Patty Otto

On the night of August 31, 1976, a three-year-old girl crept out of bed and witnessed her father wrap his hands around her mother's throat, push her against the wall, and drag her out of sight. The next morning, her father, Ralph Otto, told her and her sister that their mother, 24-year-old Patty Otto, wasn’t coming back.

For years, Suzanne wasn’t sure what she had seen that night, but as she became an adult, she started questioning it more and more. Then, in 2021 a Facebook post turned everything she thought she knew about her mother’s disappearance completely on end. Now, she’s fighting three different states to find out what really happened to Patty Otto that night. 

If you have any information about the disappearance of Patty Otto, please contact the Lewiston Police Department at (208) 746-0171. If you have any information about the identity of the Finley Creek Jane Doe, found near La Grande, Oregon in 1978, please contact the Oregon State Police. 

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[SPEAKER_01]: dark cast network, indie pods with a dark side.

[SPEAKER_00]: On the 9 August 31st, 1976, a three-year-old girl crept out of bed and witnessed her father wrap his hands around her mother's throat, push her against the wall and drag her out of sight.

[SPEAKER_00]: The next morning her father, Ralph Otto, told her and her sister that her mother, 24-year-old

[SPEAKER_00]: For years, Susian wasn't sure what she had seen that night, but as she became an adult, she started questioning it more and more.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then, in 2021, a Facebook post turned everything she thought she knew about her mother's disappearance completely upside down.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, she's fighting three different states to find out what really happened to Patty Otto that night.

[SPEAKER_00]: When a person goes missing, there's a special kind of pain and they're not knowing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I want to tell the stories of those who never came home.

[SPEAKER_00]: Today, I want to tell you the story of Patty Otto.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Conan Gallagher.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm Ethan Flick.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is, and then they were gone.

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back everyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for joining us once again.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Kona.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm Ethan.

[SPEAKER_00]: And where the husband and wife team behind this podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: Each week I tell you this story of an unsolved missing person's case.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ethan doesn't know anything about the case going into the episode and is here to provide his reactions and questions in real time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully asking some of the same ones you have at home.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, this story is one that I've kind of been aware of via Facebook for a few years now, but I've finally decided to cover it because Suzanne is so close to getting answers about her mother's case, so it kind of feels like the more people who can hear about this, the better.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: This story also has more weird twists and potential coincidences than almost any other

[SPEAKER_01]: So this case is just gonna irritate me because I don't believe in coincidences.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and you know I do but like these are so crazy that I don't know like they're just on another level.

[SPEAKER_00]: Before we get into it though, we've had a few folks join us over on Patreon so we want to give them a shout out.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you too, Stevie Lee R and Anne C. We really appreciate your support.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.

[SPEAKER_00]: As a reminder, if you'd like to get her episode's ad for you and sometimes early, you can join us over on Patreon at any level starting at just $2 a month.

[SPEAKER_00]: You'll also get a free copy of the ebook that I wrote.

[SPEAKER_00]: So now, let's get into the story of Patty Otto.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patricia Lee O'Malley was born on August 4, 1952 in Lewiston, Idaho, to Thomas and Artist O'Malley.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lewiston is a small city in North Central Idaho right on the Washington border where the snake and clear water rivers meet.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patty grew up there with two sisters and a brother in a respected working-class family.

[SPEAKER_00]: Her father was a World War II veteran who became a firefighter and her mother worked as an accounting clerk.

[SPEAKER_00]: Throughout her life, Patty was a good student and a regular church gore.

[SPEAKER_00]: The people who knew her described her as outgoing, funny, talkative, and beautiful.

[SPEAKER_00]: She was the type of person who everyone thought would go on to do great things.

[SPEAKER_00]: When she was 16 years old, Patty was looking for work as a babysitter.

[SPEAKER_00]: There was something a lot of teenage girls did.

[SPEAKER_00]: But what Patty had no way of knowing was that this babysitting job would change the course of her entire life.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patty met a man named Ralph Otto.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was about 18 years her senior.

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was looking for a babysitter for his girlfriend's children.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ralph quickly began grooming the teenager.

[SPEAKER_00]: He worked for the forestry service at the time and made good money so he lavished her with gifts including like a car.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just gross.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like what the hell?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I know this was a different time but not that much different.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this is in the

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Patty's parents did not approve of this relationship, but they didn't really know what to do about it either, and even Patty knew that at best, like, it wasn't socially acceptable, you know, so like she's in high school.

[SPEAKER_00]: And when prom came around, she wasn't taking her 34-year-old, 35-year-old, however, oldie was boyfriend, so she liked to look another classmate to prom.

[SPEAKER_00]: Nevertheless, the relationship in heavy quotes survived, and Patty and Ralph married on October 17, 1970, when Patty turned 18.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's disgusting.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, so what he's 37 at that time?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, something like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's so gross.

[SPEAKER_00]: And again, I'm not blaming Patty for any of this.

[SPEAKER_00]: She was literally a child.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, so I don't want this to come off as victim blaming at all.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, obviously we're winning him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, like he's a creep.

[SPEAKER_00]: Their daughter Natalie soon followed and a second daughter Dallas was born when Paddy was 21.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now Dallas now goes by Suzanne, so that time just going to refer to her throughout the rest of this.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Suzanne becomes a big part of this story later on.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how long it was before the marriage started to deteriorate but it seems to have gone bad pretty quickly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ralph was a drinker and had been married before.

[SPEAKER_00]: His former wife later told police that the couple fought constantly and she got, quote, slapped around and quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because of his drinking and his violent tendencies, Patty never left her children alone with Ralph.

[SPEAKER_00]: She loved her kids and she loved being a mom.

[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the nightmare marriage that she found herself in, Patty was working hard to give her girls the life that they deserved.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now Ralph, like I said, he was well off, like, I mean, not well off, like, you know, generational wealth, but like, he had a good job, but they were doing well.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Patty likely did not need to work, but she chose to work.

[SPEAKER_00]: So she got a job working at a local insurance agency.

[SPEAKER_00]: She also enrolled as a full-time student at Valley Business College where

[SPEAKER_00]: By the spring of 1976, the writing was on the wall.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patty came to understand that her situation was untenable, so she filed for divorce.

[SPEAKER_00]: She got her own apartment and took both of her kids with her.

[SPEAKER_00]: She would go to work, take care of the girls, and then at night, she would drop the met her parents' house and go to class.

[SPEAKER_00]: During that time, she also reconnected with a man she had known in high school, Randy Benton, who had just come back from the military.

