Auburn police find body believed to be missing actress
Oct 16, 2014, 2:07 PM | Updated: 7:03 pm
Auburn police say they believe a body found Thursday is a missing actress whose disappearance has been the subject of international attention.
The body thought to be 32-year-old Misty Upham was discovered at the bottom of a cliff in the area of Elm Street Southeast and Forest Ridge Drive Southeast, near the White River.
“The person who found the body is a friend of the family’s of Missy Upham,” said Cmdr. Steve Stocker. “The family has had kind of a search party out looking for her and this person found a body.”
He said searchers also found a purse partway down the cliff. Some of the things included Upham’s name.
The actress is known for her roles in “August: Osage County,” “Frozen River” and “Django Unchained.”
Upham was reported missing by her family Oct. 5 after walking away from her sister’s apartment near the Muckleshoot reservation.
Stocker says the body was discovered by a family member who was in the area searching for her.
A purse with her identification was found at the scene, but the the medical examiner has not made a positive identification or determined cause of death, Stocker says.
“She was visibly upset and she was acting erratic, her behavior,” her father Charles Upham told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show earlier this week.
He said his daughter had stopped taking medication for anxiety and bi-polar disorder, and “was not in her right mind.”
Upham was angry police did not pursue a search or consider her endangered because her disappearance had to be unexplained, involuntary or suspicious, Cmdr. Steve Stocker told The Seattle Times.
“It wasn’t like she just decided to take time off. She’s out there, she’s missing, she needs help, she needs her medication,” Upham said.
The disappearance received national attention, with some media outlets reporting that Upham is worried his daughter committed suicide. But he insisted that wasn’t the case.
“She has said suicidal things in the past but never followed through,” he said. “She doesn’t believe in killing herself. She believes that is a sin and she would never do that.”
Misty Upham had moved to the Seattle area to help care for her father, who’s recovering from a stroke.
