The Finley Creek Jane Doe and the Disappearance of Patty Otto: A Conversation with Suzanne Timms and Mel Jederberg

Summary

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The Finley Creek Jane Doe and the Disappearance of Patty Otto:

A Conversation with Suzanne Timms and Mel Jederberg

Podcast: Murder Sheet
Air Date: October 21, 2025
Hosts: Áine Cain (A), Kevin Greenlee (B)
Guests: Suzanne Timms (C), Melinda "Mel" Jederberg (D)

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Overview

This heartfelt and doggedly reported episode investigates the decades-old disappearance of Patricia "Patty" Otto from Lewiston, Idaho in 1976, and its possible link to the unidentified "Finley Creek Jane Doe" discovered in rural Oregon two years later. Host Áine Cain speaks with Patty's daughter, Suzanne Timms, and citizen investigator Mel Jederberg. Together, they detail their years of advocacy, the labyrinth of errors and lost evidence, and the emotional toll of trying to prove Jane Doe must be Patty Otto—despite official roadblocks. Central themes include family trauma, cold case frustrations, and community-powered justice.

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Major Discussion Points & Insights

1. Patty Otto's Disappearance (03:38-16:05)

• Background: Patty Otto, aged 24, vanished on August 31, 1976.
• Family: Wife to Ralph Otto, mother to Natalie (age 4) and Suzanne (age 2, now 3).
• Marriage Context: Patty married Ralph (22 years her senior) as a teenager under unusual circumstances.
• Domestic Abuse: Ralph had a documented history of abuse toward both Patty and his previous wife. Patty had separated and returned home prior to her disappearance.

"My father was an alcoholic. He had previously abused his first wife and had began to abuse my mother as well. And that was witnessed by family and friends." — Suzanne (07:48)

• Night of Disappearance: A violent altercation occurred; Suzanne remembers witnessing her father dragging her mother away after a physical fight.
• Aftermath: Ralph claimed Patty left voluntarily. Suzanne and Natalie were told their mother "abandoned" them.
• Suspicious Behavior: Ralph moved Patty’s car, was found passed out with a weapon, and quickly sought out a bartender for a "hit" on a police captain investigating her case.
• Charges: Ralph was arrested for soliciting multiple murders shortly after Patty disappeared.

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2. Discovery of Finley Creek Jane Doe (16:05-23:01; 30:13-40:13)

• Discovery: In 1978, hunters in Finley Creek, Oregon, found the remains of an unidentified woman.
• Evidence Handling: Due to jurisdictional complications, evidence and the body were sent to different locations; this led to major complications and confusion.
• Initial Comparison: Patty’s family was flown in to identify clothing—red pants and white blouse, exact matches to Patty's disappearance. But Jane Doe was quickly ruled out as Patty by Oregon authorities, based on questionable dental record comparisons.
• Witness Connection: Coincidentally, one of the hunters present when Jane Doe was found later became Suzanne’s father-in-law.

"It's my husband's grandfather, Lee Parr... And he starts describing how the body was laying in the grave, how him and his friend... found the jaw... how the feet were crossed over..." — Suzanne (40:16)

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3. Mel Jederberg's Involvement & Investigation (16:05-30:13; 40:13-46:28)

• Origins: Mel, a native of the area with a background in criminal justice, began investigating the Finley Creek Jane Doe after being inspired by Michelle McNamara’s "I’ll Be Gone in the Dark."
• Crowdsourced Sleuthing: Mel began telling Jane Doe's story in first-person on social media to generate leads and community interest.
• Critical Error: Official documents and comparisons regarding Patty’s dental records were found to be riddled with mistakes, as Mel and Suzanne later uncovered.

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4. A Case of Mistaken Identity, Lost Evidence, and Advocacy (46:28-74:21)

Evidence Mishandling & Official Obstacles

• Case Closure: The Finley Creek Jane Doe case file was accessible to Mel and Suzanne only because Oregon authorities had closed the case and ordered the destruction of the body and evidence.
• Cadaver Dogs: Multiple thorough searches yielded scent indications, but official support was limited.
• Flawed Dental Record Analysis: Official exclusion of Patty as the Jane Doe was based on unreliable or misattributed dental records, possibly confused with another Jane Doe (Annette Willits).

"They want science. They want science. That’s why." — Mel (56:59)

• Destruction and Misplacement: X-rays, evidence, and the remains were lost, misplaced, or destroyed. Oregon’s bureaucracy was deeply confused over jurisdiction, with records showing mishandling, misfiling, and miscommunication over decades.

A Serendipitous Family Connection

• Haunting Coincidence: Suzanne moved to Walla Walla, Washington, and married Rob, whose family had, years before, discovered Jane Doe’s remains. Later, likely remains of Finley Creek Jane Doe were found unclaimed at the local funeral home.

"She literally was sent here in 1990. And in 1999, I left Idaho and moved, of all places, to Walla Walla to marry the one man that I dated who happens to have found her body." — Suzanne (69:13)

The Frustration and Pain of Not Being Heard

• Official Resistance: Authorities continue to cite lack of new scientific evidence, even as all circumstantial and available forensic indicators point to Patty.
• Advocacy for the Forgotten: Suzanne and Mel urge others to take ownership of cold cases in their community and be the squeaky wheel—pressuring law enforcement through constant reminders and public advocacy.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Childhood Trauma and Memory:

  "I was told for so long that she left that night and that she abandoned us. I think I intentionally pushed every memory out of my head except this one ... I snuck up the stairs and I remember looking through this wrought iron railing ... my parents were in a physical altercation." — Suzanne (09:43)

• On Systemic Failures:

  "Every adult around us put us in danger and put us right back in that same house knowing he was responsible for her death and knowing that he was trying to kill other people to silence them." — Suzanne (26:30)

• On Official Indifference and Need for Advocacy:

  "Why doesn't she matter to these people? Why are we the ones begging to identify her?" — Suzanne (51:16)

• On Bureaucratic Errors:

  “Nobody in all those 45 years realized that there was a day between August 27th and August 28th. ... AI picked that up right away. AI would have taken that case and said, wait a minute. You can’t ask for a rule out two weeks before the person’s found. This is a mistake. It’s an obvious mistake on Oregon’s end.” — Suzanne (72:42)

• On Community Responsibility:

  "You pick up your community and you say, this person belongs to my community. We are responsible for them... We need to get their faces out there and continue to push for answers for them. And we can all do this together." — Suzanne (74:21)

• Advice to Law Enforcement:

  "If you don’t have any more information, just say you don’t have any more information. Don’t ignore emails. Don’t ignore phone calls. ... Any word is better than being stonewalled." — Mel (75:58)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:38–16:05] — Patty Otto’s marriage, family context, abuse, and night of disappearance
• [16:05–23:01] — Discovery of Finley Creek Jane Doe, initial confusion, and Oregon’s quick exclusion of Patty
• [23:01–30:13] — Suzanne’s recounting of family trauma, aftermath, and system failure
• [30:13–36:16] — Mel’s cold case advocacy and early investigation steps
• [36:16–46:28] — Suzanne’s realization and family connection; coordinating advocacy efforts
• [46:28–51:16] — Dead ends, destruction of evidence, and the search for remains
• [51:16–57:18] — Systemic inertia, flawed forensics, and authority resistance
• [72:42–74:21] — Dangers of bureaucratic errors, their impact, and grassroots action
• [74:21–77:30] — Calls to action for listeners and law enforcement
• [77:47–78:02] — Contact info for tips

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Conclusion & Calls to Action

Suzanne Timms and Mel Jederberg urge the public to demand accountability and attention to long-overlooked cold cases, emphasizing the need for persistence and community-driven advocacy. They request listeners to follow the case, share information, and support efforts for justice in Patricia Otto's disappearance and the identification of the Finley Creek Jane Doe.