[SPEAKER_00]: But of course, it's not easy to make a clean break when you're in a bad marriage like that, especially in 1976.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's really important because like 1974 is when the Fair Housing Act like finally included women.

[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, she could actually even get an apartment on her own like women also couldn't get a credit card in their own name until 1974 so like it was not easy to get out of a bad marriage at this time and Ralph wanted her back so in an effort to do that he checked himself into a rehab center when he completed his treatment the center called patty and basically just said okay well he's done come get your husband Jesus.

[SPEAKER_00]: because that's because that's all it takes right yeah just go to a treatment center and then oh you're good for the last year life exactly and you know they were still legally married she had filed for divorce but you know it hadn't gone through yet and they're like okay well you're the wife come get them and you know she did because listen it's 1976 she was under a lot of societal pressure to make her marriage work

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure there's part of her that wanted it to work if it could.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they had two girls together.

[SPEAKER_00]: She had been with him since she was 16.

[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, but like right or wrong, like, yeah, no, I know.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's an emotional attachment there.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that summer, Patty and the girls moved back in with Ralph.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ralph quickly went back to his old ways, though.

[SPEAKER_00]: He started drinking again and was violent with Patty.

[SPEAKER_00]: From what it sounds like, the reconciliation really never took off.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patty was apparently still seeing Randy, and Ralph was apparently also seeing somebody else.

[SPEAKER_01]: Another 16-year-old?

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how old she was.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't, I probably don't want to know.

[SPEAKER_00]: Everything came to a head on August 31st, 1976.

[SPEAKER_00]: That night, Patty finished her classes, and during 11 p.m., she picked the girl's up from her parent's house and brought them home.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne, who is only three at the time, remembers part of that night.

[SPEAKER_00]: One detail that is stuck with her is that when they got home that night instead of putting her and her sister to bed in their room upstairs, which is next to their parents room, Patty put them downstairs.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne has said that she thinks from other knew there's going to be a fight and what of them to be as far away from it as possible.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that makes sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: According to Suzanne, as soon as that downstairs door closed, she heard crashing and yelling coming from upstairs, and she was a curious kid, so she followed it.

[SPEAKER_00]: She went up the stairs and she looked through the wrought iron railings into the living room.

[SPEAKER_00]: She told Dateline QUOTE, I remember very clearly looking through those wrought iron rails and seeing her hit him in the face, him hit her back, and then he grabbed her by the neck, pushed her up against the wall, and drug her out of my sight, and QUOTE.

[SPEAKER_00]: She ran back downstairs to her big sister Natalie, who was only five years old herself.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne was scared and didn't really understand what she had seen.

[SPEAKER_00]: Her sister comforted her and told her it would be okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then, Suzanne says, the next thing she knew it was morning, and her father was waking them up, yelling at them to get their shoes because they had to go.

[SPEAKER_00]: That morning, he loaded the girls into the car and drove them across the river to Washington to his girlfriend's house, saying that they had to help her move.

[SPEAKER_00]: He told the girls her mom didn't want to be a mother anymore, and wasn't coming home.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then he dropped the kids off at Patty's sister Alice's house and said that he was going to go, look for his missing wife.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patty's family was understandably alarmed, but hope that she had just taken some room to breathe.

[SPEAKER_00]: They decided to give her one evening to come back on her own.

[SPEAKER_00]: And when she didn't, her parents reported her missing to the Loost and Police Department on September

[SPEAKER_00]: The detective who caught this case was a young Lewiston officer named Tom Saline, he was 26 years old.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's retired now, and he told Dintline that he put more time and work into Patty Otto's case than any other case of his entire career.

[SPEAKER_00]: He went to the house and he met Ralph who told him his wife had simply left after a disagreement.

[SPEAKER_00]: Interestingly, Ralph claimed that the night in question was September 2nd, not August 31st.

[SPEAKER_00]: So basically, he was trying to, you know, like, avoid, just thrown off the timeline.

[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Because he didn't want it to see that he didn't report his wife missing for two days.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's like, Oh, yeah, no, she just left like, that's why I didn't report it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: His story was that he'd been drunk when Patty came home with the kids.

[SPEAKER_00]: He said that shortly thereafter he heard a horn honk out front, and that Patty grabbed her purse and just left.

[SPEAKER_00]: He hadn't seen her sense and he assumed she'd run off with Randy Benton.

[SPEAKER_00]: And here's a line that's right out of Officer Saline's 1976 report that tells you everything you need to know about how seriously this whole thing was taken.

[SPEAKER_00]: Police searched the property, wrote that they found, quote, no sign whatsoever foul play and quote, and advised Ralph to quote, get off the drugs and whisky so that his wife would return to him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is Christ.

[SPEAKER_00]: Police figured that she'd cool off and come back.

[SPEAKER_00]: No one talked to Suzanne Ornathalie and the case was not pursued as a homicide or of the criminal matter at all.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they didn't even go and talk to her boyfriend.

[SPEAKER_00]: I would imagine given what I'm what I'm going to be saying later that they probably did talk to him, but yeah, I don't know much about how that's turned out.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they must not have at least initially, at least not at this point because if they had the stories wouldn't have lined up and they would have known that she was not with her boyfriend and also not with her husband, so she's missing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it's interesting because Ralph really did try to like push the self on Randy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: A lot.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's like, I don't know, whatever happened to her.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was the one who was with her.

[SPEAKER_00]: Didn't have anything to do with me.

[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, those deflecting.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so yes, they had to have talked to Randy at some point.

[SPEAKER_00]: But whatever they said and whatever didn't match up wasn't enough

[SPEAKER_01]: That's crazy to me, like the initial call by her parents saying that she's missing.

[SPEAKER_01]: You go talk to the husband, the husband said, I don't know, off with Randy.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you go and talk to Randy and Randy's like, no, I haven't seen her in a couple of days.

[SPEAKER_01]: Haven't heard from her.

[SPEAKER_01]: Really?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, somebody's got any line.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but then you go back to the husband and just be like, get off the drugs and alcohol and she'll come back to you.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's hot.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, and that's not like you're not even into how insane this gets.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, unfortunately, Patty's disappearance in addition to not really being taken seriously by police at first, also wasn't considered newsworthy at all.

[SPEAKER_00]: There weren't any news articles written about this.

[SPEAKER_00]: There was like one short little blurb in one newspaper and that was about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the fact that her family was a well-respected family within the community, they had been there forever.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like these are well-established people and like still nobody cared.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's how little people gave a shit about like a woman going missing.

