Two men suspected in the 1973 deaths of two girls in California were arrested Tuesday, including one man in Oklahoma who was being held as an unregistered sex offender, according to authorities.
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Patterson said he intends to waive extradition to California to face charges in the 1973 deaths of 12-year-old Valerie Janice Lane and 13-year-old Doris Karen Derryberry.
The two men are 65-year-old cousins who both lived near the victims in Olivehurst, California, when they were killed almost 43 years ago. Arrested were Larry Don Patterson, 65, of Oakhurst, Oklahoma, and William Lloyd Harbour, 65, of Olivehurst.
Hours later, the girls were found along a dirt road in a wooded area near Marysville, which is north of Sacramento. Semen that was found on one of the victims matched the DNA of both suspects.
The 43-year-old cold case was just recently re-opened and DNA testing led to the arrests of William Lloyd Harbour and his cousin, Larry Don Patterson, both 65. He was arrested in 2006 after he failed to register as a sex offender, says Durfor. According to a quote by Durfor published by ABC News, both families “endured decades of suffering and grief for not knowing who was responsible for the brutal murder of their loved ones”.
The girls’ killings made headlines around the nation at a time when such incidents seemed rare, McGrath said.
The Yuba County Sheriff’s Department reopened the case in 2014.
The six charges three for each of the victims include one count each of premeditated murder, one count of murder committed during a rape or attempted rape, and one count of murder committed while molesting a child.
Harbour, who was 22 at the time of the slayings, lives on Sixth Avenue in Olivehurst. “There will be a lot of frustration, there will be a lot of anger, a lot of things that we need to be concerned about”.
Olivehurst in 1973 was a very small community, Durfor said.
Durfor says that at the meeting with the families, “enormous emotion [came] rushing back to them but also a tremendous amount of relief”. “This was a big deal”. The semen from both men, which had been collected from the body of one of the girls, was sent to the California Department of Justice for forensic analysis.
They later considered Patterson after he was charged in 1976 with raping two women in nearby Chico, Vacek said, but found no link to the killing of the two girls until the DNA match decades later.
Several of the original investigators, as well as the pathologist who conducted the autopsy, had already died by the time authorities reactivated the case.
“We literally were looking in five different states”, McGrath said.
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Leslie Carbah, a spokeswoman for the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department, said that investigators knew that Harbour was still living in the area but that it took them until Tuesday to find Patterson, with the help of U.S. Marshals. According to the U.S. Marshals Service, he is now in custody in the local jail and has been charged with multiple charges surrounding the murders.
