Town note
The town's motto is 'the perfect mountain town'.
about 0:04:45The story
Barbara Oberholzer, known to everyone as Bobby Joe, was born on Christmas Day 1952 and lived with her husband Jeff in Alma, Colorado, half an hour south of Breckenridge. They married in 1977, called themselves hippies, and Jeff ran an appliance repair business while Bobby Joe worked for a real estate company. On 6 January 1982 she got a promotion and went with colleagues to the Village Pub in Breckenridge to celebrate, then told the bartender she would hitchhike the sixteen miles home because none of her co-workers offered her a lift. It was below zero with driving snow. She carried a heavy brass clip with a brass ring that Jeff had given her for self-defence.
Earlier that afternoon Annette Schnee, twenty-one, had finished her day job as a maid at the Holiday Inn, collected a prescription from a pharmacy and was hitchhiking home to change before her evening shift as a cocktail waitress at the Flip Side bar. She was last seen at about 4.30 p.m. talking to a woman police never identified.
By midnight Bobby Joe had not come home. Jeff woke, drove the road towards the bar, found nothing, and was told by Breckenridge police that they could not act for twenty-four hours. At about 7.45 the next morning a rancher telephoned: he had found her driving licence and the contents of her wallet blowing across his driveway. On the way there Jeff found her blue backpack, her right glove and a tissue, the glove and tissue both bloodstained, beside the road. A search party on cross-country skis set out at about three in the afternoon and found her body on Hoosier Pass, shot twice in the chest at close range, with one wrist zip-tied. Her brass key ring, with blood on it, was later recovered from a parking lot. Nearby lay a thick orange sock that Jeff did not recognise.
The following day the Holiday Inn reported Annette missing. Her movements stopped at the pharmacy. Months passed. Jeff then volunteered to investigators that he had premonitions, and said Annette's body would be found four miles from his house on the Fourth of July. On 3 July 1982 a boy fishing in Sacramento Creek near Fairplay, twenty-three miles from where she disappeared, found her face down in the water. She had been shot once through the back at a downward angle, and the autopsy suggested a sexual assault: her clothing was in disarray, her jeans zip was broken and her shoes were on the wrong feet. On her left foot was an orange sock matching the one found beside Bobby Joe, which tied the two murders together. A business card for Jeff's appliance business was in her jacket. He denied knowing her, then remembered giving her a lift in November 1981. He passed two polygraph tests and was later excluded by DNA.
The case went cold. In 1989 Annette's family hired the retired Denver detective Charlie McCormick for a dollar a year. In 1998 testing found blood from an unknown male.
In 2020 detective sergeant Wendy Kipple sent DNA to United Data Connect, which used genetic genealogy. He was by then sixty-nine, a semi-retired mechanic in Dumont, and had stayed in the area. Police followed him for five weeks before he left a Sonic bag in a post office bin; saliva on a napkin gave a match. The blood on Bobby Joe's glove and tissue was his, with a match put at one in seventeen quadrillion.
He denied everything. Dave Montoya, the volunteer fireman who had rescued him from Guanella Pass on the night of the murders, said that if he had known then what he knew later he would probably have left him there.