Colorado 1982 Double Homicide Cold Case Solved 

Colorado 1982 Double Homicide Cold Case Solved 

Nearly 40 years after the murders of two women near Breenidge, investigators make an arrest in this cold case. Tory Mason has learned it was DNA blood on a glove inside one of the victim’s backpacks that along with advances in technology that helped crack this case. Barbara Oberhalter and a Neti were seen hitchhiking near Breenidge in January of 198,000 ft up in the dark.

 A truck is stuck in the snow and a man is flashing his headlights on and off, on and off, in a pattern anyone who has ever been lost knows by instinct. Three short, three long, three short. The wind at that altitude does not simply blow. It presses, and the snow does not fall so much as fly sideways.

 And a man alone up there with his engine dead and no way down has every reason to believe this could be the night he doesn’t survive. Somewhere above him, a commercial jet is cutting through the storm on its way into Denver. And by pure chance, a sheriff from a county 200 m from where he is supposed to be happens to be looking out the window.

 He sees the lights. He tells the pilot. The pilot radios it in. And within hours, a rescue team is climbing Guanella Pass in a blizzard to save the life of a man none of them have ever met. It will make the local news. A stranded motorist saved by an alert lawman on a passenger plane. A small miracle on a terrible night.

Nobody covering the story that week has any reason to connect it to anything else. Certainly not to two young women 30 mi down the mountain who are at that very hour walking out into the same storm and never coming home. It will take Colorado authorities nearly four decades to understand what really happened on Guineella Pass that night and why the man they rescued was so desperate to be found.

 Breenidge, Colorado sits high in the Rockies, a ski town that in the winter of 1982 had fewer than 900 full-time residents. swelling many times over each season with tourists, seasonal workers, and drifters who came for one winter and never came back. It was the kind of place where a stranger blended in as easily as a neighbor, where hitchhiking wasn’t a last resort, but a normal way to get from one side of a mountain pass to the other, and where a small town police force had no way of tracking who was actually in town on any given night.

That fluid, transient population made Breenidge a wonderful place to disappear into. It also made it a very hard place to solve a crime in. Young women who hitchhiked those mountain roads in those years kept a set of informal rules to feel safer doing it. A buddy system, a phone call home the moment they arrived, an instinct about which cars to wave down and which to let pass by.

 Those instincts had kept people safe for years. On one particular night in January, they would not be enough. Barbara Joe Ober Holtzer, everyone called her Bobby Joe, had come to Colorado in 1980 with her husband Jeff, married 3 years earlier, chasing the mountain life the way a lot of young couples did in those years.

 She was 29 years old, 5’3, barely 100 lb, with strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes that people remembered. She had an 11-year-old daughter, Jackie, from an earlier relationship, and she worked as a receptionist at a real estate office in Breenidge, a 30-inut drive from the home she shared with Jeff in the smaller town of Elma.

 Bobby Joe hitchhiked often, the way plenty of people did on those roads, and she wasn’t shy about it. She knew a lot of the drivers who passed through town, and she had every reason to believe that a ride home was a small, ordinary risk. 21-year-old Annette K. Schnee had come to Colorado for the same reason most young people did, for the mountains, for the work, for a version of life that didn’t exist back home in Sous City, Iowa.

 She’d arrived in 1979, the year after high school, and settled in Frisco, 20 minutes from Breenidge. She was 5’2, barely over 100 lb, with dirty blonde hair and brown eyes. And she worked two jobs to make a life for herself in a town built almost entirely around other people’s vacations. Days at the Frisco Holiday Inn, nights behind the bar at a place called the Flip Side.

The people who knew her all said the same thing about her afterward. She was reliable. The kind of person who called in if she was going to be late. The kind of person whose absence everyone would later agree was instantly obviously wrong. On the morning of January 6th, 1982, Bobby Joe hitched into work as usual a little after 7. It was a Wednesday.

