[tense music]
CHARLES MCCORMICK: January 6, 1982, was a Wednesday.
It was 22 degrees below 0 in Summit County.
JIM HARDTKE: That night it was dark, dark.
There's no lights other than stars or the moon.
[tense music]
MARK HURLBURT: A United Airlines flight was going over.
WENDY KIPPLE: A passenger saw somebody flashing an SOS
signal with their headlights.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: The pilot called the Denver tower.
The word gets back to the county sheriff.
MITCH MORRISEY: When the fire chief found him,
this guy had a gash in his forehead.
KAREN RIESSEN: The guy who rescued him was thinking
he was saving somebody's life.
He didn't know what happened that night.
[tense music]
JIM HARDTKE: When you first saw the body,
there was a lot of blood.
STEPHANIE MILLER: She was a fighter.
She fought her way through her attacker
and managed to run from him.
MARK HURLBURT: She started running.
It is knee deep, thigh deep snow.
[tense music]
We found the second body four miles up the creek
from Highway 9.
The only real connection between these two cases
was this blood on this glove that was found near the bodies.
WENDY KIPPLE: The suspect's DNA was not in CODIS.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: We're looking at evidence
that's 40-plus years gone by.
WENDY KIPPLE: It's like a big 2,000 piece puzzle.
(OFF) STEPHANIE MILLER: Is this DNA
evidence going to be the answer to decades of heartache?
[tense music]
MARK HURLBURT: Hoosier Pass
is this 11,000 foot windy pass.
The pine trees give way to the tundra
as you're going up and over the pass.
It is absolutely gorgeous.
And at the top is the Continental Divide.
It's kind of the backbone of the continent.
[tense music]
In the winters, it can be very inhospitable if you
are driving over Hoosier Pass.
It becomes really difficult.
[tense music]
WENDY KIPPLE: In the beginning
of the year in January 1982, there was a lot of snow coming.
It seemed like we just kept getting
pounded with storm after storm.
January 6, law enforcement got a report
that a woman went missing.
Her husband said she wasn't coming home,
he couldn't find her.
[tense music]
That time of year, the snow banks were high.
The friends that were searching went on cross-country skis.
They kind of went around behind those snow berms.
They are looking for tracks, any disturbances in the snow.
And as they're skiing along, a couple hundred feet
from the road, one of them looked up and sees
something buried in the snow.
They could see a body.
STEPHANIE MILLER: They don't get close enough
to touch her, but from what they can see,
they believe it's their friend.
JIM HARDTKE: There was no question that she
was deceased at that point.
- Her body is essentially frozen.
[tense music]
WENDY KIPPLE: If the friends hadn't have
been diligent and insisting on going to look for her,
she certainly would have continued to be buried by snow.
STEPHANIE MILLER: Her friends were shocked,
and they were horrified.
No one knows what happened to her.
[tense music]
They managed to get back to the top of Hoosier,
and flag down a car, and say, go call the police.
[tense music]
JIM HARDTKE: When I got the call,
my first thought was that it could have been accidental.
It was 20 to 25 below 0.
STEPHANIE MILLER: When police find the body,
she was covered in blood.
And there was blood on the snow around her.
It looked as though she had been shot.
- There was a tie wrap on one of her wrists.
So as soon as I saw that, I said this is no accident.
The victim was murdered.
[tense music]
WENDY KIPPLE: Breckenridge is a ski town.
Back in the '70s, people were coming from all over the place.
Everybody wanted to come here to be in nature, to ski,
to just be themselves.
[mellow music]
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: Back in the '70s,
there was an allure to go to Colorado for a lot
of the Midwest younger folks.
[mellow music]
My wife Bobbie Jo and I both grew up in the same town,
Racine, Wisconsin.
When I met her in 1973, I was on a motorcycle riding
down the road, and this convertible kind of
pulled up alongside.
Bobbie Jo was about the prettiest thing I'd ever seen,
I guess.
I made a date with her, and we clicked.
I fell pretty much head over heels.
In May of 1980, Bobbie and I decided
that we were gonna try to move to Colorado and set up shop.
We ended up setting up, you know,
outside of Alma on the other side of Hoosier Pass
about 20 miles from Breckenridge.
It was like a small hippie town, in a sense.
A lot of people hitchhiked.
It was kind of rough and tough and rowdy with all the miners
who worked in the Climax Mine or the Henderson Mine
in Summit County.
We knew pretty much everyone.
Bobbie Jo was working for an investment company
and was the receptionist.
I was starting out my business, which was Alpine Appliance.
We were gonna begin a family.
We were building a life.
Bobbie Jo was just gentle, and critters
got along with her really well.
She raised birds.
And I remember I came home one day,
and she was sitting in the rocking chair.
She was sleeping, and the bandit, the cedar waxwing,
was just also asleep sitting on her finger.
And it-- and it was just--
just a picture that I'll never, ever forget.
[mellow music]
Being up so high in the mountains, it was--
it was a winter wonderland.
But it was not for the weak.
WENDY KIPPLE: In January 1982,
I remember it snowing so much the plow drivers were running
out of places to put snow.
Even with snow coming in, nothing ever
really shut down completely.
It's-- it's a way of life here.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: January the 6th, 1982 was a Wednesday.
It was 22 degrees below 0 in Summit County that night.
I've never seen it colder than that.
JIM HARDTKE: Bobbie called me after work
and said that she had gotten a promotion at her job.
She said she was gonna celebrate with her friends.
I was excited for her.
She said she was going to get a ride home or hitchhike,
which was a normal thing.
[tense music]
I woke up right after 2 o'clock in the morning,
and Bobbie Jo wasn't--
was still not home.
The snow was blowing bad, and I was really worried.
I decided to go to Breckenridge to look for her.
[tense music]
I went over to the house of the friends
that she was supposed to get a ride home from, woke them up.
