I’d been married for 11 years when I discovered my husband’s strange link to my missing mom

Suzanne Timms was reading an old newspaper article about a woman’s remains being found in a remote forest in Oregon when something stopped her in her tracks.

‘Two hunters from Milton-Freewater, Ron Swiger and Lee Parr, found the grave on a brushy, wooded hill about 200 yards from Finley Cow Camp, a roadside hunters’ campsite,’ read the piece in the Oregon Observer, dated August 29, 1978.

Timms couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Lee Parr was, after all, the name of her husband Gary’s grandfather. She read the article again – and again – to be sure.

‘I was laying in bed with my husband and I turned to him and said “Did your grandpa ever mention finding a body in 1978?”‘ Timms tells DailyMail.com.

Gary read the article too and realized it would be near-on impossible there could be two Lee Parrs in the same small, tight-knit town.

By then, it was 2021 and his grandfather Lee had passed away. So Timms picked up the phone and called Rob, Gary’s father and her father-in-law, to see if he knew anything about what had taken place four decades earlier.

His answer stunned her even further: Rob told her he was just eight-years-old and was with his dad when they made the tragic discovery in the woods.

‘I said, “wait, Rob, are you serious?”‘ Timms says, before she told him something that would change their family dynamics forever.

‘I think you found my mother’s body.’

One dark night two years before her future father-in-law stumbled across the skeletal remains of the so-called ‘Finley Creek Jane Doe’, three-year-old Timms had witnessed an argument between her mom and dad turn physical inside their home in Lewiston, Idaho.

That was the last time she saw her mom Patty Otto alive.

What followed next was decades of lies about her missing mom, her dad’s conviction for hiring a hitman to kill a cop investigating her disappearance, and a chance sighting of a composite sketch on Facebook that seemed destined to finally give a daughter the answers she had waited her whole life for.

But now, 49 years on from her mom’s disappearance, Timms is still fighting for the truth following what she says are a series of mistakes from a mix-up of dental records to destroyed DNA and lost evidence.

The wild connection between Timms and her husband marks just one of a growing number of twists and turns in the case that first began one night back in 1976.

Despite being just three years old, Timms remembers that night vividly.

It was September 1, 1976, and 24-year-old mom-of-two Patty had picked up Timms and her four-year-old sister Natalie from their grandparents’ house on her way home from school that evening.

‘She put us to bed downstairs, which was not normal because our bedroom was next to their bedroom and [my mom and dad] proceeded to have a verbal argument,’ she recalls.

‘I was a very curious three-year old child and, also concerned, I went back upstairs to go find out what was happening, and I saw my dad hit my mom.

‘I saw my mom hit him back and then I saw him wrap his hands around her neck and push her up against the wall. And then he dragged her out of my sight.’

Terrified, Timms remembers running back upstairs to her sister.

The next morning, the two little girls found their mom gone.

Suzanne’s father takes drastic steps 

Their father Ralph Otto claimed Patty had walked out on her family, telling their daughters ‘our mom didn’t want to be a mother anymore and that she wasn’t coming home’.

But Patty’s disappearance instantly set off alarm bells among her family who insisted she would never have left her daughters – especially alone with their father – and reported her missing.

Three-year-old Timms later confided in her family – and then the police – about the violence she had seen that night.

Very quickly, Ralph became the only person of interest in his wife’s disappearance.

With police hot on his tail, he took extreme steps to avoid jail.

While drinking in a local bar two months after his wife went missing, Ralph tried to recruit a hitman to take out the police officers investigating the case.

A sting operation was set up, culminating in Ralph paying an undercover officer $250 to kill Lewiston Police Captain Duane Ailor – with the promise of another $750 when the job was done.

He was arrested and charged with attempted murder. He was found guilty at trial, but his conviction was later overturned on appeal.

In 1983, Ralph died while in police custody on unrelated charges.

In a police interview not long before his death, Ralph told a detective: ‘I’m doing time here because I murdered my wife.’

He was also confronted about a shovel and a newly-washed tarp seen in his yard in the days after Patty’s disappearance.

But when asked outright if he had killed the mother of his children, Ralph stopped short of a confession.

‘There might have been times that I wanted to kill her,’ he said, according to the police interview transcript.

Ralph went to his grave without ever confessing to Patty’s murder – or revealing the whereabouts of her body.

Break in the case

Two years after Patty’s disappearance, there appeared to be a possible break in the case when the remains of a woman were found in woods near Elgin, Oregon, on August 27, 1978.

