In January 1982, a woman was found shot to death near the summit of Hooser Pass in Colorado.
Beside her body in the snow, investigators found something that didn’t belong to her.
A single bright orange sock.
6 months later and 20 m south, a young boy fishing with his father in a mountain creek found a second body.
A woman face down, fully clothed, preserved by the cold water.
On her left foot was a single bright orange sock.
The match to the one found on Hooser Pass in January.
Two women, strangers to each other, killed on the same night by the same man.
And the only physical link [music] between them was a pair of orange socks that a mother in Iowa had mailed to her daughter as a Christmas present six weeks earlier.
For 39 years, investigators knew those socks connected the murders.
They knew a single killer was responsible for both.
They had his blood on a victim’s glove left behind because she fought for her life.
And they had a rescue report showing a man with fresh facial wounds pulled from a snow drift just hours after the killings on a mountain pass he had no reason to be on.
They had everything.
They just didn’t have a name.
This is the story of Bobby Joe Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee and the four decades it took to finally get them justice.
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Now, to understand how that night unfolded, we need to go back to Breenidge, Colorado in the winter of 1982.
It was a different world up there.
Breenidge [music] sat at 9600 ft in the Colorado Rockies, a former gold mining camp that had reinvented itself as a ski town.
In 1982, [music] it had just been named Colorado’s number one ski destination for the first time.
Tens of thousands of tourists flooded in every winter to hit the slopes.
But the permanent population was barely 1,200 people.
A tight-knit community [music] built around the ski industry and the malibdinum mines that still operated deep in the surrounding mountains.
The Climax Mine, the Henderson mine.
A good chunk of the local workforce drove winding narrow passes [music] every day just to get to work underground.
The town itself was small enough that you recognized faces at the gas station, at the post office, at the one or two bars where everyone ended up on Friday nights.
People looked out for each other.
Doors were left unlocked.
And when it came to getting from one mountain town to another in the dead of winter, everybody did the same thing.
Hitchhiking wasn’t risky behavior in Breenidge.
[music] It was just transportation.
The roads were narrow and icy.
The distances between towns could stretch 10 or 15 miles along winding mountain highways, and not everyone had a car that could handle those conditions.
You stuck your thumb out on the side of the road.
Somebody you half recognized from the grocery store [music] or the ski lodge pulled over and you were home in 20 minutes.
That was the arrangement.
Nobody questioned it.
[music] The local bartenders did it.
The hotel staff did it.
The young women who worked the restaurants and shops in town did it every single day.
Annette K.
Schne was 21 years old and had come to Colorado from Sous City, Iowa, chasing something bigger than the life she’d left behind.
She was the kind of person who wanted to see the world, not just read about it.
She graduated from East High School [music] in 1978, attended a modeling program at Patricia Stevens College in Omaha, and then headed west to the mountains [music] sometime around 1979 or 1980.
Colorado was the first step.
She had her sights set on becoming a flight attendant, a career that would take her everywhere.
[music] She settled in Blue River, a tiny community just south of Breenidge, and worked two jobs to make ends meet.
By day, she was a housekeeper at the Holiday Inn in Frisco, about 10 mi north of Breenidge.
By night, she waited tables [music] and mixed drinks at the Flipside Bar in town.
The people who knew her described her as reliable, upbeat, and well-liked.
She showed up on time.
She covered shifts for co-workers who needed the help.
She was close with her roommates and the other young women working the service industry in a ski town where tips were good in season and thin the rest of the year.
She had siblings back in Iowa, sisters Cindy and Karen, a brother named [music] Russell.
She called home regularly.
She was supposed to fly back to Sous City [music] in April for her mother Eileen’s birthday.
She was already looking forward to it.
A few weeks before that January night, Eileen had mailed Annette a Christmas present.
Inside the package was a pair of bright orange booty [music] socks.
Annette wore them.
Barbara Oberholtzer, who went by Bobby Joe, was 29 years old and had already packed more living into those years than you’d expect.
She grew up in Rine, Wisconsin and married Jeff Oberholtzer on the 1st of July in 1977.
Both of them were from Rasine.
They dated for a few years before the wedding and from the start they shared a restless [music] adventurous streak.
They were self-described hippies who wanted out of the Midwest and into the mountains.
Colorado was the dream.
They packed up and headed west.
They landed in Alma, a tiny former mining town about 15 mi south of Breenidge, sitting at over 10,000 ft.
It’s the kind of place where the winters are long, the air is thin, and the nearest grocery store is a real drive.
Jeff started an appliance repair business called Alpine Appliance Repair, servicing the homes and lodges scattered [music] across the high country.
Bobby Joe worked as a receptionist at a real estate company in Breenidge.
The commute meant crossing Hooser Pass every day, and she hitchhiked to [music] and from works almost without exception.
Jeff worried about it.
He worried enough that he handmade her a self-defense weapon, a heavy brass clip with a brass ring attached, designed to be used as a striking tool if she ever needed it.
He put it on her key ring.
Bobby Joe had a young daughter named Jackie from a previous [music] relationship.