And they said that Bobbie Jo had left
the bar at about 10 to 8:00.
And they hadn't seen her and that she said
she was gonna hitchhike home.
So now, I'm kind of in a panic.
She never spent the night away.
Something is horribly, horribly wrong.
[tense music]
A rancher told me that he had found
Bobbie Jo's driver's license blowing in his driveway.
- On the wool glove, there was blood.
JIM HARDTKE: How do you have two missing people that
fit the same profile in one night,
one day missing in Breckenridge?
[tense music]
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: It was January the 6th.
It's, you know, 2:30 in the morning now, at least.
I went in, and I talked to an officer
at the Breckenridge Police Department.
I said, my wife, Bobbie Jo, hadn't come home.
It wasn't in her character to do anything like that.
[tense music]
JIM HARDTKE: At that point,
there's no indication of foul play.
So police were doing what they always do.
They wait the 24 hours.
WENDY KIPPLE: In a blizzard,
there's a lot of welfare checks, people
stuck on the side of the road.
That night, a plane flying overhead saw somebody
flashing an SOS signal with their headlights,
and somebody was found and was subsequently rescued.
Law enforcement was very busy that night.
Officers told Jeff there's nothing we can do right now
and she hasn't been gone missing for long enough.
[tense music]
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: At that point,
I had no other place to go than just back home.
Around 8 o'clock or so, I had got a call.
It was from a rancher who called my number
and told me that he had found Bobbie Jo's driver's license
blowing in his driveway.
[tense music]
(OFF) STEPHANIE MILLER: The Hamilton
Ranch is miles away towards Denver,
well beyond their house.
Why are her items many, many miles north
of where they should be?
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: I know something's wrong.
So I start making some phone calls to different friends.
People started coming to the house.
STEPHANIE MILLER: People load up in vehicles.
They're headed to Denver to the Hamilton Ranch.
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: And as we were coming
around the corner on 285, I spotted
a blue speck in the snow, and I recognized it as her backpack.
[tense music]
WENDY KIPPLE: It was freshly fallen snow.
So the backpack stands out like a sore thumb.
There's no other tracks out to the backpack.
Jeff notices very close by to it is one of Bobbie
Jo's wool gloves and a Kleenex.
And on the wool glove, there was blood.
(OFF) JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: You know,
the worst things that I could think were going on in my mind.
WENDY KIPPLE: Jeff called the sheriff's office,
and a detective did meet them and took those items from Jeff.
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: In the meantime,
the word is getting out more and more,
and some other friends decided to search
north toward Breckenridge.
JIM HARDTKE: They decided to search on skis
and look in different places off the highway.
(OFF) STEPHANIE MILLER: At that time,
the only place to pull off of the highway was Hoosier Pass.
[tense music]
WENDY KIPPLE: The search party
wasn't into the search very long when they did find her body.
[tense music]
Once the friends reported, then the Park County
Sheriff's Office came up.
Then, at that point, they made the decision, hey, this
is bigger than us and called for Colorado
Bureau of Investigations to start up there from Denver.
[tense music]
JIM HARDTKE: I got up to the summit of the pass
at probably 7:30 at night.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: The crime scene is at 11,500 feet.
It's dark.
It's snowing lightly.
It's 25 below now.
The crime scene itself, you might
as well not even have a floor.
I mean, the snow is so deep.
[tense music]
STEPHANIE MILLER: Bobbie Jo had obviously at some point
been walking or running in very deep snow.
And it looked as though she was shot,
she maybe took a few more steps, blood in the snow,
and then fell down.
WENDY KIPPLE: As an investigator,
you look at the totality of the scene.
It's like, what doesn't belong here?
(OFF) CHARLES MCCORMICK: A hundred
yards back up the road into the parking
lot, two items were found.
One was a orange booty, like a tennis sock.
And there was another one.
It was a very heavy, round, steel key ring.
[tense music]
JIM HARDTKE: And at that point,
Jeff Oberholtzer was there, and he had told the sheriff
that he wants to see her.
[tense music]
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: I approached the body bag,
and I told them to unzip it, and--
and they did.
It was like, isn't this just a bad dream?
She was pale and frozen solid.
She was gone.
And I would never see her alive again,
and I was alone without my Bobbie Jo.
[somber music]
WENDY KIPPLE: At that time,
the coroner took her body to a funeral home down
in the Denver area for autopsy.
Bobbie Jo had two gunshot wounds in the chest.
STEPHANIE MILLER: She did have injuries to both wrists
from the zip ties.
WENDY KIPPLE: There was no indication that she
had been sexually assaulted.
JIM HARDTKE: The bullet itself was found,
but it was so damaged that we couldn't
do real ballistics tests.
But it looked to be-- you know, we could narrow down what
caliber it might have been.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: As far as the items of evidence
near her body, according to Jeff,
the key ring belonged to Bobbie Jo.
But nobody really knew anything about why that sock was there.
WENDY KIPPLE: When Bobbie Jo was found,
she was fully clothed.
She had her socks on.
It didn't make sense.
Why would that orange sock be there?
JIM HARDTKE: The blood on the glove and Bobbie Jo's blood
were both A-positive.
It didn't give us a lead.
(OFF) CHARLES MCCORMICK: I remember
saying a prayer for whoever was gonna be the case agent.
There is, of course, no witnesses.
There's no real evidence.
You could tell that it was going to be
an extremely difficult case.
[wind howling]
JIM HARDTKE: That point would be
day two of the investigation.
Bobbie Jo was last seen when she walked out of the bar
to hitchhike home.
Breckenridge police stopped traffic and asked everybody
if they had seen anything.
Because of the bitter cold--
well, well below 0--
people were so bundled up.
So they may have seen Bobbie Jo but didn't know it was her.
- Bobbie Jo did hitchhike quite frequently.
