Hi, this is Sarah Morgan, one of the voices you've heard on Still.
We hope this story moves you, but more than anything, we pray
someone will come forward to help solve these tragic cases. Spread the word by
posting about Patricia Otto and the Finlay Creek Jane Doe on social media. You
can find links to their advocacy pages in our show notes. It's not too
late to help these women. The truth is out there. And please take
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to Info at the Reporter's Notebook dot com. And please, if you know
something, come forward now. Get ready for the next episode of Still.
This podcast contains intense subject matter. Listener discretion is advised. My dad,
while he was in prison, tried to keep really busy, so he used
his hands to make things. He made a grandfather clock, and he made
these very impressive dollhouses. So he originally sent the first dollhouse, and we
were so impressed with this house. It's huge, it's this tall and this
wide, and I can stand on it right now. It's so strong,
it's heavy, it's amazing. And all these little people, a whole little
family, and we thought this was the coolest house to ever. And then
he told us, I'm building an even better house than this house. You
girls are going to be so amazed. In between them made me a leather
vest with my name Dallas on it, a purse with my name, Dallas,
leather purse, all these little nice things. And then the dollhouse came
in. This massive dollhouse has electricity in it, the lights light up.
It's everything's handmade, all these wooden pieces of it's impressive. You still have
it, of course I have it. Suzanne Tims, who of course used
to be Dallas Auto, took us to the garage to see the dollhouse.
The massive structure would dwarf any of Barbie and Kin's mansions. It has two
full stories with dormers on the wood shingled roof and an attic that opens up
to reveal more rooms On the third level. A bay window and covered porch
welcomed tiny visitors, and the windows are adorned with shutters and curtains. Like
all of the stuff. He made it all by hand. Every piece of
furniture is tacked and made would furniture by hand. All the little drawers in
prisons, and all the little drawers open. Oh my god, it's right
there. So it's three full stories. Just this is a clear piano.
Wow, it is let's see. Let see one. It's crazy. It's
playing that same song. This see is different. The tiny player piano was
a perfect replica of the one Suzanne remembers near the front door of the house
on twenty ninth Street. I've heard songs that have played off that piano before
where you're like, I'm right back in the house. So I try to
analyze everything. But we loved our dollhouses, and we spent so many hours
playing perfect family in the dollhouse. And at no point did anybody die in
my dollhouse. From the pages of the Reporter's notebook, this is still season
two. I'm your host, Gary Anderson. At the end of the last
episode, retired Union County, Oregon District Attorney Dale Mammon asked us what happened
to Pattiotto's husband, Ralph. This is as good a time as any to
fill you in on that. In our minds, it helps explain why in
the Lewiston Police Department is hesitant to talk with us on the record. In
nineteen eighty one, Ralph's attorney successfully petitioned the Idaho Supreme Court to review his
murder for higher conviction. His lawyer had been arguing that Ralph's dependence on alcohol
made him incapable of fully understanding what he was doing when he paid the undercover
cop to kill Lewiston police Captain Dailor. His attorney said it was entrapment for
the officer to meet with Ralph to discuss an assassination, and then to accept
payment for the hit. But as far as the court was concerned, the
issue wasn't whether Ralph was culpable for the crime, it was the statute under
which he was charged and convicted. The court ended up splitting its decision,
voting three to two that hiring a hitman did not qualify as attempted murder.
Instead, the court wrote in its decision that Ralph was guilty of mere solicitation.
He was released from prison seven years before his sentence would have ended,
and he returned to Lewiston, still proclaiming that the cops in his town were
crooked and had railroaded him. He started making plans to sue the police.
