A man was arrested this week in west Tulsa, in connection with a 1973 cold case out of Yuba County, California.
Advertisement
Patterson said he intends to waive extradition back to California to face charges in the deaths of 12-year-old Valerie Janice Lane and 13-year-old Doris Karen Derryberry, said officials there.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) – A California prosecutor said Wednesday that two men charged with murder in the shotgun slayings of two young girls can’t face the death penalty because it wasn’t an option when the girls were sexually assaulted and killed more than 40 years ago. However, it was only sent for testing in March 2014 by an investigator who “had a bit of free time and really looked very closely at this case”, Sheriff Steve Durfor tells the AP. Harbour was arrested after a traffic stop two hours later near his home in Olivehurst, where the two victims also lived. Patterson was being held in the local jail on multiple charges involving the deaths, said Tommy Roberts, the supervisory deputy USA marshal in Tulsa.
Durfor said he and Yuba County District Attorney Patrick McGrath met with members of girls’ families Tuesday morning to inform them of the arrests in the case.
A law enforcement task force arrested Patterson on Tuesday in the rural town of Oakhurst, Oklahoma.
According to the AP, both men had previously committed crimes severe enough to warrant their DNA collection. 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.
The families “have endured decades of suffering and grief for not knowing who was responsible for the brutal murder of their loved ones”, Durfor said.
“Our sympathies are with the families and we’re just glad to start the healing process for them even if it’s 43 years later”, said Leslie Carbah with the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department.
They were 22 at the time of the murders. “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”.
Larry Don Patterson was ordered held without bond in Oklahoma, where he was arrested Tuesday.
The twin slayings four decades ago shocked the small community and the nation, he said.
The most the men could face is a life sentence, but the law then provided that they could be considered for parole after serving seven years, McGrath said.
Harbour is facing two counts of first-degree murder with additional charges for rape and child molestation.
It took longer to reopen an investigation so old that several of the investigators and the pathologist who conducted the autopsy have since died, McGrath said.
Advertisement
“We literally were looking in five different states”, McGrath said.