 A storm was building in the mountains, the kind that Coloradoatans respect and tourists underestimate. That evening around 6:20, she called Jeff to say she’d be a little late. She’d been promoted at work, and her friends wanted to celebrate. He should go ahead and eat without her. She told him not to worry.

 She’d catch a ride home. Earlier that same day, Annette hadn’t been feeling well. She’d left work at the Holiday Inn to see a doctor, and from there, a little before 5:00 in the afternoon, she hitchhiked into Breenidge to fill a prescription at a local pharmacy. The staff there knew her by sight.

 She’d been in before, and they would later remember something small and strange about that particular visit. Annette wasn’t alone. Beside her at the counter was another woman nobody recognized. Unckempt, dark-haired, dressed like she’d been camping for days. Someone the staff was certain hadn’t arrived with Annette, and yet somehow seemed to be with her.

 When Annette paid for her prescription, she paid for the stranger’s pack of Marlboro, too. A small passing kindness that would haunt investigators for decades because nobody could ever work out who the woman was, where she’d come from, or whether she had anything at all to do with what happened next. A police sketch of her exists to this day.

 Nobody was ever able to put a name to the face. Annette’s shift uniform for the flip side sat folded at her house that night. She never went home to get it. Bobby Joe left the bar alone just before 8:00, having assured her friends she’d find a ride. She walked to a convenience store called the Minute Mart 100 yards down the road, a spot everybody in town knew as the place to catch a ride heading south.

 A friend offered her a lift, but only 5 mi, not the whole way to Elma. And with the roads icing over, Bobby Joe didn’t want to get stuck halfway. She said she’d wait for something better. It was the last decision anyone would ever see her make. By 2 in the morning, Jeff Overholdzer was worried enough to drive into Breenidge himself, retracing the route, checking the real estate office in case Bobby Joe had taken shelter there.

 Finding nothing and no one, he called the sheriff’s office. They told him what departments told every husband in 1982. She was an adult. It hadn’t been long enough. They’d keep an eye out. He drove home through the storm, hoping she’d be there when he arrived. She wasn’t. The next call came from a stranger. A rancher near the small town of Ko had found a driver’s license lying in his field. Bobby Joe’s.

 Jeff drove out to collect it, and on the way back, not far from where the license had turned up, he saw something dark against the snow, her backpack, and beside it, a tissue, and one of her mittens, both stained with blood. He and a group of friends organized a search party on the spot.

 The snow was waste deep in places, the temperature well below zero, and it would not be an easy search. It did not take long to end in the worst possible way. Just after 3 that afternoon, January the 7th, they found Bobby Joe less than 25 ft off Highway 9, 10 miles south of the minute mark where she’d last been seen alive.

 Investigators determined she had suffered fatal gunshot wounds alongside clear evidence that she had been physically restrained. Thankfully, forensic evidence confirmed no additional physical assault had taken place. The footprints in the snow told their own story. Bobby Joe had run first toward the treeine, then turned back toward the road, fallen, and slid down an embankment before she died 300 ft from the parking lot at the summit of Hooser Pass, 11,500 ft above sea level in weather so severe that investigators photographed at the scene showed men

standing beside a speed limit sign nearly buried up to its face in drifted snow. Had her injuries not been fatal, the cold alone would have finished the job within the hour. Ballistics would later suggest a 38 or 357 caliber handgun had been used. Investigators found two objects near where she lay that made no sense together.

 A set of house keys, unmistakably hers. Jeff had made the ring himself with a hook sturdy enough to double as a weapon and a single sock, orange. It was not Bobby Joe’s. Annette Schne was reported missing the very next day, January the 8th, the same day Bobby Joe was found. For 6 months, nobody knew what had happened to her.

 Her mother, Eileen Franklin, waited through a winter and into a summer without an answer. The e specific grinding kind of not knowing that never fully leaves apparent. Checking the phone every time it rang. Scanning every crowd in town for a familiar shape. Unable to grieve because there was nothing yet to grieve and unable to hope because hope after enough months starts to feel like its own kind of cruelty.

