This podcast contains intense subject matter. Listener discretion is advised. So you remember
finding the remember, Yeah, it was actually I was with my dad when
because I was only eight, I was surprised how much I could remember,
you know, because I came up here and made to make sure to make
sure I knew what I was talking about, and I could remember it.
And yeah, so it was pretty easy to find the campsite. And I
went up there and walked around, and I think I got real close to
uh to where to where the grave was. Yeah, from the pages of
the reporter's notebook. This is still season two. I'm your host, Gary
Anderson. I'm not knowing you way about the pin. Yeah, lit the
pin s. Yeah, I'm back there, but I'm like, okay,
we'll learn. What are you guys here in this area? Were below?
We're back below, but we're gonna let Rob row. I don't know what
Rober this. We're deep into the foothills of the Blue Mountain in eastern Oregon
degree everybody brought a camp trailer, I remember that, and one family was
camped over there. I think we were camped pretty much in front of my
truck. And then there was another another camper down there. My colleagues and
I caravan up here with the group. All told, there were a dozen
of us plus a few dogs before we arrived at this spot. We all
rendezvoused in the nearest town Okay, now Somerville, Oregon, population one hundred
and forty four. Okay, I'm like I recogna's okay, Sirian Christine.
Nice to meet you, guys. The town is about ten miles southeast of
where an unidentified woman's remains were found by hunters in late August of nineteen seventy
eight. We're here to see that spot, learn more about the case,
and do some searching for more evidence. On this mild August day in twenty
twenty one, we're joined by Susanne Tims, who, as you may recall,
is Pattie and Ralph Otto's daughter. She changed her name from Dallas to
Susanne when her aunt Marcy adopted her and her sister Natalie. Susanne believes that
Jane Doe, the hunters found more than forty years ago, could have been
her mom. Okay, all right, we've been waiting a long time for
those guys. Yes, this is big, it's exciting, and we're going
to bring back some good news today. So we're gonna bring back some good
news. Let's do this. We'll introduce you to other members of this group
as you hear their voices. From the meeting point in town. We all
followed a rural road past fields and acres and acres of farms. This is
the type of land that looks like a patchwork quilt if you look at it
from a satellite view. The first leg of the drive was punctuated by abrupt
ninety degree turns as Somerville Road in Dry Creek Lane traced the edges of crop
ridge fields. At Craig Loop, we ran out of pavement. From there,
our tires followed shallow ruts in the dirt and gravel. Do we have
any idea what this mountain is called? When we finally reached Ruckle Road,
we turned right and headed farther north past jack Cold and Moonshine canyons, slowly
ascending into the mountains. There's no service. The chalky road that took us
up here was originally the Thomas and Ruckll toll Road for horse led wagons.
Over the past century and a half, the road has been trecked by bandits,
loggers, day trippers, and hippies. As the road gradually narrowed,
we occasionally had to make way for another vehicle to pass. At times,
tree branches scraped against our car. The road was washed out by mudslides in
the past, but the gravel is still in relatively good shape, with just
a few ruts and deeper dips here and there. By the time we stopped,
the trees looked as tall as skyscrapers. We parked and walked a few
yards toward a small clearing on our left. But what we have to remember
is we're looking at forty years of growth here in fact, because this and
I would bet that if we uncovered all that brush, we'd find a fire
pit, because that's where everybody hung out. And back then you could see
this, You could see that whole ridge. You know, those trees weren't,
you know, nearly as tall as they are now. And yeah,
this was definitely the spot. That's Rob Parr talking. He was only eight
years old in nineteen seventy eight when his dad and a buddy took their sons
with them for a big game hunt. The old population around the Blue Mountains
of eastern Oregon was thriving back then, and hunters from surrounding states flocked to
the area. The clearing we were standing in had held campsites for several hunters,
and it was still only archery season. Rob and his dad were only
about thirty miles from their home, but in terrain like this, driving thirty
miles takes well over an hour. Camping overnight is not only practical, it's
part of the experience. So, and where we found the skeleton is just
up there's kind of a little ridge right here. It kind of goes up
and then back down before it heads up heads up that hill, and it
was right up there alongside the right on that ridge. You'll see it when
we go down there. There. We go down through this crick we just
followed up, and it's just right down through the other crick on a game
trail, and that game trail is still there. So you know, how
animals are there, creatures of habit And so the son of the other adult
hunter in their party was the first to stumble across the woman's remains. Large
groupings of bones appeared to have been dug up by animals, and we're lying
on the trail in front of him when we came back up and found it,
you know, because it was initially found and then you know, the
kid didn't know where it was, and so everybody came up looking, and
I remember my dad and I we were done, we were we couldn't find
it. Everybody's calling it quits, and we were headed back and we were
coming from this direction down the trail, and bam, there it was.
