PORT ANGELES – Investigators spent nearly eight hours Monday literally digging for clues in a 21-year-old missing-person case, but found little besides dirt.
Borrowing a backhoe and operator from the Clallam County Road Department, Clallam County Sheriff’s Department officers supervised excavation of a 60-foot-long, 12-foot-wide trench behind a house at 3905 Bean Road, just south of Lauridsen Boulevard.
They were looking for the body of 39-year-old Norman Boullion, who had lived briefly at the address in 1986 while visiting his stepsister, who still lives in the area but was unidentified on Monday.
Boullion told his stepsister he was returning to his California home but never arrived there, said Clallam Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Monty Martin.
The case is unrelated to the disappearance of 14-year-old Carla Owens in 1981, which Jefferson County authorities are re-investigating, with plans to dig at a site near Port Angeles soon.
Martin said officers reopened the Boullion case last summer when a prison inmate in Ohio said he had helped bury Bouillon’s body.
At Clallam County’s request, FBI agents interviewed the inmate and found that he had lived near Port Angeles during the time Boullion disappeared.
“It was credible enough to be reopened,” Martin said Monday afternoon as the backhoe neared the end of its work.
“We couldn’t ignore the information.”