She and Jeff had recently decided they wanted to try for children together.
Her sister Lorie Merllo would later say that being Bobby Joe’s little sister was one of the best things that ever happened to her.
On January 6th, 1982, Bobby Joe was promoted to office manager.
These two women lived within 15 miles of each other.
They traveled the same highway.
They relied on the local custom to get home, and they had never met.
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Now, January 6, 1982, the night everything changed.
A blizzard had settled over Summit County.
The temperature dropped to roughly 20° below zero.
Wind whipped across the open stretches of Highway 9.
Visibility collapsed to almost nothing and the snow pack on the passes thickened by the hour.
The kind of cold where exposed skin burns in minutes.
Where car engines won’t turn over.
Where the mountain passes between towns become tunnels of white that swallow headlights whole.
On a normal January evening, the drive from Breen Ridge South over Hooser Pass to Alma takes maybe 30 minutes.
On a night like this, with ice on the road and snow blowing sideways, it could take an hour or you might not make it at all.
Annette left her housekeeping shift at the Frisco Holiday Inn around 4:15 in the afternoon.
She wasn’t feeling well.
She saw a doctor in Frisco, got a ride back to Breenidge, and around 4:45 was spotted at a pharmacy called The Drugstore, [music] filling a prescription.
While she was there, she was seen talking with an unidentified woman, white, about 5’4, slender build, looked as though she’d been camping, a Marlboro smoker.
Annette reminded her to buy cigarettes.
That woman was never identified.
Investigators have wanted to speak with her for over 40 years.
By around 5:00, Annette was standing on the south side of Breenidge, thumb out, trying to hitch a ride home to Blue River.
She was scheduled to work the Flip Sidebar at 8 that evening.
Her bartending uniform was still at her house.
She needed to get home, change, and get back.
She never arrived.
She never called in.
Nearly 3 hours later and less than a mile away, Bobby Joe Oberholtzer stepped out of the village pub in Breen Ridg’s Bell Tower Mall.
She’d stayed late at work celebrating her promotion, had drinks with friends, at sump, and called Jeff around 6:20 to let him know she’d hitch a ride home.
She left the pub around 7:30.
By 7:50, she was seen hitchhiking southbound near the Minute Mart, about a 100 yard from where she’d been drinking.
Almost the exact [music] same stretch of road where Annette had stood 3 hours earlier.
The same highway, the same direction, the same blizzard.
Back in Alma, Jeff was [snorts] at home.
A friend had come by for the evening, and the two of them hung out until around 10:00.
After the friend left, Jeff fell asleep.
He wasn’t worried yet.
Bobby Joe had called to say she was having drinks.
She’d done this before.
She’d find a ride the way she always did and be home before too long.
He woke up close to midnight.
Her side of the bed was empty.
The house was quiet.
He checked the clock and felt the first twist of unease.
By 1:00 in the morning, he was pacing.
By 2, he was calling friends.
By three, he couldn’t stand it anymore.
He got in his car, drove to Breenidge through the blizzard, walked into the police station, and told them his wife was missing.
They told him not enough time had passed to file a missing person report.
Go home.
She’ll show up.
Two women had vanished from the same road, heading the same direction into the same storm, roughly 3 hours apart, and nobody knew it yet.
The next morning, January 7th, the phone rang at the Oberholtzer House in Elma.
A rancher at the Hamilton Ranch along US 285, roughly 30 miles from Breen Ridge in the direction of Denver, told Jeff that he’d found Bobby Joe’s driver’s license and the contents of her wallet scattered across his property.
Scattered as if someone [music] had thrown them from a moving vehicle at speed, letting the wind carry them across across the frozen ground.
Jeff drove out immediately.
On the way about 30 feet off the highway in an open field, he spotted something that made his stomach drop.
Her blue backpack.
The one she carried to work every day.
Beside it lay a blood stained wool glove and a handful of bloody tissues.
This wasn’t a woman who had gotten lost in the storm or fallen on the ice.
Something violent had happened.
Jeff called friends.
They organized a search party.
Bobby Joe’s daily commute took her south on Highway 9 over Hooser Pass, the 11,500 ft crossing between Breen Ridge and Elma.
If something had happened on that road, the pass was the most remote and isolated stretch.
They drove to the summit.
Around 3:00 in the afternoon, searching on cross-country skis through deep snow and bitter cold, they found her.
Bobby Joe’s body lay about 20 ft off the southbound lane of Highway 9 down a snow embankment roughly 300 ft south of the Summit parking lot.
The scene told the story of what had happened.
Footprints in the deep snow showed that she had gotten out of a vehicle in the parking lot, run downhill, been confronted again, stumbled over the embankment toward a line of trees, reversed direction, and then collapsed and slid down the snow.
On one of her wrists were a pair of 18in [music] plastic zip ties.
Her killer had tried to bind her hands.
He failed.
She fought.
Jeff’s brass self-defense weapon, the one he’d handmade and put on her key ring, was found in the parking lot.
It had traces of blood on it, not just hers.
The autopsy confirmed that Bobby Joe had been shot twice in the chest at close range, 1 to 2 ft away.