Contact for tips:
Lewiston Police Department: 208-746-0171 ([77:47])

Follow:

• Patty's Voice (social media)
• Finley Creek Jane Doe (social media)

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This episode embodies heartbreak, grit, and the urgent need for systemic change in how unsolved disappearances are treated—offering hope and a rallying cry for the "squeaky wheels" who refuse to let the forgotten go nameless.

Transcript

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[B]

Content Warning this episode contains discussion of domestic violence and murder on August 31.

[A]

1976, Patty Otto was 24 years old. She was the wife of Ralph Otto. She was the mother of two little girls, four year old Natalie and two year old Suzanne. She was living with her family in Lewiston, Idaho. Then she was gone. That night she vanished. Patty Otto was never found.

[B]

Or was she? On August 27, 1978, a group of hunters found human remains in the woods of Findlay Creek, Oregon. Those remains belonged to a person who became known as the Finley Creek Jane Doe. But Oregon ruled that Doe out as a match for Patti. So nothing changed.

[A]

Then, years and years later, Suzanne Timms, Patti's daughter, came across a drawing of a woman on Facebook. The woman looked exactly like her. She read on. She was looking at an artistic rendering of the Finley Creek Jane Doe. Suzanne reached out to Mel Jetterberg, an advocate who's done exhaustive work on this Doe case. They connected and together they began to dig into the possibility that Patty Otto and the Finley Creek Jane Doe were one and the same. That's when everything changed.

[B]

Suzanne and Mel are joining us to discuss Patty's disappearance, the Findlay Creek Jane Doe, all the bizarre coincidences that link Suzanne with his Doe case, and the frustrating setbacks she's run into in her quest to find answers.

[A]

My name is Anya Cain. I'm a journalist and I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney and this is the Murder Sheet.

[B]

We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're the Murder Sheet and this is.

[A]

The Findlay Creek Jane Doe and the disappearance of Patty Otto. A conversation with Suzanne Timms and Mel Jetterberg. Awesome. Well, to start out with, Suzanne and Mel, thank you both so much for joining us today on the murder sheet. We really appreciate it.

[C]

Thanks so much for having us.

[D]

Yeah, thank you.

[A]

I guess to start out with, can you both just introduce yourselves a little bit and then we'll start talking about this, this case.

[C]

I'll go first then, since Mel's not raising her hand. I am Suzanne Timms and I am the daughter of missing person Patricia Otto. I am a nurse by trade, married, and I have four children. And I'm super excited to be able to share this story with you guys. And thank you for being interested in advocating for my mother. Thank you.

[D]

Yeah. And my name is Melinda Jetterberg. I do go by Mel. It's just easier to say and remember. And I'm the lead civilian investigator researcher on the Finley Creek Jane Doe case out of Northeast Oregon.

[A]

And you both have done such wonderful advocacy over the years. So I just want to say it's an honor to speak with you both about this situation. And I also want to thank our, I think our mutual friend Brenton for sort of connecting us because he's. He's done some amazing work too, with.

[D]

Some of these cases.

[A]

I guess to start off with, I mean, it's such a. It's such a kind of long and twisting story. But Suzanne, if you, if you can tell me a bit about your mom, Patricia, or Patty, and sort of what she was like and what you've sort of like, what you know about her.

[C]

Okay, so I will start off. My mom was just a young 16 year old girl at Lewiston High School when she started babysitting for a gentleman just down the road. He was dating a lady that had five kids. And so my mother, being the sweet little teenage girl wanting to make a little extra money, thought it would be a good idea to go down there and babysit. At that time, she was a sophomore in high school. And interestingly enough, by the time she turned 18 years old, that male had moved the girlfriend out and invited her to be his wife at the age of 18. And he was 38 years old at the time. So that is how my mother and father originally met. The family kind of agreed that it was okay. And it wasn't that they really wanted her to marry an older man that she was babysitting for. It was more that they had previously protested the oldest daughter's marriage and she just ran off and Eloped. So they kind of didn't want that to happen with Patty. And so they said, if that's what you want, we're going to support you, we'll go ahead and allow that to happen. And she graduated from Lewiston High School, married my father, and within a matter of a couple of years in 1970, my sister Natalie was born. So Natalie was born in 1970 and I came along in 1973. They had two children by the time 1976 rolls around and their marriage was very tumultuous. My father was an alcoholic. He had previously abused his first wife and had began to abuse my mother as well. And that was witnessed by family and friends. And she was attending college at the Valley Business College and we were being babysat by our grandparents. So the night that she disappeared, my sister and I were at her grandparents house and she came to pick us up August 31, 1976. And that is the last time that she was seen.

[A]

And you were so young at the time, but do you have memories of her?

[C]

That is also an interesting question because I was told for so long that she left that night and that she abandoned us. I think I intentionally pushed every memory out of my head except this one that kept playing over and over, which is the night that she disappears. And my sister and I were put to bed downstairs, which was not the norm because our bedroom was across from theirs. All I can imagine is that she knew a fight was going to ensue so she put us downstairs. I heard the fight, I heard a lot of loud noises and my curious little 3 year old brain had to go see what was happening. I snuck up the stairs and I remember looking through this wrought iron railing that's around the fence and my parents were in a physical altercation. He hit her, she hit him back, he grabbed her by the neck, he drug her out of my sight. I was frozen in fear and didn't know what to do because I'm just a little kid. I eventually was able to get back down to my sister who comforted me and just told me I had a bad dream to go to sleep. And then the next thing you know, I wake up and we're being told that our mother left us and that she no longer wanted to be a mother. So as far as me actually remembering her, that memory played over and over and over in my head and I told the adults around me about that. But unfortunately, all those positive memories, the other things, all I can see in the pictures, the woman who I see being my mother, the woman Who I see dressing me up in dresses and fixing my hair and taking our photos of JCPenney's and Sears regularly. I don't remember her at all. And that's heartbreaking to me because I. I can't get that back.

[A]

Yeah, you. You were absolutely robbed of that. And I guess, you know, in. In terms of what you've been able to piece together about the night of August 31, 1976, what other information were you able to gather about what happened?