Then on July the 3rd, 1982, a young boy fishing in Sacramento Creek, a shallow stream in a rural stretch of Park County, 13 miles from where Bobby Joe had died, found someone floating face down in the water. It was a net. Enough time had passed that investigators could tell only that she had suffered a fatal gunshot wound, but could determine little else about what had transpired.

Someone had redressed her, or tried to. Her shirt was on inside out and on her foot when the medical examiner looked was one sock. Orange. It matched exactly. The sock investigators had found near where Bobby Joe lay months earlier and the sock now on Annette’s foot were as far as anyone could tell a pair.

 Detectives worked out a theory that would hold for the next four decades. Whoever was responsible for Annette’s death first had somehow carried one of her socks away from that scene, and it had ended up, however carelessly, at the site where Bobby Joe died hours later. Two deaths, two separate crime scenes 13 mi apart, tied together by a single piece of cheap orange cotton.

 It was such a small, almost embarrassing detail to be the lynch pin of a double homicide that the press ran with it immediately. The Orange Sock Murders. The name stuck for decades, long after most people had forgotten either woman’s actual name. In September of that year, hikers found Annette’s backpack near the Hooser Pass Summit Lot close to where Bobby Joe had died with her other orange sock tucked inside a boot and something else that investigators couldn’t explain, a small passport-sized photograph of a man nobody recognized. He had a buzzcut, a

plain background, and what looked like a swollen, bruised eye. It didn’t look quite like a mug shot, though some thought it might be one. Others guessed military. No one ever identified him, and the photograph sat in an evidence file for the better part of 40 years. A face with no name attached to a case with no suspect.

 There was, however, a name investigators did have, and it belonged to the last person any of them wanted it to. Tucked inside Annette’s wallet was a business card for an appliance repair shop, and the name printed on it was Jeff Oberholtzer, Bobby Joe’s husband. Jeff explained it simply enough. He’d once picked up a hitchhiking stranger months earlier, given her a ride, and handed her his card the way any chatty small business owner in a town of 900 people might, hoping for future work.

 He hadn’t known her name. He hadn’t thought about it since. But to investigators working two deaths from the same night with almost no other leads, a dead woman’s husband turning up in a second victim’s belongings was not something they could set aside. Jeff was questioned. He took a polygraph. He passed. He took a second one.

 Administered by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. He passed that one, too. It didn’t matter. In a town that size, suspicion doesn’t need proof to spread. And Jeff Oberholtzer spent the better part of the next two decades living under a cloud that never fully lifted. His business, his friendships, his ability to walk into a diner without feeling every eye in the room.

 All of it shaped by a rumor that started with a business card he couldn’t remember handing out. The timeline, when detectives actually laid it out, barely worked. For Jeff to have been responsible for both outcomes, he would have had to locate Annette sometime around 4:30 in the afternoon, drive her south, carry out the act, leave her near the creek, drive roughly 10 minutes back home, and be outside shoveling his own driveway, appearing completely composed by the time a friend arrived to visit just before 7 that evening. All before

receiving Bobby Joe’s phone call at 6:20, confirming he was home, sounding like himself. It left him, by the most generous accounting, less than an hour to abduct, assault, and dispose of every trace of what had happened without leaving evidence on his person in his car or in his home. That friend, a man named Joe Urban, told police he’d spent the evening with Jeff watching television and running an errand to a gas station, an alibi that should have settled the matter quickly.

 except Urban left the state shortly afterward and investigators didn’t manage to track him down and confirm his account until 1990, nearly 9 years after the two women died. Even then, some in the sheriff’s office weren’t fully satisfied, and a theory persisted for a while that Jeff and his friend had somehow acted together, a theory that never produced a shred of physical evidence to support it.