It's probably fair to say that most officers in Lewiston were also still angry with
Ralph for trying to have one of their own killed. I imagined that they
were particularly resentful that his conviction was overturned. All this was simmering beneath the
surface when Lewiston cops came to his door at nine pm September seventh, nineteen
eighty three to arrest Ralph for theft. He had been charged with stealing a
chainsaw in nearby Clearwater County, and a judge there issued a bench warrant when
he failed to appear in court. Police reports say that Ralph was severely intoxicated
when he was picked up, and the arresting officers had to help him walk
to the police cruiser. When he was booked into jail in Lewiston at eleven
twenty pm, the report indicates Ralph was so intoxicated he was unable to sign
the inventory acknowledgement for his belongings. Over the next few hours, various agencies
took custody of Ralph. He was first handed over to nez Perce County's Sheriff's
deputies, who then passed him on to Clearwater County deputies. The paperwork processing
and custody transfers took time, and it was almost four am before he made
it inside the jail in Orofino. Ralph's family believes that the amount of time
it took for him to be booked into the Lewis In jail indicates that police
there used the opportunity to try to coerce a confession from him about killing his
wife. In the shower room at the Orofino Jail, Clearwater County staff saw
grotesque injuries on his right ankle and foot. The skin had almost completely separated
and was falling off. The jailers called for help, but Ralph lost consciousness
before paramedics arrived. He stopped breathing. Officers in. Paramedics tried to resuscitate
him and rushed him to a nearby hospital. Medical personnel at the hospital worked
for nearly two hours trying to revive them. Ralph was pronounced dead at seven
fifty four am, September eight, nineteen eighty three. Yeah, so we
were told that he had a heart attack and that he died in the shower,
but he's forty two. So, like I said, when we got
old enough, Natalie wanted to know what happened, so she requested the autopsy,
and we got the photos. I have them, I can show them
to you. It's not a heart attack. There's something not normal. And
it's very obvious by the photos that there's something not normal. You don't deglove
your foot, which means all the skin removes and it turns inside out from
a heart attack, and you don't have patches of skin missing from a heart
heart attack. I do wonder, though, if the degloving of sport because
he was binding it doing something too. I think he twisted his ankle and
he called and said I cast at it and got it stuck in something.
He hurt his ankle that night. It's so obvious that he hurt it that
night. He tries to cast it. He calls his brother, I hurt
my foot. Ray says, go to the doctor tomorrow, do something.
But he's so stubborn and he's so smart. He's going to make his own
cast and make his own brace. And he got his foot stuck in some
kind of plaster, And that could explain that one, because he was binding
it, so it wouldn't hurt, and he was cutting off the circulation,
so it wouldn't hurt. That could definitely explain the degloving, but it doesn't
explain all the other marks on his body. The medical examiner concluded that Ralph
did die of a heart attack and that alcoholic liver disease was a contributing factor.
There was no ready explanation for the skin lost on his right foot and
ankle. In their notes of the incident, Sheriff's deputies wondered if Ralph's wounds
could have been caused by a chemical burn or steam. As you heard from
Suzanne, Ralph had been binding his foot and ankle because of the pain he
was having. What was causing the pain. We know that he complained to
his brother about hurting his ankle back on September fifth, nineteen seventy six,
but we're not sure if it was the same ankle that had the severe wound
when he died. Dodie also wrote in her manuscript that in nineteen seventy seven,
Ralph tried to make a cast for his foot and ankle. He soon
realized the cast was too tight, so he tried to soak it to soften
it. The cast swelled, increasing the pressure and tightness on his foot.
He then called Ray for help, but Ray wasn't available that day. We're
not sure how that issue was eventually resolved, or again, if the injury
he was treating was related to the ankle he injured the previous year. Clearwater
officials said Ray told them that Ralph would often bind his foot tight enough to
stop the circulation because of the severe pain he was having. We're not doctors,
but it does sound like Ralph's heart disease, severe foot pain, and
self treatment could all be connected. Our amateur research into heart conditions did provide
a plausible explanation. Most of the injuries on his body appeared to be arterial
ulcers, which are incredibly painful sores with a punched out appearance. They're caused
by heart disease and poor circulation, and they're prone to appear on the lower
extremities. If untreated, they can lead to death of the affected body tissue,
also known as gangrene. If you're interested in seeing what we found,
google arterial ulser. If any doctors are listening, feel free to correct us
or offer a counterpoint. We would definitely be interested in hearing an expert's opinion.
We also want to remind you that Ralph's father died of a heart attack
when he was only thirty nine, so it doesn't seem out of the realm
of possibility that Ralph could meet the same fate at a young age. Now,
I don't want to give the impression that we're taking Ralph's death lightly.
No matter what our opinions are about his guilt or innocence, he still had
rights, and family members earnestly believed that Ralph had been the victim of police
brutality. Worst of all, Natalie and Suzanne had lost another parent. It
was devastating for them. Suzanne's older sister, Natalie, spent years trying to
discover what happened to both her parents. She gathered binders full of police and
newspaper reports related to her mother's disappearance and her father's death so we could look
and see what happened. Why does one family think one thing and family think
another thing? And you read through it, and the more that I read
through it, the more that I probably ten pages in was telling my sister
my father's guilty. There's nobody else than him who knows what happened. To
her mother and I know what I saw was real, This is real.
My sister didn't want to believe that. She wanted to believe that that our
dad was this loving, wonderful person who had never hurt her or us.
So she tried to prove by going through this that they missed things, that
they over things, that there was leads that they could have looked into.