But I vividly remember them, the skull, the boots in between the skull
and rib cache. I can see it plain his day. We followed Rob
up the same path law enforcement took as they responded to the scene in nineteen
seventy eight. And I'm not a detective, but this area, just the
way the grass has kind of looked down there, and the way this ground
looks right here, there's really no reason for this pilot dirt here, and
there's an indentation there. And because I remember, you know, as the
corners were going through and sipton, yeah, you know, they left a
pilot of dirt on each side of they never backfilled it. Well, yeah,
where were they? The woman's voice you here is Melinda Jetterburg, a
volunteer investigator who has been working since twenty nineteen, to try to help the
jandoe reclaim her identity, She and other volunteers formed the Finlay Creek Jandoe Task
Force. Here's Rob Parr again talking about watching the investigators search for evidence in
the shallow grave. I'm not saying this is the spot, but I know
we're really I know we're really really close because as a kid, you know,
being a curious eight year old kid, I would sneak away, you
know, because I wasn't enough to help with my dad when they go out
in these big hunts in the mornings, and I would sneak away from camp
and come up here and watch, you know, just as a curious kid.
And I remember watching them. I remember there was two of them.
I remember they had their little screens out and they were just sifting away through
the dirt. But Suzanne, you're really close right here. I know you
are. Investigators work for days at the site, taking photos, documenting locations
of every bone and scrap of cloth, sifting through dirt for tiny remnants of
bone, and slowly bringing every thing they could find out of the shallow grave.
The grave appeared to be a little more than two feet deep. It
was twenty inches wide and four feet long. A cable possibly from a CBE
radio or a high end stereo, and pieces of a nylon cord were buried
with the bones. There were no obvious signs of trauma on their remains,
which appeared to have been in the ground anywhere from two to five years.
The investigators recovered a pair of red pants Catalina brand Junior's size fifteen Ladies Size
sixteen. The length had been altered. They also found some zippers and what
appeared to have once been white cloth, possibly from a halter top. The
clothing all appeared to be consistent with someone who was dressed for warm weather,
all except for a pair of ankle high lace up boots. The woman had
light brown or blonde hair and appeared to be in her early twenties. The
medical examiner estimated that she stood between five foot one and five foot four inches
tall and had a slight build, weighing anywhere from one hundred and fifteen to
one hundred and forty pounds. The crews working at the crime scene were not
able to find the entire skeleton. Portions of her right arm and hand were
missing. The bones were probably carried away by animals. Before our team went
to the site, Susanna arranged to have a canine handler meet us there with
a dog to see if anything else could be sniffed out, Like, oh
my gosh, even after forty years, finding just a tooth is not an
impossible task for a well trained search dog. Amity Larson, who is with
us today, is a nationally certified search and rescue canine handler who also raises,
trains and sometimes breeds German shepherds for this type of work. As Rob
showed us the spot where he remembers seeing the grave, Amity and her dog
Brand worked the hill in a meticulous pattern, sweeping back and forth across the
slope. Sometimes the dog ran up the hill, but Bran seemed most interested
in areas below where the grave had been. So we've been in both of
those areas several times and it's like she kind of checks that moves down.
