Patty Otto- Idaho- 1976

(Above photo credit: nbcnews.com)

From nbcnews.com:

Suzanne Timms was scrolling through Facebook one day and stopped cold. It was the drawing of a woman that caught her eye. That woman, she thought, was her.

“Why would somebody draw me?” Suzanne wondered. “It’s like they took my picture at 30 and penciled it.”

Of course, the woman was not her. The post was about the long-ago cold case of a woman simply known as the Finley Creek Jane Doe.

Suzanne read on.

“And then it says, ‘Red pants and a white blouse.’ And I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ I literally sit up in my bed, and I wake up my husband.”

She was shocked to read the clothing description because red pants and a white blouse was what her mother was last believed to have been wearing when she disappeared in August of 1976...

The memories of a child can be tricky. Especially for children as young as Suzanne and her sister, Natalie, were on August 31, 1976. Natalie was 4 years old at the time, Suzanne only 2.

August 31 was the night their mother disappeared from the family’s home in Lewiston, Idaho.

Suzanne’s memory of what she says happened that night is strong, bolstered, perhaps, by years of family whispers.

That night, “when my mom brought us home, instead of putting us in our bedroom -- which is next door to their room -- she put us downstairs,” she told Dateline. “So I think it was known that there was going to be an argument.”

“And then as soon as we closed the door, I immediately heard crashing and yelling,” she said. Suzanne, who describes herself as having been a curious child, said she followed the commotion. “I went up the stairs to find out what was happening. And I remember very clearly looking through those wrought iron rails and seeing her hit him in the face, him hit her back,” she said. “And then he grabbed her by the neck, pushed her up against the wall and drug her out of my sight.”

That night was the last time Suzanne and Natalie ever saw their mother, 24-year-old Patty Otto.

Suzanne said she ran back downstairs to her big sister, who comforted her until the yelling stopped.

“Next thing I know, it was morning and my dad was waking us up and he was yelling that we needed to get our shoes and go,” Suzanne said. She said they spent the day at their father’s girlfriend’s house.

Suzanne told Dateline that her mother had been trying to get a divorce from her father, and she thinks that may have been what they were arguing about that night.

“Later that night, he brought us to my mom’s sister’s house and said he was going to go look for my mom,” Suzanne remembered.

She said that ultimately their father, Ralph Otto, told her and Natalie that their mother left of her own accord. “We were told she abandoned us,” she said. “‘Your mom is gone, and she doesn’t want to be a mom anymore. And she ran off with some other man,’” Suzanne quoted her father as saying.

Almost immediately, Patty’s sister, the girls’ Aunt Alice, thought something was wrong. She reported Patty missing to the Lewiston Police Department on September 2, 1976.

Dateline spoke with Tom Saleen, now retired, who was a lieutenant with Lewiston PD at the time of Patty Otto’s disappearance and investigated the case. “I was 26 years old when I was working this case, and now I’m 74,” Saleen said. “I put more time, work in this case than any other case I ever worked on as a detective.”

He remembered responding to the call about a missing person. “I went to the home [in Lewiston] on a call of a missing person, and there I met Ralph — that was the husband,” Saleen told Dateline. “Met him, and he said his wife just left after they had a disagreement.”

According to Suzanne, in addition to her father having a girlfriend, her mother had been seeing another man. His name was Randy Benton.

Dateline spoke with Benton, who said he might have been what the Ottos were fighting about that night in 1976. “Yeah, I probably had something to do with that because I had took her home the night before,” he said. “And when I left, I felt somebody was watching me.”

Benton said he met Patty in high school. “We dated a couple of times,” he said. “She was a good person. I mean, she was fun. She could laugh. She liked to dance a little bit. She was a great person.”

When he heard that Patty was missing, he also felt something was wrong. “When Alice told me that she was gone and nobody had seen her and her kids were by themselves and all this, it was like, ‘Man, something’s bad -- wrong here,’” he said.