[C]

So what we were told happened is that when she came home, a fight did ensue. And my father admits that. He admits that she was threatening to leave. And she had previously actually moved out and had her own place and came back. And he said that the fight was really bad. She left, stormed out on her own. But the interesting thing is, when he brought us to her sister's house so he could go look for her, they were very suspicious because she had never left my sister and I alone with him. That's also a big red flag. Why. Why were we never left alone with our own father? So my aunt went down to the house to go see if there was any kind of sign of a fight or if, you know, maybe my mom was there injured. And they didn't find her, but they noticed that her car was on the wrong side of the house. She's parked at the back of the house instead of at the front of the house. So he had moved her car, and there was no sign of any kind of a, you know, bloody struggle or something. But my father was laying on the bed, passed out with a weapon in his hand, and she didn't know what to do with it, so she just removed it. Actually, the police suggested she hide it from him because at the time that she's reported missing, my father's also asking for the location of the young man that she had dated while she had separated from my father. So he had a mission to murder this young man who had dated my mom while she was separated from her. And the police thought that it would be safer if he didn't have weapons, because he's vocalizing that he is going to kill this young man. And I'm reading all this in police reports years later, obviously at the age of three. I don't have any of this information. I'm just piecing together from the police reports what's happening in those days. He said he's going to go look for her, but he didn't. He immediately went to the girlfriend that I had mentioned earlier that my mom had been babysitting for her. She was moving out of state. He went over to her house across the state lines there. Idaho and Washington are right on the border. He went to go visit her in Asoton and help her move out. When we arrived, because my sister and I are there with him at this time, I asked that young lady if she was going to be my mother because I didn't have one anymore. The only reason I would say that is because on the drive over there Is when he was explaining to us that she's gone, she's not coming back, and she doesn't want to be a mother anymore. And as a young child, I'm thinking, every kid needs a mother. So obviously, this lady's gonna be our new mom. And she explained that she was moving to California and that wasn't gonna happen. So those first couple of days we spent, my dad had us and he brought us to our aunt's house. And then only two months after she disappeared, My father was sitting in a bar, local bar, where he went all the time. And he was talking about. The bartender, had previously told him that he had known people who could get rid of people if you needed to. And he needed some assistance with getting rid of the captain of the Lewiston police department. So he asked if he could please connect him to these people that he knew so that my dad could get rid of the captain who's investigating my mother's case. And again, this is all from reading the police reports. We actually have the captain's handwritten notes from when my father came back in to collect his guns. So he shows up at the police department and says, hey, I need my guns back, because he needs to go kill that guy. And he openly tells them that's why he needs them back, is because he needs to go get rid of that guy. And if they would just give him the guns, he would let them know where my mother was. Very interesting that he would say that if she left on her own. So they arrest. Obviously they arrest my father for attempted murder because he paid for the hit and then proceeded to arrange for two more people that he wanted to get rid of. So here my father is two months after my mother disappears, and he's trying to off a captain of the police force, A local judge, and a friend who had done him wrong in a business deal. So my dad's not exactly the grieving husband out searching for his wife in any way. And obviously, that's just the beginning of many unfortunate events. If we can fast forward then while my dad's in prison. While he's in prison for the attempted murder charges. This is when Oregon finds a body buried in the woods by hunters who are out hunting. And this is where Mel comes into play. So I'll let Mel explain how this Jane Doe comes into play with my mother's story.

[D]

Absolutely. And just backing up a little bit, I got involved in this case just because I have a history of. My educational background is criminal justice and criminology, and I'm from this area where this body was found. So in 1978, I was about 4 years old. So Suzanne and I are roughly the same age and our parents roughly the same age as well. And when I started listening to podcasts and things like that, I've always been interested in cold cases. Like I said, my educational background is in criminal justice and criminology. And just the idea of figuring out something that is a mystery has just held an immense amount of interest for me for a very long time. And I read Michelle McNamara's book, I'll be Gone in the Dark. Right. A lot of people have. And just the idea of this woman who just had this mission and was so driven to figure out this puzzle. And she had done many other things before that. Right. She had worked on a number of other cases, but this one became very famous, and she did so much and dedicated just her heart and soul to that case. And I thought, you know, I could put my skills and knowledge of this area to use and my interests, quite frankly, as well. So I decided to look up the DOE network. I'd never logged onto the DOE network before, and so after I read her book, I logged on there. And, you know, UD County, Oregon, we don't have any does here, but I just want to check this thing out. And surprisingly to me, there was an unidentified Woman found in 1978. She was found in August20, on August 27th of 1978 by hunters. Now, if you read local papers from that time, it only mentions two people. And actually the police reports only mentioned two people, which were two men, two adults, two friends, and that they just came upon these bones while they were out hunting and called the police.

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[D]

Well, what they failed to mention in any of these reports was that not only were these two men there, but their families were there. Their children, their spouses. And it was actually one of the children that found the bones. He stumbled across these bones, wasn't quite sure what he was seeing. He was alone and when they all met up at the hunting camp, he said I think I found a body. And so he took several other people back over to where he was and it was getting dark at this time so they had a little bit of trouble finding these bones again. But they finally did and many years later I was able to speak with one of the other boys in the hunting party who happens to be Suzanne's father in law and he described what he saw as an eight year old boy. He described the skull, what it looked like. He described the orientation of the bones on this hunting trail. And he said, that is something that I will never forget. And he described to a T where it was to the point that we've been able to go back there several times and look at it. He's been there with us. And that was the start of this investigation. They collected the bones and the evidence. And one thing to know about the area that I live in is at that time, it was the Oregon State Police who had jurisdiction outside the county lines. And this area fell outside their. Their jurisdiction. And we didn't have, at that time, like, a Fish and Wildlife who did investigations like that. It was the state police. And we don't have a lot of murders here. So anytime something happens, evidence, technicians, laboratories, all of that is outsourced. It's out of town. So when they collected this, what they later determined to be a woman, and her effects, her clothing, they sent her to one lab about four hours away from here, and they sent her clothing and her boots to another lab, which is only one hour away from here. So right off the bat, they're separating all the evidence, and that's where the shenanigans begin, I think.

[C]

So that takes us right back to where my dad's at, sitting in jail for the attempted murder charge. When the Idaho investigator who was on my mother's case comes down to Boise, Idaho, to meet with my father, and he has now had this body ruled out as not being my mother. So when he sits down with my father, he says, you know, we thought we found her in Pendleton. And my dad says, pendleton? Yeah. No, like, that's not her, because he didn't bury her in Pendleton. Right. The body's in Portland. The evidence is in Pendleton, and the body was found out in a rural area of Somerville, Oregon, essentially. Somerville.

[A]

Right.

[C]