The victim was wearing red pants and a white shirt – matching the description of the clothing Patty was dressed in when she vanished.

What appeared to be a radio antenna cable was found next to her in the shallow grave.

Timms’ grandparents flew out to Oregon to identify her.

Due to the state of the remains – and the lack of DNA technology at the time – it all hinged on dental X-ray records. The results came back: Oregon authorities said they didn’t match.

While police and Patty’s family were all convinced that Ralph was responsible for Patty’s disappearance, Timms says she and her sister spent their childhoods believing that their mom had abandoned them.

The two girls were adopted by their dad’s sister and husband and she says both sides of the family kept up the pretense that Patty left of her own accord.

‘My entire childhood I was raised to believe that she left us and that was her choice to walk away from us,’ Timms says.

She and Natalie always thought that one day their mom might walk back through the door.

‘Maybe she needed to get a good job before she could bring us home. Maybe she’ll just show up when my sister graduates from high school,’ she says they thought.

The story began to unravel in their teens when the two sisters stumbled across a file hidden in the bathroom of their home. In it was a trove of newspaper clippings about both their mom’s disappearance and their dad’s arrest.

When they turned 18, the two young women went down to the police department and obtained the files on both their mom and dad’s cases.

‘It was at that time, between the ages of 18 and 21, that I started really questioning the narrative,’ Timms says.

‘Why would everybody lie to me?’

Searching for the truth 

She adds: ‘I’m thinking everyone who ever loved me has lied to me this whole time. They all knew he was responsible. Everybody knew he was responsible. Not one person ever said that to me.’

Before their deaths, she says both her adoptive parents admitted the truth.

‘[My aunt] just blurted out one day to me: “You know your mom would have never left you.” And I’m like “yeah, I don’t think she would have either,”‘ she recalls.

Her adoptive father also confided that he sat down with her dad one day and gave him the chance to tell him the truth and pray together. But he never got a straight answer.

‘My dad’s answer was “I don’t really know what happened that night. I don’t think I killed her.” But he didn’t deny it,’ she says.

Together, Timms and Natalie set to work digging to find out the truth about what happened to their mother – until tragedy struck the family once again.

Natalie, her husband, their child and another child were boating in 2006 when they all died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

After that, ‘I wanted nothing to do with’ the case, Timms says.

‘I just did not have the mental capacity to deal with a missing person’s case on top of losing my everything,’ she says.

‘So that police file just sat untouched… it just sat in storage from 2006 all the way to 2021.’

It was only because of a random, chance encounter that Timms was prompted to pick up her mom’s case again 15 years later.

Shocking Facebook discovery 

One day in 2021, she had been mindlessly scrolling through Facebook when an image popped up.

It was a drawing of a woman with blonde hair and big eyes.

For Timms, it was like looking in a mirror.

At first, she was certain the woman staring back at her was herself.

‘I felt like it was a joke – that there’s just no way that somebody would randomly draw a picture of an unidentified person and it just happens to look like me,’ she recalls.

‘This is me. Like somebody found a picture of me and they recreated it thinking that this is going to be funny – and it’s not funny at all.’

Thinking it was some sort of bizarre prank, she clicked on the link and began reading it.

It wasn’t a sketch of her after all. It was a rendering of the Finley Creek Jane Doe found back in August 1978, the woman who Timms’ grandparents had flown out to identify decades earlier.

The woman was aged 17 to 25 years old, was around 5 foot 1 to 5 foot 3 tall, weighed around 115 to 125 pounds, and had sandy brown/blonde hair.

She was also believed to be pregnant.

And she was dressed in red pants and a white shirt.

A ‘flood of emotions’ swept over Timms as each nugget of information matched  everything she knew about her missing mother.

Patty was 24, was 5 foot 3 tall, weighed around 135 pounds, had blonde hair and was wearing red pants and a white shirt when she vanished.

‘I thought “you’ve got to be kidding me.” She never left. I wasn’t abandoned. All of that was not real,’ she says.

She reached out to the Finley Creek Jane Doe Facebook page and they swapped information about her mom’s case and the case of the Finley Creek Jane Doe.

Among the documents shared by the Doe volunteer group was that 1978 newspaper article which revealed to her that it was her own husband’s family members who had found the woman’s remains.

Revisiting where mom Patty was found 

Following that shocking revelation, Timms visited the burial site with her father-in-law who was able to pinpoint exactly where he found the remains from memory.

