In the winter of 1982, Breckenridge, Colorado was a small mountain town of barely 1,200 permanent residents, a place where doors were left unlocked and hitchhiking was not a risk but a routine form of transportation on the icy, winding roads between towns. Twenty-one-year-old Annette Schnee had come west from Sioux City, Iowa, working as a housekeeper by day at a Holiday Inn and tending bar at night, dreaming of becoming a flight attendant. Twenty-nine-year-old Bobby Jo Oberholtzer worked as a receptionist in Breckenridge and commuted daily over Hoosier Pass from Alma, on the other side of the 11,500-foot crossing. She usually hitchhiked, and her husband Jeff worried enough about it that he handmade her a brass self-defense weapon to carry on her key ring.
The two women lived within fifteen miles of each other, traveled the same road, and had never met. On January 6, 1982, a blizzard settled over Summit County. Temperatures dropped to roughly twenty degrees below zero. Annette left work around four in the afternoon, stopped at a pharmacy in Breckenridge to fill a prescription, spoke briefly with an unidentified woman, and by five o’clock was standing on the south side of town trying to hitch a ride home to Blue River.
She was due at her bartending shift by eight. She never arrived. Nearly three hours later, Bobby Jo stepped out of a bar after celebrating a promotion at work. She had called her husband around 6:20 to say she would hitch a ride home.
By 7:50 she was seen hitchhiking southbound near a convenience store, on the same stretch of road where Annette had stood hours earlier, heading in the same direction into the same storm. Back in Alma, Jeff slept through the evening. When he woke near midnight to an empty bed, he began calling friends, then drove through the blizzard to the police station. He was told they had not waited long enough to file a missing person report, and to go home.
The next morning, a rancher called to say he had found Bobby Jo’s driver’s license and the contents of her wallet scattered across his property, as if thrown from a moving vehicle. On the way to retrieve them, Jeff spotted her blue backpack off the highway, beside it a blood-stained wool glove and bloody tissues. A search party formed. Around three in the afternoon, they found Bobby Jo’s body twenty feet off the southbound lane of Highway 9, just south of the Hoosier Pass summit.
Footprints in the deep snow showed she had gotten out of a vehicle in the parking lot, run, been confronted, stumbled toward a line of trees, reversed direction, and collapsed. Plastic zip ties hung from her wrist, where her killer had tried to bind her hands and failed. She had been shot twice in the chest at close range. Jeff’s brass self-defense weapon lay in the parking lot, traces of blood on it, not just hers.
Near her body lay a single bright orange booty sock that did not belong to her. Nobody could explain it. Annette was still missing. Six months of silence followed.
Then, on July 3, 1982, a boy fishing with his father in Sacramento Creek, about twenty miles south of Breckenridge, saw a body in the water. It was Annette, preserved by the cold, shot once in the back with the same type of ammunition used to kill Bobby Jo. As investigators examined her, they noticed her clothing was in disarray and her shoes were on the wrong feet. On her left foot was a single bright orange booty sock.
It was the match to the one found at Hoosier Pass. The socks were a pair, a Christmas gift Annette’s mother in Iowa had mailed to her weeks before the murder. The theory crystallized: the killer picked up Annette first, she lost a sock in his vehicle, and when Bobby Jo fought and escaped at the summit hours later, she carried the loose sock out with her into the snow. One pair of socks, two crime scenes, one killer.
For thirty-nine years, investigators pursued that theory. They had the socks. They had the blood on Bobby Jo’s glove, the DNA of an unknown male she had wounded during the fight. They had a rescue report showing a man with fresh scratches and a cut over his eye pulled from a snowdrift on Guanella Pass just hours after the murders, lit by a sheriff who spotted flashing SOS signals from an airplane.
They had everything except a name. The husband Jeff Oberholtzer became the prime suspect and spent four decades under a cloud of suspicion that even two passed polygraphs and a DNA exclusion in 1995 could not lift. Suspects came and went: a violent offender who bragged in jail and was later cleared by DNA, a hotel guest whose ballistics were inconclusive, a notorious serial confessor, ex-boyfriends, a dead person of interest cleared through relatives’ DNA. The unidentified woman at the pharmacy was never found.
Jurisdictional gaps between Summit County, Park County, and the CBI slowed the case. Evidence moved between offices and was lost in transfers. But one man refused to let it die. Charlie McCormick, a retired Denver detective who had moved to Breckenridge in 1976, was hired by Annette’s family in 1989 for one dollar a year.
Over thirty years, his files on the case grew to thirty-nine binders. He re-interviewed witnesses, pushed for new forensic testing as technology advanced, and became a special deputy in Park County to keep his hands on the evidence. The breakthrough came from genetic genealogy. In early 2020, Detective Sergeant Wendy Kipple submitted the unknown male DNA profile to a Denver forensic genealogy firm.
The blood on Bobby Jo’s glove and key ring was sequenced and uploaded to public ancestry databases. Investigators built family trees through partial matches and eventually narrowed the search to two brothers. One lived in Arizona. The other, Allen Lee Phillips, had lived near Breckenridge, worked as a mechanic at a local mine, and still lived in the Colorado mountains.
Surveillance followed, but Phillips was nearly a ghost, rarely leaving his property, rarely discarding anything. Then he drove to a Sonic Drive-In, ate, and walked into a post office carrying the paper bag. He walked out without it. Investigators recovered the bag and pulled DNA from a napkin.
On February 23, 2021, the match came back. The probability on the glove alone was one in seventeen quadrillion. The blood Bobby Jo tore from her killer thirty-nine years earlier belonged to Allen Lee Phillips. The next day, Phillips was arrested during a routine traffic stop.
The trial began in August 2022 in the small courthouse in Fairplay, the same town where Phillips had dropped off a female hitchhiker he had beaten with a rock in 1973, a crime for which he had served six months. The prosecution built the case on three pillars: the DNA on three separate pieces of evidence, the orange sock linking both women, and the Guanella Pass rescue, where Phillips was found hours after the murders with fresh facial wounds and a story that did not hold up. The 1973 assault was presented as pattern evidence: same town, same victim type, same direction toward Fairplay. The defense attempted to argue contamination and to redirect blame toward Jeff Oberholtzer.
The jury was not convinced. On September 15, 2022, after five hours of deliberation, Allen Lee Phillips was convicted on all eight counts, including two counts of first-degree murder. On November 7, he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, one for each woman. Bobby Jo’s daughter, grown and a mother herself, told the courtroom she saw her mother in her own child’s blue eyes.
Annette’s family visited both crime scenes and thanked Bobby Jo publicly, knowing her final fight had preserved the evidence that solved both murders. Phillips died by suicide on February 27, 2023, less than six months into his sentence. Because he died while his appeal was pending, Colorado law required the convictions to be vacated, a procedural outcome known as legal abatement, not an exoneration. Additional complications followed, including the exposure of a CBI DNA analyst who had manipulated data in other cases and a wrongful conviction claim filed by Phillips’ daughter that former investigators publicly rejected.
But the factual record remained: a jury heard the evidence, deliberated, and convicted him on all eight counts. The families finally had their answer. The case was never really about the legal technicalities that followed.
It was about the people who refused to stop: the retired detective who worked for a dollar a year, the investigator who put the cuffs on the killer herself, the agent who remembered an orange sock at an autopsy, and a woman named Bobby Jo Oberholtzer, who in the final minutes of her life, at eleven thousand feet in the dark in a blizzard, fought back hard enough to tear the truth from her killer’s body and leave it behind for thirty-nine years.