TWO WOMEN VANISHED FROM THE SAME COLORADO ROAD IN ONE BLIZZARD—THEN A SINGLE ORANGE SOCK CONNECTED THEIR FAMILIES TO A KILLER HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

TWO WOMEN VANISHED FROM THE SAME COLORADO ROAD IN ONE BLIZZARD—THEN A SINGLE ORANGE SOCK CONNECTED THEIR FAMILIES TO A KILLER HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

The investigator was standing beside Annette Schnee’s body when he noticed the color.

After nearly six months in the freezing water of Sacramento Creek, the 21-year-old woman was still wearing one bright orange bootie sock on her left foot.

Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent Jim Hardtke had seen its match before.

It had been found in the snow near another murdered woman, miles away, on the morning after Annette disappeared.

Until that moment, the deaths of Annette Schnee and 29-year-old Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer had looked like separate tragedies. The orange socks proved otherwise.

Two young women had vanished from the same Colorado mountain road on January 6, 1982. They had never met. They left work at different times. Their bodies were found in different places.

But they had entered the same man’s vehicle.

And for the next 39 years, the only person who knew his name would continue living in the same mountains where he had left them.

In the winter of 1982, Breckenridge was changing from an old mining settlement into one of Colorado’s best-known ski towns.

Tourists arrived by the thousands, but the permanent population remained small. Locals recognized one another in restaurants, bars, hotels, and grocery stores. Many worked in the ski industry or drove through the mountains to jobs at the Climax and Henderson molybdenum mines.

The roads between towns were steep, narrow, and often buried under snow.

Hitchhiking was not regarded as reckless. It was simply how many people traveled.

Workers stood beside Highway 9 with their thumbs out. Someone from a nearby lodge, restaurant, mine, or repair shop would pull over. Even when drivers and passengers did not know each other well, they often recognized a face.

That shared trust was part of mountain life.

It was also what placed Annette and Bobbie Jo in danger.

Annette Kay Schnee had come west from Sioux City, Iowa.

She had graduated from East High School in 1978 and attended a modeling program at Patricia Stevens College in Omaha. She hoped eventually to become a flight attendant. Colorado was meant to be the beginning of a larger life, not its final destination.

She settled in Blue River, just south of Breckenridge, and worked two jobs.

During the day, she cleaned rooms at a Holiday Inn in Frisco. At night, she waited tables and mixed drinks at the Flip Side bar in Breckenridge.

Coworkers knew her as dependable and cheerful. She covered shifts. She arrived when expected. She called her family in Iowa regularly and planned to return home in April for her mother Eileen’s birthday.

Weeks before Annette disappeared, Eileen had mailed her a Christmas package.

Inside was a pair of bright orange bootie socks.

Annette wore them.

Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer had also left the Midwest for the mountains.

She grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, and married Jeff Oberholtzer in July 1977. Friends described the couple as adventurous and restless, two people who wanted a life far from the flat landscape they had known.

They moved to Alma, a former mining town south of Breckenridge at an elevation of more than 10,000 feet.

Jeff opened Alpine Appliance Repair, servicing homes and businesses across the high country. Bobbie Jo worked for a real estate company in Breckenridge.

She had a daughter, Jackie, from an earlier relationship, and she and Jeff had recently begun discussing having a child together.

Bobbie Jo’s younger sister, Laurie Merlo, remembered her as free-spirited and loving. She was the kind of older sister whose presence made ordinary life feel larger.

Her daily commute required crossing Hoosier Pass.

Because the couple had only one reliable vehicle for much of their time in the mountains, Bobbie Jo usually hitchhiked to and from work. Jeff disliked it, but he understood how common it was.

Still, he worried enough to make her a defensive tool.

He fashioned a heavy brass hook and ring that could be attached to her keys and used to strike someone in an emergency.

Bobbie Jo carried it with her.

On January 6, 1982, the real estate company promoted her to office manager.

It should have been a night she remembered for the right reasons.

Instead, it became the final day of her life.