My dad's saying, yeah, no, that's not her. The detective is explaining to my father, we swore it was her. The lady was wearing red pants and a white blouse, which is exactly what my mother was wearing. She's the same height, the same weight. Everything about her was exactly the same. Even the cause of death, there was no obvious sign of injury, so they assumed it was strangulation. She was buried in the grave with her red pants and her white shirt and these odd men's boots. They look like hiking boots. Look like they don't go with the outfit. Well, my grandparents were flown over at midnight because they were so certain that this body was my mother. Patti Otto, they're showing them the clothing saying, look, we just found this doe that we are trying to compare to Patty, and she's wearing the exact same clothes. But my grandparents are saying there's no way that my mom would be wearing these hiking. She doesn't even own those hiking boots. She was at school. She more than likely was barefoot when she came home. Where would those boots come from? So, unfortunately, because Oregon told Idaho that it's not her, ruled her out, they're kind of giving my dad this one last chance to say, where? Where is she? Because we could have swore this was her. Where is she? My dad's explaining that everybody in prison knows he's not there for trying to kill the cop. He's there because he killed his wife. And he says this. And then he catches himself and says, oh, you know, I mean, I didn't. I, I, I, I, I. It's the only time he stutters in the whole interview is when he's saying, I killed my wife. That's the reason he's there in prison. The detective goes on to try and try to squeeze it out of him, what he did with her. And he even goes into this, like, hypothetical thinking, what would Ralph Otto have done if he'd have killed her? And he gives all these incredible stories about what he would have done to her body. And Mel and I have talked about this. If you ask me what I would do with my husband's body right now, I would be like, I I've never considered that. I, I have no clue what I would do with somebody's body right now. I don't think I could just come up with immediate, very detailed explanations as to what he did with his body. So 1978 comes and goes. They think, okay, it's not her. My dad's fighting his attempted murder case with all the money that he has. He gets the supreme court to overturn his conviction because essentially what he did was solicit murder. Because the hitman that he hired is an undercover cop. You know, the bartender goes and calls the police and says, ralph is in here hiring a hitman. What do I do? And they said, set it up. Tomorrow we'll send in a cop. So Idaho state patrolman pretended to be the hitman. So my dad gets out. He comes back and picks us up. All this time, we've been staying with his sister in Idaho on a farm, and he just picks us up and brings us right back into the home where I had just watched my mother be drug away from me. And I break out in hives from head to toe. Our local emergency room tells us often when children are going through traumatic experiences, they have these, you know, physical responses, and the parents and the adults around them just need to support them through that. And so they proceeded to put my sister and I right back in that same house. That was an interesting year. And that's all the way moved forward into 1983. And in 1983, my father decided he can't handle taking care of us girls. And he packed us up and brought us back to his sister's house. And within a year, we were notified that he died in police custody of a heart attack. So within a matter of seven years, my sister and I lost our mother and our father, and we are now orphans. Our aunt decides that she's able to adopt us because they can declare my mother legally dead, and my aunt legally adopts us. And at that time is when I changed my first and last name because I didn't want to be associated with my mother or my father at that time. I thought they were both absolutely terrible parents, and I wanted nothing to do with either of them. So I changed my. My birth name is Dallas Otto, and I changed my name to Suzanne, and my last name was Smith. Nobody would ever know that I am Ralph Otto's daughter. I am the generic Suzanne Smith. I'll never know who I am. And then we can fast way forward into the late or early 90s when my sister and I are old enough to get the police reports. We start hearing and getting a lot of feedback from community members who are telling us that there's things we don't know. So we think it would be a good idea to get that police report. We're able to get a completely unredacted version of my mother's missing person case, as well as some of my father's information, not the whole thing. And it was so evident to me right away that my dad did this. Everybody around us has told us that our mother disappeared on her own, that she left. And it is so evident by the. The case file that my father's so responsible. And he didn't just go to jail because he was set up, which is what we had always been told. He was not set up. He attempted to murder multiple people after he killed my mother right in front of me. That's extremely difficult to swallow because it essentially means every adult around us put us in danger and put us right back in that same house knowing he was responsible for her death and knowing that he was trying to kill other people to silence them. Yeah, let's put two little, two little girls, seven and nine years old, right back in that house. It's absolutely mortifying to me to think that's what we do as adults. My sister and I worked on that case for, you know, years. Her going her direction, thinking that my father was murdered and set up and we got to prove his innocence. And me moving on, saying, one day we'll find her body. It's not that we argued about it, we just had our different viewpoints on it. In 2006, my sister was killed in a horrible accident, A carbon monoxide poisoning accident that took her life, her husband, my only nephew, and another 12 year old child who was with them. So that case file, I couldn't even look at it. I just told her best friend, please hold onto that. I'm not ready for that. Honestly, I have lost everything. I can't handle that right now. And it, the case just sat completely empty until essentially Mel starts poking holes in the Union county case, saying, who is this red pants Doe that has never been identified? So Mel, then we can jump way forward into 2019.

[D]

Yeah, 2019.

[C]

So Mel, I'll let you take over in 2019 because I'm still at this point not looking at the case at all.

[D]

Right. And one thing to mention. Well, I'll just, I'll just start where I started in 2019. After I started looking into this Doe case and kind of getting my inspiration from Michelle McNamara. I started thinking about social media because these days that's pretty much the first place that you go to. And I thought what the best way to do this would be is start telling the story from a first person point of view. So if you look back on the very first social media posts that I did, they are told from a first person point of view. Just saying I was this age, I was this tall, I was found in a shallow grave with these items. And I could only say as much as I could find on the Internet because I didn't get the police file right away. I wasn't even sure how to do that. But if you look on the old newspaper archives and on NAMUS and the DOE network, they do have those very few details there. So I just started telling a story and just started saying what if? And I remember doing an entire post on where is my stuff? I am a young woman. I maybe was fashionably dressed in this white top and this red pants. These boots are kind of an outlier. But where's my purse? Why was there no jewelry found in the grave? Where's all Where's a jacket? So I just started kind of spinning the story. One thing to keep in mind as well was the details that were listed publicly included the deduction that she was potentially pregnant and that she was very pregnant. Now we kind of question this even with the records, because the records are not very detailed and there's really not a great description of these additional bones that were found in this clump of dirt in with the skeleton. So. But that's how she was put out on the Internet, is having this late term pregnancy, right? So pregnant woman. And you know that's going to garner some sympathy, right? This young woman and her baby both dying and being put in the woods and buried. Buried. Not just left out there. She was intentionally buried to be hopefully forgotten and never found again. So I just started telling this story and then almost immediately I started getting people saying, hey, I know about this case. I would like to help you with it. And I got connected with a guy by the name of Jason Futch, who had done a little bit of research and done some websleuth postings and things like that. And I had actually come across his posts online. And so we connected and just started chatting about this case. And he said that he'd been able to talk to Dr. Nikki Vance, who is the state forensic anthropologist at the time I started the case. She's recently retired and. And that he'd had conversations with her and she couldn't really tell him much. So as we started talking and we started gathering more folks into the group, we thought, hey, let's try to get our hands on the police records. I had tried once to do a records request with a case number that was online. Turns out there were two case numbers published. And the one that I requested came back with some lady's drunk driving ticket. I was like, well, that's not it. So we. I literally went to records request boot camp, figured out the right way to do it, and we just blasted everybody we could. Oregon State Police, Union County District Attorney, the Union County Sheriff's Office, Legrand Police Department. Because we really weren't sure who now would have the records. We just didn't know. So eventually we did get the records from the Oregon State Police, and it included photos. We were not expecting photos. We were thrilled to get photos. And they were photos of the skull. There were some photos of the bones in there, not very good ones. They had laid them out on a table and kind of taken the picture from the head and so you couldn't really see. And the skull was disoriented. In all these strange ways. But Jason was able to take these photos and he said, I think I know somebody who can do something with these. And he gave them to Dr. Anthony Redgrave, who is the founder of Redgrave Research Forensic Services. And Anthony was able to do the rendering that you see out there today. If you Google Finley Creek Jane Doe, you will find this beautiful smiling face that's done in black and white. That honestly made me burst into tears when I first saw it, because by the time I saw it, I'd been working on this case for almost a year. The forensic art came back to us in 2020 and we forwarded it to Dr. Vance and she said, all right, excellent. She put it on namus and we started putting it out into the world everywhere we could find it. And that was in May of 2020. And it took over a year. It took until June of 2021 for Suzanne to finally see it.