She bled to death on the snow.
The weapon was a 38 or 357 caliber handgun firing Remington Peters copper jacketed hollowpoint bullets.
It was never recovered.
And then there was the detail that didn’t fit.
Lying in the Summit [music] parking lot near where Bobby Joe’s body was found was a single bright [music] orange booty sock.
It did not belong to her.
Nobody knew whose it was.
That sock sat in an evidence bag.
And for 6 months, nobody could explain what it was doing there.
Meanwhile, Annette Schnee was still missing.
She hadn’t shown up for her shift at the flip side.
She hadn’t gone home to change into her bartending [music] uniform.
Her roommates in Blue River reported her missing when she didn’t come home that night.
Her family in Sous City waited for a phone call that never came.
The police searched.
They found nothing.
No body, no clothing, no belongings, no trail.
The snow was so deep in the mountains around Breenidge that it could have buried anything or anyone.
Annette’s mother, Eileene, contacted investigators in Colorado repeatedly, asking for updates.
There were none to give.
January turned to February.
February to March.
The ski season wound down.
Spring came and the snow began to melt and still there was no sign of Annette Schneay.
Her birthday passed in January.
Her mother’s birthday came and [music] went in April.
The visit Annette had been planning never happened.
6 months of silence.
Then on the 3rd of July 1982, a boy fishing with his father in Sacramento Creek, a remote and isolated valley about 20 mi south of Breenidge and roughly 10 mi south of the Hooser Pass summit, saw something in the water.
A body.
A woman face down, fully clothed, preserved by the cold mountain air and creek water.
It was a net.
Her clothing was in disarray.
Her shoes were on the wrong feet.
Her jean zipper was broken.
She had been shot once in the back, a through and through wound at a downward angle of about 30° with the same type of ammunition used to kill Bobby Joe.
Remington Peter’s copper jacketed hollow point fired from a 38 or 357 handgun.
No bullet was recovered.
She had died at that location.
Retired CBI agent Jim Hartkey attended the autopsy.
And the second he looked at Annette’s left foot, the entire case shifted.
On her left foot was a single bright orange booty sock.
Hardkeyy’s mind went straight to the evidence locker.
The orange sock from Who’s Your Pass.
The one found near Bobby Joe’s body 6 months earlier.
The one that didn’t belong to her.
The socks were a match.
They were the Christmas present Annette’s mother had mailed her from Iowa.
The investigator’s theory crystallized.
The killer had picked up Annette first sometime after 5:00.
During the assault, she lost one of her orange socks in his vehicle.
Hours later, he picked up Bobby Joe.
When Bobby Joe fought and escaped from the truck at the Hooser Pass Summit, that loose sock came with her, kicked or dragged out onto the frozen ground.
One pair of socks, two crime scenes, one killer.
Two months later, in September 1982, Annette’s [music] backpack was found near the Hooser Pass Summit.
Inside it was a business card for Alpine Appliance Repair, Jeff Oberh Holtzer’s company.
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That business card turned Jeff Oberholtzer’s life into a nightmare.
A nightmare that would last for decades.
From the very first day after Bobby Joe’s body was found, Jeff had been the number one suspect.
CBI agent Jim Hardkey told him so directly to his face.
In homicide investigations, especially when the victim is a married woman, the husband is always the first person investigators look at.
Statistics support it.
And Jeff fit the profile on paper in ways that were hard to ignore.
He knew the mountain roads better than almost anyone.
He lived in Alma, just on the other side of Hooser Pass, barely 15 miles from where Bobby Joe’s body was found.
He was the last known person she spoke to before she disappeared.
He was the one who reported her missing.
And now with Annette’s body recovered [music] from a creek just a few miles from his home, his business card had turned up on the body of the second victim.
Two dead women, and both of them had a connection to Jeff Oberholtzer.
Jeff explained it easily enough.
He’d given Annette a ride while she was hitchhiking back in November of 1981.
He handed out business cards to everyone he met.
Alpine [music] Appliance Repair.
It’s what he did.
There was nothing unusual about it.
But then came the prediction.
During one of his interviews with investigators, Jeff told police that he believed Annette’s body would be found about 4 miles from his house around the 4th of July.
She was found on July 3rd, roughly 6 to 7 mi from his home.
For investigators, that accuracy didn’t bring relief.
It brought suspicion.
How could [music] a grieving husband predict the location and timing of a body recovery with that kind of precision?
Jeff took two polygraph tests, one administered by Summit County and one by CBI.
He passed both.
It didn’t matter.
The shadow stayed.
The friend who had visited Jeff’s home on the night of January 6th, the person who could confirm Jeff was in Elma while Bobby Joe was being killed on Hooser Pass, could not be located.
Investigators searched for that alibi witness for 8 years.
They didn’t find him until December 1990.
And when they did, his recollection of the timeline didn’t quite match Jeff’s.
It wasn’t enough to charge Jeff.
It wasn’t enough to clear him either.
He spent [music] the next four decades under a cloud that never fully lifted.
