Two Colorado women found shot to death in 1982 were last seen within two hours of the other on January 6 in Breckinridge, the popular ski resort town in the Rocky Mountains, approximately eighty miles southwest of Denver. The finding of one pair of orange socks on one victim and of the second pair lying near the other suggested they had been killed by the same man.

Twenty-one-year-old Annette Schnee and twenty-nine-year-old Barbara “Bobbie” Jo Oberholtzer were believed to have separately encountered their killer while hitchhiking, a common area practice at the time.

After over forty years, advancements in DNA technology enabled authorities to finally sock it to the “other” Orange Socks killer.

Annette Schnee And Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer

Bobbie Jo Oberthotlzer was married and lived in Alma, fifteen miles south of Breckenridge; the unmarried Annette Schnee resided in Blue River, five miles south of “the Breck.” The women are not believed to known each other even though they both worked in Breckinridge, Bobbie as a receptionist at a real estate developer’s office and Annette as a cocktail waitress at the Flip Side Bar.

Both women frequently thumbed rides to and from work, and each sought to hitch home on the frigid evening of January 6.

Both Women Worked In Breckenridge

Annette also worked as a chambermaid at the Holiday Inn in Frisco, ten miles north of Breckenridge and about fifteen miles north of her home. It was from this job that she had left at approximately 4:15 p.m. feeling under the weather. After seeing her doctor in Frisco, she was driven back to Breckenridge, where she was observed speaking to another woman at The Drug Store, a local pharmacy, at about 4:45 p.m. It appeared they knew each other as Annette was overheard reminding the other woman to buy cigarettes.

After purchasing some medication, Annette was seen hitchhiking at approximately 5:00. She was scheduled to work at the bar at 8:00, but she never arrived. Though she may still have felt ill, she did not call to offer an explanation for her absence.

Annette Disappears

Roughly an hour after Annette Schnee was last seen hitchhiking, an excited Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer departed work, having learned she had received a promotion to Office Manager. At approximately 6:20, she telephoned her husband Jeff saying she and several friends were celebrating by having drinks at the Village Pub, in Breckinridge’s Bell Tower Mall. She said she would bum a ride home.

 Jeff said a friend visited him at his home for several hours that evening. After the friend left at approximately 10:00, Jeff fell asleep on the couch while watching TV. When he awoke around midnight, he was surprised that Bobbie Jo was not home. He grew concerned when she had not returned by 3:00 a.m., because the bar closed at 2:00.

Jeff drove to Breckenridge early that morning, January 7, to search for Bobbie Jo. The friends with whom she had had drinks told him she had left the bar at approximately 7:30 p.m. and they assumed she had hitched a ride home.  Several motorists observed her doing so southbound out of town at approximately 7:50 near the Minit Mart, approximately one-hundred yards from the bar, and less than a mile from where Annette was seen hitchhiking.

 After finding no trace of his wife, Jeff went to the police station but was told not enough time had elapsed to file a missing person’s report.

Jeff Searches For Bobbie Jo

The following morning, a rancher who lived thirty miles outside of Breckinridge telephoned Jeff saying he had found Bobbie Jo’s driver’s license on his property along with several of her purse contents. As Jeff and two friends were traveling along United States Highway 285 to retrieve the items, Jeff noticed a blue spot in an open field approximately thirty feet off the southeast side of the highway and about ten miles from the ranch. Pulling over, they found it was Bobbie Jo’s backpack and purse.

Bobbie’s Backpack

     And Partial Contents     

Lying nearby were several bloody tissues and Bobbie Jo’s right wool glove, also spattered with blood. A short distance away lay her left glove and stocking cap.

               

                      Right Glove And Tissue             Left Glove And Hat

Jeff’s friends conducted a cross-country search for Bobbie Jo. At roughly 3:00 p.m., her body was found in a snow embankment approximately twenty feet off Highway 9 near the summit of Hoosier Pass, an 11,500-foot mountain ten miles south of Breckenridge and over twenty miles from where her backpack had been discovered. The mountain was along the route she usually took home from work.