- Bobbie Jo was picky,
and she'd turn down rides from people that she didn't know.
I had made her a key ring weapon that she could use.
It made you feel better knowing that you could possibly defend
yourself better than not.
Bobbie could take care of herself.
- Well, at that point, the only person I knew
who knew the victim was Jeff.
He was the first person I talked to.
Jeff said he went to the Sheriff's office to report
Bobbie Jo missing to no avail.
After that, he's getting really nervous, getting angry.
- When Bobbie Jo went missing,
Jeff said he was at home alone at 10:00
at night, 2:00 AM in the morning,
waiting for her to come home.
- He said he actually slept for awhile.
And I remember him telling me that he
heard a siren around midnight.
We checked later, and there were no emergency
calls passing by his home.
(ON) STEPHANIE MILLER: So of course,
he can't prove that that's where he's at.
- Jeff was the first person
I considered the suspect.
January 8 was the day I talked to Jeff.
And by January 9, I learned that there
was another hitchhiker reported missing to the Summit
County Sheriff's Office.
[dramatic music]
And her name was Annette Kay Schnee.
KAREN RIESSEN: Our family was raised in Sioux City, Iowa.
When my father died when I was in third grade,
my mother remarried.
My mother had four of us at home, and he brought one in,
and then they had one.
So we were kind of like the Brady Bunch.
- Annette was just a goof ball.
She was funny, very funny.
She had a bubbly personality, and she was outgoing.
And then after Annette graduated from high school,
she moved down to Omaha, Nebraska,
and went to modeling school to get more prim and proper.
She wanted to be a stewardess.
[upbeat music]
When Annette graduated, she moved to Colorado.
- She loved it here--
the woods, outdoors.
She loved going hiking, loved hiking.
She talked about how hard it was.
It's expensive, so she had two jobs
to make ends meet because she was still trying
to get into stewardess school.
- She had this ambition and this drive
to just go and live her life and start it on her own
and figure out what she wanted to do.
She was pretty ambitious.
WENDY KIPPLE: The person that called Annette in missing
was her coworker.
She had missed her shift for two days.
Annette was a very reliable person,
so this was very out of character for her.
She worked at the Holiday Inn in Frisco.
That was Annette's day job.
And then at night, she was a cocktail
waitress at the Flip Side bar.
She didn't have a car, so she would hitchhike
back and forth as well.
- When my mom got
the phone call from the detective,
I could hear her voice crack.
She hung up the phone, and she broke down in tears and said,
I knew what this phone call was going to be.
I had a feeling that some detective was going to call
me and say Annette was missing.
And she's missing.
[dramatic music]
- The investigators
started interviewing Annette's coworkers.
The last time Annette Schnee was seen
was leaving the drugstore in Breckenridge at about 4:45
in the afternoon on January 6, the same night
that Bobbie Jo went missing.
Annette was scheduled to work at the Flip Side Bar that night,
and she never made it home to get
her cocktail waitress outfit.
- Annette and Bobby both
work in the Breckenridge area.
They both hitchhike to and from work.
They're both young and attractive.
How do you have two missing people
that fit the same profile in one night, one
day missing in Breckenridge?
[intense music]
- People were afraid.
People were scared.
Is there a murderer out there roaming around Summit County?
- He picked her up hitchhiking.
It seemed like quite a coincidence.
- They did bring in the truck that he had,
and they found some blood in there.
[wind howling]
- In January of 1982,
people in Breckenridge were really
frightened for good cause.
[ominous music]
For two young women to be plucked out
of a small little village with people having fun
scared the hell out of everybody.
[ominous music]
I knew that-- just the way things
are, that the second woman would undoubtedly
be found dead somewhere.
- When I learned that Annette was last
seen within a tight time frame of when Bobbie Jo went missing,
my immediate thought was these cases are together,
but there's no way we could prove that.
As far as Annette and Bobbie Jo knowing each other,
nobody knew.
The next time I saw Jeff, I asked him.
I said, do you know Annette.
And he said, no, I don't.
- But at some point,
an article came out in the newspaper
where they put Annette Schnee's photograph right
next to Bobbie Jo's photograph.
And when Jeff saw the pictures, he goes back to police
and says, I have seen her.
I gave her a ride back in November.
- We picked her up hitchhiking, and he said,
I gave her a business card.
It seemed like quite a coincidence.
- The police asked Jeff
questions about Annette Schnee.
Has she been murdered as well?
Did he see her?
- I asked him if he'd
be willing to take a polygraph.
And he took the polygraph.
[dramatic music]
And he passed.
That's not evidence, but it helps back up Jeff's story.
- Police had no way to tie Jeff
to the homicide of Bobbie Jo.
And at this point, Annette has not been found.
No one knows what's happened to her.
- Trying to find a body with all the snow
was virtually impossible.
KAREN RIESSEN: I and my brother Russ made the decision
to go out to Colorado to try to find something
that would give us a clue.
But there wasn't any answers.
We felt helpless, went home brokenhearted with no answers.
[solemn music]
JIM HARDTKE: As far as a profile of the unknown
suspect at the time, it's possible this
was a random killing.
Initially, the serial killer idea came to mind.
In my mind, I thought, I mean, if you're a serial killer,
you have the barrel, and there's fish in the barrel
right at that hitchhiking spot.
- Law enforcement started to look
towards cases that are similar.
They were looking for people that were violent,
people that had committed sexual assaults.
- In February of 1982,
six weeks after the murder of one woman
and the disappearance of another,
there was another very violent sexually-oriented crime.
A woman who's kind of standing out
near the depot for a Greyhound bus late at night--
not too far from where Bobbie Jo and Annette
had been last seen--
a man stopped and asked if she needed any help.
So she accepted the ride and got in with him.
He eventually pulled over and pulled a hammer
out from underneath his seat.
He started to beat her with the hammer.
He then raped her.