His step-daughter Jackie grew up in the shadow of her mother’s murder and her stepfather’s unresolved [music] suspicion.
The community whispered, “The case file stayed open with Jeff’s name at the top.
I mean, think about that for a second.
The man’s wife was murdered.
He was the one who found her belongings, organized the search, and identified her body.
And for 40 years, a significant number of the people working this case believed he did it.
While Jeff waited and wondered if anyone would ever believe him, the investigation churned through suspect [music] after suspect.
About 6 weeks after the murders, a man named Thomas Edward Luther was arrested near Frisco for a violent attack on a 21-year-old woman.
Luther had beaten her with a hammer.
While sitting in jail, he bragged to other inmates that he had killed two women in Summit County.
Investigators jumped on it.
Luther failed multiple polygraph tests and then recanted everything.
[music] DNA would later exclude him entirely.
Luther went on to murder a woman named Sher Elder in 1993 and is currently serving a life sentence.
Then there was Tracy Petrachelli.
He had been staying at the Frisco Holiday Inn, the same hotel where Annette worked.
Ballistics testing on his firearms was inconclusive.
DNA eventually cleared him, too.
Petrochelli is on death row in Nevada for an unrelated murder.
Henry Lee Lucas, the serial confessor who falsely claimed credit for hundreds of killings across the country, told investigators he had murdered the two women near Breenidge.
He had not.
He was lying as he did with virtually every case he touched.
Ex-boyfriends of Annette were investigated and eliminated.
A person of interest who died shortly after the murders was cleared through DNA obtained from relatives living in Great Britain.
[music] And the woman at the pharmacy, the unidentified Marlboroough smoker, who spoke with Annette at the drugstore on the afternoon she disappeared, was never found.
To this day, investigators still want to talk to her.
Each lead [music] faded.
Each suspect fell away.
The case grew colder with every passing year.
And the structure of the investigation itself wasn’t helping.
The crimes had occurred across multiple jurisdictions.
Annette was last seen in Breenidge, [music] which is in Summit County.
Bobby Joe’s body was found on Hooser Pass, which sits on the border between Summit County and Park [music] County.
Annette’s body was recovered in Sacramento Creek, deep in Park County.
The investigations involved the Breen Ridge Police [music] Department, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, the Parki, the Park County Sheriff’s Office, and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Four agencies, each with their own chain of command, their own filing systems, their own priorities.
Communication between them was fractured from the beginning.
Paperwork was lost in transfers.
Evidence moved between offices and storage facilities.
When one detective retired, the institutional knowledge went with them unless someone else picked it up.
In a rural jurisdiction with limited resources, a case with no active leads doesn’t stay on the front burner.
It gets pushed aside by newer cases, fresher evidence, more pressing demands.
There was one person who refused to let it die.
Charlie McCormack was a retired Denver homicide detective [music] who had moved to Breenidge in 1976, years before the murders.
He knew the community.
He knew the mountains.
And he knew what a cold case looked like when the system was getting ready to shove it.
In 1989, [music] Annette Schne family hired him as a private investigator.
His fee was $1 a year, a symbolic amount that meant [music] everything.
It meant someone was still working the case when the official channels had gone quiet.
McCormack [music] took the case and never put it down.
Over the next three decades, his files on the Oberholtzer and Schnee murders grew from two binders to 39.
He tracked leads [music] that nobody else was following.
He reined witnesses whose memories had faded, but occasionally produced new fragments.
He pushed for new forensic testing whenever [music] technology advanced, lobbying agencies to re-examine evidence with tools that hadn’t existed when the murders occurred.
He built relationships with every new detective who rotated through the case, making sure the institutional knowledge didn’t die when officers retired or transferred.
Eventually, he became a special deputy with the Park County Sheriff’s Office, giving him official access to the evidence and the authority to participate in [music] the investigation directly.
30 years, $1 a year, 39 binders of notes, reports, [music] leads, and dead ends.
That’s what kept the case breathing when the system was ready to let it go.
The breakthrough came from the blood on Bobby Joe’s glove.
In 1988, 6 years after the murders, the CBI crime lab tested the bloodstained wool glove found near Bobby Joe’s backpack on Highway 285.
The results revealed a mixture.
Bobby Joe’s blood and the blood of an unknown male.
This was the first hard evidence that she had wounded her attacker during the struggle at Hooser Pass.
In 1995, further DNA testing on the glove and the bloody tissues [music] confirmed that the unknown blood belonged to a single male contributor and that male was not Jeff Oberholtzer.
After 13 years of suspicion, Jeff was finally scientifically cleared.
The blood on the glove did not match him.
The blood on the tissue did not match him.
He hadn’t killed his wife.
Think about what those 13 years cost him.
The sideways glances in town, the interviews with investigators who believed he was guilty, the knowledge that his stepdaughter was growing up in a house that half the community suspected harbored a murderer.
Jeff had lost his wife and [music] then lost his reputation.
And it took DNA to give even a piece of it back.
In 2002, the unknown male DNA profile was entered into Kotus, the FBI’s national DNA database that contains genetic profiles from convicted offenders and crime scene evidence across the country.
