True Crime in the Great Outdoors
The most shocking crimes from national parks, camping trips, backpacker murders, and hiking incidents
The miracle rescue of Alan Lee Phillips at Colorado’s Guanella Pass - the man who turned out to be a serial killer
Revised July 2024
Alan Lee Phillips, a 30-year-old mechanic, was rescued from the top of a high pass called Guanella Pass in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in the winter of 1982 with temperatures down to -22°F (-30°C) during a horrendous snowstorm. Local papers described the rescue as a “miracle”.
On January 6, 1982, His pickup truck was stuck in a snowdrift, and he had managed to flash SOS with his headlights. Only by chance did a Jefferson County Sheriff happen to be on a United Airlines flight to California as it passed overhead and spotted the truck. The sheriff alerted the flight crew, who radioed for rescue.
Phillips was slightly intoxicated and had a large bruise on his face when he was found, but was otherwise unharmed. Dave Montoya, the local fire chief who saved him, said at the time, “How in the heck did this guy get so lucky for all the stuff to fall into place?”
The rescuers were wondering what Phillips was doing out in the Guanella Pass. Forty years on, the reason has become clear, and recent DNA analysis has found that hours before his rescue, the mechanic had shot and killed two young women who were hitchhiking nearby and whose murders had never been solved.
The story has switched from a miracle rescue to that of a despicable killer of hitchhikers in the famous skiing areas around Breckenridge, Colorado.
Guanella Pass
The rescue of Alan Lee Phillips in Guanella Pass in 1982
Montoya said that on the night he got the call from the dispatcher that a stranded motorist had been spotted from an aeroplane, he thought, “It was the craziest thing I ever heard of.”
He arrived at Guenella Pass 15 minutes later and found Phillips. “Sure as heck, there he was in his little pickup, and he saw me and said, ‘Oh, God, I’m saved.’ He said he got drunk and decided to drive home. And I said, ‘You came up over the pass?’ And he said, ‘Well, it seemed like a good idea.’”
Phillips explained the large bruise on his face by saying that he had climbed out of his truck to take a pee, and he had been blinded by the snow and hit his head into the corner of the truck. Only later was this version of events proven to be wholly fictional and had been inflicted by one of the women he had attacked earlier in the day.
The murders of Annette Schnee and Barbara Oberholtzer
Annette Schnee, 22, and Barbara “Bobbi Jo” Oberholtzer, 29, went missing while hitchhiking near Breckenridge, Colorado, on January 6, 1982.
Annette was last seen at about 4.45 pm, and her body was found six months later face down in a stream, having been shot in the back.
Barbara disappeared after leaving work colleagues just before 8 pm. Her family found her body with a bullet wound in her chest the next day on a snow embankment about 20ft from the road below another mountain pass, about 10 miles from Breckenridge and 50 miles from Guanella Pass.
Investigations into the murders
Charlie McCormick, 81, a retired Denver murder detective, who had been working on the cold case since 1989 after being hired by the Schnee family, said in a statement to The Denver Post: “I’ve been trying to define my emotions, and it’s been hard to do. I never thought I would see the day. It’s been a long haul.” He got a call from the team’s lead genetics researcher to tell him the news. “She said, ‘We got him. It was phenomenal, something I thought I would never see.”
From late 2020 into 2021, DNA from the crime scenes was analyzed using Genetic genealogy against samples submitted on public DNA databases such as 23 and Me, and Ancestry.com was linked to Phillips, now 70 and still living in the area.
On February 24, 2021, police arrested Phillips, now a father of three who lived in Clear Creek, during a traffic stop in Clear Creek County, and he was charged with the kidnapping, assault, and murder of both women. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for September 13, 2021.
Eileen Franklin, 88, Annette’s mother, said: “I thought maybe I'd be gone before I had closure to this case. I'm ready to go when it's my time now.”
Montoya said: “We ended up picking up the guy straight out of hell. He got his mercy, he got saved, he got his life saved, he didn’t die up there, but he did bad things before that, and he’s got to pay for them.”
Bobbi Jo’s husband, Jeff Oberholtzer called the four-decade wait for justice a “hideous nightmare.”
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Read other stories from True Crime in the Outdoors
The chilling story of Thomas Lee Dillon - the Ohio Outdoorsmen killer
The miraculous escape of the Brazilian and German backpackers at Salt Creek in South Australia
Murder on the Appalachian Trail
Robert Hansen “Butcher Baker” - the Alaska Serial killer who hunted his victims in the wilderness
Sources
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mechanics-arrest-may-solve-40-year-mystery-of-murders-in-the-rockies-lqb30w6jf
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/alan-lee-philips-colorado-murder-b1853711.html
RockyMountainColdCase.org