[dramatic music]
She eventually got away from him and ran.
The victim had given a description
of the attacker and his truck.
And so the police started looking for this very
distinctive old pickup truck, and they eventually found
it parked in a trailer park.
And based on that, they arrested Tom Luther.
Tom Luther was a picture-perfect mountain man.
He had several jobs in January of '82.
One was as a cab driver.
And he also had a job with a friend
of his gathering firewood.
- Law enforcement
did go interview him about Bobbie Jo and Annette.
He denied that he had any involvement in that case.
- He said he did not
recall what he was doing the night that both
these girls disappeared.
- Investigators talk
to Thomas Luther's girlfriend about where he was,
what he was doing during that time.
And she had said that he had not gone to work the next day.
- Speaking to the people who
knew Tom Luther, we heard he could be a very accommodating,
friendly individual.
But if he got angry, which he quite often did,
he would blow his top, scream and holler.
- Luther had a violent history,
especially against women.
There were eerie similarities between what
happened with Bobbie Jo and what happened with this victim.
Law enforcement thought they had their guy.
[wind howling]
In spring of 1982, during the investigation,
Thomas Luther was in custody because of a sexual assault
in Summit County.
- The fact that he committed
this hammer rape-- the violence that was involved
and the nature of it in a small community
like Summit County, this suspect was
the best thing we had going.
- They did look at Thomas Luther's truck
that he had, and they found some blood.
But the blood was from the victim in the sexual assault
in Summit County.
They were not able to connect it to Bobbie Jo and Annette.
- We knew that Tom Luther's girlfriend owned
a gun that could fit the caliber of the bullet in Bobbie Jo,
but the bullet was so damaged that we couldn't
do real ballistics tests.
- Given all of the evidence that we had
to make Luther a suspect, there was
not any direct evidence of his involvement in these cases.
And of course, he denied being involved.
He went to trial for sexual assault,
and he was convicted and sentenced to 10 years.
- There is a measure of comfort
that these people are behind bars for other crimes,
but it's kind of small comfort because you
want to solve this case.
- Not getting any solid provable
or even investigate able information
is extremely frustrating.
- At that time, law enforcement,
they kept running into dead ends.
Then they really focused on Jeff, Bobbie Jo's husband.
Law enforcement kept going back to Jeff,
and it's because at that point, they didn't have anything else.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: He passed the polygraph.
It didn't mean much to the investigators
because polygraphs are not admissible as evidence
in court, and for good reason.
They're not foolproof.
- As investigators,
we went through so many possible scenarios of Jeff's timeline.
Could he'd been the one that killed Bobbie Jo?
I called the phone company to make
sure that that was a real call that was really answered.
The timeline, it just was not exact.
Our agency did a number of interviews with him,
some of them friendly, some of them rough.
At that point, until we found a killer,
everybody is still on the list.
As far as locating Annette, we had nothing.
- Every day that goes by without Annette,
your heart sinks a little more.
It's really hard.
- Sometimes, you would just break down
and cry because where is she?
Where could she possibly be?
And at that point, nearing six months,
you don't think she's ever going to be found.
- It was early July.
That time of year, the snow melts.
Everything's changing.
Things are getting green, and it's beautiful up here.
- When the snow starts melting away,
it's like a sense of renewal.
You start seeing the buds start coming out
on the Aspen trees and the wildflowers
starting to try to come up.
Around the July 4th holiday, a lot of people
come up from the city to get out of the heat
and come up to the mountains where it's cool.
- So July 3, a family
comes into the Sacramento Creek area to their summer home,
like they do every 4th of July.
WENDY KIPPLE: Their boy, who was 13 at the time wanted
to go fishing, so he got his fishing pole
and walks down to Sacramento Creek,
which is a short distance away.
- He is just working his way
up the creek by himself and he sees
a body face down in the water.
[dramatic music]
The body has on a winter coat and thick pants and boots.
He saw hair waving with the movement of the water.
And then at some point, it waved away and he saw an ear.
Of course, it terrifies him.
He scrambles up this embankment.
And when he gets to the road, he takes rocks
and he piles them up to mark where it is that he
has come out of the creek.
- He runs back up to the cabin
and tells his dad.
And his dad contacts the police.
- When police find the body,
it's obvious to them that the body has been in the water
for quite some time.
It's female.
- The water in Sacramento Creek
is from snowmelt, so it's very cold,
so her body was remarkably well preserved.
- Her physical appearance still remained.
- Right away, they knew that the body
was Annette Schnee.
[dramatic music]
- In January, that area
was just piled with snow.
WENDY KIPPLE: We have snow clear up till June.
Her body would have been buried in the snow
from the moment she was murdered.
- I attended the autopsy of Annette
Schnee down in Denver.
And as we're preparing the body for autopsy,
I see on her foot an orange footie sock.
[dramatic music]
I've seen the orange footie sock that was found at Bobbie Jo's
crime scene for all those months wondering,
how does this fit in.
And I see what appears to be the mate to it on Annette's foot.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: The individual--
serial killer now-- puts himself right in the hotel
where Annette worked in the week both these girls disappeared.
MARK HURLBURT: The only connection
was this blood on this glove.
MITCH MORRISEY: Now, 40 years later, you've
got an eyewitness on the night that this happened,
saying this guy had a gash in his forehead.
(ON) JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: And finally,
this nightmare might be ending.
WENDY KIPPLE: That's what broke this case wide open.
[suspenseful music]
(OFF) STEPHANIE MILLER: Bobbie Jo
Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee had
gone missing on the same night.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: Six months later, July the 3rd,
1982, about 12 miles away into Park County,
Annette Schnee's body was found floating in Sacramento Creek,
face down.
[STREAM GURGLING, BIRDS CHIRPING]
STEPHANIE MILLER: The 13-year-old boy
was fly fishing in the creek, and he came upon her.