[SPEAKER_00]: For our purposes here doing this podcast, that also means that I don't have contemporaneous sources to work with, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So like I can't really see like what police were thinking at the time or you know what they're investigating like what avenues they were going down any of that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, except for that note that you just read and it clearly shows that they were not taking the seriously and they didn't give a shit.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so we have some of the documents available that I'll get to later that Suzanne has been able to get over the years.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then, you know, what we know about this is really just from like interviews that Suzanne has given everything's so piece together, you know.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: What it comes down to is I don't really understand or know why police weren't picking up on the substantial amounts of alarming evidence that began to pile up.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's standard, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's just normal stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: And on September 4th, her wedding rings were found in Ralph's coat pocket, which was hanging in his bedroom.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, all of this is in the police report.

[SPEAKER_00]: So like this isn't just like rumors that have been passed down.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, because you said witnesses, but then you're saying that the rings were found by a police detective or somebody.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know who it, they were found by, but whoever found it made it into the reports.

[SPEAKER_00]: Another thing that was in the police report or the police file that Susanna ended up getting was a letter written by a woman named Werna Eddie that said Ralph Otto had choked and raped her while quote laughing like a madman.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, what I don't know is like when that allegedly occurred, I don't know if that was, you know, years before, if it was years after, if it was around this time, I don't have a date on that.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it just goes to show that like people were very alarmed by Ralph Otto in the type of person he was.

[SPEAKER_00]: And again, that's how we got the statement from his ex-wife saying that she had gotten slapped around, like that was all in the police file too.

[SPEAKER_00]: So like police were aware of his history of violence or an alleged history of violence at the very least.

[SPEAKER_01]: But that's not looking to it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: A few years ago, Suzanne started a Facebook group called Patty's Voice, and in it, she has posted some of the documents from the police file.

[SPEAKER_00]: One of the documents she posted is handwritten interview notes from an interview that Captain Dwayne A.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or did with Ralph.

[SPEAKER_00]: On this piece of paper, it says, quote, I am a very violent person.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a very violent person.

[SPEAKER_00]: I get all worked up over certain things, and quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is ostensibly a quote from Ralph.

[SPEAKER_00]: In Ralph, it should be noted, was allegedly under the influence of drugs and alcohol during the interview.

[SPEAKER_00]: He also talked about Randy, the man Patty was seeing, saying, quote, if I found him Tuesday, I was going to kill him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just outright kill him.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was going to be a dead man.

[SPEAKER_00]: The hate I have in my guts for him, if I just had five minutes with him, you wouldn't have to worry

[SPEAKER_01]: So he's basically admitting that he would have killed her or him.

[SPEAKER_01]: He would have killed him and potentially already killed her.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, or he would have if he found them together, you know, basically the, you wouldn't have to worry about him or her, meaning if he found them together, then yeah, he would have killed them both.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I mean, he's, I mean, he's very clearly admitting that he's violent person.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, right.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he said it twice.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like a couple days, I mean, within the first week.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so again, like he's admitting that he would have killed one or both of them.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but they're still on the, well, you know, get off the booze and drugs and show them back to you.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, unbelievable.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, it is.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's even worse.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's even worse than that.

[SPEAKER_00]: He also told Captain Aore in this, you know, interview that he owned a 357

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, come on.

[SPEAKER_01]: So he admitted that the murder weapon was was missing, essentially.

[SPEAKER_00]: A weapon.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, honestly, I wouldn't necessarily think that that was the murder weapon, because, you know, Suzanne Natalie, nobody remembers hearing a gunshot.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's no evidence of that happening in the house.

[SPEAKER_00]: So.

[SPEAKER_01]: Tarp and a mission.

[SPEAKER_01]: Missing cushions.

[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, for sure, for sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, who's to say that they, this is several days later before they even had access to this, before they even knew about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he took the kids to her sisters and left the kids there to go, quote unquote, look for his missing wife.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, so what was he doing then?

[SPEAKER_01]: He's fucking cleaning up and this is the 70s.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like they did well I mean even the initial detectives.

[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't do any forensics.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, I don't think there was ever forensic search of the home I mean from what I'm kind of piecing together.

[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like they looked around you know

[SPEAKER_01]: and didn't bother to make note of the tarp.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I don't know if it counts because I mean, right.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know if that was missing at the time.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't again, because I don't have the exact timeline of all this, but yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he also, so basically, trying to say that Patty took off, took the gun with her, and also she had $500.

[SPEAKER_00]: So like that was the money she was using to start her new life or whatever.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, this is what makes this even crazier, because what he said about finding Randy on Tuesday, refers to Tuesday, August 31st.

[SPEAKER_00]: That day, Paddy was late coming home from class, and Ralph thought that it was because Paddy was with Randy.

[SPEAKER_00]: He allegedly took his gun, went to a local bar and asked if anyone knew where Randy was.

[SPEAKER_01]: Where's this information coming from?

[SPEAKER_00]: So this is, well, yeah, so the police were called.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh Jesus.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's where.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they already knew about this.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is a known fact.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: So basically he was like drunk went to this bar demanded like if anybody knew where Randy was order to beer was waving his gun around the bartender

[SPEAKER_00]: police knew that on August 31st, Ralph was angry, he had a gun.

[SPEAKER_00]: That was enough.

[SPEAKER_00]: A few months later, a family friend told detectives that on December 4th of that year, three-year-old Suzanne had said, quote, Mama hit daddy, daddy hit mama, daddy carried her out and quit.

[SPEAKER_00]: So this is four months

[SPEAKER_01]: the police reports.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: That wasn't enough.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, somewhere during all of this, Ralph got a lawyer and shot.

[SPEAKER_01]: Stop talking.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then things got even crazier because clearly Ralph, like, was getting away with this against all odds, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, even though he wasn't talking police apparently weren't going with any of the other evidence that they had,

[SPEAKER_00]: But that wasn't good enough for Ralph.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ralph was still like these cops, Celine and Captain Ailer.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're like, they're on my ass.

[SPEAKER_00]: I got to get them off.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what does he do?

[SPEAKER_00]: This is just so absurd that like, I mean, I'm not, obviously, this is all awful.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not trying to make light of any of it, but it's genuinely absurd.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ralph put a hit out on them.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ralph Otto tried to have the police officers who were investigating him, killed.

[SPEAKER_00]: Specifically, according to Celine, Ralph went to a bartender and tried to find a mafia connection to take out both Captain Ailer and Celine himself.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, apparently, this bartender had previously told Ralph that he fee ever needed someone taken out that he knew people.

[SPEAKER_00]: The bartender was talking out of his ass, like the bartender didn't know anyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so when Ralph was like, yeah, no, I do actually need somebody taken out.