That afternoon, a severe winter storm closed around Summit County. Temperatures dropped to roughly 20 degrees below zero. Snow blew sideways across Highway 9, hiding the pavement and swallowing headlights.

Annette finished her housekeeping shift at the Holiday Inn around 4:15 p.m.

She was not feeling well. She visited a doctor in Frisco, caught a ride back toward Breckenridge, and stopped at a pharmacy known locally as the Drug Store.

At approximately 4:45, witnesses saw her filling a prescription.

They also saw her speaking with an unidentified woman described as white, slender, about five feet four inches tall, and dressed as though she had been camping. The woman smoked Marlboro cigarettes.

Annette reminded her to buy cigarettes before they separated.

Investigators would spend decades trying to identify that woman.

No one ever did.

By around 5 p.m., Annette was trying to hitchhike south from Breckenridge to her home in Blue River.

She was scheduled to begin work at the Flip Side at 8. Her bartending clothes were still at home. She needed to return, change, and come back to town.

She never arrived at Blue River.

She never reported for her shift.

Less than three hours later, Bobbie Jo left the Village Pub inside Breckenridge’s Bell Tower Mall.

She had remained after work to celebrate her promotion with friends. At approximately 6:20 p.m., she called Jeff and told him she would be home soon.

She left the pub around 7:30.

At 7:50, a witness saw her hitchhiking southbound near the Minute Mart.

She was standing less than a mile from where Annette had been seen earlier, facing the same direction on the same road.

A driver stopped for her.

The storm erased any clear view of who was behind the wheel.

Jeff was at home in Alma with a friend that evening. After the friend left around 10 p.m., Jeff fell asleep.

When he awoke close to midnight, Bobbie Jo’s side of the bed was empty.

At first, he tried to explain the delay. The roads were nearly impassable. She might have stopped somewhere safe. She might have gone home with a coworker rather than risk the pass.

By 1 a.m., he was pacing.

By 2, he was calling friends.

Around 3, he drove through the blizzard to the Breckenridge police station and tried to report his wife missing.

Officers told him too little time had passed. They expected her to appear.

Jeff returned home without her.

At that moment, two women were missing from the same stretch of highway, but no one had yet connected their disappearances.

On the morning of January 7, a rancher near U.S. Highway 285 called the Oberholtzer home.

He had found Bobbie Jo’s driver’s license and items from her wallet scattered across his property. They appeared to have been thrown from a moving vehicle and spread by the wind.

Jeff drove toward the ranch.

Along the way, he noticed Bobbie Jo’s blue backpack lying in a field about 30 feet from the highway.

Near it were a bloodstained wool glove and bloody tissues.

Whatever hope remained that Bobbie Jo had chosen to stay somewhere overnight ended beside that road.

Jeff contacted friends, and they organized a search.

They focused on Hoosier Pass, the remote 11,500-foot crossing between Breckenridge and Alma. Bobbie Jo traveled it almost every day. If she had been harmed while heading home, the pass was the most isolated part of the route.

Searchers moved through deep snow on cross-country skis.

At approximately 3 p.m., they found her.

Bobbie Jo lay down an embankment about 20 feet from the southbound lane and roughly 300 feet from the summit parking area.

Tracks in the snow suggested that she had escaped from a vehicle near the summit. She had run downhill, changed direction, and tried to reach a stand of trees before collapsing.

An 18-inch plastic zip tie remained around one wrist.

Someone had attempted to bind her.

She had resisted.

Bobbie Jo had been shot twice in the chest at close range. Investigators determined that the weapon was a .38- or .357-caliber handgun loaded with Remington-Peters copper-jacketed hollow-point ammunition.

The gun was never found.

Jeff’s handmade brass key-ring weapon lay in the summit parking area.

It carried blood.

Some belonged to Bobbie Jo.

Some did not.

Investigators also collected a single bright orange sock from the snow.

It did not belong to her.

No one understood why it was there. It was bagged as evidence and stored with the rest of the case.

For six months, the sock meant nothing.

