A man convicted of killing two women who disappeared near a Colorado ski town nearly 40 years ago after DNA testing identified him as the suspect was sentenced Monday to two life sentences after the women’s relatives asked for the maximum sentence for the murders. that changed their families forever. Alan Lee Phillips, 71, was convicted in September of two counts of first-degree murder and other charges in the slayings of Annette Schnee, 21, and Barbara “Bobbi Jo” Oberholtzer, 29. Authorities said the two women, of whose bodies were found in separate locations, he had no connection. Both are believed to have been killed while hitchhiking outside Breckenridge, about 60 miles (96 km) southwest of Denver, when they disappeared on January 6, 1982. Friends and family discovered Oberholtzer’s body the next day in a snowdrift atop 11,542-foot (3,463-meter) Hoosier Pass, near Breckenridge. Schnee’s body was discovered six months later, fully clothed, by a boy fishing in a creek in rural Park County. Both women had been shot. Investigators said Phillips was rescued the night the women disappeared from the top of nearby Guanella Pass when his truck got stuck during a snowstorm, KUSA-TV reported. Phillips, a miner and auto mechanic, was arrested last year in Dumont, a small mountain town about an hour’s drive from Breckenridge, after living in the area for the past four decades. He plans to appeal his conviction, claiming the DNA evidence used against him was tainted and wrong. Schnee’s sister, Cindy French, was 11 when her older sister, who wanted to be a flight attendant, disappeared. In a statement to Judge Stephen Broome read by Deputy District Attorney Mark Hurlbert, she said she remembers her mother breaking down and crying during the six months Schnee was missing. French named her oldest daughter after her sister. She said that while her sister did not live to raise a family, Phillips was able to remain free for decades and father wives and children. Oberholtzer’s daughter, Jackie Vukos-Walker, was about the same age when her mother was killed. Her childhood was marked by sadness, depression and anxiety, she said in a statement read by Deputy District Attorney Stephanie Miller. He couldn’t relate to other children and cried so many tears into a pillow decorated with a horse that it was impossible to tell where the drops fell, he said. Vukos-Walker said it was a constant reminder of her mother, whom she looked like, and she avoided talking about her loss because it upset other people. “I felt like I let everybody down,” Vukos-Walker said. She also said that references to serial killers in the abundance of crime shows on television still give her a thrill whether in public or in private. Phillips did not speak in court, but his daughter, Andrea Shelton, was the only person to speak on his behalf. She expressed sympathy for the Schnee and Oberholtzer families, but said she believed in forgiveness and redemption. She told Broome that Phillips had taught her and her siblings honesty and morality growing up. “He’s a good person and I thought somebody should say something,” Shelton said. Broome said he would impose life in prison without the possibility of parole for each of the two women, ordering them to technically be served consecutively, instead of the maximum sentence allowed under the law. Prosecutors had asked for it to recognize the loss of each woman’s life. “I hope the healing begins today and God be with you,” he told their families.