- She'd been shot in the back.
[suspenseful music]
[STREAM GURGLING, BIRDS CHIRPING]
- As a child, I just
remember thinking about my mom.
That-- I was sad, but I was so sad for my mom.
KAREN RIESSEN: You want to know it was fast.
Because you hope that they're not suffering.
That was terrible.
I was so mad that I couldn't have been there to help her.
WENDY KIPPLE: When Annette was taken down for autopsy,
a lot of her clothing was kind of in disarray.
Her boots were on the wrong feet.
- The zipper on her blue jeans
was broken.
WENDY KIPPLE: It's our belief that she
was sexually assaulted.
STEPHANIE MILLER: We believe, at some point,
Annette is hastily trying to get dressed,
so that she can, literally, run from her captor.
At the autopsy, there was something off about her socks.
She's wearing one long purple sock and one orange bootie.
Investigators are like, one orange sock.
One orange sock.
There was one orange dog found with Bobbie Jo.
These two women must be connected.
CINDY FRENCH: Annette really
liked it out in Colorado, but she hated being cold.
So at Christmas, Mom would send her,
like, those little fuzzy socks.
So when she was found, my mom was able to say,
I gave her those.
I gave her those socks at Christmas.
But she only had one on, of course.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: The orange sock--
finding the mate to that orange sock
just invigorated the entire investigation.
Based on the timing of when Bobbie was last seen
and when Annette was last seen, Annette was picked up first
and disappeared.
The clothing on Annette suggests that she
was murdered that same day.
(OFF) STEPHANIE MILLER: The orange sock
becomes significant, because when Annette got out
of his vehicle, she didn't put on one of those orange socks,
and she left it in the vehicle.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: Since Annette's sock was founded
Bobbie Jo's crime scene, it became, in my mind,
that whoever took Annette away from Breckenridge
came back to Breckenridge and picked up Bobbie Jo,
about 3 and 1/2, 4 hours later.
WENDY KIPPLE: Bobbie Jo jumped out of the truck
at the top of Hoosier Pass, and when she did,
she kicked the orange booty sock out.
MITCH MORRISEY: Just like Annette, she tried to escape,
and she was shot and killed.
MARK HURLBURT: Early on, law
enforcement focused on Bobbie Jo's husband, Jeff Oberholtzer.
JIM HARDTKE: Our agency had polygraphed Jeff,
and he passed.
MARK HURLBURT: After Annette's body was found,
law enforcement was looking for anything
else they can find that would lead
them to who killed Annette.
WENDY KIPPLE: When we looked
in Annette's coat pockets, we found Jeff
Oberholtzer's business card.
STEPHANIE MILLER: And of course, that made police go,
is he somehow connected?
(ON) CHARLES MCCORMICK: I remember
thinking, what are the chances?
Jeff Oberholtzer became a prime suspect.
[suspenseful music]
STEPHANIE MILLER: Bobbie Jo's husband,
Jeff, was a suspect very early on.
When Annette's body was eventually found,
Jeff's card was in her pocket.
Of course, they then thought he could be connected somehow
to the homicide of Annette.
WENDY KIPPLE: Originally, when
investigators talked to Jeff, they
asked Jeff if he knew Annette.
He said, the year before, he had stopped and given her a ride.
JIM HARDTKE: He had told me that he
gave Annette his business card.
He said, I give everybody a business card.
STEPHANIE MILLER: Why would this married man give
a business card to some single 19-year-old girl
that he's picked up hitchhiking?
JIM HARDTKE: There were several investigators
that said, aha, there it is.
You know, he's connected with her.
They're both dead, both murdered.
Jeff is the guy.
KAREN RIESSEN: When we heard from the law enforcement,
at that time, they were pointing toward Bobbie
Jo's husband, Jeff.
They told us about how they found Jeff's business card.
And at that time, you know, it makes
me think he's more guilty.
JIM HARDTKE: Shortly after Annette was found,
Summit County investigators asked him
if he'd be willing to take a second polygraph.
So Jeff was polygraphed by CBI, and then
polygraphed by Summit County.
And he passed both.
There was no indication of any deception
in either one of the tests.
- Police kept coming back
to Jeff over a number of years.
They would leave him alone, then come back to him,
question him again, search his house, talk to his friends,
talk to his family.
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: After I had lost Bobbie Jo,
I didn't understand why I was the number-one suspect,
because I hadn't done anything.
When they found my business card,
that didn't do me any good.
It didn't add to me being less of a suspect,
I can tell you that.
I really felt that after that point,
that they were going to make sure that I was put in prison.
The community did start forming opinions,
and some weren't on my side after a while,
and weren't for years.
It hurt.
JIM HARDTKE: It's months past after Annette was found.
It came to a point where there was
not much information coming in.
KAREN RIESSEN: My mom would
fly out to Breckenridge, probably yearly,
to talk to the detectives.
CINDY FRENCH: The challenging part
was the frustration with the investigation
and having nothing.
It wasn't until several years later
that new detectives got on the case
and really lit a fire under it.
And that made my mom so happy to see.
(OFF) CHARLES MCCORMICK: It was 1989,
seven years after the murders, when I finally
got involved in this case.
I had started a private investigative business
in Breckenridge.
And in the course of working that,
I happened to meet the Sheriff's detective who
was assigned to work the case.
We set up a task force where we would work the case together.
We decided to go back and start at the beginning
to solidify what evidence we did or did not have.
We saw, in the first weeks after the murders, in January of '82,
there was an attempted carjacking in the Denver metro
area, in which a man got shot.
Our murder was only a couple of weeks after that.
So the investigators at that time
did a ballistic exam of that bullet.
And the results were inconclusive on that.
But since 1982, the two detectives in the Denver area
had a person who had become a prime suspect
in that carjacking--
a guy by the name of Tracy Petrocelli.