Annette’s absence, meanwhile, became impossible to dismiss.

She had not come home. She had missed her bartending shift. She also failed to return to the Holiday Inn, behavior her coworkers knew was completely unlike her.

By January 8, police had been contacted and began tracing her final movements.

The trail ended at the Breckenridge pharmacy.

There was no body, no backpack, no clothing, and no witness who could identify the person who had picked her up.

Winter made the search nearly impossible. Snow covered the valleys and passes. Creeks froze. Roads closed. Large areas could not be searched effectively until spring.

Annette’s mother called Colorado repeatedly from Iowa.

Eileen wanted to know where her daughter had gone and what had happened after she left the pharmacy.

Investigators had no answer.

Annette’s January birthday passed.

Then Eileen’s birthday arrived in April, the one Annette had intended to celebrate in Sioux City.

Her daughter did not come home.

On July 3, six months after the disappearances, a boy was fishing with his father in Sacramento Creek, south of Breckenridge.

He saw what looked like clothing in the water.

It was Annette.

She was lying facedown, fully dressed, preserved by the cold creek. Her clothing was disarranged, the zipper of her jeans was broken, and her shoes were on the wrong feet.

She had been shot once in the back.

The bullet traveled downward through her body, suggesting she might have been kneeling or moving down the slope toward the creek when she was struck. No bullet remained, but the ammunition type was consistent with the rounds used against Bobbie Jo.

Then Hardtke saw the orange sock on her left foot.

He remembered the unexplained sock from Hoosier Pass.

The two booties matched.

The Christmas gift Eileen had mailed from Iowa had become the physical bridge between two murder scenes.

Investigators developed a theory.

The killer had picked up Annette first. During whatever occurred inside or near his vehicle, one orange sock came off and remained behind.

Hours later, the same man picked up Bobbie Jo.

When Bobbie Jo fought him and escaped near Hoosier Pass, the loose sock was dragged or kicked from the vehicle into the snow.

One pair of socks had traveled with two victims.

The women had been strangers.

Their killer was not.

In September 1982, Annette’s backpack was discovered near Hoosier Pass.

Inside was a business card for Alpine Appliance Repair.

Jeff Oberholtzer’s company.

The card turned the grieving husband into the investigation’s most persistent suspect.

Police had already been examining him, as they commonly examined spouses in homicide investigations. Now they had a second victim carrying a card connected to his business.

Jeff said he had given Annette a ride while she was hitchhiking in November 1981. He handed out business cards while working throughout the mountain communities. There was nothing secret about the encounter.

But investigators saw other details that kept their attention on him.

He knew the roads and remote locations. Bobbie Jo’s body had been found near his route home. Annette’s body was discovered only several miles from Alma.

During the investigation, Jeff also predicted that Annette would likely be found near his home around the Fourth of July, when snowmelt and runoff might expose whatever winter had hidden.

Her body was found on July 3.

To investigators, the accuracy seemed troubling.

Jeff submitted to two polygraph examinations and passed both.

The results did not end the suspicion.

The friend who had visited Jeff on the night of January 6 could not initially be found. Detectives searched for years before locating him in December 1990, and his memory of the evening did not match Jeff’s timeline in every detail.

There was not enough evidence to charge Jeff.

There was also not enough, investigators believed, to remove his name completely.

He remained in the area, carrying two forms of grief.

His wife had been murdered.

And many neighbors believed he might have killed her.

People hesitated to allow him into their homes for appliance repairs. Conversations changed when he entered a room. His stepdaughter grew up knowing that some members of the community suspected the man raising her.

Jeff had organized the search that found Bobbie Jo.

He had also become trapped inside the investigation that followed.

Other suspects emerged.

Six weeks after the murders, Thomas Edward Luther was arrested near Frisco after attacking a 21-year-old woman with a hammer.

While jailed, he reportedly claimed to have killed two women in Summit County. He failed polygraph examinations, then withdrew his statements.

Luther was capable of extreme violence. He later murdered another woman.