That you know that our mom left and she was in the process of years
she had actually reached out Tidaho State Patrol and was trying to sue the State
of Idaho saying this is so wrongly done and there's so much injustice in this
case. She spent years, years, years on the case. Now,
I wanted to prove that the police had tortured him to get answers about where
my mother was located at. And obviously the police deny any involvement. And
they say that he was drunk when they picked him up and he fell.
He drunk. He was drunk and he fell and he hurt himself. But
his blood alcohol is point one on the autopsy. I believe that is not
intoxicated. By now, you've probably wondered why you haven't heard from Natalie Suzanne's
older sister. In two thousand and six, another tragedy struck Natalie. Her
husband, son, and a friend of her sons were all overcome by carbon
monoxide during a Memorial Day weekend boat outing. When the boat was found,
it appeared the group had taken shelter from the cool weather under a storage tarp
snapped onto the boat's exterior. The boat's engine and a propane heater produced carbon
monoxide fumes which couldn't dissipate under the boat cover. Susanne had lost another lifeline.
And there was a time when at our house we got our own bedrooms
for the first time in all those years, and I think we were seventeen
or eighteen, and I used to sneak back into her room. I literally
could not sleep without her. And I'm like, I'm the most pathetic seventeen
year old ever. I have to have my sister. But we would just
sit and talk, just like we had always done. Then she would comfort
me and encourage me. She was a mother and a father and a best
friend all in one. The clearest course forward to Susanne was to pick up
the torch Natalie had been caring and try to find justice. For her mom
and hopefully finally bring her home, which brings us to the summer of twenty
twenty one, when she scrolled through Facebook and saw a drawing of a woman
who looked eerily familiar. So I reach out to Redgrave Research, who did
the three D friend a drawing, and I send them a picture of my
mother and me side by side, and I said, how did you draw
this photo? It looks like you drew my mother and I had a baby
together because it's her and I together. And I thought, I'm going to
wait for months to hear back from this guy, because he's back east somewhere.
I'm going to wait for months. Within hours, Anthony got back to
me, and I thought that was a good sign that Anthony got back to
me so quickly. And I reach out to the Cold Keith team, who's
on this Facebook page, who actually is the one that created the page to
get this going? And I realized since twenty eighteen, they have been trying
to give this Jane Doe a name. The Thinly Creek team is headed by
volunteer investigators Jason Fudge and Melinda Jetterburgh. You heard Melinda's voice at the Jane
Doe site in the last episode. So I'm messaging mel, Hey, melt
you found a body. I'm missing a body. Let's talk right. This
is my mom. She's five foot, three hundred and thirty pounds, Caucasian
female with blonde hair. Last seeing wear red pants in a white shirt,
and you have a body matching that. And they told us in nineteen seventy
eight it wasn't my mom. I literally have a paper right here that says
it's not her. What Daniel records did they use? How do they compare
her? How do I know it's not her? As we said in the
last episode. In nineteen ninety, the Finlay Creek Jandoe case was labeled as
unsolvable and was closed. The Jando's remains were cremated and all the associated evidence
was destroyed. The cremains were then lost, wiping out hopes of finding a
DNA match. Melinda, who many call mel, spent months in the early
part of the pandemic chasing down leads to try to find out what happened to
those cremains. She ran into dead end after dead end. The funeral home
where the Jando had been sent had changed ownership and the previous owner had passed
away. The new owner couldn't find any records of the remains. Then Mel
had a conversation with an Idaho detective about an unrelated When she mentioned her frustration
with this case, the detective suggested she checked with the coroner's office in Walla
Walla, Washington, which in nineteen ninety was the closest community with a crematorium.
I never thought to do that because I just assumed she was at the
funeral home. And then there was another conversation. He said, yeah,
get hold of the docent at the Walla Walla corner's office because they keep really
good records. I was like, oh, okay, I guess I can
do that. And then I had also talked to the City of Walla Walla,
a representative of the City of Walla Walla, and he had said the
same thing. They're like, get old of the coroner's office. So I
get a hold of Richard Greenwood. I emailed him, and I had to
email him a couple of times because again, you know, we had this
whole pandemic thing going on. And then he said so that's when he said,
so I found this bag of remains. They look kind of old,
and they have half a sticker on the from the funeral home that she was
sent to, and I just went The cremains the corner found were labeled as
a John Doe, not a Jane Doe, and the location noted on the
file of where the unidentified remains were first found didn't match. But the case
number written on the side of a piece of paper did match the finlay crete
Jane Doe, so did the name of the investigator assigned to the case.
