Joan Leigh Hall, a Warrenton High School senior, went missing in 1983.

Unsealed records in the missing persons case of Joan Leigh Hall have sparked renewed interest in the 1983 disappearance of the Warrenton High School senior.

Dean Andal, the businessman and former California assemblyman who petitioned Clatsop County Circuit Court to lift a protective order in place since 2018, has been studying the hundreds of pages of notes, interviews and police reports released by the sheriff’s office.

He’s not the only one. Over 2,000 people follow a Facebook page dedicated to investigating the cold case.

The page, which reached a record number of views in April, is maintained by Dena Rush, who has been examining the case and documenting her findings on social media since 2006.

“A week after she disappeared in 1983, I overheard three girls talking about it on the street in Seaside,” she said. “And she’s just been with me ever since. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

Rush began piecing together a timeline after receiving police reports on the case in 2010 following a media investigation. She took note of persons of interest and discrepancies that appeared in their stories.

While there were numerous people interviewed who ended up recanting their stories, for Rush, three stand out: Mike Basch, Jimmy Sears and Gary Leer, who initially told detectives they had witnessed Hall in a car with Mike Moore, a friend and classmate of the boys.

The three were interviewed at the time by Warrenton Police Chief Bill Humphrey and Deputy Sheriff Gerald Basch, who failed to note in his report that he was the father of Mike Basch.

According to Basch’s report, the three boys changed their statements and said the girl they had seen with Moore was not Hall, but instead another girl who went to their school.

There was no explanation for the change in stories, and no explanation why Humphrey’s report did not mention any change or recanting of the statements given by Basch, Sears and Leer.

Moore claimed in an interview that Hall had declined a ride from him outside the Mini Mart. His version was contradicted by several witnesses who said Hall walked out of the store and immediately headed westbound alone, rather than toward the parked vehicles nearby.

Hall, 17, was last seen on Main Avenue on the afternoon of Sept. 30, 1983.

‘Detective’s Handbook’

Andal and his brother, Erik, went to court last year to lift the protective order on the records. Judge Beau Peterson indicated in late December that he would release the files after hearing no objections from law enforcement.

Many of the files involving Hall’s disappearance were pieced together from various agencies in 2006 by Astoria Police Deputy Chief Eric Halverson, who was working as a detective at the time.

Halverson, who dubbed the collection the “Detective’s Handbook,” organized the information by agency to create a more central, comprehensive database for people to navigate.

That collection makes up the entirety of what was unsealed earlier this year. Some of the files from the investigation are meticulously typed. Others, sometimes bordering on illegibility, are handwritten.

“They did the best they could today with the original material they had to work with, which was not well put together,” Rush said. “Especially what we have from the early days, when it first happened in ’83. There are notes with no notation of who wrote them. They just look like chicken scratch.

“You go through, and you think you’ve read it. And then you go through it again and find something else.”

Halverson said new information has been added to the handbook since 2006 as people reached out to him with questions and tips.

“Once you do something like that, people call you frequently and say, ‘Hey, do you remember this name?’ or ‘Do you remember that?’” he said. “And so that’s how I’ve stayed connected with it.

“I still get lost in it. Somebody emails and says something, I spend a lot of time reading back through and refreshing my memory or looking for the connection that’s been brought up. It does have a way of capturing your interest … there are a lot of avenues that aren’t fully resolved in my mind, but you’re talking about information gathered in 1983.”

Investigation techniques from that time were not necessarily the same as they are now, Halverson said, especially given a lack of easily accessible recording technology.

“I think things probably did get done but didn’t get written down … but there are certainly questions,” he said. “The biggest one is, you know, what happened to her? Where is she?

“And some of the information has changed. Right in the moment that this was really active, you had people giving information and changing their stories right out of the gate. And that leaves a lot of questions rather than answers.”

‘Committed to investigating’

Sheriff Matt Phillips said he has seen an increase in public interest in the case after the files were unsealed, with an uptick in public records requests and tips coming in.

The sheriff’s office has detectives follow up on the tips. Investigators have not ruled out conducting new interviews with persons of interest noted throughout the investigation.

Phillips said he hopes the public interest will lead to some answers to what seem to be an ever-increasing number of questions.

“I know we’re committed to investigating this and doing everything we can,” he said. “But her disappearance is 40 years ago now, and that presents some real challenges. Not necessarily insurmountable, but it is a challenge.”