But if you take that all into account, yet exactly right, so where
everything runs down, so um, it would be different if we had someone
buried there, because she probably still would pick up odor down because of water
going down through, you know, hydraulics and stuff going down through, But
she would be more inclined to be like, though, there's something here,
and it's here, and here's the here's the box that you're going to find
it in. And when we've worked graves where I know that, you know
the body is in that grave, she's done that. She's worked the edges
of the grave. Mafra. She's more likely to alert on the edge of
a grave than on top of it, so because that's where the odors mostly
odors escaping, it's from the edge of it. As we watched Amity and
Brin work, several of us gathered and chatted on the slope above the grave.
Susanne sat down on the ground to rest. The search dog ran up
and laid down next to Suzanne, something it's trained to do when it finds
something. No one said a word. I meant my heart about stopped.
M yeah, and twice. What is that When the dog sits down,
that's the sign to say, lay down, lay down down sign. I
think she did lay down one. That means she found something. This is
it. But they were explaining she thinks she's also trained to search for an
injured hiker. So Susanne is sitting down. She may have said I found
some Everyone else was standing at the time. Hond was the only one sitting.
I found her. She's the injured one. You are injured, Dianne
injured. I think I smell like injury. That other voice you heard was
Jennifer Harrington, Susanne's cousin. She has helped tremendously with the research for this
case, helping to track down documents and witnesses. After Bryn laid down next
to Suzanne, Amity called her back to work, saying, that's not your
person. Melinda, the researcher, and Rob talked about some of the early
theories about who the Jane Doak be. Also on Craig Loop, there was
a woman named Burt Metcalf who lived there, and she and her family were
really familiar with this area. They hunted here too, So I came here
with her and her son as well, and we wandered around up here a
little bit. I've just never been able to zero in on the exact area,
so I'm hoping I can well, and maybe you'll know. But I
just remember, you know, everybody was speculating back at the time that there
used to be In the late sixties and early seventies, there was a hippies
camp somewhere up here and like, and I mean when I was a kid.
I mean, because they had a bunch of garbage, they had,
like their own, their own garbage to dump over there, and being an
eight year old kid, I was over there crawling through their garbage, you
know. And I think it was right a little bit down the creek from
here, and so people were speculating at the time that, you know,
it was a hippies had it was a hippie kill, basically, that was
the speculation that I remember him talking about at the time. Yeah, I
heard that rumor as well. I had two different women who lived on Craig
Loop at the time call me after the newspaper article came out last year saying
that they remembered to women who had been up here and they just saw them
walking and they thought they were squatting. I don't know if you guys saw
me point out the window at Stanley Cabin back there, they think that they
were squatting there. If you go down there, there's not much down there
now, but there's also when you go back a little ways, you can
see the base of another cabin that used to be there, So you know,
there's anywhere that they could have been staying up here. We called Bertha
Metcalf to try to get more details about what she remembers. Hello, Hi,
is this Bertha? Yes, I could tell you everything I know.
Okay, from what I understand, you recall seeing two women who were wandering
the roads around the time that the body was found. Yes, my husband
and I was working out front in the yard and we saw these two young
girls walk by the house. And I'm trying to think if she had red
pantshone or checks or something. I can't remember, but they just was walking
by and we said hi, they said hi, and they kept on going,
and we watched them turn off Craig Loop and go up Bruckel and that's
always saw And did either of them seem to be in distress? No,
they did not. Do you feel like one of the women you saw is
the body that was later found. I'm thinking it was, okay because she
was the smaller of the two. And what puzzles me is what happened to
the other woman? Right right? And yeah, were they followed? Yeah?
I mean, you know, I worked for a police department for ten
years and I do have always questioned that Dale Mammon and I have discussed this,
so I just I don't know. I have a lot of questions.