Feeling hopeful, Mel contacted the Oregon State forensic anthropologist, who then coordinated with
Washington State to see what could be done with the remains. The first task
for forensic DNA analysts is to see if any genetic material can be extracted from
the remains. Despite advancements in testing, it's difficult to extract DNA from cremated
bones because extreme heat destroys the organic material. The remains were sent to a
Canadian lab in late August of twenty twenty one in an attempt to get answers.
Kathy Taylor, a forensic anthropologist in Washington State, was invaluable in facilitating
the transfer of the remains. The team was crushed to learn in August that
she passed away before the results were available. We were at Suzanne's house when
the news was delivered about her death, so Richard Greenwood and the coroner and
I have been communicating with doctor Taylor, who is an outstanding anthropologist similar to
doctor Vance in the state of Oregon, and I knew she hadn't been feeling
well. So I'm absolutely shocked too. I have. She's a young I
mean a young lady. She's totally dedicated to the state of Washington and defining
unidentified and like she is the bone expert. She carries her phone with her
when she's on vacation and they will text her all the time with random bones
and she's incredible, it says doctor Kathy Taylor says. She passed away on
August first, and it says her work also served as a critical link in
solving criminal investigations, including the Green River Killer murders. She's phenomenal. She
identified the youngest Green River Killer victim and she was super responsive. Another blow
came in December when the lab said there was no usable DNA in the cremains,
but the team is undeterred. They know that Suzanne's best shot of getting
DNA for comparison with the Jane Doe to herself is in finding undiscovered bone left
behind on the hillside where investigators combed for remains in nineteen seventy eight. So
but yeah, this is this is the area right in here. So yeah,
and I mean, you know, you look at that tree right there.
It's it's probably only thirty years old, if even that. So,
yeah, there's a lot of growth in here because this was a lot more
open. There was a lot more well you can imagine because it hasn't been
touched in forty years. I haven't been in here and logged. It doesn't
look like so there is a lot more ground cover at the time, or
was it a lot more? There was a lot more scrub a lot more
scrub brush um, and more of these grasses and ferns. I think I
remember ferns. Rob Parr's memory was accurate. It matched the crime scene photos
Mail received when she got copies of the Jane Doe case file. It's like
he was looking at pictures that I had already seen. So it was,
but he's not describing pictures that he seemed no describing ye memory of he said,
because I had always assumed that they were taking the pictures as they were
excavating, and Rob's like, no, I saw the skull, I saw
the ribs, it was all out. And he talked about the job and
the shoes. She's like, I saw all of that, and I was
like, that's exactly what the pictures look like that I have. So I
don't ever see the pictures. Yeah, because I've never published them anywhere.
Those those don't go anywhere. Retired Da daale o'mammon remembered a similar scene.
And we parked in a parking spot beside it a rural, very rural road,
and it was pointed out down a small embankment up on the other side,
and then beside a log was this body in a very very shallow grave,
or the remains of the body, I should say, in a shallow
grave. And that's all we found at that point. And then it was
sort of a quasi open area, not all a grown and we had no
difficulty in looking down the creek and a northerly director or a southerly direction maybe
fifteen or twenty feet, and there was a down tree who had been there
a long time, and it was right beside the tree in a quasi open
area five or ten fifteen feet wide. That's where the body was found.
Pre DNA testing, investigators had little to go on to try to identify the
woman. One there was no reported missing persons in northeast Origan, and that's
the four or five county area here, and certainly it would have in the
law enforcement community been common knowledge had there been somebody missing. It was,
as I recall, about the time that the homicides were occurring in the Green
River area around Seattle, and our conversation speculation was, well, there's there's
another one that they that happened to from that area and got this far and
decided to dispose of the body or whatever they were doing. But they were
never really I think the law enforcement didn't make inquiry, and no missing persons
were reported even in that area at that time. Soon we're going to talk
about who the woman could be if it's not Patty Otto, but for now,
let's focus on what's been happening at the grave side. So this is
what we have narrowed down. When we were up there, we had come
out for about fifteen minutes because she had odor and was not able to figure
out where it was coming from, and so when I took her out so
she was quit being frustrated, and then put her back in and we put
her back into a different area, so hoping it would be like a fresh
take. So it worked in that a lot of the odor that she'd been
confused with before it was no longer she wasn't catching it, so so that
is a rule out. There was no longer you know something here. It
was like I don't have anything. So we worked back down. So this
is good and bad. We worked back down. She still has serious interest
below where it's believed the body is found. It is super thick, so
she goes back to it. So she's not a larning she's not like it's
right here. She works in. There's like that big, big down tree
and we've marked it, so I have the way points and stuff. We've
marked it, and we moved it so she could get into it. And
she snuffs and snuffs, and then she's like, I don't know, and
so she'll work her way down the tree a little bit and she comes back
and she goes the other side of the tree and walked back, and then
we take her out past to see if the odor could be coming in from
somewhere else, and so that's where we're at, is that she definite,
finitely has odor, and thankfully the second time and we were able to rule
out because you know, saw how far out she kept working. I was
like, oh, my goodness, a lot of area right, and there
could be It would be unusual, though to have it that far up and
that far down. And what I saw because we went back in, it
had clouded over, so the sun was no longer shining in there, and
I think that's what happened. I think it quit pulling the odor up because
sun directly on an odor pulls it very quickly. So um, so it's
hard a lot of times. That's why we talk about daytime and stuff,
because if we have a lot of sun in an area, our odor can
just go straight up and the dog doesn't get it very well at all.
