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.
Advertisement
Authorities say a man in Oklahoma and another in California have been arrested in connection to the killing of two girls in California more than 40 years ago.
Creek County District Attorney Max Cook says Patterson was denied bond but indicated he would waive extradition to California. Patterson was arrested in Oklahoma. Both girls were from Olivehurst, California.
They are suspected in the November 1973 homicides of 12-year-old Janice Lane and 13-year-old Doris Karen Derryberry.
NewsOK.com has disabled the comments for this article.
The cousins’ DNA was available for comparison, Durfor said, because both have since served prison sentences that allowed their DNA to be collected. “We would like to have time to come to grips with this”. Harbour lives near one of the victim’s families, and “inevitably there will be contact between various families and this is a situation we had to talk to them about”.
Sheriff Steven Durfor said detectives periodically looked at the case over the years.
But the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department was notified a few hours later that their bodies had been found along a dirt road in a wooded area near Marysville, north of Sacramento, where they had been shot at close range with a shotgun.
Yuba County prosecutor John Vacek says William Lloyd Harbour pleaded not guilty to murder at his arraignment in California on Wednesday.
For decades, investigators made little progress in the case – until a state forensics lab matched DNA from the two suspects to semen found on Derryberry. Evidence indicated that Derryberry also has been sexually assaulted. Both men will face murder charges, he said.
After the suspects’ match, Yuba authorities said they worked on a “renewed and expanded investigation” before presenting their evidence to the district attorney for warrants, according to the news release.
Despite significant investigative efforts, including more than 60 interviews, they produced no successful leads and the case remained unsolved.
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.
He says, “I can’t even imagine the suffering, the wondering, the grief that the families had been going through for decades”.
Advertisement
Associated Press writer Tim Talley contributed from Oklahoma City.