 It took DNA to finally lift the suspicion, and even then it took 20 years. In 2002, testing on the bloodstained tissue found near Bobby Joe’s backpack. Evidence investigators had assumed for two decades belonged to her came back male. It was not Jeff’s. Somewhere in that snowbank on the worst night of her life, Bobby Joe Ober Holtzer had fought back hard enough to draw blood from the man responsible, and he had left that tissue behind without knowing it would one day identify him.

 Whatever else was true, the man on that tissue was not her husband. It was the first real physical evidence anyone had of the man they were actually looking for, and it would sit in a lab waiting for technology to catch up to it for another 19 years. a name written in blood that no one alive yet had the tools to read. With Jeff cleared, in fact, if not always in the town’s memory, investigators turned elsewhere, and elsewhere gave them plenty of reasons for hope, none of which panned out.

 Thomas Edward Luther was already in custody by 1982, awaiting trial for a severe physical assault on a woman he’d picked up hitchhiking in the same stretch of mountains just 6 weeks after Bobby Joe and Annette disappeared. It was hard on paper to imagine a more obvious fit. Inmates who’d served time near him told police independently and repeatedly over a period of years that Luther had bragged about the Orange Sock case, specifically by name.

One former cellmate, a man named Dylan Curtis, who had spent about 6 weeks locked up with Luther, walked into the Summit County Sheriff’s Office in April of 1982, months after the crimes, to report what he’d heard. That Luther had described an abandoned mineshaft near Frisco, a good place to hide someone, one he said he’d found while out riding horses with his girlfriend, a woman named Sue Potter.

Investigators later showed Potter’s photograph to the pharmacy staff who remembered the unidentified dark-haired woman with a net. They couldn’t confirm it. They couldn’t rule it out either. For reasons nobody has ever fully explained, Curtis wasn’t formally interviewed about what he knew until more than a decade later.

 Luther failed two separate polygraph tests. For years, on the strength of nothing but jailhouse talk and a strange coincidence, he looked like the answer. When his DNA was finally compared to the male profile recovered from Bobby Joe’s belongings, it did not match. He is currently serving a 48-year sentence for a different murder, and he was never charged in this one.

 A second name surfaced almost by coincidence. Tracy Petrachelli had taken his fiance’s life in Seattle in October of 1981, then fled across state lines on a spree of robberies and violence that records would later show brought him through Colorado and specifically to the Frisco Holiday Inn, where Annette Schne worked the front desk.

 Petrachelli had a habit, investigators learned, of talking men into becoming his accompllices and then turning on them, too. One such accomplice tied to an attempted robbery in Thornton, Colorado that left a car salesman dead was never identified. And for a while, detectives wondered whether that unnamed, presumably deceased man might account for the blood they couldn’t otherwise place.

 Petra Kelly’s own DNA didn’t match. He is serving time for three other deaths in a separate case, a death sentence for those crimes later commuted on appeal while his conviction stood. The theory about his missing accomplice, like so much else in this file, was never proven and never entirely ruled out.

 Other leads simply evaporated the way cold case leads do. A tip about two brothers renting a house near Alma, driving a gray van, working for a local plumbing company. Pursued then dropped. The men never publicly identified as suspects, only as people investigators wanted to talk to. a partial license plate number publicized in 2008 in hopes that somebody somewhere would recognize it. Nobody ever did.

In 1991, the show Unsolved Mysteries sent a crew to film at Sacramento Creek, a decade almost to the hour since Annette had last been seen, interviewing the detectives who’d carried the file that long and introducing the case to a national audience for the first time. It generated tips. It generated no arrests.

In 2006, a pair of psychics working separately on a television program. Each gave detectives the same first name for a suspect who was already unbeknownst to the public quietly on their radar. An unsettling coincidence that nonetheless led nowhere anyone could act on. Year after year, task force after task force, the file grew heavier and the trail grew colder, and the two women at the center of it slipped further from public memory, even as their families never once let go.