Dale Mammon was the district attorney for Union County back in the seventies. Later,
you're going to hear his recollections of going to the site and seeing the
grave. So what other questions do you have? Maybe it was a guy
dressed up like a girl, I don't know. Yeah, but what happened
to her for him? And how was this lady killed? I would be
taking up like an archaeology dig and I would try and find some bones left
over, because surely that god, they didn't get all them bones. And
with DNA today, you know, Bertha put us in touch with her son
Kit. He didn't have much to add to what his mother already told us,
but we wanted to ask him if it seemed reasonable that someone from Lewiston,
Idaho might go to the area to hunt Idahope I would have had good
hunting, But I mean, we had people from Texas everywhere, so there
could have been people from Lewiston. The Lewiston angle felt like a reach,
but we were really curious if it's plausible to think that Ralph could have come
all the way to this spot to bury his wife. If so, to
get here from Lewiston, Idaho, he probably would have gone across the Snake
River into Washington and taken Highway one twenty nine down through a Sotan and into
the hills and gulches of southeast Washington and northeast Oregon. We drove it just
to see what the drive would be like, and it was quite the experience.
While you navigate switch back turns, winding up and down steep canyons,
in particular the Grand Rond River Canyon, you have to be alert for wildlife,
which there's plenty of right in the middle of the road, be ready
to break at any moment. All told, it took us more than three
hours to make the drive one way, and we were doing it in the
daylight and on a paved surface. Back in nineteen seventy six, this highway
only had gravel in some spots, and the guardrails that gave us a monicum
of security hadn't yet been installed. We didn't even want to imagine making that
drive while drunk, sleepy, or high on drugs. Randy Benton, the
man Ralph wanted to kill because of a brief relationship with Patty had made that
drive often when he was playing gigs with his band. When we played for
the Joseph Radio Road. I dated a girl in there or Joseph as the
crow flies. Joseph, Oregon is about forty miles southeast of the spot where
the Jane Doe was found, and we finally decided we'd better get married to
work. I was going to kill him driving that road. But yeah,
I'm driven that road, I don't know, five hundred times. It's a
scary road. We drove it just yesterday and I just can't imagine that.
Yeah, I can't imagine doing it drunk. Well I can't, yeah either,
you know. Um, but when you're twenty one in bulletproof, you
can do anything. I'm not saying I always drove a drunk and again,
um, I have driven it after drinking a few um. But yeah,
and it used to be way different than it is now. The gravel was
almost all of you remember all them curs, yes going down in there.
Yeah, well that used to be growled. Oh man, that would be
terrifying. Yeah, I could, I could tell you. Yeah, we
used to see Barren Mount Lion and you know, everything on that road.
I could probably tell you some stories about that road. But were there railing?
Yes, it's treacherous winter, I can imagine. Were there railings everywhere
when you were driving it back? Then? You mean guard a roll?
Yeah? No, no, And and right at the bottom it just washed
out last year, so that's a new bridge. This all just reinforces our
thinking that if the Jane Doe is indeed Patty Otto and Ralph brought her here,
he had to have had help. But was this woman Patty? Patty
Otto had blonde hair, was twenty four years old, five foot three,
and about one hundred and forty pounds. She was last seen wearing red pants
and a white blouse. Everything about her seemed to be a remarkably close match
to the Jindoe, except for something else found in the grave that we haven't
told you about, a fetus estimated to have been from the third trimester of
pregnancy. When we first talked to Suzanne in early summer twenty twenty one,
she had just recently seen the composite drawing a forensic artist made of what the
Jaando probably looked like. So nobody in my family, they're all saying,
Susanne, I see kind of a resemblance, but there's no way that's your
mom. We would have known she's pregnant. There's no way she could have
hid that. Susanne believes her mom could have easily hidden a pregnancy, especially
because Susanne herself didn't look pregnant when she delivered one of her own babies,
and if Patty had mixed feelings about getting pregnant while she and Ralph were having
marital problems, she might have tried to hide her pregnancy for as long as
possible. The medical examiner's report doesn't indicate that any of the clothing found at
the scene was maternity style. That tells us that the woman may not have
developed a visible baby bump. Yet the pants she was wearing were from a
line of sportswear that was often made with stretchy polyester. Because more than one
person told us that Patty struggled with her weight, we wonder could it be
because she was carrying a baby? Did she find out she was pregnant?
