Cindy French repeatedly had to get up and leave during the trial of the man charged with her older sister’s murder.
French and other family members had travelled from different parts of the country to Colorado in 2022 for the case against Alan Phillips, then 71, who’d been arrested and charged decades after the 1982 killings of her sister, Annette Schnee, and another young blond, 29-year-old Bobbi Jo Oberholtzer.
Both women vanished on January 6, 1982, after hitchhiking near Breckenridge, about 80 miles west and 4,500ft higher than Denver.
Friends of Oberholtzer’s organized a search party and found her body the next day; Schnee wasn’t found until the following July. Both had been shot within hours of each other.
Phillips wasn’t tied to the double murders until almost 40 years later, thanks to blood, DNA and circumstantial evidence – including the fact he’d been rescued from the mountain on the night of the murders when his truck got stuck in a blizzard. He was found with a huge bruise on his head.
‘It was very hard sitting in the same courtroom with this man who had no reaction – just nothing, just [a] stonewall face – and it was just so eerie and so creepy,’ French told the Daily Mail.
‘You relive in your mind her last moments – the terror, and when he left her out there in the snow bleeding to death and [she] hears the car drive off,’ French says, her voice shaking.
‘Just the sheer terror – was she thinking about mom? It’s just horrible,’ she says. ‘So really, going through that trial, I had to leave a couple of times – especially when they were talking [about] when they found the body and stuff.’
In the end, however, Phillips was convicted and sentenced to life in prison where he died by suicide four months later, in early 2023.
‘We waited 40 years. We got the guy. The jury found him guilty,’ French tells the Daily Mail. ‘He went to prison. He took his own life. We thought… Mom, who’s 92 years old, you can be at peace now.’
Up until this June, at least.
That’s when a Colorado law firm filed notice of claim, a prerequisite before filing a civil suit on behalf of Phillips’ daughter, Andrea Shelton, essentially seeking to invalidate the late prisoner’s guilt.
It came five months after a disgraced DNA analyst for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Yvonne ‘Missy’ Woods, was accused of mishandling evidence for 15 years.
She was charged with 102 counts including cybercrime, perjury and forgery in connection to the alleged manipulating and tampering – which could lead to the unravelling of untold numbers of criminal cases.
Woods has not yet entered a plea; her arraignment has been pushed to October as the defense team scours more than 45,000 files, they told a Colorado judge on Monday.
After anomalies were discovered in Woods’ work, an investigation ‘revealed evidence of instances where Woods altered and deleted quantification values, re-ran entire batches of DNA multiple times without any documentation and concealed possible contamination,’ First Judicial District Attorney Alexis King said in a January release announcing the charges.
That included 30 sexual assault cases. Her behavior cost the state of Colorado upward of $11 million, the release continued.
One man has already walked free from prison; Boulder authorities vacated Michael Clark’s murder conviction earlier this year after new DNA testing turned up different results from Woods.’
Woods’ lawyer told Daily Mail this week that she had no comment.
The law firm representing Phillips’ daughter, Mehr Jolly PLC, told the Daily Mail she also would not be giving interviews.
In its announcement of the notice to sue, the firm alleged ‘not only that Woods mishandled the evidence used to convict Shelton’s father… but that members of the CBI “were aware of anomalies in Ms Woods prior reporting of DNA results prior to the time that Mr Phillips was arrested, charged, tried and convicted” and failed to disclose that information.’
The CBI told Daily Mail it had no comment on the firm’s notice filing.
Schnee’s sisters and mother were on vacation together last month when they found out about the filing.
‘I don’t even have the words,’ says French, who works as a court reporter, as does her husband.
‘I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to try to get monetary compensation when your dad was rightly convicted of two murders. It’s just beyond my imagination.
‘If anybody should be getting any compensation, it should be the victims’ families. They’re the ones who lost the loved one and had to bury the loved one…
‘I think that there are so many other pieces of evidence that it doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘Just because she mishandled how many cases, that doesn’t mean that every single case that she ever became involved with is tainted.’
The murders of her sister and Oberholtzer remained unsolved, torturing their families, for longer than both girls had been alive.
Annette had moved to Colorado ‘to figure out her life,’ her sister says. She grew up in Iowa, then attended modeling school in Nebraska.
She was 21, working two jobs and living with roommates in the famed tourist destination of Summit County at the time of her disappearance.
‘She was beautiful,’ says French, who was 12 when Annette vanished – and idolized her older sibling. ‘She had so many friends. She was so outgoing… I still have some letters from her that she wrote me, and she always just said how much she missed us.’