He's a vicious little individual, shot and killed
his girlfriend, drove down the West Coast,
and he went on a killing spree.
He shot and killed a guy outside of San Bernardino.
He killed two people in Evanston, Wyoming.
He's arrested in Reno.
And when he was interviewed about the car dealer
in Denver being killed, his response
was, well, I've never been in Colorado,
except for the first week in January of 1982,
and I stopped at a little town called Frisco,
and I stayed at the Holiday Inn there.
I mean, he puts himself as a serial killer now.
He puts himself right in the hotel
where Annette worked in the week both these girls disappeared.
I couldn't believe it.
So at that point, we start investigating Petrocelli.
I went to Ely, Nevada, which is where he was serving his time.
He just would not admit to anything.
We had no physical evidence to speak of, really.
The bullet from the carjacking was no good.
MARK HURLBURT: There was a lot of circumstantial evidence,
but certainly not enough to prove a case
beyond a reasonable doubt.
You hope that you get a new piece
of evidence, a new statement from a witness or something.
It's the hope that kills you.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: A few years later, in 1995, we
started getting calls from the investigative agency in Denver
about Tom Luther.
MARK HURLBURT: Originally, Thomas Luther had
been a suspect in this case.
In early 1982, he was a cab driver that had assaulted
another woman in Summit County.
About a month after the murders, law enforcement
was not able to provide a solid link
between the murders of Bobbie Jo and Annette and Thomas Luther.
But then, after the spring of 1982,
after Thomas Luther was arrested for sexual assault,
he was later convicted and sentenced
to 10 years in prison.
And he got out early.
And then, just months after he was released from prison,
another woman, Cher Elder, who was with Thomas Luther
in Central City, which is a little mountain
town just outside of Denver--
she disappeared.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: Evidence showed him a casino's
closed-circuit TV with her.
So he was a pretty heavy suspect in Cher Elder's disappearance.
MARK HURLBURT: Law enforcement started to go back
and started to dig into Thomas Luther's past.
(OFF) CHARLES MCCORMICK: We found out,
after he was arrested for the rape in 1982,
he was a troublemaker in jail.
We eventually interviewed cellmates that Luther had.
MARK HURLBURT: The cellmate
had said that while Thomas Luther was in custody in Summit
County, back in 1982, he had bragged to an inmate
that he had killed two girls in Summit County.
It was huge.
It made Thomas Luther a prime suspect again.
MARK HURLBURT: In 1995, we found
out that we potentially had a confession to these murders.
Law enforcement put out a BOLO, or Be On the Look-Out,
for Thomas Luther, because they didn't know where he was.
And he ended up turning up in prison in West Virginia,
where he had raped a woman.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: When we interviewed him
in West Virginia, he denied killing anybody.
- Law enforcement kept at him
and kept at him about the murders
of Bobbie Jo and Annette.
And finally, Thomas Luther said, those aren't my girls.
(OFF) CHARLES MCCORMICK: He got very--
almost studious, academic.
He said, you know, think about it, look at it.
And it dawned on me, he's right.
The modus operandi is pretty different in the cases
we were trying to pin on him.
Doesn't mean he's exonerated, but it did make a point.
MITCH MORRISEY: Around this time, in the '90s, DNA
advanced from the late '80s at an incredible pace.
MARK HURLBURT: When DNA became available,
law enforcement resubmitted the bloody glove and the Kleenex
that were found along with Bobbie Jo's backpacks
to the Bureau of investigation to do DNA testing on it.
In 1998, the crime lab found that the profile was a mixture.
The blood was Bobbie Jo's, and there
was a male, an unknown male.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: And that was just gigantic,
because that's the suspect.
That's like having a picture of him without the name on it.
All you got to do is find the name.
JIM HARDTKE: Law enforcement
had DNA comparison from the glove
to the suspect's, and none of them matched.
Everyone was clear, including Jeff Oberholtzer.
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: It wasn't my DNA.
It, pretty much, helped corroborate
the fact that I wasn't there, that I didn't do anything.
KAREN RIESSEN: When DNA came out and Jeff was cleared,
then we felt terrible, because we knew here,
all these years, we thought he was the one, and he wasn't.
It breaks my heart to this day to think that about that.
MITCH MORRISEY: As DNA evolved, mid-'90s, we get
the DNA database, we get CODIS.
- That DNA, male DNA from the glove,
was put into CODIS in 2002.
No match.
Over the years, with each DNA test,
there was always a fear that we were
going to run out of sample.
WENDY KIPPLE: We would still roundtable this case
and keep trying to look for new leads
and get more testing done.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: None of it went anywhere,
but everybody wanted to solve it.
Nobody was ready to give up.
CINDY FRENCH: You always kind of wonder what, like,
what if this didn't happen?
Would Karen and I and Annette be going on cruises and vacations?
And would her kids be close with mine?
JEFFREY OBERHOLTZER: The world doesn't stop
just because you want it to.
You have to move forward with your life
and live your life to the best you can.
But always keep that hope in the back of your heart--
we would, one day, know the truth.
WENDY KIPPLE: For this case,
it was a matter of thinking outside the box.
It's like we've tried everything else.
What do we have left to try?
I'd heard about the Golden State Killer case in California.
That was kind of my introduction to genetic genealogy
and how investigators would take the DNA samples
and would build out family trees.
At that time, then, investigator McCormick and I
started kicking around in, I believe, it is early 2020, what
about using this genetic genealogy,
like they did in the Golden State Killer case?
- United Data Connect is my company.
We do DNA and investigative genetic genealogy.
So we're using DNA differently now with genealogy
because we're building out family trees based
on these commercial databases.
People can upload their DNA then to family tree DNA
or to GEDmatch.
And those are the two databases that
allow law enforcement to look for the people that
commit these horrendous crimes.
And maybe they committed them back 30, 40 years ago.
