This podcast contains intense subject matter. Listener discretion is advised. On Thursday, September ninth, nineteen seventy six, at approximately three pm, Detective Spears and myself went to the Ralph Auto residence to request that he Ralph Otto take a polygraph examination administered by Al John's state investigator. Otto indicated that he would not
take a polygraph examination under any circumstances and that it would be fruitless. In an attempt to get him to do so, Otto asked, are you accusing me of murdering my wife? I advised him on the contrary, I just wanted to know if he knew of anything of her disappearance. Otto indicated and put his finger on my chest and said, if you think it, you're going to have to prove it against me. I again asked Otto if he had anything to do with the disappearance of his wife, and he advised that
he did not. I suggested that he'd take the polygraph examination to show the truthfulness of his statements, and he again advised he would not. From the pages of the reporter's notebook, this is still season two. I'm your host, Gary Anderson. In the last episode, we talked about Patricia Otto's disappearance late in the evening of August thirty first or early in the morning of September
first, nineteen seventy six. On September second, the day after Ralph told everyone that his wife had left him, Ralph started telling people that he didn't want Patty to come back. He said he had changed the locks on the house and on the white Chevy station wagon Patty normally drove in case she ever tried to return. We're going to spend quite a bit of time in this episode delving into Ralph and Patty Otto's personalities, their marriage, and their friendships.
All of these things strongly influenced the chain of events leading up to and following Patty's disappearance. So let's start with Ralph. Ralph Otto was born in nineteen thirty four in the little town of Craigmont, Idaho. An old cowboy went riding out one dark and windy day. Like most newborns, Ralph curled his tiny fingers at the shock of his new, unfamiliar surroundings, but there was something different about the way he formed his fists. Ralph was already swinging
for a fight. The second oldest of four kids. Ralph was raised in a thrifty household by parents who had eloped during the Great Depression and spent most of their years barely scraping by. But Ralph had no intention of settling for a mere portion from life. From a young age, Ralph learned to be crafty. He would charm, cheat and steal to get what he wanted, and would bare knuckle his way out of the situation if he got caught.
This is Ralph's youngest daughter describing him. But he was small. He was a small man, and I've heard from his friends that they think that had something to do with why he was so aggressive with everyone. He wanted to pick fights. You want to fight with me, You want to fight with me, And I'm like, I've never been in a physical fight in my life. I can't imagine fighting with my friends that you love and ador why is he picking fights with them? They would just say he'd drink his whiskey
and he'd want to fight everybody. Sometimes Ralph wanted something simply because they belonged to someone else. He didn't always want to keep it, he just didn't want anyone else to have it. Provoking fury was a sport for Ralph. In early August of twenty twenty one, Christine Hughes, Karen Shaw Anderson and I sat down with Ralph's sister in law, Dolores, who goes by Dodie, Thank you man. She was married to Ralph's younger brother Ray. My
aunt white Gary Anderson, he's the sound man. We chatted with Dodie at our kitchen table. So Ralph was your brother in law, right right? Tell us about the relationship between you and Ray and Ralph and Patty. What kind there was none? Ralph absolutely hated my husband. He was extremely jealous of me. Dodie told us a story that illustrated the brother's relationship. In high school, Ray had saved enough money working at a grocery store to buy
himself a blue letterman's jacket. And he came home for work one time, and here's Ralph in his garage and you're at the car. All this screece was place cold on and Ray ask him, what are you doing? Were in my coat? And he thought it and just beat the holy heck out of him, and rain ever lifted a hand to him. Never Ralph and Ray's father, Arthur Otto folks called him Art worked for the Highway Department before landing a job at the Potlatch lumbermill. Arthur died of a heart attack when
he was thirty nine, two months before Ralph's seventeenth birthday. At the time, Ralph's older brother Jerry, had recently moved out, so Ralph's mother, Marjorie had three children at home to care for on her own. This is Ralph's sister Marcy talking. My father died young, and some of the kids wanted to blame one of the other kids. So Ralph and I were at odds speak because I was a teenager at that certain point, and I'd ran away from home only a month before my dad died, and that was bad,
you know. It was all put on me, and those were the bad times at that point in my life. Just a few months after Ralph's high school graduation in nineteen fifty two, he got married. He was eighteen, and his bride lied about her age on their marriage license. Joy would still be fourteen for another month and a half. She had claimed to be
sixteen. Ralph and Joy were married only a year when Ralph's brother Jerry, who was also married and now the father of a baby girl, drowned at a family outing while saving his wife and mother who were swimming in the Clearwater River. Jerry was only twenty years old. By all accounts, the tragedy hardened Ralph even more. This is Marcy again. Ralph had a tendency to leave a bad past behind him, and he could be mouthy and you just
want it, you know, get him out of the way. But from the time we were just young children, my younger brother and I were real close, but nobody could be real close to Ralph. Marcy talked to us about a time Ralph threw an axe adder. Well, he threw axe across the crick and hit me in the head, and the parents thought that they were going to lose me. But I never ever blamed Ralph because it's you
know, he made a mistake. As a family all stuck together. My dad wouldn't let anyone blame Ralph. Those who weren't related to Ralph by blood had a harder time for giving his temper. Joy divorced him in nineteen sixty five, but just a few months after their divorce was finalized, they remarried
each other. Then a few months after that they divorced again. Idaho hadn't yet passed a no fault divorce law, so blame had to be assigned to one or both of the spouses in order for a judge to grant a divorce. In both cases, Joy sued Ralph for the divorce, citing extreme cruelty as the cause. We were going to interview Joy for this podcast, but she changed her mind at the last minute. We do know that she and Ralph went their separate ways after the second divorce. They had no children together.
