Alan Lee Phillips, a 72-year-old convict, died in prison on Friday. Phillips was convicted in the murder of two women in Breckenridge in 1982. He died at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility, the Crowley County coroner confirmed.
Although the murders took place in 1982, it was only in the fall of 2021 that police could identify him as the suspect. His victims were Annette Schnee, 21, and Barbara “Bobbi Jo” Oberholtzer, 29.
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Who was Alan Lee Phillips?
Alan Lee Phillips was convicted of a double murder in 1982. By the time he was identified as a suspect in 2021, the case had already become old. Reports say that DNA tests led the police in Colorado to him in a coordinated campaign of local, state, and federal authorities.
Phillips was arrested in Dumont, in 2021.
He was sentenced in November 2021 to four months in prison by a jury in Park County, Fairplay. There were eight counts of charges against him, including first-degree murder after deliberation and first-degree murder involving felony, kidnapping and robbery.
CBS News says that Schnee and Oberholtzer were killed while hitchhiking in the Summit County area when they disappeared on Jan. 6, 1982. Oberholtzer’s relatives and friends discovered her body the next day in a snow drift on the summit of 11,542-foot Hoosier Pass while Schnee’s was found six months later fully cloth in a creek in rural Park County.
They had no connection, except for the fact that both of them were shot by Phillips.
Families and friends of the two women demanded the harshest punishment for Phillips, saying that his action forever changed their families.
