40-Year Murder Mystery Solved: A Passenger Saw an SOS From a Plane Window — The Rescue Exposed a Killer

An airline passenger spotted SOS flashes from the Colorado mountains below. That triggered a rescue – and exposed a killer, 40 years later.

The mountains were silent that January night in 1982, except for the wind scraping over ice. A commercial flight cut across the Rockies through dense clouds, its cabin lights dimmed for the late-evening descent.

Near Breckenridge, Colorado, a passenger peered down and saw a glimmer in the darkness — headlights blinking in a rhythm too precise to be random. Three short. Three long. Three short. SOS.

• The passenger pointed it out. A sheriff aboard the same flight recognized the code. Down below, temperatures had dropped to –20 °F. A blizzard had swallowed the passes.

• Volunteer rescuers, guided by coordinates relayed from the sky, clawed their way up the snow-packed road until they found a pickup truck half buried in a drift.

• The driver was Alan Lee Phillips, a 30-year-old miner from Clear Creek County. His face was bruised, his clothes stiff with frost. He said he’d taken a wrong turn. Fire Chief Dave Montoya recognized him and pulled him free. Newspapers called it a miracle: “Man Saved After SOS Seen From Plane.”

No one yet knew that the man blinking SOS into the storm had just killed two women.

The Disappearances

In Breckenridge, 29-year-old Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer finished work and stopped by a local pub to celebrate a promotion. At 6:21 p.m., she phoned her husband: she’d caught a ride and would be home soon. She never arrived.

Twenty-one-year-old Annette Kay Schnee ended her housekeeping shift that same afternoon, stopped at a drugstore for medicine, and was last seen at 4:45 p.m. hitchhiking south out of town.

By dawn, Bobbie Jo’s husband found her blue backpack abandoned near the highway, spattered with blood.
Searchers fanned across the slopes. That afternoon—January 7, 1982—they found her body buried in a snowbank near the summit of Hoosier Pass. She had been shot twice, once in the chest and once in the back. Zip-ties bound one wrist. Nearby lay a tissue, a glove, and a single orange bootie sock.

Annette Schnee stayed missing until July 3, when a boy fishing along Sacramento Creek found her remains 20 miles away. She had been shot in the back as she ran downhill; her shoes were on the wrong feet.
On one foot: the matching orange sock from Bobbie Jo’s scene. That single thread of acrylic yarn fused the cases together—the “Orange Sock Murders.”

The Case Grows Cold

Investigators interviewed hundreds of witnesses and hitchhikers. Without DNA technology, all they could say was that the blood on Bobbie Jo’s glove came from a male, blood type A. No match. No suspect.

The driver that was rescued stayed in the area — mining, raising a family, and telling the story of his rescue whenever storms rolled in. Decades passed and the case file gathered dust.

Forty Winters Later

In 2020, Colorado’s Cold Case Review Team reopened the file. DNA extracted from Bobbie Jo’s glove and Annette’s clothing was run through a genetic-genealogy database. For the first time the two killers were linked. The profile traced back to one family — and one living descendant: Alan Lee Phillips.

• The rescue site matched the corridor between both murders.
  
• The SOS call’s timing overlapped with the victims’ last known movements.
  
• And that old facial bruise? Investigators now believed Bobbie Jo had struck him with her brass key-ring weapon while fighting for her life.

Phillips was arrested on February 24, 2021, nearly 39 years after the crimes. A jury convicted him in September 2022 of two counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms that November. Three months later, he took his own life in prison.

Why It Took 40 Years

These were separate victims. The investigations were separate files. The killings were six months apart, and that hid the connection until the orange-sock clue emerged.

There was no DNA testing yet – DNA evidence was first used in criminal investigations in 1986 in the U.K. And the killer had a built-in alibi. The SOS rescue made Phillips appear innocent. Evidence from the crimes was preserved but went unanalyzed for years.

The Incredible Irony

A passenger saw a flicker in the snow and saved a life. No one knew that the man who was saved had just taken a life, or that the light was a signal from the killer that rescuing officers had been searching for.

A man trapped by the same storm he’d created was saved by chance. The act of mercy kept him alive – long enough for science to expose him. That light blinking through the blizzard was more than just a cry for help. It was the last echo of two women’s voices. Four decades later, the truth was exposed.