Benton told Dateline that authorities from the Lewiston Police Department spoke with him about Patty’s disappearance. “A friend of mine was in the Lewiston Police Department and so he came to my house and asked me what I knew and what I didn’t know,” Benton said. He told them he didn’t know anything about Patty’s disappearance.

Tom Saleen told Dateline that he conducted interviews with the people in Patty’s circle. “Later, at the sister’s home — Alice’s home — I met the children and, of course, they were so young,” he said. The retired lieutenant said he didn’t speak to Suzanne and Natalie directly, but recalls that the police report reflected that “Suzanne saw an incident with her mother being carried out of the house.”

Saleen said that he and Captain Duane Ailor from the Lewiston Police Department questioned Ralph Otto at the time. “It was not long before he attorney-ed up and obtained legal counsel and then prohibited us from doing any more interrogation,” he said. “And it was at this time that Ralph was very nervous, and he went to a bar owner trying to get a Mafia person to do a hit on both Captain Ailor and myself.”

“We found out about that and set him up with a state investigator. And the state investigator met with Ralph and was told he would only do one hit at a time,” Saleen said. “Ralph agreed to that and said Captain Ailor was his first choice, and so the money was paid.” Otto was arrested and charged with attempted murder.

Suzanne remembers her father being arrested. “On October 27. It’s my sister’s fifth birthday, and Dad gets arrested,” she recalled. “Only two months after my mom disappeared.”

Ralph Otto went on trial for attempted murder and was convicted. “We had the trial for him. He went to prison. I went to interview him in prison on one occasion,” Tom Saleen told Dateline. But then, not long after being convicted, Otto took his case to the Idaho Supreme Court. “He got the case dismissed, saying that there was no actual way you could be charged for attempted murder by hiring a hit man,” Saleen said. In its decision to overturn the case, the Idaho State Supreme Court stated that “acts done in planning to commit a crime, or in devising, obtaining, or arranging the means to commit it, are not sufficient to constitute an attempt…. The act must be something done beyond mere preparation which shows that the defendant began carrying out the plan to commit the crime.”

Meanwhile, Patty’s family continued their search. Suzanne said her grandparents put up a $3,000 reward for “all information which results in the location of Mrs. Otto or her body.”

In September of 1978, two years after Patty’s disappearance, investigators got a lead. “There was a body found,” Tom Saleen told Dateline. “And then we took the parents over to see the medical examiner.”

Suzanne was 5 years old at the time. “We were told that Grandma and Grandpa were going to Oregon because they thought they had found my mom,” she said. “And when Grandma and Grandpa came back, they just both said, ‘I just can’t believe it. They found a woman’s body, a blonde-haired, short woman wearing red pants and a white blouse -- and it’s not her.’”

“Both Natalie and I remember that,” Suzanne said. “And we remember it, because we called her, and referred to her as the ‘Red Pants Doe.’” Suzanne told Dateline that while her mother had been wearing red pants and a white blouse when she was last seen, her grandparents were told the x-rays did not match Patty Otto.

At that point, the family became resigned to the idea that ‘Red Pants Doe’ was not Patty.

For most of their childhoods, Suzanne and Natalie lived with their father’s sister, Marcy Smith, who passed away in January 2023. When the sisters were 18 and 20 years old respectively, they decided to try to get to the bottom of their mother’s disappearance. “We’re old enough to start really asking a lot of questions and trying to figure out how come nobody’s even mentioned my mom or my dad for all these years,” Suzanne said. “We went into the police department and said, ‘I want both files. I want my dad’s file and I want my mom’s file,’ and we’re going to figure out ourselves what happened.”

Suzanne said they were given the files and, almost immediately, she realized that what she had been told for most of her childhood was not true. “We believed this our whole lives -- that Mom left,” she said. “It’s not true.”

Suzanne told Dateline that she believes her father had something to do with her mother’s disappearance. When Suzanne was 10 years old, her father, Ralph Otto, died in 1983 in police custody for an unrelated crime. He was never charged in Patty’s case or officially named a suspect in her disappearance.