[C]

So in June of 2021, I'm laying in bed at night scrolling through my Facebook. And at that time, I had a social media following for a suicide prevention effort that I was doing. And so I was often on my social media. I had lost my 17 year old in the period between losing my sister and then this event. So I come across this Jane Doe poster, and it looks like my face in black and white on this Jane Doe poster. And it completely stops me in my tracks. I sit up out of my bed, I'm looking at this face and I'm like, I know her because it's my face. And then I look at the details and it says, red pants and a white blouse. And I'm like, wait, you've got to be kidding me. I'm finding a Jane Doe that looks like me, that's wearing my mother's clothes. It describes my mother's height, my mother's hair color or age, the time of death. Everything is about my mother. And I'm like, there is no way. I just found my mom on Facebook. So I think I'm just going to reach out to this group that had submitted the photo. And this is the missing Northwest missing Facebook. And she puts me in contact with Mel, who says, that's the family Creek Jane Doe case, which Mel had given her the moniker. Finley Creek Jane Doe. You need to talk to her. So I'm saying, mel, this is me, this is my mother, and this is your Doe. What the hell? Essentially. And Mel's response was it?

[D]

Well, what she said was, why was Patty Otto ruled out as the Finley Creek Jane Doe? Was it the pregnancy? And I said, no, that wasn't it. And I knew in my mind that Patty Otto was a rule out, but I couldn't remember why. So I went through my records. Pattyato's name is not in the investigative case file that I had. I only got 48 pages and Patty Otto's name was not in there. So I was like, why? Why was she ruled out? And turns out she's been listed on NAMUS as a comparison all this time. But there was no documentation in this file as to why. And so we started talking and I gave Suzanne this information. I'm like, I'm not seeing your mom's name in this file anywhere. So I don't know. I don't think that was it. But the only thing that is available for comparison, as far as I know, is dentals. And we use heavy air quotes on dentals because all There are is 50 year old photographs of a skull that were originally 35 millimeter and now have been scanned and passed around electronically. And a written dental chart, clearly written a number of years after the medical examiner's report was written. And they drew up this chart based on his description of the teeth, which we have found very questionable over the years. And we can get more into that if you like. But these dentals are not great. They're not good. So that kind of sent us down this rabbit hole as to. Okay, so how was Patti actually ruled out as Finley Creek Jane Doe?

[C]

And I said, mel, that's interesting that my mother's not listed in your case file, but your Doe is listed in my case file. And she says, let's share. Let's share records. So Mel sent to me the 44 pages that she had for Finley Creek and I sent to her. I have thousands of pages. I.

[D]

Yes, I have about two pages of your mom's case file.

[C]

Yeah, I have thousands of pages. But the most important one is I have one handwritten note that is written on September 8 that says the X ray does not match the body found out of Legrand. That is all it is, one note saying that the X ray does not match the body found out of Legrand. So at this point, Mel and I are scanning through all this information and I'm trying to read her file. She's trying to review the information I sent. And this is when she sends the newspaper release that explained that this Jane Doe was found by the two hunters in Milton Freewater. I thought I was shocked to find my face on this forensic image. I am now reading a police report from 1978 that says two men found this body and one of them happens to be the grandfather of my husband. Now we live in a very rural area. I mean it's not as rural as I came from an Idaho, but Milton Freewater has less than 5,000 people. That's a little town in Oregon. So when the newspaper article says it's my husband's grandfather, Lee Parr, I looked to my husband who's laying in bed and said, did your grandpa ever mention finding a body? People don't like when I say this because I said he told me I was crazy and that I sounded crazy because first I'm saying, look at this, look at this doe and now look your grandpa. And he's like, listen to what you're saying. You're saying that before he was even born, his grandpa's out hunting and finds a body and it's my mother. And I'm like, look at the report. He reads it, his grandfather is an elk hunter. Huh? He is from Milton Freewater. Well, unfortunately, Grandpa Par died. I met him, knew him. In 2009 he passed away. So I was like, I'm calling your dad, I'm going to call your dad and ask if he ever mentioned it to him. And this is my father in law who says, how did you know about that? I never told you about that. And he starts describing how the body was laying in the grave, how him and his friend that they were out there hunting, he was only an 8 year old kid, found the jaw laying separate from the head, how the feet were crossed over in the grave. I mean, he's explaining Mel's pictures to a T. And I'm thinking, I cannot believe this is happening. How is this even possible? I said, rob, I think you found my mother. Now he's confused because I had just seen my mother the week before. And Rob, you realize I'm adopted. You know I'm adopted. And then he's like, oh, you knew your biological mother, like how is this possible? He says, I don't want to hear anything else. I'm going to drive out there to that location because it is a cat, a noticeable camp that we had been to. And he's like, I'm going to mark it with GPS and then I'll get in contact with Oregon State Police and they can figure out, are you out of your mind or is this body that they made a forensic image of that looks like my face and is wearing the same clothes as my mother? The same body he found in 1978. How close was he, Mel?

[D]

He was spot on. I had been out to the site a couple of times because there had been a GPS pin listed on one of the sites. I can't remember which one now. So I had driven out there and I had also connected with the former district attorney, Dale Mammon. He was the one who was in office then. And he and his lovely wife drove out there with me and he said, to the best of my recollection, it was this area. He was off a little bit. This was 50 years ago, but it was, it was the same general area. And then I was able to talk with Rob and he was telling me too. He was describing the way the pictures looked. And I'm looking at the pictures while he's talking to me on the phone about what he remembered and I was speechless. So, yes, the fact that he stopped Suzanne in her tracks and said, I'm going to drive out there. And then later on was able to take us out there, walk right up the hill to this tree. And he turns to Suzanne and says, this is it, Suzanne. As far as I can remember, this is it right here. And it was incredible. Yeah.

[C]

It's also interesting to note that as Rob is walking out there, he said, wow, this area has really changed a lot because the forest, you know, has grown up extensively. He said, back when I was here, this area was covered in ferns. I get goosebumps again just saying this. The area was covered in ferns. That was so interesting because In September of 1976, my family had gone down to the basement of our house to go do some cleaning and they found ferns on the floor and couldn't figure out why in this dry area of Lewiston, why these ferns that weren't there before would suddenly show up. My father had also been found wandering out in the front yard, shoeless, completely confused and out of his mind and hallucinating. Shoeless with ferns. And that's the first thing Rob says when he walks out there. This is so strange. It was all covered in ferns. And Mel and I, again, we have not given my father in law the police report. We did know there was a large downed tree right below the body. Rob's pointing out where this is at and you know, tree. A tree down here and there. Yes, you're going to see them. There's a large tree right below where this grave is at. Rob is right on. He has, he's been a hunter for many, many years. This is a spot they'd return to. This is a place that only, only a hunter could just Go right back out to that area and say, this is a deer trail. This is where it was at. What had happened is erosion and snow comes and melts off and it erupted the grave. And that's what opened her up, scattered her remains out and scavengers carried parts of her away. So Rob takes us to the location. We are able to, to be there, see the area. We decide that it would be a great idea to bring cadaver do up there. And we need to get Oregon State Police somehow to. To help us with this. It's an Oregon homicide. So we approach Oregon and ask for their help and the case is closed. So where'd we go from there, Mel?