Reconcile with my dad and then it's like, hey, I need to tell
you I'm pregnant, and merriment not your baby, but her whole family insists
no way. She was not pregnant. It's impossible. Nevertheless, on September
first, nineteen seventy eight, exactly two years after Patty vanished, her parents
flew with Tom Selene to a crime lab in Pendleton, Oregon, to look
at the clothes found at the scene. When the O'Malley saw the clothing taken
to the lab, they said they didn't think it was what Patty had been
wearing when she vanished. None of the reports from Patty's disappearance described her blouse
as a halter top, and the ankle high boots found at the scene looked
more like men's work boots than the fashionable shoes Patty would have worn. Just
to be clear, the boots weren't simply thrown into the grave with them.
They were on her feet when she was buried. But there's no record to
indicate the size of the boots. Maybe they weren't hers, maybe her killer
put them on her feet. All we can do is speculate. The Oregon
State Medical Examiner also compared Patty's dental records to the jawbones recovered at the scene
and said they didn't match. He wrote in his notes that the Jane doe
found near a Ruckel road had a number of fillings that didn't match Patty's most
recent dental x rays. He also noted that one of the Jando's wisdom teeth
was missing, but three others looked normal. However, in a memo the
medical examiner wrote to one of the Oregan investigators explaining the comparison, he cited
contradictory details. The memo said the Jando was missing three wisdom teeth, with
one remaining maxillary molar. After seeing the composite drawing of what the Jando probably
looked like, Suzanne looked at actual photos of the Jando's remains, particularly her
skull, and became convinced that the unidentified woman is her mother. She talked
to her own dentist to get his opinion. When she handed her mother's X
ray film to the dentist, he remarked that the copy had been printed on
the wrong side of the film. No one had noticed the error before because
otto the most identifiable word on the X ray is a palindrome, the letters
are in the same order, even if they're written backward. He pointed to
a letter in the corner of the film that indicates right and left. It
was backward that could explain why the fillings in her X ray didn't match those
of the Jane Doe. They appeared to be on the wrong side of the
jaw. So I start getting dental records pictures of my mom. Comparing the
pictures. I'm taking the teeth in those photos and I'm tracing them, and
I have her X ray and I'm tracing them. This is my mother,
but nobody's gonna believe me because it sounds too crazy. So I'm calling the
police department to have them send dental records to Oregon. I want her compared
again. This is my mother. I can tell I'm a nurse, not
an odentologist, but I can tell these teeth belong to this body. I
can see every variance in the teeth in the skeletal photos. The current Oregon
State Forensic Anthropology looked at the photos of the Jane Doe and digital images of
Patty's X rays and said she can't draw any conclusions based on the images alone,
and she can't compare Patty's X rays to X rays taken of the Jane
Doe's skull and teeth because they're missing, along with all the remains and evidence
from the scene. After the medical examiner documented details of the case in nineteen
seventy eight, the Jane Doo's remains were sent to a funeral home for storage
until a positive identification could be made. Twelve years later, with the case
still unsolved, the only evidence that might give us a clue about her identity
was destroyed and the Jane Doe and her unborn baby's sculled to remains were sent
to a crematorium. In an upcoming episode, we'll talk more about how all
this unfolded. But you should know that after the cremation, even the cremated
remains were lost, the paper trail of who had custody of the cremains went
cold. Now she's missing again, missing twice. There's your podcast title.