Retired lieutenant Tom Saleen told Dateline that he also believes Ralph Otto is responsible for Patty’s disappearance. However, “now that he is dead, we don’t have anyone to prosecute, unless it’s someone that was assisting him,” he said. “I remained working the case until I was promoted to captain,” Saleen noted. “Each and every subsequent detective that’s worked the case, I’ve taken the time to talk to them and give them ideas and knowledge, background information on the case, so that hopefully, it can be solved someday.”

Together, Suzanne and her sister continued looking into their mother’s disappearance in the years that followed.

Until 2006, when tragedy struck again. Suzanne’s sister, Natalie, died from carbon monoxide poisoning in a boating accident. “I think that really changed the course of the case, because I wanted nothing to do with the case file. It’s all at my sister’s house. Boxes and boxes, and all Mom’s stuff is at Natalie’s house,” Suzanne said. “And I said, ‘I don’t want any of that. Put it somewhere else. Maybe someday I’ll look at it.’”

She had no idea when “someday” would be.

The Finley Creek Jane Doe

2021 is the year Suzanne Timms scrolled through Facebook and did a double-take when she saw what she believed to have been her own face staring back at her.

It was an artist’s rendering of a woman whose body had been found in August of 1978 in Finley Creek, Oregon.

She was found on August 27, 1978. According to a post from the Finley Creek Jane Doe Facebook page, The Finley Creek Jane Doe was 5’1”-5’3”, 125 pounds. They also found small bones, indicating that the victim may have been pregnant. Items found with the remains included a white top and red pants.

Suzanne said the description of the clothing stood out to her. According to NamUs, her mother, Patty Otto, was “believed to have been wearing red slacks and a white shell blouse” when she disappeared. “Reading that description stopped me dead in my tracks,” Suzanne said. “That perfectly describes my mother, right down to the clothing that my grandmother reported she was wearing the night she vanished.”

Suzanne immediately reached out to the Finley Creek Jane Doe Facebook page. She said that she questioned the person running the page, thinking it had to have been some kind of sick joke or prank. “‘How is it possible that you draw my face and then you describe my mom in the post,’” Suzanne recalled asking. She said the person running the page sent the case file for the Finley Creek Jane Doe over after seeing the similarities in the side by side pictures. “My mom’s not mentioned once in the Finley Creek homicide report,” Suzanne said. “It doesn’t say she was ruled out. It doesn’t say she was presented. It says nothing about Patty Otto.”

“So we’re like, ‘My God, this is insane. I need to look through this information,’” Suzanne said. “And that’s when I see the newspaper article.” The story got even more bizarre, Suzanne said, when she learned who discovered the Finley Creek Jane Doe.

“It says she was found by two hunters from Milton-Freewater: Ron Swiger and Lee Parr,” Suzanne told Dateline. “Now I’m really thinking that I’m losing my mind --because Lee Parr is my husband’s grandpa.” Suzanne asked her husband if his grandfather ever mentioned finding a body in Oregon in 1978. “And he’s like, ‘You sound crazy — you literally sound crazy,’” she said. “And I hand over the newspaper article and he reads it, and he’s like, ‘Milton-Freewater is too small of a town to have two Lee Parrs.’”

Suzanne said her husband’s grandfather died in 2009, so they decided to call her husband’s father to see if he ever remembered Lee talking about finding a body. “I call my father-in-law, and he’s like, ‘How do you know about that? I’ve never told you anything about that,’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Well, what do you know about it?’”

Suzanne said that’s when her father-in-law told her that he was also there when the Finley Creek Jane Doe was found. “He’s like, ‘Well, when you’re 8 years old hunting and you find a body, it’s not like you forget about it,’” she recalled him saying. “And I’m like, ‘Ron, I think you found my mother.’”