[D]

Yeah, that's a detail that we hadn't mentioned quite yet. The reason that we were able to get the case file when I received it was because they closed the case. And in closing the case, they also ordered the destruction of the body and the destruction of the evidence. That was our face right there. Yes. And so we knew it was going to be incredibly difficult to draw any connections between Patty Otto and the Findlay Creek Jane Doe. We have terrible dental records. Any physical evidence that we're aware of is gone. It's been willfully destroyed. So that was one of the reasons we thought, well, according to the autopsy report, there are a few bones missing. Maybe we can get some cadaver dogs to go out there and search, just do a search of the area. And I cannot stress enough the thoroughness and the quality of the searches that were done. I have heard so many people say, yeah, but dogs do this, dogs do that. One of the most recent meetings that we had that was a little frustrating was the dogs can't tell the difference between a human bone and an animal bone. Incorrect. When we went out there, we've been out there three times. And the reason we've been out there three times is because these dog searchers wanted. They had a mapped out area, they wanted to cover it in a very intentional way. And they wanted to do searches in a variety of different weathers and temperatures and humidity and all that, because all that will affect cinch. And we got quite an education from the dog handlers about this. And one of the first things that we witnessed, and we have a photograph of this is the search dog. Her name's Bryn. We love Bryn. Saw this huge mammal bone. I'm not sure if it was a cow. We don't know if it was an elk. We have a picture of Suzanne with it. It's as big as her arm. Brynn clocks this bone. Nope, not my target. She keeps on walking. So do not tell us that these dogs cannot tell the difference between a human bone and an animal bone. They. They're trained for that. Not only that, but they are trained for archeological sites. And Brynn has been certified as that. She has been tested on archeological sites. So not just human bones, old bones. And so we ended up getting scent indications on three. Three different areas that were marked out very clearly by the dog searchers. We did end up bringing out a detective who was holding the case at the time. He was there for the last search. And they did spend a weekend sort of digging in these areas that the dog indicated. But one of the first things they did, and one of the places they spent the most time was the prior grave site. And that's all fine and good, but the grave site's already been excavated. It was excavated back in 1978. And they. From the reports that we saw from the criminalist, they did a pretty thorough job excavating at that time. What we were interested in is these other areas, because, as Suzanne mentioned before, when we get a lot of snow, we get spring runoff, and we're talking rivers of water that just rushes down these hills. And so when water is coming down a hill, it's going to, you know, go in all different directions when it hits the bottom. And this is an area where the creeks, the Finley Creek and Dry Creek, they're not creeks all year round. They're only creeks up until about July, and then everything dries out because they're purely runoff. And the dog searchers knew this. And they're like, okay, so here's the water pattern. When it's dry out here, we want to search there, and we want to search there, and we want to search there. And that's what they did. And so it was these other areas that we really wanted to get some extra digging and excavating into. And ultimately we did not get that. But that's one of the things we are actually pushing for now that Oregon State Police actually has a dedicated cold case team.

[C]

I also want to note that Bryn is a cadaver dog trained on archeological bones. She is also a search and rescue dog. So it was really interesting that when Bryn came out, she did her first little perimeter check, and she came right over and sat down and alerted on me. And I thought, oh, my. I'm sitting on my mom. Like, I'm literally sitting on her arm right here. How is she alerting on me? And the handler explained that Bryn is trained to rescue injured Hikers. And she's like, she is literally smelling your grief. She can tell that I am the one that is hurt. It's not just 1978. People need to realize it's not just 1978 to a child. This is happening today, this is happening right now. And it's so unfair that what we get is there's no evidence, there's no clothing, there's no DNA, there's no X ray that there is no hope to identify my mother. Even though everything in my heart, everybody in the forensic world who has seen the bones, who has seen the teeth, can tell you that those teeth line up one by one to my mother's X ray. Why doesn't she matter to these people? Why are we the ones begging to identify her?

[A]

I want to ask you about that and I want to drill down on this because this is what is so anger inducing and frustrating about this case. And I know I don't have to tell you guys that, but what is the holdup here? What is happening here where this is not clicking? Because it just. It seems like you're having to beg for resources here. And it just seems like a pretty simple case of like, this should be prioritized. So I guess if you could talk me through that and where this is.

[D]

Not clicking for people, I was going to say, she's pointing at me. We'll do the clinical answer. And Suzanne gets pretty emotional and fired up about this, and rightly so. Over the last few years, the people that we were working with, like I said, Dr. Veronica Vance had. When she came into office a number of years ago, she went across the state of Oregon and gathered up all the unidentified remains in county coroner's offices, sheriff's, sheriff's offices. She wanted all of those, so she did that. Under that kind of movement is when the Finley Creek Jane Doe case came under her purview. Not because there was a body, but because it was an unidentified person. So she's the one who had possession of all these remains and was working on these cold cases for all of those years. But at the heart of it, she's a scientist. And so one of the reasons she wanted these was she knew the. The power of genetics and forensic genetic genealogy that was coming down the pipeline. And I actually saw her speak last year with Cece Moore at the National Missing and Unidentified Persons Conference specifically on this. She at one point also applied for grant money through Parabon in order to do DNA extractions and forensic genetic genealogy on some of these cases. You know, on grant money, not Something that Oregon would have to pay for. Full disclosure. I'm an employee of the state government here in Oregon. I know this budget stuff and how it works. And it's always a struggle and it just, it never seems to let up. That's not an excuse. So I feel like. And she said she wanted DNA, full stop. She really wanted to have DNA in order to be able to declare that Patricia Otto and Finley Creek Jane Doe were one in the same. I can see her coming at it from a scientist point of view. Totally get that. She had also had the Oregon State Police forensic odontologist do a comparison. And according to them, they were like, we cannot definitively say that this is Patricia Otto. They didn't say. Nope. Former rule outstands. They said, we just can't definitively say whether this is her or not. This goes back to the condition of the evidence. So when you look at these photos, and we are happy to share those with you if you want them, what you see on these photographs is just these dirt caked teeth. That's what it looks like to us. I'm not a dentist. Suzanne's not a dentist. She is a nurse. And. But it looks to us like dirt. And we don't really see. See all this extensive dental work that the original medical examiner says was there. And it's this extensive dental work. And I am holding the memo right here that William Brady, state medical examiner in 1978, says that the X rays of Patricia Otto were compared to the unidentified remains found in Union County. The skull contains an unerupted wisdom tooth. But there is a note stating that Ms. Otto's wisdom teeth were removed. We'll get to that in a minute. Additionally, a significant amount of dental work of the right and left maxillary molars are evident in the skull which do not match the X rays of Patricia Otto. So he, he said there was all this dental work done, but to us it looked like dirt. In addition to which, you know, I'm getting into a bit of a rabbit hole here because I know you asked me one thing, so that's what I'll say. They want science. They want science. That's why.

[C]

But wait, Mel, he clearly said there's an unerupted wisdom tooth. Yes, there is one. Unerupted. That means the wisdom tooth has not come through the school through has busted through the skin. This body clearly has three erupted wisdom teeth that we can see in the photos. So he is clearly describing.

[D]

That's right.

[C]

Previous Jane Doe, which is the one that Idaho is asking for a Comparison to which is a Portland Jane Doe identified by her extensive dental work and her erupted wisdom tooth. That's why we know these are not the dentals of Finley Creek. These are the dentals of the DOE found one month prior to the discovery of the Finley Creek Jane Doe.