On the afternoon of January 6, 1982, Annette visited a doctor, then hitchhiked to a pharmacy in Breckenridge. At the time, hitchhiking was very common in the mountain towns. The 21-year-old was last seen around 4:45pm.
Oberholtzer, meanwhile, had received a promotion at her Breckenridge real estate job that day and told her husband, Jeff, she was hitchhiking back to their home in Alma. Aware of the dangers of hitchhiking, despite the safe vibe of the area, he’d fashioned her a heavy hook for her keychain she always carried that could double as a weapon.
For years, Jeff had been a main suspect in the murders, though authorities eventually cleared him when his blood type didn’t match blood on a glove found with Oberholtzer.
Then, decades later, investigators asked a Denver-based genealogy to run DNA evidence from the case. It turned up two names in January 2021: Phillips and his brother, who’d never lived in the area of the crimes.
Authorities then tied a seemingly unrelated incident to the murders: Phillips’ rescue on the same night.
Then 30, he began flashing SOS signs with his truck lights after the vehicle became stuck near Guanella Pass. A sheriff on a flight passing overhead saw them, incredibly, and word was sent to local rescue groups.
Dave Montoya, the Clear Creek County fire chief at the time, was the one who plucked Phillips from the blizzard and noticed the stranded man’s head injury. Phillips said he’d fallen when stumbling around in the snow during the storm.
‘We ended up picking up a guy straight out of hell,’ Montoya told Denver’s KUSA TV, calling the circumstances of the rescue ‘the craziest thing I ever heard of’.
When he found Phillips, ‘he said he got drunk and decided to drive home’, Montoya told the station.
‘And I said, ‘You came up over the pass?’ And he said, ‘Well, it seemed like a good idea.’ I thought, how in the heck did this guy get so lucky, for all the stuff to fall into place?’
French points to the same rescue as further damning evidence of Phillips’ culpability.
Describing Phillips ‘trying to go over a mountain in the middle of a blizzard,’ she says it’s something ‘anybody in their right mind would not have done unless they did not want to go back through Breckenridge for some reason.’
French recalled testimony that Phillips ‘had a wound on his head, and that Bobbi Jo supposedly used her key chain and hit’ him.
‘When he got arrested, he didn’t freak out and go, ‘Oh my gosh, what are you talking about? A double murder? I didn’t do that!’ she says.
‘He basically went in, and when they drove him back through the scene on the way to the jail, he got physically sick and ill,’ she says. ‘He attempted suicide before trial.
‘Well, in my mind, if you’re innocent, why would you go and not go to trial? And then, after being convicted, he [died by] suicide before his appeal,’ she says. ‘Well, if you’re innocent, then wait for the appeal to come about.
‘So, in my mind, this Missy Woods [angle] is just a door to get in there and for attorneys to get their name out there in a high-profile case. They want other people, cases that Missy Woods handled, to come forward, so then they can profit off of it, also.’
Tyler Jolly, one of the attorneys representing plaintiff Shelton, said ‘more than 10 individuals and families’ had reached out since the firm issued notice of the claim to explore possible action over convictions based on Woods’ evidence.
‘Our perspective is that the DNA was absolutely critical to the conviction in Mr Phillips’ case, and the DNA was absolutely critical to, potentially, convictions in other cases,’ Jolly told the Daily Mail.
‘Absent DNA that was discovered by Ms Woods, that she testified tied Mr Phillips to this crime, then… I don’t think there would have been any conviction of Mr Phillips.’
He said the law firm would file suit if they’ve not received a response by the deadline of September 23, 90 days after filing notice.
Jolly said he felt for the victims’ families who could be affected by civil action – but reiterated that ‘the person who has affected their sense of closure is Missy Woods.
‘And what’s been reported by CBI is her omitting material facts, tampering with DNA… the number of cases is so enormous we think that it’s important for the individuals who are charged and for their families to have the truth.’
As French and her family try to come to terms with the action by Phillips’ daughter, they remember and miss Schnee. French gave her own child the middle name Annette as a tribute.
They’d found some solace initially, but now, ‘two, three years later, you’re not at peace anymore… I can’t believe that there is a loophole where she can come in and try to get $100 million,’ French huffs. ‘Really, I mean, come on.
‘I guess my brain has such a hard time wrapping around it, it’s hard to put in words.’
She and her family resolutely stand behind Phillips’ conviction, she says, ‘DNA aside, there’s so much.’
She is still angry about the theft of her sister from her family, and the theft of a future from Annette.
‘She wanted to get out there and try to figure out life, and didn’t have a chance to do that.’