“I reached out to the Oregon State Medical Examiner,” Suzanne said. “And I sent [them] the information I had.” She hoped that maybe this was the break she needed to solve her mother’s case.

Suzanne also took to social media. In August of 2021, she started with a Facebook page called ‘Patty’s Voice.’

“I created Patty’s Voice on Facebook as a thing to say, ‘Guys, I need information. I found this body, and I believe this is my mom, and I need to know what everybody else knows. I want to hear my family stories. I want to hear my mom’s family stories,” Suzanne said. “And my cousin reached out to me. She’s like, ‘I’ve always been so fascinated with what happened to your mom, and I want to take part, so I want to help you.’ And she’s, like, super detail-oriented.”

Suzanne’s cousin, Jennifer Harrington, began going through the files and putting them in chronological order. That’s when they found a discrepancy.

“She’s reviewing the files, and she says, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but look at the dates on that letter that’s requesting Lewiston to compare the x-rays,’” Suzanne told Dateline.

“So she pulls up this August 28th letter,” Suzanne said. “And it says, in response to the August 10 APB.”

“She’s like, ‘How can there be an APB for August 10 when the body is found August 27, the day before this letter is written?’” Suzanne told Dateline.

Suzanne said they began looking into it further and found that there were actually two bodies found in Oregon around the same time. “We look at the file, and there’s two APBs in there. There’s one APB dated August 10 — a young Caucasian female found buried near Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon,” Suzanne said. “Then there’s another APB for September 13 — a young Caucasian female buried in the woods in eastern Oregon. So we’re like, we have two Jane Does.” The September 13 APB was for the Finley Creek Jane Doe.

The body from the August 10 APB was later identified as a woman named Annette Willis, whose body was found on July 28 in Portland. “She is identified by the extensive dental work– she had, like, 11 fillings,” Suzanne said. She told Dateline she looked at the dental records for the Finley Creek Jane Doe which show the “exact same record” as what was on file for the Portland Jane Doe, Annette Willis. “That’s astronomically impossible to have two bodies found within a month of each other and they have the exact 11 fillings,” Suzanne said.

Suzanne told Dateline she has a report saying Oregon police ruled out Patty Otto for the Finley Creek Jane Doe. “They said the x-rays don’t match,” she said.

Months later, Suzanne was going through some paperwork and saw that her sister, Natalie, had saved a police report from the Lewiston Police Department in Idaho about the Finley Creek Jane Doe, that described her as being found wearing red pants and a white blouse. Natalie had written a note on the report to call someone regarding the woman from years earlier the family had called ‘Red Pants Doe.’

“It’s a three-page report about when the Lewiston detective flies my grandparents over to Oregon and explaining to them that that’s got to be Patty Otto,” Suzanne said. Suzanne told Dateline she provided the report to the Oregon State Police and they told her that they had a different document in which the Oregon State Medical Examiner explained that the Jane Doe couldn’t have been Patty, because of the extensive dental work done.

Suzanne believes that there could have been a mix up, and that back in 1978 the Oregon State Medical Examiner may have tested the wrong body. Dateline reached out to the Oregon State Medical Examiner’s office about the case, but they declined to comment.

Suzanne said the Oregon State Police Department sent the body of the Finley Creek Jane Doe to be cremated back in 1990. “They just closed [the case] and cremated her,” Suzanne said. “They don’t have a crematorium in this little town in Oregon, so they send her to the closest one. It happens to be in Walla Walla, Washington.” She said when she found that out, she couldn’t believe it. “That’s where I’ve lived since 1999. I left Idaho and I moved to Walla Walla, Washington in 1999,” she said. “So she’s been sitting in Walla Walla unlabeled. She’s just labeled as miscellaneous cremains, and Walla Walla has no Jane or John Doe, so they can’t explain why they have this.”

Dateline reached out to the Walla Walla County Coroner’s office, and the coroner confirmed that they are in possession of an unidentified set of cremains.

