Larry Don Patterson, also 65, was arrested in Oakhurst, Oklahoma.
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Twelve-year-old Valerie Janice Lane and 13-year-old Doris Karen Derryberry of Olivehurst, California, went missing after going on a weekend shopping trip in November 1973.
The California cold case began after Derryberry and Valerie Janice Lane, 12, never returned to their homes in Olivehurst, California, a town which has grown in population to 14,000 in the years since the murders, after a visit to a Linda, California, shopping mall on November 11, 1973.
Sheriff’s officials said the homicide was actively investigated from 1973 through 1976.
That December, testing revealed that DNA evidence was matched and identified the two men as suspects. Both were 22 at the time of the killings and living in Olivehurst, a small agricultural town in California’s Central Valley. Both men are 65-years-old.
Sheriff Steven Durfor said detectives periodically looked at the case over the years.
A few hours later, the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department was notified that the bodies of two girls had been found alongside a dirt road in a wooded area near Marysville, north of Sacramento, where they had been shot at close range with a shotgun, Sheriff Steve Durfor said Tuesday.
Authorities then and now said a large-scale investigation was immediately launched and some 60 people interviewed over a three-year period before the case went cold for a lack of solid leads and was shelved in 1976.
Durfor said he and Yuba County District Attorney Patrick McGrath met with members of girls’ families Tuesday morning to inform them of the arrests in the case.
In March 2014, an investigator doing a routine look through cold cases made a decision to send semen samples found on Derryberry’s body and preserved for 43 years to the state Department of Justice forensics lab for analysis. Harbour had felony drug convictions, Durfor said. Harbour was also arrested Tuesday at a traffic stop on Rupert Avenue and Edgewater Circle in Linda, California.
They say Patterson fled first to Arizona, where he never registered as a sex offender.
It took more time to reopen an investigation so old that several of the investigators and the pathologist who conducted the autopsy have since died, McGrath said. In addition, says ABC News, Patterson proved hard to locate, as he was awaiting an extradition hearing in custody for being an unregistered sex offender.
Investigators said it took weeks to figure out how to safely apprehend Patterson after they learned of his whereabouts within the state.
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The US marshals service found that Patterson was staying in an area near Southwest Boulevard and 71st West Avenue in the Oakhurst area. Patterson, who was incarcerated in Creek County jail, was also charged with being an unregistered sex offender, said Tommy Roberts, the supervisory deputy US marshal in nearby Tulsa.
