FBI looking for information on 40+ year disappearance of 2 Quinault Nation girls

FBI looking to solve cold case disappearance of 2 young girls

On Aug. 30, 1979, Elsie Eldora Luscier and her cousin, Carlotta Maria Sanchez, disappeared from Taholah, which is in the Quinault Nation Indian Reservation.

TALOLAH, Wash. - The FBI is looking for the public's help in finding two missing women who were last seen more than four decades ago when they were just 12 and 13 years old.

Both women disappeared from the Quinault Nation Indian Reservation in 1979. Washington has some of the highest case numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous people in the country.

The Quinault Nation Indian Reservation is on Washington's coast, just north of Pacific Beach.

According to the FBI, Elsie Eldora Luscier was just 13 years old when she disappeared from Talolah, Washington. Investigators said Luscier was with her cousin, Carlotta Maria Sanchez, when she went missing. Sanchez was just 12 years old at the time.

Now, the FBI is hoping people will take a good look at the posters they published and ask anyone with information as to what happened to either of the girls will come forward.

"If those trigger memories or recollections - or perhaps someone is willing to come forward in the past, but over the passage of time, things have changed, and circumstances have changed and they're willing to come forward to law enforcement - we're hoping that will cause them to do that," said Kelly Smith, assistant special agent in charge with the FBI's Seattle division.

Sanchez and Luscier went missing in August of 1979, but the cases weren't brought to the FBI until recently.

Take a look at Luscier's missing poster here, and view Sanchez's here.

"More recently, we learned additional information that caused us to open our investigation," Smith said. "And certainly cases that are on tribal land, it has to be a criminal act. Not a runaway or a civil matter. But an actual federal crime. That's when the FBI would get involved."

While Assistant Special Agent Smith with the FBI said he can't get reveal the specifics as to the history of the case, he doesn't doubt the possibility of getting answers and justice for these girls.

"They may think that this case is so old or so distant that it's not able to be solved, and we have proved time and time again that these cases are solvable," Smith said.

If you have any information to share with the FBI, you can go to tips.fbi.gov.