[SPEAKER_00]: The bartender just like, okay, cool, cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let me work on that for you.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then call the police.

[SPEAKER_01]: I can't imagine a bartender in like Northwest, Idaho is real connected with the mob.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know the mob was big in the 70s, but I don't know about in that particular region.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So investigators set Ralph up with an undercover state investigator posing as a hitman.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I read one article that said he was like a liquor investigator or something like he wasn't a member of the FBI or like even a detective.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think he was, you know, usually finding a trade war.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: But in any case, they set this guy up and he posed as a hitman and met with Ralph.

[SPEAKER_00]: He told Ralph that he'd only do one hit at a time, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like he's not going to go and kill both of these cops at the same time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ralph agreed and said that Captain Auer was his first choice and paid him $250 to do the job with the promise of 750 more when it was completed.

[SPEAKER_01]: $1,000.

[SPEAKER_01]: $1,000.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: In 1976 money, you know, that would get you.

[SPEAKER_01]: Still not a lot of money.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think you could get a car with up.

[SPEAKER_00]: So in October 27, 1976, which happened to be as daughter Natalie's fifth birthday, Ralph was arrested on attempted first-degree murder charges.

[SPEAKER_00]: You went to trial and was convicted and sentenced to 10 years.

[SPEAKER_00]: But even that wasn't enough to get charges brought against him in patty's disappearance.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like they didn't even do any further investigation.

[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't sound like it.

[SPEAKER_01]: They were just like, I, we gotcha on this, we're good.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, which to an extent, okay, but if you got like a life sentence.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you got 10 years.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or if they did any investigation into, yeah,

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things where it's like, okay, we've got him on this charge.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, let's do a heavier investigation and bring additional charges at that same trial.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Stack it all up.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Show the truth like this guy is a bad guy, but they didn't do that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now Ralph had a good lawyer because again, he had money.

[SPEAKER_00]: Though he did get convicted, he appealed and it went all the way up to the Idaho Supreme Court, who voted to overturn his conviction.

[SPEAKER_00]: Based on what?

[SPEAKER_00]: Their reasoning was that hiring a hitman and paying the money was in their view still just planning and preparation not an actual attempt in the legal sense, and he was charged and convicted with attempted first degree murder.

[SPEAKER_00]: But there is, so because at that, at the time, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't, yes, the solicitation wasn't, they didn't have that on the books.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so the Supreme Court was like, well, he didn't actually attempt to murder anyone.

[SPEAKER_01]: So back then you could just plan you could plan a murder and and be totally fine as long as it didn't happen right now the charge would be conspiracy to commit.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, our solicitation or yeah, depending on yeah, but no, they just didn't have that at the time.

[SPEAKER_00]: So his conviction got overturned and he ended up only spending four years in prison.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, when Ralph was in prison, Suzanne and Natalie stayed with Patty sister.

[SPEAKER_00]: when he was released, he was able to get them back, and by that point the girls didn't know what to think.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they're like 10 and 7 at this point, they're still very young.

[SPEAKER_00]: Haddy's family had been prohibited from talking about her.

[SPEAKER_00]: By Ralph,

[SPEAKER_00]: Which I don't know why they listened to him.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he's in jail.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: He probably killed her like what the fuck do you mean?

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think my guess is that in order for the girls to stay with them and for Ralph's family not to fight for custody.

[SPEAKER_00]: The agreement was you can't talk about patty like you can't talk about Ralph kind of thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, that's just speculation on my part, but anyway, so the then with haddy side of the family while he was in prison, Ralph gets out, takes the girls back, and then shortly realizes that he's not really cut out to be a single father.

[SPEAKER_01]: Weird.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he sent them to live with his sister.

[SPEAKER_00]: So now they're on Ralph's side of the family.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, and that's when Dallas became Suzanne.

[SPEAKER_00]: So she changed her whole name because it's really interesting.

[SPEAKER_00]: They ended up growing up with this aunt and we're very, very close with her.

[SPEAKER_00]: Until she died and I believe 2023,

[SPEAKER_00]: The girls grew up with her called her mom very close to her.

[SPEAKER_00]: They ended up taking her last name, which was her married name, so like they were no longer autos.

[SPEAKER_00]: Dallas became Suzanne, so her whole name was changed, Natalie stayed Natalie, but had a different last name.

[SPEAKER_00]: From what I've read, Ralph's sister believed in his innocence.

[SPEAKER_00]: you know, and so they grew up with a family that believed that their father was innocent and that patty really just took off.

[SPEAKER_01]: But with Ralph's sister, they had a decent life.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it sounds like it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it sounds like she was a lovely woman.

[SPEAKER_01]: Good.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, look, this is a terrible, horrible story.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: But at least there's some sort of bright spot in this.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not like the kids, even Suzanne having that extremely traumatic memory from when she was three years old.

[SPEAKER_01]: you know, seeing her mom getting beaten and dragged away, like that's awful.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: At least that's the only memory that she had because you know what I mean, but it could have been, it could have been worse, but it could have been better too because apparently that's the only memory she has of her mother, yeah, which is tragic, but yes, it does sound like they were actually able to grow up and have, you know, a fairly decent life for a while because things are about to get really bad again.

[SPEAKER_00]: After his release from prison, Ralph wasn't doing well.

[SPEAKER_00]: He, you know, there was one article that I found where Ralph was interviewed after his release.

[SPEAKER_00]: And because, you know, him getting his conviction overturned was a big story because he can imagine, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he's like, this was terrible.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I was unjustly imprisoned.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to move to Australia and start over because I can't get a job here.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, basically, you know, even though his conviction was overturned, nobody really wanted to hire him.

[SPEAKER_00]: But he said in this interview specifically, he's like the one good thing that came out of this was that I got sober.

[SPEAKER_00]: While I was in prison.

[SPEAKER_00]: He said, you know, he said, I'd struggle with alcoholism, but now I'm sober.

[SPEAKER_00]: but I can't get a job might move to Australia.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there are no other articles, but basically, it sounds like he still was not able to get a job.

[SPEAKER_00]: He did not stay sober and just spiral down, you know.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne has said in recent years, she's like, I really truly think that the guilt

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a big part of it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a very generous way of looking at it personally, but, you know, she was there.

[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't.

[SPEAKER_00]: In any case, things started to spiral.

[SPEAKER_00]: He ended up getting arrested for theft.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this was in 1983.

[SPEAKER_00]: While he was in custody at the Clearwater County jail, he had a heart attack and died.

[SPEAKER_01]: Are you kidding me?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in 1983, he was never charged in Patty's case and he was never even officially named a suspect in her disappearance.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever he knew about what happened on August 31st, 1976, died with him about seven years later.

