According to CBS News, four decades after two women were murdered in Breckenridge, Colorado, investigators discovered that they had inadvertently saved the killer when they helped him get his vehicle unstuck from a snowstorm.
In 1982, Bobby Joe Oberholzer (29) and Annette Schnee (21) went missing from a resort in Breckenridge. Six months later, both were found dead with gunshot wounds. The authorities didn’t know that the murders were related until after they discovered the bodies.
The killer’s identity baffled the police at the time, even though he was within their grasp on the night of his crime. Forty years later, investigators discovered this “bitter truth,” according to the report.
The women vanished on a day when the police were occupied with rescuing Alan Lee Phillips, whose truck was stranded in bad weather. It turned out that he had committed his crime earlier that same day.
A plane spotted a man stranded on a snowy cliff and alerted the mayor’s office, who then dispatched the local fire brigade to rescue him.
According to a Network report, Dave Montoya, the local fire chief at the time, revealed that he remembered a prominent bruise on Phillips’ face. He told investigators that Phillips had said he got it from walking in the snow 10 years prior. However, they would later discover that Oberholzer hit him with a copper keyring made by her husband Jeff.
Investigators believe that Phillips killed the two women after he assault them in two separate crimes on the same day.
Decades later, in 2020, an investigator sent a sample of the DNA they found on the socks of one of two young women to a lab. In January 2021, the DNA results came back and showed that the owner of the mechanic’s shop in Colorado was “Alan Phillips”.
The murder case of Bobby and Annette was considered an unsolved crime for decades, and is among the crimes presented on the “Unsolved” website.
The details that the authorities discovered during Phillips’ trial this year were revealed recently. He was convicted of “first degree murder” and other charges and sentenced on November 7 to life imprisonment twice in a row without the possibility of parole, according to a report by the Associated Agency Press.