COTUS holds millions of profiles.
If the killer had ever [music] been arrested and swabbed for a felony anywhere in the United States, the system would flag the match.
Investigators submitted the profile and waited for the result.
No match.
Whoever had killed Bobby, Joe, and Annette had never been convicted of a qualifying offense since DNA databases came into existence.
He wasn’t in the system.
He was [music] out there somewhere.
And the most advanced forensic tool in the country couldn’t find him.
The case went quiet again.
Not dead, but dormant.
The evidence sat in storage.
The binder sat on shelves.
And the years kept passing.
In 2013, investigators [music] went back to the evidence one more time.
They tested Bobby Joe’s keyring, the brass self-defense hook that Jeff had handmade for her, the one she carried everyday because her husband worried about her walking alone.
Once again, the results showed a mixture of Bobby Joe’s blood and the blood of a wounded male, the same unknown contributor.
A third piece of evidence confirming what they already knew.
The significance of this cannot be [music] overstated.
Bobby Joe Oberholtzer’s refusal to go quietly.
Her decision to fight back in a blizzard at 11,000 ft in the dark against a man with a gun had preserved the single piece of biological evidence that could solve both murders.
Without her resistance, there would be no DNA.
Without the DNA, there would be no case.
She saved an investigation she would never know about.
And yet, the frustration was enormous.
They had a perfect genetic profile of the killer, clear, testable, unambiguous, and it matched nobody.
The case was alive in the lab and dead on the street.
Now, pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything that happened after.
The killer had been right there the whole time, not hiding, not on the run, living in the same Colorado mountains where he had left two women dead, [music] working as a mechanic, driving the same roads.
Alan Lee Phillips was born on February 6th, 1951.
On the night of the murders, he was 30 years old, working as a mechanic at the Henderson Malibdinum Mine in the mountains above Georgetown.
He lived in the Georgetown area about 45 mi northeast [music] of Breenidge.
And 9 years before the murders, he had done something remarkably similar.
In July 1973, when Philillips was 22, he picked up a female hitchhiker on the south edge of Breenidge.
He drove her toward Fair Play, the same direction both victims were heading in 1982.
He took her to a cabin off a county road, dragged her from his vehicle, and beat her head with a rock.
She survived because she screamed for him to stop and told him she had a baby girl.
Phillips broke into the cabin, cleaned her up, and dropped her off in fair play.
She went to the police.
He was arrested.
He confessed to the entire assault.
He was convicted of assault and burglary.
He served six months.
And no, that’s not a typo.
Six months for picking up a woman who trusted him [music] enough to get in his car, driving her to a remote cabin on a mountain road, and beating her skull with a rock.
Park County Sheriff Tom McGra, who later recounted the details of the 1973 case, noted that the victim’s plea about her baby daughter was the only thing that stopped Phillips from killing her.
He had the intent.
He had the isolation.
He had the victim completely [music] at his mercy.
The only reason she survived was that she found the one thing to say that made him stop.
The justice system gave him 6 months and sent him back to the same [music] community, the same mountains, the same roads, the same population of women who hitchhiked home from work every evening because that’s what everyone did in a small Colorado mountain town.
This decision seemed small at the time.
It wasn’t.
9 years later, two women were dead and the pattern was identical.
Female hitchhikers.
The road south out of Breenidge, the direction toward Fair Play and Park County, the isolation of the high passes.
Detective Sergeant Wendy Kipple would later find that 1973 case file buried in the last drawer of the last filing cabinet in the Park County Sheriff’s Archives.
A fire had destroyed many of the department’s old records, but this one survived.
The case itself had been purged from the system in 2002, but the physical paperwork was still there, waiting.
Now, the night of January 6th, 1982, [music] from Phillips’s side.
After the murders, Philillips drove east through the mountains, not toward Georgetown on the main highway, but on back roads, winding through the darkness and the blizzard.
His pickup truck hit a snow drift near the summit of Guanella Pass.
An 11,000 ft crossing about 45 mi from Hooser Pass.
The rear end of the truck sank so deep that his headlights pointed straight up at the sky.
What happened next would have been unbelievable as fiction.
Phillips began flashing his headlights in Morse code SOS.
By pure coincidence, Jefferson County Sheriff Harold Bray was a passenger on a United Airlines flight passing over the Rockies, headed from Denver to California.
From his window seat, he spotted the blinking lights below, recognized the distress signal, and alerted the flight crew.
The crew radioed for help.
Clear Creek County Fire Chief Dave Mononttoya, a former miner who knew Phillips from working at the mine, reached him shortly before midnight.
He found Philillips mildly intoxicated [music] with scratches across his face, bruises on his body, and a cut over his eye.
Phillips told Mononttoya he’d been driving home from a friend’s house in Bailey, had taken the back roads to avoid police because he’d been drinking and hit his head on the truck when it got stuck.
He declined medical treatment.
Mononttoya drove him home.
The local newspaper, The Clear Creek Corrant, ran the story, a feel-good piece about a miracle rescue in a blizzard.