An autopsy found Bobbie Jo had been shot twice in the chest from one-to-two feet with the second bullet grazing her right breast.  The gun was not found, but ballistics tests showed it was a .38 or .357 Remington/Peters handgun using Winchester hollow point copper bullets.

Bobbie Jo’s Body Is Found

The assailant appeared to have attempted but failed to bind Bobbie Jo, as two eighteen inch plastic tie-wraps were found on only one of her wrists.

The oddest piece of evidence found at the scene was a single orange ankle bootie lying several hundred yards from Bobbie Jo. She did not own such a sock.

                                                       

                                             Plastic Wire Ties                  Orange Bootie 

The only footprints found at the scene were Bobbie Jo’s and her tracks showed backtracking near where she was found. Investigators believe she had escaped from her perpetrator’s vehicle at the top of the pass and ran downhill along the road approximately three-hundred feet where she was shot. Wounded, she then went over the snow embankment toward a stand of trees before collapsing and sliding down the snow a short distance and perishing.

Crime Scene Photo

Bobbie Jo’s keys and key ring attached to a brass hook Jeff had made for her as a protective weapon were discovered in the summit parking lot, three-hundred feet south of where her body was found. It also had traces of blood on it, identified as hers.

Bobbie Jo’s Key Ring And Hook

Several days later, more of Bobbie Jo’s purse items were found scattered along the same side of Highway 285, and her driver’s license was found north of where the rancher had found her backpack.

Bobbie Jo’s Driver’s License Photo

Although by all accounts Bobbie Jo and Jeff Oberhotlzer’s three-and-half year marriage had been happy, he became a suspect in her murder as well as in Annette Schnee’s disappearance.

When initially questioned by police, Jeff said he did not know Annette. After seeing her picture in the newspaper on January 14, however, he told them he recalled having picked her up while she was hitchhiking in November 1981, two months before she disappeared.

Jeff, the owner of Alma’s Alpine Appliance Repair Company, remembered giving Annette his business card after she had mentioned needing something fixed.

Two months after his wife’s murder, Jeff passed two polygraph tests, one administered by Summit County and the other by Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI.) Still, he was not cleared as a suspect because he was the only link established between Bobbie Jo and Annette, and because the friend with whom he said he had spent the evening of January 6 could not be located to corroborate his claim.

Jeff Is The Only Connection

The murdered Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer and the missing Annette Schnee were each petite, had long blond hair, and were last seen hitchhiking in Breckenridge on the same evening. Authorities believed the cases were connected.

Virtual confirmation came six months later, as the snow had melted away.

The Cases Are Believed Connected

Annette’s body was found on July 3 by a thirteen-year-old boy (some sources say he was nine-years-old) fishing in the remote Sacramento Creek, three miles west of Colorado Highway 9, roughly twenty-three miles from where she was last seen, and approximately thirteen miles from where Bobbie Jo’s body was found.

An autopsy determined Annette had bled and frozen to death after being shot in the lower back, with, as had Bobbie Jo, a .38 or .357 handgun firing Remington/Peters copper jacketed hollow point bullets. Also as with Bobbie Jo, the gun was not found.

Annette’s Body Is Found

Annette’s pants zipper had been broken, her boot shoes were on the wrong feet, and she was wearing a long sock on only her right foot; the other sock was in her sweatshirt pocket. The crumpled and disarrayed state of the clothes suggested she had been raped, but that could not conclusively be proven.

                           

Annette’s Clothing Items:

                   Pants                          Right Shoe And Sock    Sweatshirt And Sock

The shorter sock on Annette’s left foot stood out to authorities. She often wore a pair of orange booties and the single sock matched the one found lying near Bobbie Jo’s body on Hoosier Pass six months earlier.

Annette Was Wearing The Other Orange Sock

In September, two months later, Annette’s backpack was discovered near the Hoosier Pass Summit, not far from where Bobbie Jo’s body was found in January. Among the items in her wallet was the business card Jeff Oberholtzer had given her ten months earlier.

