The decades-long mystery of who killed two young girls found dead after failing to return from a California mall may finally be solved after DNA from the cold case sent to be tested by an investigator with “a bit of free time” pointed to two now-65-year-old men, officials said.
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Sheriff Steven Durfor said detectives periodically looked at the case over the years.
Authorities say it was an investigator “with a bit of free time” who chose to send DNA samples from a long-dormant California cold case to a lab for new testing.
Mary Jane Griego was in high school when the bodies of 12-year-old Valerie Lane and 13-year-old Doris Derryberry were found near Camp Far West Lake in northern California. Witnesses saw them in their neighbourhood that night but neither girl returned home. He thought it unusual and noted that when the girls returned to the auto they were crying. An Oklahoma man suspected in the killing of two California girls in 1973 has been denied bond.
Two boys were target shooting and found the girl’s bodies about 20 hours later, according to news accounts at the time. The girls had been shot at close range with a shotgun.
The homicide case remained an active investigation until 1976, when the case went cold following more than 60 interviews but no successful leads, authorities said.
They arrested one suspect in Oklahoma and another in California after comparing their DNA with semen from two men found on one of the victims, 13-year-old Doris Karen Derryberry.
The Yuba County Sheriff’s Department reopened the case in 2014. Authorities collected DNA samples from both men when they were sentenced to prison for other crimes prior to Tuesday’s arrest. Patterson was arrested in 1976 for raping two women and again in 2006 for failing to register as a sex offender, Durfor said.
William Lloyd Harbour, 65, of Olivehurst was arrested about 10:35 a.m. during a traffic stop in Linda.
“I called the Police Department and they weren’t too much concerned”, Granger said. 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”. “We would like to have time to come to grips with this”.
He and Yuba County District Attorney Patrick McGrath informed both victims’ families of the arrests Tuesday, and they have requested privacy. He lived in Olivehurst at the time of the murders.
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 girls’ killings made headlines around the nation at a time when such incidents seemed rare, McGrath said.
Both Harbour and Patterson are each being charged with two counts of murder in the first degree.
Investigators searched in five different states for Patterson, who had moved to Oakhurst, Oklahoma.
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