A man’s life saved because a sheriff on a passing airplane happened to spot an SOS from 30,000 ft.
And on the very same page of that newspaper was a second story.
A woman had been found shot to death on who’s your pass.
The man who was rescued and the man who killed those women were the same person and nobody connected them for 39 years.
Investigators would later conclude that the scratches and cuts on Phillips’s face were not from hitting his head on the truck.
They were from Bobby Joe.
The injuries she inflicted while fighting for her life at the summit of Hooser Pass.
The same fight that left his blood on her glove, her tissue, and her key ring.
Dave Mononttoya, learning the truth in 2021, said something that captures the weight of the entire case.
If I would have known what I known then, I probably would have left him.
In 2005, an anonymous caller to Crimestoppers named Alan Lee Phillips as a possible suspect in the murders.
Investigators looked into the tip but could not corroborate it.
The DNA was in Coodis.
Phillips had never been convicted of a qualifying offense, so his profile was not in the database.
There was no way to connect him to the evidence.
He continued living quietly in Dumont, Colorado, a small unincorporated community [music] along the Interstate 70 corridor in Clear Creek County.
His property sat behind a rest area off the highway.
He was semi-retired, running his own mechanic shop.
He had been married three times over the course of his life and had a daughter named Andrea.
By this point, [music] he was a recluse.
He rarely left his property.
He rarely interacted with neighbors.
He didn’t socialize.
He kept to himself in the mountains, the same mountains where he had [music] killed two women and gotten away with it for decades.
Nobody suspected him.
Nobody connected him to the 1982 murders.
The 2005 Crimestoppers tip had come and gone without traction.
His 1973 assault conviction had been purged from the system.
He was by every outward measure an unremarkable elderly man living alone in the Colorado foothills.
He blended into the background of a community that had no idea what he had done.
Around early 2020, the investigation entered its final chapter.
Detective Sergeant Wendy Kipple and Special Deputy Charlie McCormack, the retired detective who had spent over 30 years on the case for a dollar a year, turned to the last tool available to them, genetic genealogy.
Kipple submitted the unknown male DNA profile from Bobby Joe’s Evidence to United Data Connect, a forensic genealogy firm based in Denver.
The company was founded by former Denver District Attorney Mitch Moresy and it had partnered with Metro Denver Crimestoppers [music] to tackle cold cases across the region.
The process was painstaking and methodical.
Genetic genealogy does not work like coodis.
It does not search for a direct match in a criminal database.
Instead, it takes a DNA profile, sequences the entire genome, and uploads it to the same public genealogical databases that millions of ordinary people use to trace their family ancestry.
Then, investigators look for partial matches, distant cousins, and second cousins, and third cousins who share enough DNA to indicate a family connection.
[music] From those partial matches, they build family trees.
They trace branches backward and forward [music] through generations, cross-referencing birth records, marriage certificates, census data, obituaries.
They eliminate entire family lines, narrow others, and slowly, methodically close in on a single person who fits the profile geographically, chronologically, and genetically.
It is detective work crossed with genealogy crossed with molecular biology.
And in cold cases where every other lead has gone dry, it has become the last resort that actually works.
On January 9th, 2021, the genealogologist called Kipple.
She had two names, brothers [music] Allen and Bruce Phillips.
Bruce Phillips lived in Arizona.
He had never lived in Colorado.
Alan Phillips had lived near Breenidge.
He had worked at the local mine and he still lived in the Colorado mountains.
Investigators began surveillance.
For roughly 5 weeks, they watched Alan Lee Phillips go about his daily routine, [music] and it became clear very quickly why he had avoided detection for so long.
The man was practically a ghost.
He stayed on his property most of the time.
He rarely interacted with neighbors or shopkeepers.
[music] He didn’t eat at restaurants.
He didn’t have a social life that anyone could observe.
And critically, he almost never discarded anything.
For investigators who needed a piece of his DNA, someone who doesn’t throw things away is the worst possible target.
They waited day after day, week after week.
They couldn’t approach him.
They couldn’t compel a DNA sample without tipping him off and giving him time to run or destroy evidence.
They needed him to leave something behind voluntarily in a public place where they could legally collect it.
Then he made one mistake.
Philillips drove to a Sonic drive-in.
[music] He ordered food, ate it, and then drove to a post office.
He walked inside carrying the Sonic bag.
He walked out without it.
Investigators entered the post office and recovered the bag from the trash can.
They pulled Philillips’s DNA from saliva on a napkin.
On February 23rd, [music] 2021, the results came back.
His DNA matched the blood on Bobby Joe’s glove and tissue.
The match probability on the glove alone was 1 in7 quadrillion.
To put that number in perspective, that is roughly 2,275,000 times the entire population of Earth.
There was no doubt the blood Bobby Joe had torn from her killer 39 years earlier belonged to Alan Lee Phillips.
On February 24th, [music] 2021, Phillips was arrested without incident during a routine traffic stop in Clear Creek County.
He was charged [music] with two counts of firstdegree murder, first-degree kidnapping, and first-degree assault.
Wendy Kipple put the handcuffs on him herself.
