William Lloyd Harbour and Larry Don Patterson were arrested Tuesday in Linda, California, and Oakhurst, Oklahoma, respectively, the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.
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Creek County District Attorney Max Cook says Patterson was denied bond but indi.
They arrested one suspect in Oklahoma and another in California on Tuesday after comparing their DNA with semen from both men found on one of the victims.
She and 12-year-old Valerie Janice Lane, both of Olivehurst, California, were reported missing by their mothers on November 12, 1973, after they failed to return from a shopping mall in nearby Linda that the girls had visited the previous day.
Police in Oklahoma and California arrested the two 65-year-old suspects Tuesday morning for the murders of Valerie Janice Lane, 12, and Doris Karen Derryberry, 13.
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Harbour has previous felony drug convictions and Patterson was previously convicted for the 1976 rape of two women, Durfor tells PEOPLE.
Harbour will next appear in court Wednesday afternoon, Carbah says. (Yuba County Sheriff’s Departmen) William Lloyd Harbour pleaded not guilty.
“Back in 1973, this simply didn’t happen”, he said.
Officials with the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department found the girls’ bodies alongside a dirt road near Camp Far West Lake outside of Wheatland a few hours later.
That December, testing revealed that DNA evidence was matched and identified the two men as suspects – and the case was reopened. “And it’s really, really hard”, Margrette Hasting, the mother of Valerie Janice Lane, said after the arraignment.
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. Both men will face murder charges, he said.
“I think they were just kind of overwhelmed with the information they were being provided, so that was just a piece of it”, said Deputy District Attorney John Vacek.
He declined to discuss a motive or what the suspects may have said after their arrests, citing the ongoing investigation, but Durfor says the suspects allegedly had “a level of familiarity”, at least, with the victims’ families at the time of their deaths.
The girls’ killings made headlines around the nation at a time when such incidents seemed rare, McGrath said.
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The homicide case was an ongoing, active investigation until 1976, when the case went cold following no successful leads from the investigation, which involved more than 60 interviews. “We’re reasonably confident there was nothing to connect them to the crimes at the time”.