[SPEAKER_00]: Though the sisters basically believed what their family had told them over the years, questions began to nag at them.

[SPEAKER_00]: When they were 18 and 20, they walked into the list in police department and asked for both their mother's missing persons file and their father's file.

[SPEAKER_00]: They decided that they were going to figure out what happened themselves.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne says that almost the moment she started reading, she realized that the story she'd been told her entire life was a lie.

[SPEAKER_00]: As she put it, quote, it was very apparent my father was responsible just by reading three ports and quote.

[SPEAKER_01]: And how old is she at this point?

[SPEAKER_00]: She's 18.

[SPEAKER_00]: 18.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Natalie's 20.

[SPEAKER_01]: Gotcha.

[SPEAKER_00]: The sisters dug into their mom's case together for years, but then in 2006, a horrible tragedy hit this family again.

[SPEAKER_00]: Natalie died from carbon monoxide poisoning in a freak boating accident.

[SPEAKER_01]: What the hell?

[SPEAKER_00]: According to news reports, it's even worse, Natalie, her husband, Jeff, their 12-year-old son Jonathan and Jonathan's friend Kyle were boating on Clearwater Lake over Memorial Day weekend when a storm hit.

[SPEAKER_00]: They were on a motorboats.

[SPEAKER_00]: They covered up in order to avoid the rain and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jeff was driving the boat at the time, and then it crashed into shore.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't even understand how that happens.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I write a little bit into it because like one of the articles kind of explained how carbon monoxide poisoning on boats was like a really big danger that a lot of people just don't know about and yeah, apparently it has to do with the onboard motor like if you have an onboard motor, I guess if you cover, you know, if you cover up when you're on it, it is just really quick and easy to dive carbon monoxide poisoning.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, losing her sister, her nephew, her brother-in-law, like that, of course, was devastating for Suzanne, all of the case files and their mother's belongings were at Natalie's house.

[SPEAKER_00]: There were boxes and boxes, but season says she wanted nothing to do with any of it.

[SPEAKER_00]: She put them away and didn't look at it again for years.

[SPEAKER_00]: which again, I completely understand, you know, at some point, Suzanne got married.

[SPEAKER_00]: She had kids of her own.

[SPEAKER_00]: She had her own family to deal with as well, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: She's dealing with the grief of, you know, she's lost both biological parents.

[SPEAKER_00]: She's lost her sister who is, you know, the one who is really helping her in this fight to find out what happened to their mother.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, she lost her nephew, her brother-in-law.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then in 2013, about seven years after Natalie's death, her 17-year-old son died by suicide.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like objectively, this is just too much for one person to deal with.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: How will she continue to put one foot in front of the other or work or raise her other children, much less investigate her mother's decades-old disappearance?

[SPEAKER_00]: So for years, Patty's case sat dormant once again until something insane happened in 2021.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne was just in bed, scrolling through Facebook one night as a lot of us do.

[SPEAKER_00]: And she came across a pencil drawing of her.

[SPEAKER_00]: She's just scrolling.

[SPEAKER_00]: She sees this drawing.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's her face.

[SPEAKER_00]: She's like, wait, wait, wait.

[SPEAKER_00]: Wait.

[SPEAKER_00]: What the hell is this?

[SPEAKER_00]: She reads the post and the drawing belonged to a Jane Doe nicknamed Finley Creek Jane Doe.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it was her face.

[SPEAKER_00]: She told Dateline that her first thought was, quote, why would somebody draw me?

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like they took my picture at 30 and penciled it and quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then she read the post, which was put up by the Finley Creek Doe Task Force.

[SPEAKER_00]: It said that the dough had been found in 1978, wearing red pants and a white blouse.

[SPEAKER_00]: The same outfit that Patty Otto was last seen wearing.

[SPEAKER_00]: She still didn't understand what was happening that like her brain could not put the pieces together.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, why had this group drawn a picture of her and included details that matched termisting mother?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, she did not understand because I just, I need to make it so clear how, because if you look at this case online, you will see a picture of Suzanne, the drawing, of the Finley Creek Janejo, and then a picture of Patty.

[SPEAKER_00]: The drawing doesn't look like Patty.

[SPEAKER_01]: that's weird.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's so like that's why like her brain just like could not compute.

[SPEAKER_00]: So she messaged the the page and was like hey, like what the hell is going on here?

[SPEAKER_00]: So of course, she also woke her husband out and was like freaking out completely.

[SPEAKER_00]: So she messaged the task force and then kind of began to put the pieces together.

[SPEAKER_00]: On August 27, 1978, two hunters in the forest near Finley Creek, which is about 18 miles north of Legrand in eastern Oregon, came across human remains in a shallow grave on a hillside.

[SPEAKER_00]: They saw a human skull and rib bones poking out of the dirt.

[SPEAKER_00]: In and around that grave, investigators found a skull and spine, rib bones, part of the pelvis, arms and legs, and light blonde or brown hair.

[SPEAKER_00]: They also found pieces of white cloth with what looked like red hearts printed on it, a white halter top, red knit pants in a size 1516 that appeared to have been altered, and ankle high shoes.

[SPEAKER_00]: In near the pelvic bones, they found small bones.

[SPEAKER_00]: Bones that told them that the woman had likely been pregnant.

[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: At the time, in 1978, Patty Spamley was actually told about this body.

[SPEAKER_00]: Detective Celine drove Patty's parents to Oregon because investigators thought that the remains might belong to Patty.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne was five at the time and she remembers her grandparents coming home from that trip absolutely shattered, saying, they found a blonde-haired, short woman and red pants and a white blouse, but that it wasn't Patty.

[SPEAKER_00]: The remains were skeletal, so obviously

[SPEAKER_00]: So, it was also before DNA, so Oregon State Medical Examiner William Brady relied on X-rays, and according to him, the X-rays didn't match Patty.

[SPEAKER_01]: What X-rays?

[SPEAKER_00]: In September 1978, he compared Patty's dental records and concluded, quote,

[SPEAKER_00]: His reasoning was apparently based on the fact that Patty's wisdom teeth had been removed, but the Jane Doe still had her wisdom teeth.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, reasonable conclusion.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you can't just grow more wisdom teeth after you've gotten them removed.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: But Susan later discovered that the only basis for that belief was a handwritten note on the envelope of Patty's X-rays,

[SPEAKER_00]: suggesting in her view that Patty likely needed to have her wisdom teeth removed, not that she already had.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne also says that the note wasn't even written by the dentist, it was written by a friend who'd gone to the dentist with her mom.