She later described the expression on his face as the cuffs clicked shut.
[music] The look of shock on his face is just priceless.
39 years, 2 months, and 18 days after the murders, someone finally said his name.
The trial of Alan Lee Phillips began on August 29th, 2022 in the Park County District Court in Fairplay, Colorado.
The same small mountain town where Phillips had dropped off the hitchhiker [music] he assaulted in 1973.
The same county where Bobby Joe’s body had been found on Hooser Pass and Annette’s body had surfaced in Sacramento Creek.
Deputy District Attorneys Mark Hurlbert and Stephanie Miller prosecuted the case under District Attorney Linda Stanley.
Their case was built on three pillars.
The first was the DNA, Philillips’s blood on Bobby Joe’s glove, on the tissue found near her backpack, and on the brass keyring that Jeff Oberholtzer had handmade for his wife.
Three separate pieces of evidence, all carrying the same genetic profile, all from a man who had no legitimate reason [music] to have been in contact with Bobby Joe Oberholtzer.
The second pillar was the orange sock.
In the months before the trial, investigators had submitted the sock for one final round of DNA testing.
The results were devastating for the defense.
Annette Schne DNA was found on the inside of the sock.
Bobby Joe Oberh Holtzer’s DNA was on the outside.
Both women who did not know each other were physically linked to the same piece of evidence as Detective Sergeant Wendy Kipple put it.
So that ties both women to that one sock.
The theory the investigators had held since 1982 that Annette lost the sock in the killer’s vehicle and Bobby Joe dragged it out during her escape was now confirmed by the science.
The third pillar was the Guanella Pass rescue.
Philillips had been found less than 6 hours after the murders, stuck in a snowdrift on a mountain pass 45 miles away with fresh scratches and cuts [music] on his face, mildly intoxicated, offering a story about back roads and hitting his head that didn’t hold up under scrutiny.
The prosecution argued that those injuries came from Bobby Joe’s fight at the Who’s Your Pass Summit.
The 1973 assault case was presented as pattern [music] evidence.
Same location, Breen Ridge, same victim type, a woman hitchhiking alone, same direction, heading south [music] toward Fair Play.
The jury could see the template.
The defense from the public defender’s office tried to cast doubt on the DNA evidence by arguing contamination and mishandling over four decades.
They also repeatedly attempted to redirect blame toward Jeff Oberholtzer, raising what prosecutors called a cold pizza [music] argument as a supposed motive.
Detective Kipple called it ludicrous.
Jim Hartkey, the retired CBI agent who had attended both crime scenes and made the orange sock connection at Annette’s autopsy in [music] 1982, took the stand and walked the jury through the evidence he had seen 40 years earlier.
Wendy Kipple testified about the genetic genealogy breakthrough, the surveillance, the sonic napkin, and the arrest.
Charlie McCormack, the man who had spent 30 years working the case for a dollar a year, who had filled 39 binders with notes and leads and dead ends, sat in front of the jury and explained what it meant to refuse to let a case die.
Jeff Oberholtzer, who had lived under suspicion for four decades, who had buried his wife and then spent the rest of his life being asked if he killed her, took the stand and face the man who had actually done it.
The courtroom in Fair Play was small.
Park County is a rural jurisdiction.
The contrast between the scope of the case and the size of the room was striking.
40 years of evidence, two victims, dozens of false leads, thousands of hours of investigation, all distilled into a few weeks of testimony in a mountain courthouse.
On September 15th, 2022, the jury convicted Alan Lee Phillips on all eight counts.
Two counts of first-degree murder after deliberation, two counts of felony murder, two counts of first-degree kidnapping, two counts of robbery.
The deliberation lasted 5 hours.
On November 7th, 2022, [music] Judge Steven Groom handed down the sentence.
Two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
The judge was deliberate about the word consecutive, not concurrent, which would have allowed the sentences to run simultaneously.
Consecutive, one after the other.
The first life sentence for the murder of Bobby Joe Oberholtzer.
The second life sentence for the murder of Annette K.
Schnee.
Each life taken was given its own sentence, its own weight, its own recognition by the [music] court.
The judge wanted there to be no ambiguity about the value of each victim.
Phillips did not speak at sentencing.
He sat in silence while the families of the women he had killed described what his actions had cost them across four decades.
His daughter, Andrea Shelton, was the only person to address the court on his behalf.
She said, “He is a good man, and I thought someone should say something.”
The courtroom absorbed the statement without response.
The families finally spoke, and the weight of what they carried into that courtroom was [music] almost unbearable.
Annette Schnee’s mother, Eileen, described what she had endured as 39 years of hell.
Not an exaggeration, not dramatic language, a factual accounting of what it means to lose a child and spend the rest of your life not knowing who took her or why.
Every Christmas for 39 years, Eileen thought about the orange socks she had mailed to Colorado.
Every April birthday, she thought about the visit that never happened.
Every time the phone rang with an unfamiliar number for four decades, a part of her wondered if this was the call, the call that would tell her they finally knew.
She [music] waited 39 years for that call.
