Creek County District Attorney Max Cook said Thursday that 65-year-old Larry Don Patterson waived extradition during a hearing before a judge in the Oklahoma county, which is just southwest of Tulsa.
Advertisement
Officers arrested both suspects on Tuesday.
Both men will now face murder charges.
The bodies of Valerie Janice Lane and Doris Karen Derryberry were found November 12, 1973 off of a dirt road near Camp Far West.
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.
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.
“Back in 1973, this simply didn’t happen”, he said.
They were just 12 and 13 at the time.
“We’re asking for the family to have time to process this news”, said Stan Vantassle, Derryberry’s nephew.
A few hours later, the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department was notified that the bodies of two girls had been found alongside a dirt road in a wooded area near Marysville, north of Sacramento, where they had been shot at close range with a shotgun, Sheriff Steve Durfor said Tuesday. Doris had been sexually assaulted and semen was collected from her body.
Investigators in the 1970s carefully noted each of the more than 60 people they interviewed, Vacek said, and the suspects’ names never came up.
MARYSVILLE, Calif. (AP) An investigator “with a bit of free time” chose to send for testing DNA samples from a long-dormant cold case, which led authorities to arrest a pair of men linked to the 1973 shotgun slayings of two young girls, authorities said.
According to the AP, both men had previously committed crimes severe enough to warrant their DNA collection. After release from prison, he was convicted of failing to register as a sex offender.
Neither man was investigated in 1973, Durfor says. Patterson is being held in Oklahoma in that case. “I think they were just kind of overwhelmed with the information they were being provided, so that was just a piece of it”, he said.
(Yuba County Sheriff’s Department via AP).
Advertisement
A key part of their work was the care with which the 1973 evidence had been preserved, Durfor says – long before anyone could have imagined it would be forensically useful in the case of Doris and Valerie. 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”.