So it's good that, I mean, the area allows the odor to be
held, so that's good, but it's so thick that it means we have
to keep holling in amity. Larson and her dog Brin went back to the
site three months later, in November twenty twenty one, with another handler,
Gail Collins and her search dog wyat, and that day it was a little
bit sunny. We had a nice breeze. It was about fifty degrees,
you know, a little more moisture, So it was much better search conditions
than when I had been there in August. Her dog showed indications of having
odor in the same regions that Bryn had in August. And interestingly, her
dog went to where the burial site, where we believed the burial site was,
and actually had put his foot on he put his nose on it,
he put his paw on it, and he would kind of do like a
scuff with his paw, and he was very interested in that area. Kept
going back to it frequently and show a lot of interest there. The thing
about that dog, I've trained with him extensively, and he's a dog that
whenever he's dealt with buried source, likes to touch the spot. So he's
not a digger in general, but he always has when we've had buried material
and that he's been searching for, he frequently will show that same behavior where
he puts his foot down and he scuts the ground almost like he's trying to
help himself smell better. And the other thing about him he's a dog that
likes to be one accurate, so we didn't get a trained final response from
him on that location either. A trained final response is when a dog gives
a signal that it absolutely has found what it's trained to find, whether that's
an injured hiker or human remains. These dogs don't alert to other animal remains.
They know what they're looking for. After sniffing the area we believe was
the grave side, the dog moved further along the trail and up the hill
a bit and got extremely interested in a cluster of trees. 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. The odor as he was working,
but he was actually standing up on the trees against them, sniffing up into
the air, and then he would work down to the bottom of the trees.
We would pull him out of that immediate area and let him go,
and he would come right back in and start working it again. So we
were very interested in that area because of his behavior, but they couldn't be
certain that whyatt had found the source of an odor because heat and wind can
play tricks on a dog's nose trapping odor in an area that's several feet or
even yards away from the source. A dog could get into an area and
have an odor, but not actually have remained right there. There's somewhere in
the scinity, or there's you know, there's a reason in the vicinity that
it's causing the oder to be there. But it doesn't mean the dog's wrong.
It just means that that's where it's most concentrated. The odor is most
concentrated. Amity and Gail used an app to get the GPS coordinates of the
spot where Wyatt was signaling, but the GPS malfunctioned. Fortunately, they also
took pictures of the area because they wanted to bring in Bryn to see how
she would react. This time, she had more interest closer to the grave
site than what she did before. Before she worked much further out from it
and had This time she was much closer to the grave site in her interest.
She still did not give a trained final response in the grave site area.
In that immediate area we lost. Well, this is when when we
were working, that's when we discovered that we had the wrong GPS because we
had GPS asked the spot where why it had been so interested in the trees,
and there was just it was something wrong with the GPS, so we
didn't actually know where it was. So we just went ahead and worked the
area. And the really interesting part for us as handlers was that we were
keeping an eye out, trying to kind of work our way back. We
really had no idea where we had been because we were just following the dogs,
letting them work. And as we were getting back into an area,
I stopped and I had my phone up because from the picture I'd taken,
and Brin went in and started working in some trees and I pulled up the
photograph and Gale was looking up the photograph with me, and I said I
think this is it, and Gale said, yes, I think that's right,
and we looked up and my dog was giving a trained final response.
Next time on still, somebody had spotted the cards the Tapidera motor in and
so I called the Tapidera just to be I try to be discreet, just
because of the long drive, right, And we're like as she still registered
death and the manager said, yeah, she just paid for another night.
Anyone with information pertaining to the disappearance of Patricia Otto should contact the Lewiston Police
Department's tipline at two zero eight to 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 of The 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 Uoso. 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
Findlay 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