WENDY KIPPLE: The genetic genealogist, Joan Hanlon,
started like 13 generations back,
and she would work forward.
MITCH MORRISEY: You start to come down,
and you're looking for a male.
And you're looking for somebody that
was alive at the time, somebody that lived in the area.
WENDY KIPPLE: On January 9, 2021,
I get a phone call from Joan Hanlon.
And she's like, OK, Wendy, I have two more names for you.
- We went from over 12,000
people in these family trees down to two brothers.
And when you get down to two brothers,
then you're really doing detective work.
WENDY KIPPLE: I start looking up the names
and figuring out where they live.
One brother lives in Arizona, the other one
still lives here in Colorado.
And the one name of the guy that lives here
in Colorado, Alan Phillips.
I was like, I know this name.
Where do I know this name from?
He worked with my ex-husband in the mine.
I really felt strongly that we had our guy.
I was just like, we're really close.
How are we going to figure out where he was 39 years ago?
MARK HURLBURT: We have to prove the case
beyond a reasonable doubt.
The only connection was this blood
on this glove and this Kleenex that
were found miles from their bodies
out on the High Plains of Colorado.
We need to know about where he was,
about what he was doing in January of 1982.
WENDY KIPPLE: And then I started getting
more phone calls from Joan.
She said, I found some newspaper articles that
are going to blow your mind.
They were newspaper articles of a guy found
stuck at the top of Guanella Pass the same night
that Bobbie Jo and Annette were murdered.
- The story hit the wires back
in '82, and it went everywhere.
It was on the front page.
WENDY KIPPLE: There was even one article
about his rescue right there next
to the article about Bobbie Jo that was Alan Phillips.
That's what broke this case wide open.
- As we were doing the investigation
into this case, we looked back into the archives
in the newspaper and found that this person, Alan Phillips, he
had been stranded the night of the murders
on top of Guanella Pass.
MITCH MORRISEY: Guanella Pass was an isolated, fairly
treacherous drive.
So you get to the top of Guanella Pass,
it's really cold.
- It can get very icy and snowy.
And it's a lot of switchbacks.
Back in the '80s, it was not maintained.
- January 6, 1982, a United Airlines flight
was going over Guanella Pass.
CHARLES MCCORMICK: On board that airplane
was a sheriff of Jefferson County,
which was one of the counties in the Denver metro area.
He's looking out of his window, and he
sees a car on top of that pass, signaling
SOS with his headlights.
The pilot called the Denver tower.
The word gets back to the County Sheriff's Office.
WENDY KIPPLE: The Sheriff's Department
at that time didn't have vehicles that could make
it to the top of Guanella Pass.
But the fire chief did.
So he gets up there and sees somebody stuck
in a two-wheel drive truck.
This guy was Alan Phillips.
He told the fire chief he had been
coming from Park County, where the bodies had been found.
MITCH MORRISEY: And it happened
to be in the route from Hoosier Pass
to where we found the backpack.
When the fire chief found Alan Lee Phillips,
Phillips said he fell and hit his head.
But remember, Bobbie Jo had a keychain that had a hook on it.
And we knew the bad guy had bled.
And now you've got an eyewitness on the night
that this happened, saying this guy had a gash in his forehead.
WENDY KIPPLE: So, of course, now, I
run his criminal history, and as soon as I look at the files,
it's like, you got to be kidding me.
He was arrested in Fairplay in 1973 for assault and burglary.
Back in the '70s, he served half a year in jail.
And I was like, I have to find that case file.
I went down to the Archive Room, and there's
hundreds of big file boxes and old filing cabinets.
So I start looking through every box,
every filing cabinet drawer.
I'm not finding it.
I get down to the last filing cabinet.
And about halfway back, I see a tab.
It says, Alan Phillips.
I was like, this is the golden egg, right here.
[laughs] Man, I snatched that file out of that filing
cabinet, and I opened that file, not
knowing what I'm going to find.
And right there was his handwritten, signed confession
that says, I saw a girl hitchhiking
and gave her a ride over to Fairplay.
And he pulled off in front of an abandoned cabin
and starts beating her head with a rock.
MARK HURLBURT: Both Annette and Bobbie Jo
disappeared after hitchhiking.
They were both shot.
Alan Phillips did have a violent criminal history.
We just didn't have enough to make
that link to make this case.
WENDY KIPPLE: At this point, basically,
we need his DNA to confirm whether his DNA matches
what is on Bobbie Jo's glove.
STEPHANIE MILLER: Law enforcement doesn't want
that person to know that they are a suspect,
so what they're looking for is to collect surreptitious DNA.
WENDY KIPPLE: We found out where he lives.
So we watched his house.
STEPHANIE MILLER: They were looking for him
to put his trash on the street, so they could go through it
and look for anything where they could collect DNA.
They watched his house for weeks,
and he never put out trash.
It was very odd.
Is he concerned about putting his DNA someplace
where police can get it?
WENDY KIPPLE: We'd watch for him to leave,
and we would follow him and see if he went to a restaurant.
So February 21, he leaves.
He stops at a Sonic drive-in.
So we're all surrounding this Sonic drive-in
like a bunch of vultures.
So Alan Phillips starts pulling out,
does not deposit his trash.
How are we going to get his DNA?
So we all follow him.
He gets off at the first exit, stops at the post office.
STEPHANIE MILLER: When he walks into the post office,
police see him go in with a brown Sonic bag of trash.
And when he comes out, he no longer has the brown bag.
So they immediately go into the post office.
There's one trash can.
And right on top of the mail is a brown paper Sonic bag.
WENDY KIPPLE: 40 years and two victims
are riding on this brown Sonic bag.
- And so now they have the sample.
They compare it to the blood stain,
and it matched Mr. Phillips.
- Now we need to make an arrest.
Our plan was to do a traffic stop.