Yeah, how do you vanishing time? We talked to daale' mammon, who
was the Union County District Attorney back in nineteen seventy eight. He went to
the scene after the Jane Doe was found and watched over some of the work
being done to unearth her. From what I understand, the remains and the
any evidence that may have been found with her were later destroyed. Is that
something that is typical. No, not in my opinion. Okay. And
now sometimes all that they get missed play or get put on a shelf,
but not not destroyed especially or something like this. So yeah, now that's
that's a rather unusual phenomena that we'd find us in. Has this case just
stayed with you over the years, Well, it's one that you remember more
than more than the others. It's it's so many unknown, so many somebody's
daughters was there, Um, somebody's grandchild was there. Mammon had not heard
of the Patti Auto case until we told him about it. Well, and
you know that's interesting because Lewiston is a back road where this is the northeast
Oorian. There's one road that goes to Lewiston. Um, and if somebody
were to get out of Lewiston and they would come into Enterprise and then on
over towards the Grand Rude Valley, probably well, there's a couple of greedy
old cabins or remnants of cabins on this area. So it was it's been
an area of access for probably one hundred and fifty years. But I don't
know, if you know, somebody were driving down one of the main cross
mountain roads and said, oh, here's a here's that old road. Let
me just take it and see where it goes. If they were going up
the road to the Northern Northern League direction, it was within a couple of
miles of basically civilization farming area. If they were coming from the other direction,
from the north, from the Elgin Weston Highway, they say, whoops,
almost out of the mountains, I better better do something. So it
was clearly not a place close to a home where you know, somebody could
have taken somebody, but there were no other reported deaths in the area.
The Weston Elgin Highway Manon is referring to is a curvy two lane highway that
takes drivers between the Oregon towns of Weston and Elgin. Weston is northwest of
the site of the Jane Does Remains, and Elgin is a short distance southeast
of the spot. To approach the site from the north, as Rob and
his dad did back in nineteen seventy eight, you'd leave the highway just south
of the Andes Prairie Snow Park and take a winding forest service road along miles
of mountain ridges before reaching Rouco Road. It's another four miles or so down
Rouco Road before reaching their campsite. To go the way Rob and his dad
drove into the site back in nineteen seventy eight. It would be a shot
in the dark to find that spot if you didn't know what you were doing.
We explained to Mammon that Patty didn't appear to be pregnant when she disappeared
in nineteen seventy six. In his mind, that doesn't rule herround as being
the woman found in these hills. Many times, not many, but sometimes
people and leugenerically termed it a full term Now you know, that could have
been anywhere from three or four months up to you know skeleton. Um certainly
wasn't scientific that it was a full term pregnancy. It's just the lay people
there said, you know there was evidence of the fetus, right, so
that that element does not bother me at all. Um m m. Interesting.
What what happened to the husband any idea time on? Still, but
we had to actually remove him, physically remove him from the area because he
wouldn't stop working to locate the source of the smell. Anyone with information pertaining
to the disappearance of Patricia Otto should contact the Lewiston Police Department's tipline at two
zero eight two nine eight three nine three nine. Anyone with information pertaining to
the identity of the Finland Creek Jane Doe or other information related to that case
should contact the Union County District Attorney at DA at Union hyphen County dot org.
If you, or anyone you know is a victim of domestic abuse,
please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at eight hundred seven nine nine. Safe
STILL is a production with a Reporter's Notebook and Grayson Shaw Media. You can
connect with us online at the Reporter's Notebook dot com or via email at info
at the Reporter's Notebook dot com. Still was researched, written and produced by
Karen Shaw Anderson. Additional research in script editing provided by Christine Hughes. Original
music by Smith Uosso. I'm your host and associate producer Gary Anderson. Special
thanks to everyone who graciously provided interviews and help with our research. We would
specifically like to thank the advocates for Patricia Otto and the Finlay Creek Jindoe Task
Force. Like Follow and subscribe to STILL on your favorite podcast platform, and
follow us on Facebook or Twitter. To join the conversation. Ezekiel thirty four
sixteen. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the stray,
and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak