Monster (4 page)

“I found a license belonging to Barbara Jo Oberholtzer this morning,” the rancher said, “and looked up your number in the phone book. It was in my yard and [I] thought she might be lookin’ for it.” The rancher fell silent when Jeff explained that his wife was missing.

“I ... I’ll be by to pick it up,” Jeff said, thanking the rancher and hanging up. What the hell was Bobby Jo’s license doing in Como? It meant whoever flung it into Hamilton’s yard had come right past their house the night before. “I knew right then that she was dead,” he later told police.

Still, he was going to need help to find her, dead or alive. He called his brother, James, and asked him to go get Bobby Jo’s license and see if there was anything else at the ranch that might indicate what had happened to her.

After hanging up with James, he called his friends. He asked them to accompany him along the lonely stretch of highway between Alma and the Hamilton property looking for clues. About four miles from the ranch, they found Bobby Jo’s red backpack twenty feet beyond a fence that paralleled the highway. Oberholtzer noticed that the heavy brass key ring was missing from its clip.

Walking along the roadside, the searchers found one of Bobby Jo’s wool mittens—it had blood on it—and then a facial tissue with more blood. Someone picked up a Marlboro cigarette butt lying on top of the snow near the tissue. With tears in his eyes, Jeff looked at the bloody items and hoped his tough little wife had hurt her attacker.

As Jeff and his friends were making their discoveries, James Oberholtzer arrived at the Hamilton ranch and picked up the license. Walking along the roadside, he and the old rancher found papers that had come from Bobby Jo’s wallet, but not the wallet itself.

Unknown to all the searchers, earlier that morning a snowplow driver had discovered a leather pouch belonging to the missing woman on top of a snowbank between Alma and the Hoosier Pass summit. Hoosier is the dividing line between Summit County to the north and Park County to the south. Whatever had happened to Bobby Jo, her possessions had been strewn along the road on the south side of the pass. Jeff decided to report his wife missing to the Park County Sheriff’s Office, just in case word didn’t make it over from the Breckenridge police.

Oberholtzer demanded that a search party be organized. But despite the bloody items, he was told to sit tight. “She’ll probably turn up,” the deputy on duty said.

Angry, Jeff and his companions went out on their own. Some drove slowly along the highway, others took side roads.

Two of the Oberholtzers’ friends on cross-country skis made their way up the pass, parallel to the highway. About 3
P.M.
, they emerged from the tree line, a couple hundred yards from the summit. They saw something lying at the bottom of a snow embankment. It was Bobby Jo.

When Highway 9 reaches the Hoosier Pass summit, most pine trees in the surrounding forest have given up the climb. Those that do struggle in the thin air and through the harsh winters are stunted and twisted into grotesque shapes by the wind. In January, it is a barren and lonely place, snow-shrouded and viciously cold.

So it was the night Barbara “Bobby Jo” Oberholtzer died, her blue eyes open and staring up at the sky, her face frozen in a look of despair that would forever haunt those who found her and those appointed to find her killer.

Rushing to the scene, investigators from both counties began piecing together the events of the night before by following tracks in the snow. Evidently, there had been a struggle in the small parking area at the summit of the pass where a vehicle with Bobby Jo in it had pulled over. Her attacker, or attackers, were apparently trying to subdue her—a pair of plastic handcuffs of a sort often used by law enforcement agencies and known as “flex cuffs” was attached to one of the dead woman’s wrists but not the other. Bobby Jo escaped, perhaps in the fight that left blood on her mitten, and fled by running along the shoulder of the highway in the direction of the tree line 200 yards away.

Maybe if she had reached the trees, she would have been able to hide and been safe, although she would have been alone on top of a desolate mountain pass in sub-zero temperatures. She only made it 100 yards.

There were no footprints in the snow tracking hers, so investigators theorized that her assailant had followed in the vehicle. As the assailant pulled alongside, Bobby Jo turned to flee away from the road. She twisted when her attacker fired a shot at his escaping prey, the bullet grazing the right side of her chest, and she stumbled down the embankment. The gunman fired again, this time hitting her in the back. The wound was fatal, but she continued floundering forward into the hip-deep snow.

The sound of gunfire must have carried in the cold, clear night and echoed off the granite faces of nearby peaks, but there was no one to hear. Still, the killer didn’t take a chance of being discovered and drove off with his victim still alive.

Mortally wounded, Bobby Jo did not give up. Realizing that the gunman had left, she backtracked toward the highway, knowing that her only chance was to flag down a motorist. She struggled to crawl up the steep embankment, leaving a trail of blood.

It was impossible. Her body temperature dropping, her movements growing sluggish, she turned over onto her back and slid to the bottom of the embankment. There, looking up into the Colorado skies, a billion brilliant stars wheeling above her, she died.

In the parking lot, investigators found Bobby Jo’s gray knit cap and the mate of the mitten found earlier that day nearly twenty miles away. It wasn’t until the next day, when the investigators returned, that Bobby Jo’s brass key ring was discovered in the snow of the parking lot.

Making a final sweep of the lot, a police officer also found an orange, ankle-high wool sock. Picking it up was almost an afterthought because it didn’t match anything worn by Bobby Jo; chances were it had been lost by some skier, but it was placed with the other items—just in case.

An autopsy revealed that Bobby Jo Oberholtzer died from hypothermia and blood loss. A large caliber, hollow-point bullet jacket was found in her body. There was no evidence that she had been raped or otherwise assaulted, perhaps because she escaped before her attacker could bind her wrists. True to her scrappy nature, she had not died without a fight—the blood on the mitten and the tissue was not Bobby Jo’s.

In a way, those who loved Bobby Jo were fortunate. There was sadness and anger and fear, but they had a body to bury back in Racine. There was no mystery to what had happened to Bobby Jo, only questions about who and why.

On the other hand, Annette Schnee’s family and friends had nothing. Reported missing by her boyfriend after she failed to come home or report to either of her two jobs, police could find no trace of her. She was simply gone.

Investigators discovered her bartender’s outfit neatly laid out at her home, ready for work. Friends who had given her a ride hitchhiking and a pharmacy clerk came forward with what little information they had. But there were no other clues.

In fact, the only connection police could make between the murder of Bobby Jo and the disappearance of Annette was that both had been hitchhiking in the same direction on the same evening, neither made it home, and they were petite, pretty, and wore their hair to their shoulders.

The incident threw Summit County, and particularly Breckenridge, into a panic. Two women had been attacked for no discernible reason: neither had been carrying much money, nor were they believed to be involved in anything illegal like drug dealing. One of them had been gunned down and left to die a miserable death in the snow, the other was missing and presumed dead. It was beyond understanding. A monster was loose, but who?

Publicly, the police played their cards close to the vest, including how Bobby Jo was murdered. She had not been raped, they said, but they weren’t discounting that as a possible motive. Meanwhile, they cautioned, they had no reason to suspect foul play in the case of Annette Schnee; she had last been seen in the company of another woman with whom she appeared to be friends. And that was about as much as they would say about either case during the first week.

Lacking much real information, rumors began to fly among the citizens of Breckenridge. Calls poured into the local weekly newspaper,
The Summit County Journal.
Another woman had been found murdered on a different pass. Raped. Stabbed. Shot. A body had been discovered in a local housing development. Welding rods had something to do with it.

The police, officially and unofficially, tried to squelch the rumors of other deaths. Nope, they said, one girl dead, one missing. It did little good. In the bars, men talked loudly about forming vigilante groups to find the killer, though no one knew quite where to start. Women discussed buying guns, and some went out and did so.

Neighbors reported the “suspicious” behavior of neighbors with whom they’d been otherwise friendly for years. Strangers were regarded silently. Suspicion fell on Jeff Oberholtzer; maybe he had come to pick up his wife that night and also somehow met up with Annette ... after which he’d killed them both, then launched an elaborate cover-up.

“Anger. Fear. Frustration. Those three words describe the emotions spinning in the minds of Summit County residents as a result of the recent kidnapping/murder of Bobby Jo Oberholtzer of Alma,” wrote a
Summit County Journal
editor a week after the killing.

“Adding to the initial report that a woman was found dead on Hoosier Pass in Park County is the report that a female resident of Breckenridge has been missing for more than a week, and could also be a victim. Reports of similar circumstances have added additional fuel to the already frenzied and muddy situation.

“As for the rumors, and we’re sure there are a multitude of those we’ve not even heard about yet, they all have someone [being] dead.”

Two weeks passed, and it was clear the police were at a loss. The killer could have been anyone: the husband, a boyfriend, some local nut case or, Breckenridge being famous for its slopes, a skier from one of the big cities east of the mountains, or even a visitor from some city thousands of miles away.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation said the two cases, as well as a recent murder of a former Breckenridge resident in Denver, were unrelated. “Authorities continue to report there is no evidence connecting the two incidents, although both women fit similar descriptions and disappeared on the same day,” the newspaper reported.

A man and a woman hitchhiking along the same highway reported seeing a woman resembling Oberholtzer in a dark GMC or Chevrolet pickup truck with what they thought were two men. The couple said they refused a ride because they would have had to ride in the back of the truck.

Breckenridge Police Chief Ralph Schultz told the newspaper that a hypnotist was being used to try to get more information out of the couple. “We can’t be sure it was her,” he cautioned.

Meanwhile, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office had been following a more nebulous lead provided by a Denver psychic. She called to say that she believed that Schnee was alive and living in a cabin three miles from Breckenridge. But deputies checked at least ten cabins in the area the psychic described, known as French Gulch, and turned up “zilch,” according to a detective.

In the same newspaper, Police Chief Schultz made an unusual plea. “It’s possible some person in the county may at some earlier time have been sexually assaulted by the Oberholtzer murderer, and, because of the stigma attached to that crime, has failed to report the facts to the police,” he said. “It’s also possible such an assault, if reported, could give law enforcement officers the lead they need to eventually find the murderer.”

The editorial writer added, “Schultz is hopeful a victim of sexual assault who, for personal reasons, has not come forth previously, will do so now and that her story will give his investigation a direction.”

As the rumors flew, a young deputy named Joe Morales found himself as frustrated as his neighbors. A patrol officer, he wasn’t privy to details of the ongoing investigation. He just hated what it was doing to his adopted home.

Joe’s father had emigrated from Mexico to Colorado in search of a better life for himself and his young wife, with whom he hoped to start a family. Through hard work and frugality, he was eventually able to buy an auto-body shop in Denver and proudly became a U.S. citizen. He was an honest man whose success hinged on his customers and friends knowing that they could take him at his word. “There is right, Joseph, and there is wrong,” he would tell his son. “There are no areas in between.”

Although not a skier, the senior Morales had loved the mountains and often brought his family to Breckenridge for vacations during the summer. Young Joe shared his father’s love and dreamed of a day he would move to the high country permanently.

Broad-shouldered and clean-cut, Joe joined the U.S. Marines out of high school. He left the service after several years and decided he wanted to be a cop, especially when he saw a job opening with the Summit County Sheriff’s Office in 1981.