 One man in particular never let go. Charlie McCormack, a retired Denver homicide detective, had taken up Annette’s case privately in 1989, hired by her family for a token fee of $1 a year. Not because he needed the money, but because the family needed to know somebody was still working. And because a dollar a year is what a family can afford to pay when they’ve already spent seven years grieving with no answers at all.

 McCormack watched over the following three decades as DNA technology evolved from something that could barely narrow a blood type down to a broad category to something that could reconstruct an entire family tree from a single stain the size of a fingernail. He spent years warning publicly about the testing backlogs that left cold cases like this one waiting behind hundreds of thousands of untested forensic assault kits and unresolved samples nationwide.

 A bottleneck, he argued, of money and manpower rather than science since even someone already sitting in prison for something else could go unmatched for decades if nobody had ever bothered to enter his DNA into the system in the first place. He believed long before most people had reason to that the answer to Annette and Bobby Joe’s deaths was already sitting in a lab somewhere waiting.

 He just needed someone to run it the right way. And by the summer of 2020, even he had begun to wonder if he’d lived to see it happen. In 2020, he got his chance. McCormack connected with a Denver forensic genealogy firm called United Data Connect, founded by a former Denver district attorney and working with funding help from Metro Denver Crimestoppers.

 A genealogologist began the slow, painstaking work of building family trees from the male DNA profile recovered from Bobby Joe’s Tissue and Glove nearly two decades earlier. It is not fast work and it is not glamorous work. It means uploading a genetic profile to public genealogy databases, the same ones ordinary people use to find long-lost cousins, and then following every branch of every resulting family tree backward and forward through birth records, marriage records, obituaries, and address histories, looking for the one person

whose age, location, and history could put him on a stretch of Highway 9 on a January night in 1982. It took roughly a year. The trees built branch by branch eventually narrowed to two brothers, only one of whom had ever lived in Colorado. His name was Alan Lee Phillips. He was 70 years old in the winter of 2021, a mechanic, a minor in his younger years, a father of three, living quietly in the mountain town of Duont.

 Less than an hour’s drive from Breenidge in the same state where it had all happened, where he had lived uninterrupted for the entire span investigators spent hunting for him. On February the 24th, 2021, he was pulled over in a routine traffic stop in Clear Creek County and arrested on the spot, handcuffed at the side of the road and told he was being taken into custody on suspicion of murder in the deaths of two women whose names he had not heard spoken by police in decades.

 He was charged with two counts each of murder, kidnapping, and assault with a deadly weapon. Records from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation showed he had a 1973 arrest for burglary and assault, though the details had long since been purged from the file. What hadn’t been purged was the memory of the Park County Sheriff’s Office, who would later describe publicly, an incident from that same year in which Philillips picked up a female hitchhiker outside Breenidge, drove her to a remote cabin, and severely harmed her, stopping, according

to that account, only after she begged him, telling him she had a baby daughter at home. He is said to have cleaned her up afterward and dropped her in the town of Fairplay. She reported it. He confessed. It happened 9 years before Annette Schne and Bobby Joe Oberholtzer ever accepted a ride from a stranger on a snowy road.

 A documented act of violence against a hitchhiker on the very same stretch of highway, sitting in a file for decades, waiting for anyone to connect it to what came later. Detectives also could not help but notice something else once they had a name and a face to work with. The small damaged photograph found in Annette’s backpack all those years earlier, the unidentified man with the buzzcut and the swollen eye bore, to some who looked at it, an unsettling resemblance to an old picture of Phillips.

 Nobody in law enforcement ever confirmed it publicly. The question of who that man was and why his photograph ended up in a dead woman’s belongings remains even now unanswered. Further testing on the orange socks themselves, the small, absurd detail that had defined this case since 1982, delivered the kind of scientific precision nobody in that decade could have imagined.

Bobby Joe’s DNA was recovered from the outside of the sock found near where she lay. Annette’s skin cells were recovered from the inside. One sock, two victims. a single piece of cotton that had traveled with the man responsible from one crime scene to the next and back out into the world for the better part of 40 years before it told anyone the truth.

And there was one more piece, one the investigators had been sitting on since the very night it happened without knowing what it meant. On January the 6th, 1982, the same night, the very same storm, a man got his truck stuck at the top of Guanella Pass and began flashing his headlights, three short and three long, until a sheriff from a neighboring county happened to glance out the window of a passing commercial flight and saw it.

 Rescuers found him with a fresh injury on his face. He said he’d fallen in the snow. Decades later, prosecutors would argue that the truth was simpler and far darker. That the man rescued off Guinea Pass that night had just come from ending two women’s lives, one of whom had fought hard enough with a set of house keys sharp enough to double as a weapon to leave a mark on the face of the man responsible.

 His name, of course, was Alan Lee Phillips. He had asked strangers to save his life on the same night he had ended two others. And for almost 40 years afterward, nobody had thought to ask why. The trial began in late August of 2022 in the Park County Courthouse in Fairplay, not far from where both women had been found. Many of the witnesses called to the stand were elderly now, testifying about events nearly four decades old.

 And the prosecution, led by deputy district attorneys Mark Hurbert and Stephanie Miller, had to walk jurors carefully through evidence that had aged alongside the case itself, authenticating decades old chain of custody records, refreshing faded memories, explaining a science that had not even existed when the crimes were committed.

 Detective Sergeant Wendy Kipple explained patiently how genetic genealogy had turned a stubborn decades old blood stain into a name, walking the jury through a process most of them had only ever heard of in relation to other more famous cases. A retired Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent Jim Hartkey described the crime scenes in detail that drew audible reactions from the gallery.

 The zip tie on Bobby Joe’s wrist. the orange sock at Hooser Pass and the moment at Annette’s autopsy back in 1982 when he’d first seen its match on her foot and understood for the first time that the two cases were one. A local fire chief, Dave Mononttoya, described pulling Alan Phillips off Guanella Pass that same blizzard night and the fresh wound on his face he couldn’t explain at the time.

Prosecutors argued the jury didn’t need to guess where that wound had come from. Bobby Joe’s own brass key ring, the one her husband had made for her, sat in an evidence bag in the courtroom, a household object that had on one particular night become a weapon in the hands of a woman fighting for her life. The defense pushed back hard on the science, questioning whether four decades of storage and handling could have compromised the DNA, whether the genealogy method itself, still new enough to be misunderstood by many

jurors, could be trusted at all. Philillips’s attorneys called it circumstantial, built on inference stacked on inference, and pointed again at Jeff Oberholtzer, the husband who had spent 20 years living under suspicion for exactly this kind of accusation. It didn’t hold. The DNA evidence was too specific, too internally consistent.

 the tissue, the glove, and the sock itself, all carrying the same story, and jurors did not need an expert to explain what it meant that one physical object had traveled between both crime scenes in the hands of one person. Alan Phillips did not take the stand in his own defense. He sat through most of the 2 and 1/2 week trial in near silence, at times shaking his head as witnesses described what had been done to two women he had never been formally connected to across four decades of freedom.

By the time closing arguments came in midepptember, the prosecution’s message was simple. For 40 years, these families have waited to know who killed their daughters, their sister, their mother. The evidence proves it was this man. The defense countered that the state had built what they called a house of cards out of new science laid over old imperfect evidence and urged the jury not to convict on that foundation.

 The jury did not need long. On September the 15th, 2022, after roughly 5 hours of deliberation, they returned guilty verdicts on all eight counts, including first-degree murder, against 71-year-old Alan Lee Phillips. In the gallery, family members who had waited most of their lives for that word, let out, in the words of one relative, a breath they’d been holding for decades.

Annette’s sister, Karen, said afterward that the way investigators had finally caught him through science nobody could have imagined in 1982 still astonished her. Bobby Joe’s sister, Lorie Merllo, described the weight for the verdict itself as sitting on pins and needles. And when the word guilty was finally read into the record, she said simply that she had been cheated out of 40 years without her sister.

 We’d still be best friends today, she said, if Bobby Joe were still here. At sentencing that November, the courtroom heard from the people the case had taken the most from. Annette’s sister, Cindy French, had been 11 years old the winter her older sister disappeared. She told the judge she still remembered her mother breaking down in tears during those six unbearable months of not knowing whether Annette was alive or dead.

 Annette had wanted to be a flight attendant. Cindy said she never got the chance to build the life she’d planned to marry, to have children of her own. So Cindy named her own eldest daughter Annette in her sister’s honor and stood in that courtroom 40 years later to tell the man responsible that while her sister’s life had been cut short at 21, he had been free for four decades to marry and raise children of his own.

 Bobby Joe’s daughter, Jackie Vukos Walker, only a little older than Cindy French had been, had her own statement read into the record by Deputy District Attorney Stephanie Miller, describing a childhood defined by sadness and anxiety she couldn’t explain to other children, of crying so many nights into a horse embroidered pillow that the fabric never fully dried out, of avoiding the subject of her mother’s death entirely, because, in her own words, she felt like she made everyone around her sad just by bringing it up. Even now, she said, seeing

violent crime cases mentioned on television was enough to bring the emotion back to the surface in public or in private without warning. Alan Phillips did not speak. His daughter, Andrea Shelton, did telling the court that she believed in her father’s goodness, that he had taught her and her siblings honesty growing up, and asking for a measure of grace that the room, by every account, did not extend to him.

Judge Steven Broom sentenced Philillips to two consecutive life terms without parole. A symbolic decision ensuring the law recognized each woman’s death as its own, complete loss, not folded into the other. I hope the healing starts today, the judge told the families, and God be with you. He did not serve long.

On February the 27th, 2023, barely 4 months into his sentence, Alan Lee Phillips died at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado. Investigators said publicly that they did not suspect foul play. An official cause of death was never widely released. Whatever the explanation, the case that had taken almost four decades to solve closed for good within months of its verdict, without an appeal, without further testimony, without Philillips ever offering the families a word of explanation for what he’d done.

Some relatives said afterward they felt cheated of the chance to watch him serve out the sentence he’d been given, to wake up every morning of the rest of his life inside the consequence of what he’d done. Others said his death simply closed the last chapter, sparing everyone years of appeals and hearings they no longer had the strength to sit through.

 Either way, he never spoke another word about January the 6th, 1982 to anyone who would ever repeat it publicly. Jeff Oberholtzer, who had carried the weight of the town’s suspicion for the better part of two decades over nothing more than a business card and a stranger’s memory, released a statement after the arrest thanking everyone who had never given up the search for the truth on his wife’s behalf.

Charlie McCormack, the detective who took Annette’s case for a dollar a year and refused to let it go for over three decades, lived to see the arrest, the trial, and the conviction he had spent half his career chasing. 80 years old by the time it was finally over, still telling reporters that you simply cannot walk away from a case like this one.

 Not once it has gotten inside you. Somewhere in an evidence room in Colorado, a small ordinary orange sock is still cataloged as evidence in a case that is now finally closed. For most of two lifetimes, it was the only thing connecting two women who never knew each other, whose lives ended hours apart at the hands of a man who drove away from both of them and straight into a blizzard so severe it nearly cost him his own life, too.

That same night, strangers moved heaven and a snowbound mountain passed to save his life. A sheriff glancing out an airplane window at exactly the right moment. A rescue crew willing to climb into a white out for someone they had never met. Without knowing what he had just done, or that somewhere below him in the snow, Bobby Joe Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee were waiting for the same kind of mercy that never came.

 He got his rescue that night. It took the rest of both their famil family’s lives, but in the end, so did they.