                             

  Annette’s Backpack And Contents     Jeff Oberhotlzer’s Business Card

Investigators believe Annette was picked up by her killer at approximately 5:00 and driven to a short dead-end road roughly twenty miles south of Breckinridge where she was likely sexually assaulted. Afterward, the assailant either dressed her or she hurriedly dressed, putting on only one orange sock and her boots on the wrong feet in haste. She apparently escaped but was chased down and shot to death as she was running.

Killed First, But Found Second

Police believe that the killer then returned to Breckinridge and saw Bobbie Jo Oberhotlzer hitchhiking. He drove her ten miles to the scenic overlook south of town where he may have attempted to rape her, but she is believed to have also escaped, knocking the other orange sock out of the killer’s vehicle in the process. As with Annette, the killer chased her down the road, approximately one-hundred yards, and shot her to death.

Killed Second, But Found First

In December 1981, a couple of weeks before the women went missing, Tracy Petrocelli was arrested for the shooting deaths of his former girlfriend, Melanie Barker, and James Wilson, a Reno, Nevada, car dealer he had tried to carjack. He became a suspect in the Breckenridge murders after he was found to have stayed at the Holiday Inn in Frisco where Annette worked shortly before the murders.

Ballistics tests of the bullets used in the December shootings were inconclusive to those in the “orange socks” murders.

Tracy Petrocelli

In February, one month after the women’s’ disappearances, cab drive Tom Luther was arrested for attacking and raping twenty-one-year-old Mary Brown of Denver. Luther coaxed her into his pickup after seeing her late at night outside a Greyhound depot waiting for a bus not far from where Annette and Bobbi Jo were last seen hitchhiking. After driving a short way, Luther pulled over, beat Mary with a hammer, and sexually assaulted her. She escaped and gave police a description of the truck, which they soon found in a trailer park where they arrested Luther.

While in jail awaiting trial, Luther boasted of having killed two women in Summit County, but he later flunked two polygraph tests in which claimed to have been the killer of Annette and Bobbi Jo. He ultimately recanted his claim.

Tom Luther

The friend with whom Jeff Oberhotlzer said he had spent much of the evening on the night of the murders was not found until December 1990. He confirmed being at the home that evening, but the timeframe he provided did not match Jeff’s, though he acknowledged his recollections of that evening of nearly nine years earlier were foggy.

In 1993, however, advanced DNA testing cleared Jeff of the murders. A man deemed a person of interest who had died shortly after the murders was also cleared after DNA was provided by his family members in Great Britain.

Jeff Is Cleared . . .

The DNA also did not match Tracy Petrocelli or Tom Luther. Petrocelli is on death row in Nevada, while Luther is serving a life sentence in Colorado, having committed a murder shortly after getting out of prison for the attack on Mary Brown.

. . . As Are These Killers

The evening of January 6, 1982, was one of the most arctic-like in Breckenridge, with a blizzard and temperatures dropping to 22° below zero. The murders committed during that bitterly cold night remained a Colorado cold case with no further significant developments for another two decades.

The Case Goes Cold

Advanced DNA testing conducted in 2013 on Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer’s metal key ring and hook showed the blood was a mixture of hers and that of a male, who had likely been wounded by her.

Further DNA Testing Proves Key

Though upwards of 30,000 tourists are in Breckenridge during the winter, investigators believed the murderer was someone local who was familiar with the mountains because of the remote area where the women’s bodies were found, in particular Annette’s, who was dumped near a makeshift firing range locals frequented.

Nearly forty years after the murders, they were proven correct.

The Killer Was Likely A Local

DNA testing and profiling through genetic genealogy has helped solve many cold cases in recent years, most notably identifying the Golden State Killer in 2018. Crime scene DNA is tested through publicly available genealogical databases to see if a genetic link to an unidentified killer can be matched to relatives. If a kinship is established, a “family tree” of the suspect is developed.