[SPEAKER_00]: But no one knew that in 1978.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Patty's parents made peace with the fact that this random woman with the red pants in the

[SPEAKER_00]: and no one ever found out the identity of Finley Creek Doe.

[SPEAKER_00]: In 1990, the Oregon State Police and the District Attorney basically gave up.

[SPEAKER_01]: I have a question.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: On the Doe.

[SPEAKER_00]: Uh-huh.

[SPEAKER_01]: Were they able to determine a cause of death?

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it wasn't like there was a bullet hole in the skull.

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_00]: They ordered the remains cremated and the evidence destroyed because of the age of the case.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my God, are you kidding me?

[SPEAKER_01]: Why?

[SPEAKER_00]: The report says, quote, it could not be determined how the victim died, nor was the victim identified, case closed, and quote.

[SPEAKER_01]: Why would you destroy the evidence, though?

[SPEAKER_00]: Isn't that insane?

[SPEAKER_00]: Just like to save space?

[SPEAKER_00]: And this was in 1990, so 12 years.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, but technology was already advancing in 1990.

[SPEAKER_01]: Why wouldn't they like DNA was already a thing?

[SPEAKER_01]: I know.

[SPEAKER_01]: Why wouldn't they just hold onto the evidence and put it in storage?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.

[SPEAKER_00]: They were a small office and needed the space.

[SPEAKER_01]: Did buy a fucking warehouse.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the bones that could one day have been DNA tested were burned.

[SPEAKER_00]: But somehow, the story gets even crazier.

[SPEAKER_00]: So after Suzanne came across the Facebook post in 2021, she started looking to old newspaper articles about the Jane Doe.

[SPEAKER_00]: In one, it said that it was two hunters who found the body and the hunters were from Milton Freewater, Oregon, which is apparently a pretty small town.

[SPEAKER_01]: OK.

[SPEAKER_00]: One of those names was Lee Par.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Lee Par from Milton for Water Oregon.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne goes, wait a minute.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know somebody named Lee Par from Milton for Water Oregon.

[SPEAKER_01]: Get the fuck out.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was the name of Suzanne's husband's grandfather.

[SPEAKER_00]: What?

[SPEAKER_00]: The other person who was there that day, the second hunter, was Lee Pahr's eight-year-old son.

[SPEAKER_00]: That little boy was Suzanne's father-in-law.

[SPEAKER_01]: Holy shit, you've got to be kidding me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne immediately called her father-in-law and was like, hey,

[SPEAKER_01]: Do you remember finding a fucking dead body when you were on a hunting trip with your dad?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's exactly what she asked and he said, how do you know about that?

[SPEAKER_00]: I've never told you anything about that, and quote, and he said, yes, that was him because, you know, when you're at yours old and you find a body, you don't forget it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Suzanne said to him, quote, I think you found my mother, and quote,

[SPEAKER_00]: Now apparently after her father-in-law and his dad found the body, they had been told by police or somebody that it belonged to an elderly lady who had been picking berries and gone off the path and gotten lost and died.

[SPEAKER_01]: Who was also pregnant?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, they didn't know all that, you know, like they never knew any of that right.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they were just told then they're so yes, that was like a crazy traumatic thing that happened to them, but there was nothing in her father and laws minds that would have ever connected that to his daughter and laws missing mom, you know, especially since he was probably like another 30 years, 40 years before he even met Suzanne.

[SPEAKER_00]: As Suzanne dug into the actual Finley Creek case file, she and her cousin who started helping her with the case after Natalie's death, found something strange.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patty Auto isn't mentioned in the Finley Creek homicide report at all.

[SPEAKER_00]: As Suzanne put it, quote, it doesn't say she was rolled out.

[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't say she was presented.

[SPEAKER_00]: It says nothing about Patty Auto.

[SPEAKER_00]: End quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it was actually Suzanne's cousin Jennifer who found out why the connection between Finley Creek

[SPEAKER_00]: When she was putting the files in date order, she caught a problem.

[SPEAKER_00]: There were two different Jane Does in Oregon that were found around that time.

[SPEAKER_00]: One was found Barry near Lewis and Clark College in Portland, and the other one was the Finley Creek Jane Doe in Eastern Oregon.

[SPEAKER_00]: The first body, the one that was Barry near the college was eventually identified as a woman named Annette Willis, and she was identified through X-rays that featured extensive dental work.

[SPEAKER_00]: She had somewhere around 11 fillings, so it was like pretty easy, you know, to compare those actresses with Annette Wallace's dental actress, right, but when Suzanne looked closer at the dental records for Finley Creek Jane Doe, they showed the exact same 11 fillings as a net willus.

[SPEAKER_00]: Her belief is that the dental comparison used to rule patty out may have been run against the wrong body entirely.

[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, she thinks that basically instead of running patties, X-rays against Finley Creek, Jane Doe's X-rays, they ran them against a net Willis's X-rays.

[SPEAKER_00]: And beyond the fillings, like the shape of the jaw, like nothing matched, you know?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: KTVB reached out to Oregon State Police about the alleged record mixup, but they said they had, quote, nothing to provide and quote.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean look it clearly it doesn't seem like they're the best to keep in records.

[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, that's not surprising that they wouldn't Know or have any way to look back and say oh, yeah, that was our bed

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know, so, but you know, that's not to say that Oregon state police have completely dismissed Suzanne's theory.

[SPEAKER_00]: In 2021 and 2022, the volunteer Do task force brought cadaver dogs out to the Finley Creek site.

[SPEAKER_00]: The dogs alerted on multiple spots, including down by the creek bed below the grave site.

[SPEAKER_00]: The theory was that decades of erosion on that floodplain could have carried bone fragments downhill into the creek.

[SPEAKER_00]: On the strength of those alerts, Oregon State Police agreed to go excavate.

[SPEAKER_00]: On August 16th and 17th, 2022, an OSP forensic team excavated the original grave site and the two spots the dog said flagged.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sifting the dirt through screens looking for even the smallest bone fragment they could pull DNA from, but they only found animal bones.

[SPEAKER_00]: OSP posted on Facebook that nothing of evidentiary value was discovered.

[SPEAKER_00]: There was an article where Suzanne and some other people went down to where OSP had searched and from what I could gather from the article, it seems like she just didn't think they searched a big enough area, basically.

[SPEAKER_00]: So when Finley Creek Jane Does remains where recovered in 1978, they didn't find an intact skeleton.

[SPEAKER_00]: There are still several bones missing.