Annette’s siblings, Cindy French, Karen Rees, and Russell Schne visited both crime scenes during the trial.
They went to Who’s Your Pass?
Where Bobby Joe had died.
And they said something that captures the heart of this entire case.
They thanked Bobby Joe.
Without her, we wouldn’t be here, they said.
Without Bobby Joe’s fight, without the blood she tore from her killer’s body, without the DNA she left on her glove and her keyring, both murders would have remained unsolved.
Annette’s family knew it, and they wanted Bobby Joe’s family to know they knew.
Bobby Joe’s daughter, Jackie Vukos Walker, who had been a young child when her mother was murdered, delivered an impact statement [music] that silenced the courtroom.
She described a childhood defined by sadness, depression, and anxiety.
The absence of her mother shaped everything.
And then she said, “When I look into my child’s blue eyes, which are truly beautiful like my mom’s, I see her.”
Jeff Oberholtzer, cleared by DNA in 1995, but never truly freed from suspicion until [music] the arrest in 2021, finally felt what he called a great weight lifted.
His statement at sentencing, read by the prosecution, called Phillips a despicable and evil being.
40 years of being suspected of killing his own wife, and now [music] the world knew the truth.
District Attorney Linda Stanley spoke about Bobby Joe’s courage.
“Bobby Joe was a fighter and is a hero,” she said.
“And she was right.”
The entire case, from the first drop of blood on the wool glove to the genealogologist’s phone call 39 years later, traced back to one woman’s refusal to stop fighting.
Charlie McCormick, the retired detective who had given over 30 years of his life to this case at a dollar a year, watched the verdict come in.
39 binders of evidence, thousands of hours, decades of dead ends, all leading to this moment.
The conviction was supposed to be the end.
In many ways, it was.
The families had their answer.
The killer had been named, tried, and sentenced.
For the first time in 39 years, Annette Schne’s family and Bobby Joe Oberholtzer’s family could look at a name in a face and know, not suspect, not wonder, no.
Alan Lee Phillips died at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado on February 27th, 2023.
[music] He was 72 years old, less than 6 months into his double life sentence.
He never served a full year for killing two women.
His death was reported as a suicide, though the Crowley County Coroner initially stated only that foul play was not suspected.
Because Philillips died while his appeal was still pending [music] and unresolved, Colorado law required the convictions to be vacated.
The court of appeals sent the case back to the district [music] court where it was formally dismissed.
This is called legal abatement.
It is a procedural outcome, not an exoneration.
It does not mean Philillips was innocent.
It means the legal process was never finalized because the defendant died before it could be completed.
The complications did not end there.
The CBI DNA analyst who worked on the case, Ivonne Missy Woods, was later exposed for manipulating and omitting DNA data across more than a thousand cases [music] during her career.
She was charged with over 100 felonies.
Phillips’s daughter, Andrea Shelton, subsequently filed a claim seeking $100 million against CBY and Woods, alleging wrongful conviction.
Former district attorney Mitch Moresy, [music] whose firm United Data Connect performed the independent genetic genealogy that identified Phillips, has publicly rejected the wrongful conviction claim.
The whole genome sequencing and genealogical analysis his [music] team conducted was entirely separate from any work done by Woods or CBI.
Moresy has stated plainly that Phillips was not wrongfully convicted.
The factual record remains.
A jury of 12 people heard the evidence.
They deliberated for 5 hours.
They convicted him on all eight counts.
The families [music] got their answer.
Two women who vanished on a January night in 1982 finally had someone held accountable for what happened to them.
This case, in the end, is not about Alan Lee Phillips.
It’s not about the legal technicalities that followed his death, or the decades of dead ends, or the suspects who were investigated and cleared, or the bureaucratic failures that let evidence gather dust in storage rooms while a killer lived freely in the same mountains.
It’s about the people who never stopped.
Wendy Kipple, who dug through filing cabinets and embraced new technology and put the cuffs on herself.
Charlie McCormack, who spent 30 years working for a dollar a year because a family in Iowa asked him to.
Jim Hardkey, who saw an orange sock at an autopsy and remembered the one from 6 months before.
Mitch Morrisy, whose firm traced a blood stain across four decades of family trees to reach a name.
And it’s about a pair of orange socks that a mother in Iowa mailed to her daughter for Christmas.
It’s about a brass key ring that a husband made for his wife because he worried about her safety.
And it’s about a [music] woman named Bobby Joe Oberholtzer who in the final minutes of her life at 11,000 ft in the dark in a blizzard with a gunman standing over her fought back hard [music] enough to tear his blood from his body and leave it on her glove.
She didn’t know that her fight would solve her own murder.
She didn’t know it would solve Annette Schnee’s murder, too.
She didn’t know that it would take 39 years.
Bobby Joe was 29.
She had been promoted that day.
She had a daughter.
She was planning to start a family.
Annette was 21.
She worked two jobs.
She wanted to be a flight attendant.
She was wearing the orange socks her mother sent her for Christmas.
Their names are Bobby [music] Joe Oberholtzer and Annette K.
Schne and they deserve to be remembered for who they were, not just how their stories ended.
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