[D]

Yes, that's right. I always have to have Suzanne help me with that, because, yes, there almost exactly one month prior to Finley Creek Jane Doe. Now remember, the trooper puts her in the back of the car, drives her to Portland. At Portland is where all of this stuff is done. And a month prior, there had been another Jane Doe found on the Lewis and Clark Community College campus near there. And she's in the lab at the same time. Right. So out of curiosity, because that's what we do, we order the investigative file for this other DOE that had been found. She was ultimately identified. Her name is Annette Willits. But what we also received in that file was her dental charts. And her dental charts match the written description that Dr. Brady wrote saying were Finley Creek Jane does dentals. Also, if you look at this autopsy file, the date that he puts on here is August of 1978. He doesn't put an actual date that he is looking at these bones. He puts a month and a year, which leads us to believe somebody potentially was writing a report based on memory. And he couldn't remember the date that he wrote it. So he just put. I know it was August, August 78. And he just kind of fudged the rest of it.

[C]

He also forgets to do the most important piece of a homicide investigation according to his own book, is the death certificate. And he fails to file a death certificate for a pregnant woman found buried in the woods. So we have. We have essentially done our own investigation from the beginning to the end. And we can explain where the errors occurred, how the rule out happened, why there's no X ray on file for Finley Creek Jane Doe or my mother. No X ray on file for my mother. That all these years they've been telling me that the X rays didn't match yet they don't even have an X ray to show me. What they compared to is because they were looking at the X ray of the woman in Portland, not the X ray of the bones that were sent to Portland, which was my mother.

[D]

Right. And we. We have so many details that we could tell you, but just a couple of examples of things. There was one document that we found where they misplaced Finley Creek Jane Doe skull for a while, so they couldn't actually use it to compare I spoke with the woman who. Well, I emailed with the woman who worked at the hospital lab here, who, once upon a time, she did X ray. Findlay Creek, Jane Doe's body. Right. So there were X rays. However, because the case was closed, they, you know, they only keep that stuff for a certain amount of time. So that's gone. We're losing our living witnesses every year. They. They're passing away within a couple of months of starting this case. I told you, I spoke with Dale Mammon. Dale Mammon is. Was an attorney after he retired, and he was involved in the estate planning for Trooper Doc Baker, who was the lead detective on this. He so graciously went and spoke with Doc about this case. Now, mind you, Doc is in his, I believe, 90s at the time, and memory's fading, right? Can't. Not as good as it used to be. But he remembered this case and he remembered. He said, I. I remember there being white fabric with red flowers. Now, he said red flowers. It was documented as red hearts. But, you know, the man's in his 90s. But that thing stood out to him. That's what stood out to him. And Doc passed away shortly after that. So that. And that's all we could get out of him because his memory was fading. So the fact that. And this kind of circles back to the holdup, the fact that there didn't seem to be any kind of willingness to look into some more creative solutions or think outside the box is one of the things that's been holding up Oregon's end of the case. We've had some recent movement, I would say, on both sides, which is pretty dang amazing. All this time, the state patrols of both states have not had a cold case unit dedicated to cold cases. Now suddenly, in 2025, Oregon has one and Idaho has one, and they have both been willing to talk to us. There's also a new medical examiner because, like I said, Dr. Vance retired recently, which I had to find out by traveling clear across the country to Advocacy Con. And I happened to talk to somebody from DNA DOE Project. They're like, oh, yeah, we miss her. And I'm like, wait, excuse me. What? She. Yes, she retired. And I'll be danged if it took me. And actually, it was Suzanne who ended up wrangling the name of the new person out of the Oregon State Police. But, yes, we are on the right track as far as a cold case team. We've had one meeting with the detective. He has now set up a meeting with the new medical examiner. Positive stuff. So we're also. We ought to keep in mind. I have to refocus here. I could go in so many different directions. We have Oregon, we have Idaho, and we have Washington. The reason we have Washington is because when Finley Creek Jane Doe's case was ordered to be closed in 1990, they sent her to be cremated. At that time, we did not have a crematorium. So all the cadavers from here were sent to Walla Walla, Washington, because that was the nearest crematorium. It's only about an hour from here. When I figured this out, when they said that she had been cremated, I'm not even sure how I came to that conclusion. They just said, case closed, ordered the remains to be destroyed. I, oh, I got a hold of all the funeral homes here because they said she had been sent to a funeral home. It was under a different name at the time. So I had to do some kind of backwards research. She'd been sitting on a shelf in this funeral home for 12 years, from 1978 to 1990, after she came back from Portland, because, yes, the trooper brought her back, didn't leave her there after the examination, which, now that I'm sitting here talking through it, was quite rushed because Doc Baker took her down one day and brought her back the next. So rush job right there, she went to the funeral home, and that's where she stayed. So I had to write to every funeral home in town to figure out which one was known as Coffey's Funeral home back in 1978. Turns out current day, it's Loveland Funeral Chapel, which, ironically now has a crematorium. And so when I wrote to them, they found a slip of paper that said that the state police had reached out to them, said that the case was closed and that she could be cremated. And so they paper trailed it to the Oregon State Mortuary Board, and that was that. So then I had to find out from them who they would have sent her to to be cremated, they told me. And so I found the funeral home, which is still in operation, where she would have been sent to, that indeed had a crematorium. And as I was looking on their website, they had gotten a grant to build a website for all the unclaimed remains in Walla Walla County. They had one set of unidentified remains. When I was looking at this, it said John Doe, which that didn't deter me because when you don't know a gender for something, you default to male a lot. And the date of death was listed as one. One of 93. I'm like New Year's Day of 93 odd. So that made me super suspicious. And I reached out to the county coroner and said, I'm curious about the set of cremains that you have, remains that you have. Can you tell me about them? I said, this is who I am. This is what I've been doing. These are the circumstances. And he said, let me go look at those. So he did and he came back and he said, well yeah, they, they have bigger chunks in them, which is how they would have appeared in the 90s because they didn't do a super good job of cremating and pulverizing back then. And he said there's also a sticker, there's a partial sticker from that funeral home. So there's a high probability that these could be your, your cremains. Because in addition to that, Walla Walla county didn't have any unidentified dose. They had unclaimed remains. But this was the only set of unidentified remains that they had. So that's how we were able to locate those that we think are hers. So you can kind of see all these kind of strings of things that we're finding that are pointing to these two cases being together, but we just can't quite get to where we need to go. And the fact that Dr. Vance was adamant about DNA. We did our best to try to get DNA extracted from those cremains. We had a fundraiser that she got really mad at us about, by the way.

[C]

Why? Because she wants to do it.

[D]

She was not moving fast enough for us, quite frankly. So yeah, so she was a little upset and she told us about this grant that she could have had to do the forensic genetic genealogy, but we just went ahead and did it anyway. And technically the cremaines are in Walla Walla and there was really no physical evidence saying that they were Finley Creek Jane does at the time. So we're like, eh, I mean she doesn't have them, they're not hers anyway. So we'll, we'll just go ahead and do what we need to do. But that's why Washington is involved too is because fairly sure that those cremains are Finley Creek Jane Doe that are sitting in Washington.