But DNA eventually excluded him from the evidence in the Schnee and Oberholtzer cases.

Investigators also examined Tracy Petrocelli, who had stayed at the Frisco Holiday Inn where Annette worked. Testing of his firearms produced no conclusive link, and DNA later eliminated him.

Henry Lee Lucas, the serial confessor who claimed responsibility for hundreds of murders he had not committed, also said he killed the two women.

He did not.

Former boyfriends, local offenders, travelers, and men who had lived or worked near the victims were investigated.

One by one, the leads failed.

The unidentified Marlboro smoker from the pharmacy remained missing from the investigation. Detectives continued to believe she might have seen something important, even if she did not realize it.

The case itself was divided across jurisdictions.

Breckenridge police handled Annette’s last known movements. The Summit County Sheriff’s Office was involved. Bobbie Jo’s body was found near the line between Summit and Park counties. Annette’s body was recovered in Park County. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation assisted both.

Files moved between offices. Evidence changed storage locations. Detectives retired. Memories faded.

In a rural region with limited resources, new emergencies kept arriving.

The two women risked becoming names in old boxes.

Charlie McCormick refused to let that happen.

McCormick was a retired Denver homicide detective who had moved to Breckenridge before the murders. In 1989, Annette’s family hired him as a private investigator.

He charged one dollar a year.

The amount made clear that he was not working for money.

Over the next three decades, McCormick’s collection grew from two binders to 39. He reinterviewed witnesses, tracked old leads, reviewed new suspects, and pushed law enforcement agencies to test evidence whenever forensic science advanced.

He became a special deputy with the Park County Sheriff’s Office, allowing him direct access to official records and evidence.

Detectives changed.

McCormick stayed.

The most important evidence had been waiting from the beginning.

It was the blood on Bobbie Jo’s glove.

In 1988, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation tested the bloodstained glove found near her backpack. The sample contained blood from Bobbie Jo and an unidentified man.

The finding confirmed what the scene had already suggested.

Bobbie Jo had injured her attacker.

In 1995, improved DNA testing showed that the unknown male blood on the glove and bloody tissue came from one contributor.

It did not belong to Jeff.

After 13 years, science cleared him.

There was no dramatic restoration of everything he had lost. DNA could remove him from a suspect list, but it could not erase years of gossip or return the customers who had refused to trust him.

Still, it gave him something the investigation had denied him for more than a decade.

It established that the blood drawn by Bobbie Jo’s resistance belonged to another man.

In 2002, investigators entered the male DNA profile into CODIS, the FBI’s national database.

They waited for a match.

None appeared.

The killer had either never been sampled for a qualifying offense or had avoided another conviction that would place his DNA in the system.

The profile was clear.

The name behind it remained unknown.

Investigators tested Bobbie Jo’s brass key ring again in 2013.

It contained the same mixture: her blood and blood from the unidentified man.

The object Jeff had made because he feared she might someday be attacked had performed exactly as intended.

It had not saved Bobbie Jo’s life.

But it had preserved evidence of the man who took it.

The killer’s identity remained hidden because forensic DNA databases could only compare the crime-scene profile against people whose samples were already on file.

If the man had never entered the system, CODIS could not identify him.

For years, that limitation seemed final.

Then investigative genetic genealogy changed what was possible.

Instead of searching only for an exact criminal-database match, genealogists could look for people who shared portions of DNA with an unknown suspect.

A distant cousin might lead to a family tree.

That tree could lead to brothers, uncles, fathers, and sons.

Investigators could then narrow those relatives by age, location, history, and access to the crime scene.

In early 2020, Detective Sergeant Wendy Kipple of the Park County Sheriff’s Office submitted the unknown male profile to United Data Connect, a forensic genealogy company in Denver.

Genealogists began constructing family trees from partial matches.

The work took months.

On January 9, 2021, Kipple received two names.

The men were brothers.

Bruce Phillips had lived in Arizona and had no meaningful connection to the Colorado crime scenes.

Alan Lee Phillips had lived in the region.

