdles is a common enemy for investigators – time.
“A lot of people have passed away from that time frame, and you know, memories degrade,” she said. Fabrizio said she is hoping that anyone from the public who has information will come forward, “even third-party rumors of things that might have happened.”
The conflict is currently their biggest lead, even though they have no idea which bar he went to, Fabrizio said. But she isn’t figuring this out alone. Fabrizio is one of the founders of the Oregon Cold Case Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to solving cold cases in the state. They have eight members with varying backgrounds – from those with human remain detection dogs to cold case experts to analysis specialists.
She and the group are working to figure out what bars existed then and if they’re still around with different ownership, Fabrizio said. Even finding old photos that used to hang at the bar could help them narrow their search.
Other questions still linger, including where Lahti’s car went. His boat, which was named either the Carmen or the Carmon, is also missing, so Fabrizio said she plans to track it down through records at the Oregon State Marine Board. Hopefully they can figure out if the boat still exists and who has owned it, she said.
“Armas loved to come to Charleston,” Fabrizio said. “So, we don’t know if his boat was docked here, if it was docked in Newport, or Astoria where he lived, because he traveled so much.”
Two other paths investigators will explore is trying to speak with the local fishermen community in different areas, as well as the Finnish community as Lahti’s parents were immigrants from Finland.
As time marches on, it gets harder to solve the case. Fabrizio said while “there is no danger to the public” as the suspect is almost certainly dead, there is still an important public good in getting an answer for these families. “Even after decades, they still deserve answers,” she said.
Laying a veteran to rest decades later
For John and Sandra Kalander, finding out where their long missing relative has been all these years later has been quite the whirlwind.
“Everybody we knew is (saying) ‘where’s Armas?’ and there was never an answer,” Sandra said. “It was shocking to find out finally after all these years what happened.”
If her son Robert were alive all these years later, she thinks “he would be delighted” to know he helped identify Lahti, she said. “He always talked about Armas over the years,” she said.
The family is waiting to get custody of Lahti’s remains so they can give him a proper burial, possibly as a military funeral in a dedicated cemetery for veterans, to honor his service one last time.
Lahti being a Navy veteran is also a soft spot for Fabrizio, who said she previously served in the US Army. While they come from different branches, they are still connected through “a brotherhood,” she said.
“We have this bond because we are all willing to lay down our lives for each other,” she said, choking up as she spoke. “That transcends time.”