[SPEAKER_00]: So like there's absolutely a chance that there are still bones out there, double onto her.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's really important because the Finley Creek Jane Doe was cremated in 1990 and as of right now, 2026, there's no way to test the cremines for DNA.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne's only real hope of definitively proving that Finley Creek Jane Doe is her mother is if they find additional bones in the woods.

[SPEAKER_00]: but so far, none have turned up.

[SPEAKER_00]: And yet another twist, which isn't quite as insane as the fact that her father-in-law and grandfather-in-law are the ones who've found her, the little organ town that had the Doze body didn't have a crematorium in 1990.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the body was sent to the nearest one, which is in Wallo Wallo Washington.

[SPEAKER_00]: Wallo Wallo Washington happens to be

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the remains that she believes belong to her missing mother have been just miles away from her for decades.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're in the custody of the Walla Walla County corridor, and they're labeled only as miscellaneous cramines, with no Jane or John Doe on the books to explain them.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne says that she has paid for DNA testing on the box of Kermaine's twice, but the reality is that successful DNA extraction from human Kermaine's has essentially never been done.

[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, the science just isn't there yet.

[SPEAKER_00]: It might be in the future, but it's just not they are right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the authorities won't give her an identification.

[SPEAKER_00]: They won't say,

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne is in her words, quote, fighting three states to get justice for my pregnant mother.

[SPEAKER_00]: End quote.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patty Otto disappeared in 1976.

[SPEAKER_00]: Remains were found two years later that potentially matched her.

[SPEAKER_01]: How far away was that?

[SPEAKER_00]: Lewis town Idaho to Finley Creek, Oregon is about 145 miles, so it's like a three-hour drive.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so six hours round trip, you know, bearing a shallow grave.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the grave was I believe 29 inches deep.

[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't take her out there that night.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's too much time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's too much time for your kids to just be left alone sleeping and late.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, remember the next day, he dropped them or he went to the his girlfriend.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's right.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that he probably left the kids with her.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then either had already had her like in the trunk of the car, whatever, or went back home.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yep.

[SPEAKER_00]: Where he had hidden her daughter.

[SPEAKER_01]: He took her to his girlfriend's house

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's true.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that was like a full day.

[SPEAKER_00]: That was a full day.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think they spent at least like one night.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's what that's when it happened.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's when he took her out there.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: But there's also a possibility too.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like if we think the gun wasn't involved because I don't think that he shot her in the house that night on August 31st.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Suzanne said she saw him with

[SPEAKER_00]: his hands are round patty's neck, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: And strangulation would make sense one because of the type of violence too because it wouldn't necessarily leave behind a lot of evidence.

[SPEAKER_00]: What if she wasn't actually dead, you know?

[SPEAKER_01]: That night, I mean.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like what if she was just injured, whatever, and he took her out there somewhere, and then shot her.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, maybe.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's a big lead, but you know, like, I just don't understand.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, why the gun went missing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why the pillow on the couch.

[SPEAKER_01]: Why was that missing?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: That could have been used to muffle the sound of gunshot.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's true as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it could have been later after the physical fight.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe like in after Suzanne had gone back downstairs with Natalie, you know, then yeah, the gunshot could have happened.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, but then where did it happen?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because that would have left.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, at 357, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big bullet.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's true.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're not talking in 22 right where there wasn't necessarily even be like an exit wound for instance.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, with a 357 there would be.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because you said she was tiny, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean,

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, maybe a garage or, you know, something like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't really know the way out of the house.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I wouldn't think outside just because, you know, somebody would have seen her heard something probably.

[SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_01]: So then the remains are discovered, most likely her.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Two years later.

[SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_01]: They potentially mix up X-rays because I, you said Suzanne saw the X-rays from the dental records, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: that had 11 fillings, but the other Jane Doe also had 11 fillings, which obviously like that's clearly a fuck up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, because you just like, what are the odds that two Jane Does have the same 11 fillings?

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's insane.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: How did Suzanne and her husband made?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like how did that happen?

[SPEAKER_00]: I do not know.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you're talking about a town three hours away from where Suzanne grew up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then she ends up meeting him, marrying him.

[SPEAKER_01]: like, how is that insane?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then like he didn't even know that his father had found this body when he was eight years old because it just wasn't something he talked about.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he didn't know any of this.

[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So like she grew up in Idaho.

[SPEAKER_00]: Her husband, I'm presuming group in Oregon, or at least that's where his father grew up.

[SPEAKER_00]: They met somewhere at

[SPEAKER_00]: where the cremines that she believed belonged to her mother had been sitting since 1999, for since 1990.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is like a Stephen King novel or something, you know?

[SPEAKER_00]: Or AZ.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then that's it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where we're at.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's where we're at.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's pretty obvious who did it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I didn't have a section this week about theories because like we don't need to waste everybody's time with like, oh, maybe she killed herself like she didn't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, she was definitely murdered by Ralph.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just the question of how when we know the why.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And why the fuck the police didn't do anything about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Didn't even investigate that that's the other thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like they didn't even bother to do a basic investigation.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that's the thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, they did.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, because we have They looked around the house.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's not an investigation.

[SPEAKER_00]: Correct.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like a forensic investigation.

[SPEAKER_00]: But like there are so many things in the police file that it's like, okay

[SPEAKER_00]: you have this information right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we're not talking rumors that have been passed down to a family for generations.

[SPEAKER_00]: We are talking about information from the police file that was all happening right then.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: You have a report the day she went missing that he was in a bar waving a gun talking about killing her boyfriend.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: like that was known that was known like there is even though even though that this the police or the missing persons report was was later was a few days later that was known then you have a you have this person who has a history of violence you have this person who who admits in an interview that he would have killed them had he seen them together why are you're not digging further into this I mean I generally I would just say misogyny like oh yeah

[SPEAKER_00]: Generally, I think that's the answer, but I think a bigger part of it, too, is the fact that there wasn't a body.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, a no-body homicide case is a lot more common nowadays because there have been a lot of successful prosecutions of them.

[SPEAKER_00]: But back in 1976,

[SPEAKER_00]: They were very few in far between.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now the very first one I had to look it up because I couldn't remember.

[SPEAKER_00]: The very first conviction in the U.S. was in 1957.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we're talking less than 20 years.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know how many had really been done in those two decades.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that a lot of it was, well, we're building this case when we find the body, then we'll have enough to arrest them.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they didn't find the body.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that misogyny and not having the body are like the two big contributing factors here.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I get not having the body, sure, but that's also potentially a foregone conclusion, like we're putting the cart before the horse situation here, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like at that point, it's a missing person's investigation.

[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, with clearly the evidence is leading you towards her being dead.

