News of 1983 Plane Crash Deaths Brings Closure

More than 20 years after two men were presumed killed in a plane crash, family members felt a sense of relief that the victims’ remains had finally been discovered in the mountains of Washington state, one relative said Thursday.

“I dreamed about them for years -- imagined Dad still alive, working on the plane,” said Leo Shaffer of Huntington Beach.

“We always assumed that they had crashed and that they [eventually] would be found,” he said. “When we heard the plane had been found, it was a big relief.”

Max Weldon Shaffer, 59, a drafting engineer for the city of Long Beach, and his brother-in-law, Eugene Carlton Goodrow, 54, a Santa Ana psychologist, had flown from Long Beach to Yakima, Wash., in January 1983 in Shaffer’s single-engine Bellanca, officials said.

After dropping off a relative in Yakima and refueling, the two took off on the return flight to Long Beach.

“The weather was clear when they took off,” Leo Shaffer said.

But as the plane headed south, it hit turbulent wind and icy conditions, officials said.

The plane went down in a remote area near Satus Pass, about 60 miles south of Yakima, the National Transportation Safety Board said. Because of heavy forestation, the wreckage was not visible from the air. It wasn’t discovered until a tribal work crew went into the backcountry of the Yakama Indian Reservation on Aug. 30 to install telecommunications equipment.

Partial skeletal remains and a wallet containing identification were found among debris that was scattered over 200 feet, officials said. The cause of the crash has not been determined.

Officials were all but certain that the remains were those of Shaffer and Goodrow, but their identities were not released until Thursday, after forensic tests confirmed the identifications and their families had been officially notified by the Klickitat County prosecutors-coroner’s office in Goldendale, Wash.

Mary Klock, who was married to Goodrow at the time of the crash and has since remarried and now lives in Melbourne, Fla., said she shared Leo Shaffer’s sense of relief when the wreckage was discovered and decades-long presumptions of a plane crash were finally confirmed.

“For a long time, I didn’t think I was going to hear what happened,” she said. “It’s good to know they probably died instantly.”

She said both men had been declared dead in the late 1980s.

Leo Shaffer said he had always felt some comfort that his father, an avid pilot, was in a plane at the end.

“He was doing what he loved to do,” he said.