And the Clear Creek County Sheriff's Office boxed him in.
And he was arrested.
We got him, finally got him.
JEFF OBERHOLTZER: They told me
that they had arrested the man or the monster who
murdered Bobbie Jo and Annette.
And finally, the nightmare might be ending.
- My mother called me and told me--
asked me if I was sitting down.
And she said, they found Annette's killer.
It was like you were numb.
You just didn't think they would ever solve it.
Mom just couldn't believe it.
And she was happy.
She was very happy.
- I remember my mom saying, Alan Phillips?
That name has never come up before.
Who is this guy?
- They figured out where Phillips was.
And a lot of people thought, oh, this guy will be long gone.
He'll be way out of Colorado.
But he wasn't.
He was still up in the area.
He'd been a mechanic.
And he lived up there for 40 years.
JEFF OBERHOLTZER: Because I don't remember
ever meeting him at any point.
It would have been entirely possible.
He may have even sat down next to me and had a beer.
That's a horrifying thought.
- We always believed
that Mr. Phillips probably learned from that first crime.
STEPHANIE MILLER: We know that with multiple victims,
we are not usually seeing isolated incidents.
Did something else happen to someone else between 1973
and 1982 and after 1982?
We just don't know.
MITCH MORRISEY: Mr. Phillips was charged with two
counts of first degree murder.
He was charged with kidnapping.
Now you've solved it.
Now you've got to prove it.
(OFF) CHARLES MCCORMICK: In this case,
we were looking at evidence that's 40 plus years gone by.
- Some of our main witnesses were dead.
We didn't have a murder weapon.
There were issues with potential contamination of the evidence.
The bloody glove and the Kleenex were
found by people searching for evidence, not law enforcement.
And so they didn't use gloves when they picked it up.
Then they kind of put everything back in Bobbie Jo's backpack.
So there were issues with the evidence,
which was certainly something the defense can focus on.
STEPHANIE MILLER: Some of our greatest challenges
for trial are chain of custody.
CINDY FRENCH: It just takes one person to not
believe the DNA evidence.
How can a jury ignore that?
It just takes one.
[wind blowing]
- The trial started in August 31 of 2022,
40 years after the murders.
As a prosecutor, I remember the shock throughout the community.
It became probably the most personal case I've ever done.
That opening statement is the first time that you really
get into the facts of the case.
On the evening of January 6, 1982, the sun set early.
It was 4:30, and it was bitter cold.
It was minus 20.
Annette was hitchhiking go to her house in Blue River.
And that's when Alan Phillips saw her.
He picked her up.
- He took her to Sacramento Creek.
And she was able to hurriedly get out of his vehicle,
leaving one of those orange socks.
She started running, and he shot her in the back.
- After Alan Phillips shot and murdered
Annette Schnee, leaving her buried in the snow,
he went back up over Hoosier Pass to Breckenridge.
STEPHANIE MILLER: And lo and behold,
there is Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer, standing outside in 20
below weather, looking like she needed a ride.
Bobbie Jo got in the vehicle, and at some point,
the zip ties come out.
It's not a coincidence that both of these women
were small, petite women.
He's hoping that she doesn't put up a fight,
but she surprises him.
She fought her way through those zip ties.
And when she jumped out of his vehicle,
she kicked the remaining Annette Schnee
orange sock out with her.
- Bobbie Jo started running.
It is knee-deep, thigh-deep snow that she is going in,
and he shoots her.
- Phillips was taking full advantage
of the conditions, and in that snowstorm,
he knew they'd be covered with snow.
And then they wouldn't be discovered,
and that would help him get away with it
I don't think he counted on Bobbie
Jo's friends and their commitment to finding her.
He certainly didn't take into account
getting stuck in the snow once he got up to Guanella Pass.
- The guy who rescued him was thinking
he was saving somebody's life.
He didn't know he had just murdered two people that night.
MARK HURLBURT: Motive is a tough one in this case.
People want to know why.
And the best thing we could come up with a motive
is Alan Phillips was angry towards women.
And this was his way of taking it out on women.
- The alternate suspect
that the defense presented at trial
was, of course, Jeff Oberholtzer.
- It hurt.
It hurt to go through it, to be asked all these questions.
STEPHANIE MILLER: Even 40 years later, you could still
see and feel the hopelessness when
he finds out that she's dead.
- After the trial,
the jurors deliberated for just under four hours.
We're all sitting there in the courtroom, and I was so tense,
I was shaking.
The judge starts reading through.
It's like guilty, guilty, guilty, all eight counts.
I was like, hallelujah.
- It was a moment of disbelief.
Is it really?
Could this be it?
Is it over?
Is it done after all these decades?
- I'm just overjoyed when they read it
as being guilty to all counts.
KAREN RIESSEN: For all those cold cases out there,
and you think that it's never going to happen,
this is a true case of, after 40 years, it happening.
JEFF OBERHOLTZER: Don't give up searching for answers.
No matter how hard it is and how long it takes,
don't lose faith.
KAREN RIESSEN: I want Annette to be remembered
as such a kind, caring girl that didn't
ever get to live her life.
- I see her outside, where she loved
to be in, and all the days sharing a room with her
and playing games.
Just, that's my fondest memories.
And I want to say that Bobbie Jo was a hero because if she would
not have struck him and caused him to bleed,
then we would never know this to this day,
that Alan Phillips was the murderer.
So thank God she did what she did.
JEFF OBERHOLTZER: Bobbie and I
never really took a whole lot of pictures of each other.
But I always figured every time I blinked my eyes,
I'd take a snapshot.
So there's a lot of pictures in my head.
Her walking down the road with a bucket
and the fishing pole and her dog,
it was always a fond memory.
And-- excuse me.
Sitting in a rocking chair, the record player going,
and a little banded bird sitting on her finger,
sleeping with her, and happy and peaceful.
[music playing]