Dateline also reached out to the Oregon State Police to see if they could provide any information about the Finley Creek Jane Doe case, but the captain of the Media Relations Department, Kyle Kennedy, replied that, at this time, they “do not desire to provide an interview.”

Suzanne said she feels like she’s never going to get an answer in her mother’s case. She believes that the Finley Creek Jane Doe was, in fact, her mother, Patty Otto. But since the body was cremated, there is no way to get information from the DNA. “I paid for DNA testing twice on the box of cremains,” Suzanne said. “There’s never, never been a successful extraction of DNA from human cremains. Unless science advances to something that’s beyond what they are capable of right now.”

“There’s literally no DNA in there,” Suzanne said. “So without DNA, they will not give me an identification.”

Suzanne told Dateline that after a couple of months running the Facebook page, she felt she needed to do more. “We got a lot of good information,” she said. “I think we had, like, 8,000 followers or something.” She wanted to get more eyes on Patty’s case. “It felt like Facebook wasn’t going anywhere.”

So, in May of 2022, Suzanne made a TikTok account by the same name: Patty’s Voice. And that’s where Suzanne has really spent a lot of time and effort trying to be just that: her mother’s voice. She’s hoping that through her videos she will find someone who can help her get Patty’s case solved officially. “My thought is there is an expert that’s out there, like a forensic odontologist who can use the autopsy photos and my mom’s x-rays and look at the teeth and say, ‘This is a no DNA case, and this is also no-brainer case,’” Suzanne said.

She also told Dateline that running these accounts has provided her with a new perspective on her mother. “I feel like I’ve learned who my mother is through the investigation that I’ve done,” Suzanne said. Patty was a “full time student at Valley Business College” and she had worked at Regents Blue Cross, an insurance agency. “She was outgoing, funny, talkative, beautiful,” she added. Suzanne also learned that Patty was a loving mother. “She wanted to be a mother so badly,” she said. “She was doting, attentive, spoiled my sister and I rotten.”

Randy Benton, the man Patty was seeing before she disappeared, told Dateline that it was evident Patty loved her daughters. “She loved her babies, without a doubt, and would have done anything for them. She had fought the world for them,” he said. “It’s too bad them babies didn’t get to know their mama.”

Suzanne said it’s the one positive that’s come out of this whole thing. “I’ve learned who my mother is, and it’s changed my opinion of everything I ever thought about her, which is huge to me,” she said.

Now Suzanne is hoping for a miracle.

She told Dateline that some of the remains of the Finley Creek Jane Doe were never found, including her arm, hand, and pelvic bone. “My goal is I am going to find a shred of DNA in the forest, or I’m going to find an expert who’s going to tell me that, ‘Yes, that is 100% your mother,’” Suzanne said.

She’s hoping that someday she’ll be able to have some closure -- “be able to take my mother’s ashes and have closure and say, ‘I have her,’” Suzanne said. “She’s been… this whole time, miles away from my home, sitting on a shelf in a box just labeled miscellaneous cremains.”

Dateline submitted a records request to the Lewiston Police Department where Patty Otto was reported missing, but was told that we would not be able to view the reports on the case. Victoria Brown, the communications manager for the Lewiston Police Department, told Dateline that “when there is an active criminal case or active investigation occurring, we do not release any of the information” so as to not deprive “a person of a right to a fair trial or an impartial adjudication.” She stated that there is “no exception or way” for Dateline to obtain these records “until the case is no longer active.”

Dateline then inquired if there is anyone available for an interview regarding Patty’s disappearance, but has yet to hear back.

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

www.nbcnews.com/dateline/cold-case-spotlight/daughter-takes-tiktok-fight-mother-patty-otto-disappeared-47-years-ago-rcna131519

Charley Project page on Patty’s case: charleyproject.org/case/patricia-lee-otto



Thoughts? I am placing Patty’s case in the National Media missing section due to the above coverage from Dateline NBC’s “Cold Case Spotlight” digital series.


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