One of the first things Rob said when they got there was how much the forest had changed, saying it used to be covered in ferns.

In the months after her mom’s disappearance, her family members said they kept finding dry ferns around Ralph and Patty’s home.

‘That gave me chills,’ Timms says.

Finally the truth seemed within touching distance.

‘I’ve never felt so close in my entire life,’ she says.

But her search for the truth was about to get even knottier.

Major mix-up

Through accessing police and autopsy records in the case, Timms believes there was a major mix-up that meant her mom was mistakenly ruled out as the Finley Creek Jane Doe in 1978.

Around a month before the Finley Creek Jane Doe was found, another woman’s remains had also been found in Oregon.

That woman was later identified using her dental records as Annette Willis.

Timms says that the dental records for both Willis – previously dubbed Portland Jane Doe – and the Finley Creek Jane Doe are identical, both with 11 fillings.

‘That’s impossible to have two bodies found within a month of each other and have the same 11 fillings,’ Timms says.

Timm believes her mom’s 1975 dental x-ray – which shows she has wisdom teeth – was compared to the x-ray of the wrong body.

She has since approached the Oregon Medical Examiner to get the correct x-ray of the Finley Creek Jane Doe’s teeth, only to be told that no such x-ray was ever taken, she says.

‘All these pieces got missed which is extremely frustrating,’ Timms says.

In the absence of those dental x-rays, a simple DNA test – one that was of course not available back in 1978 – could surely confirm once and for all if the Finley Creek Jane Doe was indeed her biological mother.

But Timms then also learned there was no DNA.

With the Finley Creek Jane Doe case long cold, Oregon State Police sent the remains to the Walla Walla Coroner’s Office in Washington to be cremated in 1990.

And so the DNA was destroyed.

These cremains are now sitting on a shelf, with no name. The Walla Walla Coroner’s Office confirmed to DailyMail.com that it has a set of unidentified cremains which predated the current coroner who took office in 2011.

And the Finley Creek Jane Doe’s clothing is also missing, Timms says.

‘It feels like a betrayal of justice – that the victim’s voice was just silenced,’ Timms says of the lost evidence.

‘My dad took her voice away that night and then Oregon took her voice away two years later. And if she was pregnant at the time, it means that he took away my sibling and Oregon took away my chance to ever even know that I had a sibling.’

DailyMail.com has contacted Oregon State Police and the Oregon State Medical Examiner for comment.  

Without DNA, Timms’ fight to solve her mom’s case has hit something of a wall.

‘I’m kind of stuck in this place where I believe I found my mother only to be told I will never bring her home,’ she says.

She has twice paid for specialized testing of the cremains but the technology is not advanced enough yet to yield a DNA profile.

But Timms says she refuses to give up.

Never giving up 

When the Finley Creek Jane Doe’s remains were found, some of her bones were missing including her hands, an arm and a pelvic bone.

With the help of her father-in-law, Timms has been sending cadaver dogs to search the area close to the gravesite to try to find the missing bones.

If one is found, it can be tested for DNA and compared with her own.

‘I want definitive closure. I don’t just want this assumption and all these crazy coincidences leading me to believe that my mother led me to her remains,’ she says.

That’s why she is urging officials to use what evidence is still available to give her answers – and let her bring her mom home.

She believes the Oregon medical examiner’s office does not want to admit a mistake was made all those years ago – a mistake that may have allowed a killer to evade justice.

There’s also the implications this could have on other missing persons cases.

‘Every family who has a missing person or missing family member is going to say, if they were wrong on that, are they wrong on mine too? Does every single case have to be reevaluated?’ Timms says.

Now, Timms says she is hopeful that a new medical examiner taking the helm in Oregon can bring fresh eyes to her mom’s case.

For Timms, the wild connection between her mom’s case and her husband’s family has cemented her belief that the Finley Creek Jane Doe is her missing mom.

‘She’s trying to direct me to the truth… it just seems astronomically impossible. My mom is trying to lead me to her… she’s literally leading me right to the truth,’ she says.

‘All I can think is that she’s working from the other side to undo the wrong that was done to her.’

It’s also given her a different outlook on her happy marriage of 15 years to her husband.

‘It feels like destiny,’ she says.

‘I feel that she has something to do with it, like “hey, look over here!” … It’s hard to put it into words when you’re trying to think about it.

‘Did destiny bring [us] together because somehow we ended up in the right place at the right time? And we’re still together all these years later.’