In January 2021, DNA testing conducted by the Denver genetic genealogy company United Data Content revealed two possible matches for the male blood found on Bobbie Jo Obertholtzer’s glove, the tissues lying next to her, and her brass key ring hook.

The blood was deemed that of either estranged brothers Bruce or Alan Phillips. Bruce, the older brother, lived in Arizona and seemed an unlikely suspect as he had never lived in Colorado, nor did he have any connection to the Centennial State.

Seventy-year-old Alan Phillips, on the other hand, was a promising possibility; he had not only resided near Breckenridge at the time of the murders, he had also previously committed a similar crime in the area.

Alan Phillips

In July 1973, nearly nine years before the murders of Annette Schee and Bobbie Jo Oberhotlzer, Phillips, then twenty-two-years old, confessed to assaulting a young woman he had picked up hitchhiking on the south end of Breckenridge. He said he drove her to an empty road in Fairplay, twenty miles to the south, where he pulled her from his Jeep and beat her several times with a rock. When the woman begged for her life, Phillips acquiesced. He was convicted of assault and burglary and served six months in jail.

At the time of the 1982 murders, Phillips was working as a mechanic in the Henderson mine, ninety miles northeast of Breckenridge, and living in Georgetown, approximately thirty-five miles southwest of the Breck.

Phillips, Circa 1973

An anonymous caller had phoned Crimestoppers in 2005 saying Phillips may have been involved in the murders of Annette Schnee and Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer. The information he provided, however, could not be corroborated.

Irrefutable proof was not obtained until sixteen years later.

 

Phillips, Circa 2005

On February 24, 2021, Alan Phillips was charged with the murders of Annette Schnee and Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer, along with two counts of kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon, after DNA obtained from a Sonic Drive-In bag and napkin he had discarded was matched to the blood on Bobbie Jo’s glove, the Kleenex lying next to it, and her key ring.

Phillips, the owner of a mechanic shop who was semi-retired, was living in Dumont, approximately forty miles north of Breckenridge, and he had resided in central Colorado since the 1982 murders. He was married to his third wife and had a daughter and two stepsons. One of his wives, Colleen, had died in 2003.

Phillips Is Arrested

As Phillips’ trial neared, advanced testing of the orange sock found on Hoosier Pass near where Bobbie Jo’s body was found showed Annette’s DNA was on the bootie’s inside and Bobbie Jo’s was on the outside.

Both Women’s DNA Are Found On The Sock

On September 15, 2022, Alan Phillips was convicted of eight criminal counts including two counts of first-degree murder involving felony kidnapping and robbery. On November 7, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Five months later, on February 27, 2023, the seventy-two-year-old Phillips committed suicide while imprisoned at the Arkansas Correctional Facility near Ordway, Colorado. I have been unable to find how he did so.

Phillips Screwed

Authorities believe Annette Schnee and Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer are not Alan Phillips’ only victims. They continue to investigate his possible involvement in other Colorado cold cases. If you have information about a possibly connected case, please contact the Park County, Colorado, Sheriff’s Office at 720-248-8378.

Is Phillips A Serial Killer?

After learning of Alan Phillips’ 2021 arrest for the murders, a former co-worker recalled coming to his aid on the evening of January 6, 1982, several hours after he had, unknown to anyone at the time, committed the killings.

A call of a stranded motorist had been reported by an unlikely source: a Longmont Air Traffic Controller. At about 11:30 p.m., with the blizzard having worsened, he had received a call from Rocky Mountain Airways pilot Mike Wilcox as he flew over Guanella Pass, a byway crossing an over 11,000-foot mountain range, approximately forty-five miles northeast of Breckenridge.

Among those aboard the plane en route from Denver to San Francisco was Harold Bray, the Sheriff of nearby Jefferson County. He noticed a vehicle on an incline pointing upwards, appearing stuck in a snowdrift, with its headlights flashing in a Morse code SOS distress signal.

