Authorities have finally made arrests in the death of two girls in California more than 40 years later. Patterson, arrested in Oklahoma, said he intends to waive extradition back to California to face the charges.
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“Olivehurst, 43 years ago, was a very small community – still small”, Yuba County District Attorney Patrick McGrath said of the town of about 14,000 people.
Larry Don Patterson was ordered held without bond in Oklahoma, where he was arrested Tuesday.
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The cousins’ DNA was available for comparison, Durfor said, because both have since served prison sentences that allowed their DNA to be collected.
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.
Yuba County sheriff’s officials said federal authorities aided in the Tuesday arrests of 65-year-old Larry Don Patterson of Oakhurst, Oklahoma, and 65-year-old William Lloyd Harbour of Olivehurst, California.
Harbour, 65, was arraigned Wednesday in Yuba Superior Court in Marysville.
Patterson and Harbour are suspected in the shotgun slayings of 12-year-old Valerie Janice Lane and 13-year-old Doris Karen Derryberry.
The case went cold decades ago, Yuba County authorities said, until a state forensics lab matched DNA from the two suspects to semen from both men found on Derryberry. Harbour had drug offences in 1997 and 2003, and Patterson was convicted in 1980 of raping two adult women in Chico in 1976, also in northern California.
Harbour, who was 22 at the time of the slayings, lives on Sixth Avenue in Olivehurst. The families had previously been notified that the case had been reopened, Durfor said. “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”.
The girls’ slayings made headlines around the nation at a time when such killings seemed rare, McGrath said. Both men will face murder charges, he stated. “This was a big deal”.
According to the AP, both men had previously committed crimes severe enough to warrant their DNA collection.
Durfor says this case has long lingered in the community’s memory and that many investigators have tried to crack it.
“We literally were looking in five different states”, he said.
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Patterson was located and apprehended with the assistance of several agencies in Oklahoma, including the U.S. Marshals, Oklahoma Department of Corrections, Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office, Creek County Sheriff’s Office and the Broken Arrow Police Department.