[C]

And to add irony to that whole Walla Walla Washington, you've heard the story that we started out in Idaho, the body ends up in Oregon and that I ended up in Washington of all places. Walla Walla, Washington is where I live. So when we're connecting all these pieces, it's like, you have got to be kidding me. She literally was sent here in 1990. And in 1999, I left Idaho and moved, of all places, to Walla Walla to marry the one man that I dated who happens to have found her body. So to them, that's that. There is no connection there. Don't tell me there is not something serendipitous about this whole thing to say. My mother has been waiting for the moment to say, you've been lied to your whole life. I am going to lead you to the truth. And that is exactly what we are doing. She, Oregon essentially came back saying, it's not our fault that Idaho didn't present your mom. She's nowhere in the case file. They obviously didn't present her. My sister led me to a five page police report from Idaho that clearly shows that not only did Oregon know my mother was missing, know that she was wearing the red pants and the white blouse, they knew my grandparents were flown there at midnight to view the clothing, and they have no evidence that they ever had those clothing or that that incident ever happened. I have five pages explaining name, place, location, how confused they were when the detective shows up and says, who's on this case? Oh, it's Union County. No, it's not. It's Umatilla County. No, it's not. It's Oregon State Police. No, it's not. It's the Pendleton crime Lab. No, she went to Portland. It's evident in that five page report that Oregon was so confused about who was really responsible that everybody was thinking, she's doing it, he's doing it, they're doing it. And nobody was documenting anything. Why would they think it's not important to say, hey, this detective flew a family here at midnight to view these clothing and he said, that is Patty Otto. The clothes match, the description matches the cause of death, the time of death. It's Patti Otto. He hands them my mother's X ray, and that is why there's none on file, because that's the original. He hands her the original. And that original is the one that's supposed to go back to Idaho is why there's none on file with Namus. Namus had no X ray because the detective hands the actual copy that was supposed to go on her file. He mailed one to Portland because he was mailing asking for the comparison to the Portland Doe that they had gotten the APB on. He's only aware of the Portland Doe and thinks this is the same body and nobody's connecting the Dots that there's two does because she was sent to Portland. So when he keeps talking about this Portland Doe that he's responding to the all points bulletin on this Portland DOE from August 13th, nobody realizes that these are two totally different bodies. And we get one rule out, one rule out in her case saying it's not the body out of La Grande. I have in writing showing that they were asking for a rule out of the Portlando because that's the only one that had the apb. By the time they do her autopsy and they release an apb, two weeks have passed. And so they put out the apb and Idaho thinks, well, we already know it's not her because they already told us it wasn't her. They don't realize that's a whole different. Whole different case. Nobody in all those 45 years realized that there was a day between August 27th and August 28th. The letters dated the 27th. You said she gets shipped to Portland on the 28th.

[D]

Right?

[C]

Because it takes them a day. It's literally that. Not close. Until my cousin Jennifer is combing through that file and she says, why does nobody Notice that this APB is for August 13th and her body's not found till August 27th? How come nobody in all these years, AI picked that up right away. AI would have taken that case and said, wait a minute. You can't ask for a rule out two weeks before the person's found. This is a mistake. It's an obvious mistake on Oregon's end. And that's why they're pushing back. They know that they've ruled her out of her own body, which is going to give pushback to every rule out ever done in Oregon. They're all going to say, what about my daughter? What about my son? What about my mother? You ruled them out. Did you mess up mine as well? Look at the repercussions that could have on the whole missing community, realizing that rule outs are not written in stone and they're not a hundred percent accurate.

[A]

You're absolutely right. It opens the floodgates. And Suzanne, I just want to say. I want to say I. My heart breaks for you and your mother. Like, this is not fair. And what happened to you is like. It's honest. It's Kafka esque. It's like a nightmare. Like. And it's. It's scary to think that this can happen. And I just. I want to commend you for everything you've done. I want to commend you, Mel, for everything you've done just the advocacy and the work you've put into this and just how much you are pushing for answers here. I want to. I want to close out by sort of throwing it back to both of you and asking, is there something that I didn't ask about that you wanted to mention? Is there something we didn't get to. That you wanted to mention? Is there something that, you know, like you want to see happen next in this case to maybe get somewhere?

[C]

I'll go first. Mel. I think there's so much that we haven't told you because obviously we only have a limited amount of time because this is literally in August. Next, next month will be 49 years since my mother disappeared. So there is so much to the case, but there are so many articles out there that people can research and review. And there's a lot of things that we can share and provide the. The evidence, like the photos. You know, if I show you the X ray and the autopsy photos, I have superimposed them. You can see it's the same teeth. All those, I think, are really important for viewers to go and look. If you can follow Mel on the family creek Jane Doe socials, we're on all of them. And then Patty's voice is my mom's. I opted not just to advocate for my mother. I realized there's a huge need that my family didn't realize at the time that we need to be the advocates for her. That I highly encourage people to say, do what Mel did. You pick up your community and you say, this person belongs to my community. We are responsible for them. Law enforcement cannot take priority on every single missing person case because 99% of them are recovered. They cannot treat every single case like my mother's case because that 1% is going to hold them up. For all those other cases that are currently going on that need law enforcement, Let law enforcement do their job. That's great. We as a community need to do our part. We need to advocate. We need to not forget these people. We need to get their faces out there and continue to push for answers for them. And we can all do this together. And without Mel, I wouldn't be here right now. She would not have a face, would not have brought me to her attention, would not have connected the two of us together. And Mel is not a paid researcher. Mel's a community member who said, I care 100%.

[D]

And I really would like to put a call out to the law enforcement community. And I'm going to tell you this straight from other Law enforcement's mouths, Families advocates, be the squeaky wheel because that's what gets attention. Law enforcement folks dealing with the public and these bereaved families. If you don't have any more information, just say you don't have any more information. Don't ignore emails. Don't ignore phone calls. We're going to understand, Suzanne's going to understand that, yes, there might be some emotion involved in that. Maybe you don't feel like you have time. Maybe you don't feel like you have the words. But I will tell you right now what I hear over and over again. Any word is better than being stonewalled. Any word, even if it's nothing has changed since the last time I talked to you. And I'm sorry, it's not that hard. It's 30 seconds out of your day. So that's my big push for right now because that's what I hear from families over and over and over again. That and she never ran away without her purse. Don't give me that. That's never the case.

[C]

Her purse was at home and her wedding rings were at home.

[D]

I mean, any. She. She did not run away with another without her purse. That's not an excuse, fellas. No, we don't believe that.

[C]

Doesn't happen. Doesn't happen. Same story over and over and over again.

[A]

Endemic. And I just want to thank you both so much for coming on the show. I feel like I could listen to you both for hours, but I. I really, really appreciate you sharing your mom's story and Finley Creek Doe's story.

[C]

Thank you for giving us an opportunity and I hope that this brings us one step closer because we have hope.

[B]

If you have any information on Patty Otto's disappearance, please call the Lewiston Police Department at 208-746-0171.

[A]

Thanks to Suzanne and Mel. We so appreciate Suzanne for speaking out about her mom and continuing to fight for her. And we so appreciate Mel's efforts with this as well. I was blown away by their advocacy and activism. We'll include links to some of their social media pages in our show notes, so definitely check those out and follow along. I also want to thank Brenton Gicker, the creator of the out from the Void small print publication in Oregon, for connecting us.

[B]

Thanks so much for listening to the Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email [e-mail] if you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities.

[A]

If you're interested in joining our Patreon that's available at www.patreon.com murdersheet. If you want to tip us a bit of money for records requests, you can do so at www.buymeacoffee.com murdersheet. We very much appreciate any support.

[B]

Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee, who composed the music for the Murder Sheet and who you can find on the [e-mail] if you're looking to talk with.

[A]

Other listeners about a case we've covered, you can join the Murder Sheet Discussion group on Facebook. We mostly focus our time on research and reporting, so we're not on social media much. We do try to check our email account, but we ask for patience as we often receive a lot of messages. Thanks again for listening.