He had worked for years as a mechanic at the Henderson Mine.

He had driven the same mountain roads used by Annette and Bobbie Jo.

And he still lived nearby.

For the first time in 39 years, the DNA had a possible name.

Alan Phillips was born in 1951. He was 30 on the night of the murders.

Long before January 1982, he had already attacked a woman under circumstances that echoed the later crimes.

In July 1973, Phillips picked up a female hitchhiker near the south edge of Breckenridge.

He drove toward Fairplay, the same general direction Annette and Bobbie Jo were traveling nine years later.

According to surviving records, he took the woman to a remote cabin, dragged her from the vehicle, and struck her with a rock.

She pleaded with him to stop and told him she had a baby daughter.

He relented, cleaned her wounds, drove her to Fairplay, and left her there.

She reported the attack.

Phillips confessed and was convicted of assault and burglary.

He served approximately six months.

Years later, Wendy Kipple found the old physical file in a drawer at the Park County Sheriff’s Office.

Many old records had been destroyed in a fire or removed from the active system. This one had survived.

It showed investigators that Phillips had previously used the southbound road out of Breckenridge to isolate a woman who had accepted a ride from him.

But the most extraordinary connection came from the night of the murders itself.

Hours after Annette and Bobbie Jo disappeared, Phillips was driving through the mountains east of Breckenridge.

His pickup truck became buried in a snowdrift near the summit of Guanella Pass. The rear sank so deeply that the headlights pointed toward the sky.

Phillips began flashing them in an SOS pattern.

High above the storm, Jefferson County Sheriff Harold Bray was traveling as a passenger on a commercial flight.

Looking through the window, Bray noticed the blinking lights below and recognized the distress signal.

The flight crew alerted authorities.

Clear Creek County Fire Chief Dave Montoya responded. He knew Phillips from work in the mining community and reached him shortly before midnight.

Phillips appeared mildly intoxicated.

He also had fresh scratches and bruises on his face and body, including a cut near his eye.

He explained that he had been drinking at a friend’s home in Bailey and had chosen back roads to avoid police. He said he had struck his head when the truck became stuck.

He declined medical treatment.

Montoya drove him home.

A local newspaper later published the rescue as an improbable survival story: a stranded man saved because someone aboard an aircraft happened to see his headlights through a mountain storm.

On the same newspaper page was a report about a woman found murdered at Hoosier Pass.

No one connected the stories.

Four decades later, prosecutors would argue that the marks on Phillips’s face had not come from his truck.

They had come from Bobbie Jo.

The man rescued from the snowstorm had the kind of fresh injuries expected on someone whose blood was found on her glove, tissues, and brass key ring.

Authorities had reached him within hours of the murders.

They simply had no reason, then, to know who he was.

In 2005, an anonymous Crime Stoppers caller named Alan Phillips as a possible suspect.

Investigators examined the tip but could not confirm it.

His DNA was not in CODIS. His 1973 case had been purged from the electronic system. The old paper file had not yet become part of the active investigation.

The lead faded.

Phillips remained in Colorado, eventually living in Dumont near Interstate 70.

He worked as a mechanic and became increasingly reclusive. By the time investigators began watching him in 2021, he rarely left his property and almost never discarded anything in a public place.

Detectives needed a DNA sample.

Genetic genealogy could identify a likely family, but it was not enough by itself to prove that Alan Phillips had left blood at the crime scene.

Investigators followed him for weeks, waiting for him to abandon a cup, cigarette, tissue, or food container that could legally be collected.

Phillips gave them almost nothing.

Then he drove to a Sonic restaurant.

After eating, he carried the bag into a post office.

He left without it.

Investigators recovered the discarded bag from a trash can. A napkin inside carried saliva.

The laboratory compared that DNA with the blood preserved from Bobbie Jo’s struggle.

The results arrived on February 23, 2021.

The probability of the glove profile belonging to someone unrelated to Alan Phillips was estimated at approximately one in 17 quadrillion.

The blood belonged to him.