Clear Creek County Fire Chief Dave Montoya was among those who arrived on the scene approximately twenty minutes later, shortly before midnight. He had previously worked in the mines and recognized the motorist as Alan Phillips, whom he noticed had scratches and bruises on his face, a cut across his eye, and was mildly intoxicated.

The Rescued Murderer

As he was driving home from a friend’s house in Bailey, about twenty-five miles southeast of Guanella Pass, Phillips said his truck became stuck in the blizzard. Knowing he had had too much to drink, he said he had taken the back roads because they were rarely patrolled by the police, and that he had bumped his head on the truck after he had exited the vehicle and tripped and fallen after being hit by a heap of snow.

Phillips gave on oral statement to police and declined medical treatment. Montoya drove him home and never had any further contact with him.

Phillips’ wounds were likely instead inflicted by Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer.

Fortunate Phillips

Local newspapers reported of Alan Phillips’ unusual rescue. The Clear Creek Courant published its article next to one about the finding of Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer’s body.

An Ironic Article Placement

The murders of Annette Schnee and Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer were solved after over forty years. Although the case is officially closed, two lingering questions relating to Annette remain.

The dark-haired women with whom she was seen at the pharmacy shortly before she vanished was never identified. This woman is not believed to been involved in Annette’s murder, but investigators would still like to speak with her.

The woman was white, had dark hair, stood approximately five-feet-four-inches tall, had a slender build, and smoked Marlboro cigarettes.

Never Identified . . .

The identity of a man in a photo found in Annette’s wallet inside her backpack also remains unknown. He appeared to be in his late-twenties to early-thirties at the time, meaning he would be in his late-sixties to early-seventies today. The photo may be a mugshot or an acting headshot.

. . . And Still Unidentified

A single orange sock was found on Annette Schee and near Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer, but their murders are not the case that is referenced by “Orange Socks.” That informal moniker is bestowed to a murder occurring a little over two-and-a-half years earlier.

The body of an unidentified woman wearing only a pair of orange socks was found in Williamson County, Texas, on October 30, 1979. An autopsy determined she had been strangled to death. Although she is believed to have been discovered only hours after being killed, her identity remained unknown until 2019, when DNA confirmed she was twenty-three-year-old Debra Jackson.

 

Debra Jackson, The Original “Orange Socks”

Henry Lucas confessed to the “Orange Socks” murder and was convicted of the crime.  Following his 2001 death, however, he was confirmed to have been in Jacksonville, Florida, at the time.

Lucas, known as “The Confessions Killer,” was convicted of three murders, but he made several hundred false confessions in hopes of receiving better treatment and privileges from law enforcement. One of the false confessions he made was to the murders of Annette Schnee and Bobbie Jo Oberhotlzer.

Debra Jackson’s murder is unsolved.

Henry Lucas

Ironically, the slain Debra Jackson, formerly known as “Orange Socks,” was found near Georgetown, Texas, while Alan Phillips, whose victims were linked by orange socks, lived in Georgetown, Colorado, when he murdered Annette Schnee and Bobbie Jo Oberhotlzer.

I have a pair of orange ankle socks that I often wear during the summer. After doing this write-up, I may be a little hesitant to continue doing so. lol

What Is It About Orange Socks?

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/201251087/annette_kay-schnee

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/17034251/barbara_jo-oberholtzer

SOURCES:

• CBS News
• Clear Creek Courant (Idaho Springs, Colorado)
• Colorado-Springs Gazette
• The Daily Sentinel (Grand Junction, Colorado)
• Denver Post
• Denver Westword
• 48 Hours
• The Journal Times (Racine, Wisconsin)
• KMGH-TV Denver ABC Affiliate Chanel 7
• KUSA-TV Denver NBC Affiliate Channel 9
• Oxygen Network
• Rocky Mountain Cold Case Website
• Sioux City Journal (Sioux City, Iowa)
• Summit County Journal (Breckenridge, Colorado)
• Summit Daily (Frisco, Colorado)
• Unsolved Mysteries
• Washington Post