[SPEAKER_01]: But why aren't you doing any investigation at all?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like you're gathering evidence, but not doing anything with it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: You're not pressing him more.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well he did lawyer up.

[SPEAKER_01]: Sure, eventually.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: But also after giving an interview saying that he would kill her and kill her boyfriend.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: You allegedly at some point interviewed the boyfriend and had to have found out that he didn't show up.

[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't take her away.

[SPEAKER_00]: So according to him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: But why aren't you pressing the both of them then?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: One of the two of them is line G. Do I believe the boyfriend of this missing person or do I believe the husband who is just down the street drinking a beer waving a gun saying he's going to kill the boyfriend?

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I get that there's not evidence enough to pursue a homicide charge, but there's evidence enough to continue digging to do more searches of the house.

[SPEAKER_01]: Ask more questions about the fucking missing gun.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, she must have taken it when she left.

[SPEAKER_01]: Bullshit.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, it just insane.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like how many red flags there were in that police report that just apparently weren't enough.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ralph was arrested for the hit in October of 1976, so like two months later, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: He went to trial.

[SPEAKER_00]: I want to say like February of 77, but it was December of 76, so while he was awaiting trial, that the relative went to police and was like, hey, so Suzanne said that she saw

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Dad hit mom and mom hit dad and then him choke mom and, you know, drag her out.

[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't think they could use that.

[SPEAKER_00]: I get that she was three, but still.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, three years old, but so what?

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's still, that's still witness testimony.

[SPEAKER_00]: Especially if they had the testimony from the ex-wife saying that he was violent with her.

[SPEAKER_00]: If he, if they had the letter from Vera who said that he raped her, like,

[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like there's stuff you can build on, people have gotten convicted with a whole hot less evidence.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And maybe we don't know this, but like I'm, again, it's like I want to know how much investigation was done with the initial report, given all of that information that we have.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Did they talk to any of the neighbors?

[SPEAKER_01]: Did any of the neighbors hear a pop, like you can't ask now, probably because most

[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe a neighbor heard something that sounded like a gunshot, but was just like, uh, well, I mean, you know, but yeah, and nobody in a safe neighborhood believes it's a gunshot when they hear a gunshot.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: But if you hear something like a loud bang and then the police the next day are like, hey, somebody's gone missing next door.

[SPEAKER_01]: Did you hear anything?

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know what?

[SPEAKER_01]: Come to think of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: I did hear a loud noise.

[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't I looked out the window.

[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't think anything of it because it was quiet after that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Didn't see anything.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, did you happen to see Ralph loading anything into his car in the middle of the night?

[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I mean?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like did they do any further investigation into this?

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the whole time I was going over the parts about, you know, the dental X-ray mix up and all that, it took me back to the case that we covered Lea Roberts, who went missing in Washington State, so in this general area, and a mummified dough was found near where she went missing that had the same metal rod in

[SPEAKER_00]: their femur that she had, but it was ruled out because they said it was a male.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I was like, well, was it though?

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I guess, you know what I mean?

[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, there are stories that potentially that do was actually identified and, you know, was a male and whatever, but I, from what I've read, that's even questionable.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't know, but like, I

[SPEAKER_00]: It's making me not just anything anymore.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, also a huge history of misogyny and just like a fucking show come back.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, to be fair, too, like during that time period before we were all so connected, like people did just leave in like loose touch and whatever.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's why you do have so many and identified missing people from that era and so many people who went missing and weren't ever found, a lot of them nothing.

[SPEAKER_00]: like no foul play happened to them.

[SPEAKER_00]: They literally just like stop talking to their family, move to a different state, and then just died later.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's also the number one fucking excuse of every murder that happened in that time frame was, ah, they just left.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's still the number one excuse.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, a lot easier to prove now that it's harder to get away with now.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, back then, you know, CCTV footage was rare.

[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_01]: If at all, nobody had any cameras on their houses.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: We weren't carrying cell phones.

[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody had cell phones.

[SPEAKER_01]: There was no social media.

[SPEAKER_01]: You're right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Many people with people genuinely could leave and never be seen again.

[SPEAKER_01]: Or they could get murdered.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but it's compounded by cops not doing their job or not digging a little bit deeper.

[SPEAKER_00]: Suzanne's only real memory of her mother is from the night she believes she watched her father murder her.

[SPEAKER_00]: She lost her sister, who was her only partner in the search.

[SPEAKER_00]: But instead of letting it break her completely, she turned her grief into a one-woman investigation that pulled

[SPEAKER_00]: She tied them together with police files, dental charts, and decades of stubborn love.

[SPEAKER_00]: She told KTVB, quote, I just feel like she's calling me to bring her home, and she's like, I've been trying to help you this whole time.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm listening, and quote, August 2026 will mark 50 years since Patty Otto was last seen alive, on the night she put a girl's downstairs because she knew.

[SPEAKER_00]: She'll be 73 years old today and her daughter is still out there in Walawala, fighting three states and the limits of forensic science, trying to do the one thing she's wanted to choose three years old to bring her mother home.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patricia, Patty, Lee, Otto, has been missing from Louis to Idaho since August 31st, 1976.

[SPEAKER_00]: She is a white woman with dirty blonde hair and hazel eyes.

[SPEAKER_00]: At the time of her disappearance, she was approximately five foot three inches tall and 140 pounds, and she had a scar on her back.

[SPEAKER_00]: She was last seen wearing red knit pants and a white shell top, possibly printed with cherries.

[SPEAKER_00]: Patty was 24 years old when she went missing, and she may have been pregnant at the time.

[SPEAKER_00]: She would be 73 today.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you have any information about the disappearance of Patty Auto, please contact the Lewiston Police Department at 208-746-0171.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you have any information about the identity of the Finley Creek Jane Doe,

[SPEAKER_00]: You can see all the sources for this episode along with photos and videos that are website and then they were gone.com.

[SPEAKER_01]: And be sure to follow us on social and then they were gone pod on Facebook and at ATTWG pod on Instagram and TikTok.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you like what we're doing, please subscribe and consider leaving a five-star review on Apple podcast or Spotify.

[SPEAKER_01]: It will help new listeners find us.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the more people that listen, the more chances we have of bringing someone home.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll see you here next week for a brand new episode.

[SPEAKER_01]: See you next week.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then they were gone as hosted by Kona Gallagher and Ethan Flick, our research writing and editing is done by me, Kona Gallagher.

[SPEAKER_00]: Theme music is the Stork, by Hatsa.

[SPEAKER_00]: Additional music is provided by Kai Engel, and then they were gone is a little monster production.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, you could do it!