The next day, February 24, deputies stopped Phillips’s vehicle in Clear Creek County.

Wendy Kipple placed him under arrest.

The handcuffs closed nearly 39 years, two months, and 18 days after Annette and Bobbie Jo were killed.

Alan Phillips went on trial in Fairplay in late August 2022.

The prosecution’s case rested on evidence that had survived nearly four decades.

There was Phillips’s blood on objects directly associated with Bobbie Jo’s fight for survival.

There were the matching orange socks linking her abduction to Annette’s.

There was the rescue on Guanella Pass, where Phillips had been found with fresh facial injuries within hours of the killings.

There was his presence in the region, his work at the Henderson Mine, his familiarity with the roads, and his earlier attack on a woman who had accepted a ride from him south of Breckenridge.

The defense challenged the age and handling of the evidence and argued that the presence of Phillips’s blood did not establish every step of the prosecution’s reconstruction.

But the DNA did not stand alone.

It fit the tracks in the snow.

It fit the brass key ring.

It fit the bloody glove and tissues.

It fit the injuries observed during the rescue.

And it fit the orange sock carried from the first victim’s ordeal into the second.

The jury deliberated for approximately five hours.

On September 15, 2022, jurors convicted Alan Lee Phillips on all eight counts, including first-degree murder and offenses involving kidnapping and robbery.

The verdict came more than 40 years after two women stood beside a snowy highway expecting an ordinary ride home.

For Annette’s family, the conviction could not recover the life she had been preparing to live.

She never became a flight attendant.

She never returned to Sioux City for Eileen’s birthday.

Her mother spent decades asking why and how, then died before she could hear a jury name the man responsible.

Bobbie Jo’s family carried a different wound.

They had lost her, then watched suspicion settle over Jeff for years.

The conviction confirmed what the male DNA had already shown: Bobbie Jo’s husband had not killed her.

The blood she left behind belonged to the stranger who had picked her up.

Jeff had once made her a brass defensive tool because he feared the danger of the road.

For years, that object had been part of the evidence used to reconstruct her final moments.

Now it helped explain why her killer’s face was injured and why his DNA survived.

Bobbie Jo had resisted an armed man in darkness, deep snow, and deadly cold.

She could not know that the blood on her glove would outlast paper files, careers, failed leads, and the limitations of 20th-century forensic science.

She could not know that a genealogist would one day use that blood to trace a family tree.

She could not know that Wendy Kipple would wait outside a post office for a discarded napkin.

But the evidence she created by fighting remained.

On November 7, 2022, Alan Phillips was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

He had spent four decades free.

The court ensured he would never be free again.

Phillips died by suicide in prison on February 27, 2023.

His death closed the possibility of further questioning.

Investigators could prove that he killed Annette Schnee and Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer. A jury could hold him responsible. The evidence could reconstruct his route through the mountains.

But some answers died with him.

No confirmed account explained what he said when each woman entered his vehicle.

No confession revealed why he targeted two strangers on the same night.

No statement explained whether he had planned the crimes or acted after seeing women alone beside the road.

The unidentified woman from the pharmacy was never found.

The murder weapon was never recovered.

Justice arrived, but not every mystery did.

Charlie McCormick’s 39 binders had kept the case alive when official attention weakened.

Wendy Kipple had taken the surviving DNA into a new era of forensic investigation.

Scientists who tested the glove, tissue, and key ring had preserved what earlier technology could not yet interpret.

And Jeff Oberholtzer had lived long enough to see another man convicted of killing his wife.

The case was solved through persistence, but its first and most important break had come before any detective understood its value.

It came from two women.

Annette’s orange socks proved that the same vehicle had carried both victims.

Bobbie Jo’s resistance supplied the blood that identified the driver.

One clue had been a Christmas present from a mother.

The other had been left by a woman refusing to surrender quietly.

For decades, the orange sock found at Hoosier Pass looked like an object in the wrong place.

In the end, it had never been misplaced at all.

It was the thread that kept Annette and Bobbie Jo together until the man who took them could finally be named.