The vehicle found near Stevenson connected Jeannie Enyeart’s disappearance to a homicide case that ultimately sent Jon French to prison.
PORTLAND, Ore. — The investigation into Jeannie Enyeart’s disappearance turned on a car stranded in the winter landscape of southwest Washington, where authorities learned her fiancé had been behind the wheel and later found her body hidden in the back seat.
That discovery became the bridge between a Portland missing-person report and the criminal case against Jon Pharris Ray French. More than two years later, French, 35, pleaded no contest to first-degree manslaughter and guilty to second-degree abuse of a corpse. Multnomah County prosecutors said he was sentenced Sept. 14 to 16½ years in prison. The resolution replaced the second-degree murder prosecution that had been headed toward trial and formally ended the case arising from Enyeart’s January 2024 death.
The first documented encounter with the car came far from the Portland home French and Enyeart shared. According to court documents reported by KATU, a Skamania County road department employee was traveling on East Loop Road on the morning of Jan. 29, 2024, when the worker spotted a Kia Soul stuck in the snow. A man later identified as French emerged from the vehicle and approached. The worker said French appeared impaired and asked for a ride to a cousin’s property nearby. It was a seemingly routine winter roadside encounter, but investigators would later make the vehicle a focal point of the case.
French’s cousin told police that French arrived in a light jacket despite the conditions and appeared to have injuries to his hands, the court documents said. French had car keys and beer with him, and the cousin told investigators he could not explain what he had been doing outside in the severe weather. The Kia was eventually towed. Investigators later confirmed that it was registered to Enyeart. Prosecutors said French had been driving when it became stuck. Those facts were significant because, back in Portland, French would offer police a different picture of where Enyeart and her car should have been.
Enyeart’s son reported her missing to Portland police that same day. He said he had been unable to reach his mother for an unusually long time, prosecutors said. During the search, relatives told KATU that she had last been seen Jan. 27 near Northeast Holladay Street and Northeast 93rd Avenue. Family members said Enyeart and French were in the process of moving and were expected to travel to Vancouver to collect belongings from a storage unit. Her daughter had spoken with her and reported no obvious sign that anything was wrong.
When police contacted French, prosecutors said, he claimed that he had seen Enyeart on Jan. 28 and said her car should be at their Portland home. Investigators already had reason to question that statement because the car was in Washington. Court filings later disclosed a second part of French’s account: He told police that a drug dealer named “Julius” might have kidnapped Enyeart or that she could have gone to see the man voluntarily. Police did not accept that explanation as the investigation developed. Neighbors reported frequent arguments between French and Enyeart and said they last saw her with French on Jan. 27.
The car then yielded the most consequential evidence. Investigators searched it and found Enyeart’s body in the back seat beneath a moving blanket and other belongings, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said. The medical examiner determined that Enyeart, 47, died from blunt trauma to the neck and classified her death as a homicide. Court-document reporting also described another finding: a ceramic fragment associated with a broken mug. Investigators later searched the couple’s Portland residence and found broken pieces of a mug in the master bedroom. Detectives believed one of those pieces matched the fragment recovered from Enyeart’s body.
The investigation expanded from the vehicle to French’s movements before and after Enyeart vanished. Surveillance video from a cannabis shop in Vancouver showed French arriving in Enyeart’s car on the night of Jan. 28, according to court documents reported by KATU. Investigators also interviewed a former girlfriend who said French was familiar with logging roads near his cousin’s property in Washington. She alleged that he had once talked about going to those roads if he needed to hide something. Authorities presented the statement as part of their investigation; it was not a judicial finding about what French intended on the night the vehicle became stuck.
Police arrested French on Feb. 5, 2024, about a week after Enyeart was reported missing. The case then entered a long pretrial period. French faced a second-degree murder charge along with an abuse-of-corpse charge, and the case remained pending for more than two years. KATU reported that he was found competent to stand trial in June 2025. By the spring of 2026, prosecutors were publicly disclosing more of their evidence ahead of court proceedings. A trial was eventually set for October 2026, meaning jurors were expected to hear the competing accounts and physical evidence unless the case was resolved first.
It was. On Sept. 4, French appeared in Multnomah County Circuit Court and pleaded no contest to first-degree manslaughter. He pleaded guilty to second-degree abuse of a corpse. The district attorney’s office described the pleas as arising from both Enyeart’s death and the movement of her body afterward. Chief Deputy District Attorney Todd Jackson and Deputy District Attorney Ryan Solomon prosecuted the case. The office also credited Portland homicide detectives Brent Christensen and Scott Broughton, who had participated in the investigation from the missing-person stage through the homicide case.
The legal distinction mattered. French no longer faced a jury decision on the original murder charge once the plea resolved the prosecution. A no-contest plea allowed the court to convict him of manslaughter without requiring the same express admission associated with a guilty plea. Ten days later, he returned for sentencing. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said Judge Jenna Plank imposed a total prison term of 16½ years. The office did not provide a detailed count-by-count breakdown in its public sentencing announcement.
The sentencing hearing also returned attention to Enyeart rather than the sequence of evidence. Her family had described her during the search as a mother of two, a new grandmother and a certified nursing assistant who worked in hospice care. Her mother said caring for others had long been part of her nature. At sentencing, Enyeart’s sister Kristin spoke of the deep and lasting pain caused by her death, according to KXL. A friend, Amy Nickerson, also addressed French directly. French was offered an opportunity to speak but did not, the station reported.
For investigators, the case ultimately came together across two states: a family unable to reach Enyeart in Oregon, a car immobilized by snow in Washington, a driver whose account conflicted with the vehicle’s location, and physical evidence recovered from both the car and the Portland residence. For Enyeart’s family, the case ended not with the murder trial once scheduled for October but with the September plea and 16½-year sentence. Her relatives have since established a scholarship for nursing students at Clackamas Community College, reflecting the caregiving work that had defined much of her life.
Author note: Last updated October 20, 2026.