By then, Ralph had established himself in Lewiston as a skilled but shifty auto mechanic. This is Ralph's sister in law Dooty again. And he was a correct and guarantee you he had his good sides that most of them are bad. He'd worked on somebody's car. He'd jack up the prizes so bad on their repaired job that they couldn't afford to pay for it. Udi, and I'm owning the car. And that's just He always says, what is mine is mine, is what is yours is mine? That was that was
his opinion. He lied, He'd tell lies about his brother. Ralph was always working on schemes to make more money. He and a friend bought a small island not far from Lewiston on the Clearwater River. Their plan was to turn rock on the island into gravel. Another friend, who owned a rock crushing company, brought in equipment for the job, but river flooding halted the process after only a day and a half. Work didn't resume for months,
and then only restarted briefly. Ralph ordered an end to the rock crushing and only repaid his friend, the equipment operator, a portion of what was due. Ralph was sued for breach of contract. It was the end of the friendship, but not the last word for Ralph. Nor was the sale of gravel Ralph's only hope of income. He also rented out and sold miscellaneous heavy equipment, allowing him to earn highway contracts to help clear trees and debris from
mountain roads covered by landslides. He was doing more than getting by for at least two years. He brought in the equivalent of a six figure salary in today's dollars. He used those earnings to buy his parents house from his mother, who had since remarried, and he turned what was a modest farmhouse into a bachelor pad complete with red shag carpet, a console's stereo, a player piano near the entryway, and an oversized painting of a nude woman on another
wall. Some of the upgrades Ralph paid for, but his family told us that a lot of the materials for the renovations were stolen from construction sites around town. Rumors also abounded that Ralph got revenge on the man who sued him by seducing that man's sister. In the years after his divorce from Joy, Ralph went on the prowl, pumping coins into jukeboxes at the local bars, lavishing women with gifts, and throwing gossip worthy soarets at his two thousand square
foot home. I'd get it one piece of the time and it wouldn't coust me a time. You lodge me when I come through your pown. I'm gonna ride around and style. I'm gonna drive everybody while I have the only one. Ralph was on the lookout for a very specific type of woman. He had a weakness for petite blonde with a slim build. Joey had fit that mold perfectly. So did Bonnie Shopbell, who you heard about in the last episode. Bonnie was a blue eyed, platinum haired beauty who had recently
left a bad relationship when she got involved with Ralph. This is Ralph's daughter talking again. He had to have been very charming, and he was definitely very good looking when he was younger. He was a good looking man, and I just don't think he saw that man in the mirror. I think he continued to see that strapping you know, high school stud five eight stud and his brother Jerry is like six foot two and Ray taller and he I think he feels inferior to them, So he's got to be stronger and tougher
physically than them because he's smaller than them. That would be my analysis. Bonnie and her kids stayed with Ralph for a brief time in the late nineteen sixties while she got back on her feet. From what she's told us, it's clear that Ralph wanted to do more than help her. He paid a teenage girl who lived up the street to watch her kids while he took Bonnie
out on the town. Bonnie told us that Ralph constantly referred to her as his Bonnie, which made her uncomfortable, but Ralph was also generous with her. He worked hard to impress her during their courtship, but Bonnie still wasn't that interested. The teenage babysitter Ralph hired to watch Bonnie's kids, was interested, though she was Patricia Lee O'Malley soon to be Patty Otto. Jonathan remember how younger mom was. She didn't get to. That's Patty's sister, Alice
Mills talking. As you listen in to this interview, you'll also hear Patty's youngest daughter, and they'll refer to Marcy, Ralph's sister. I know when she first would go down there, she baby set for Bonnie. Bonnie is the one that was living with him, and that's where it started. She put baby set, and then when she moved off, she just kept going down and she's cleaning us house and runs errands and can That's what Marcia was sam. She was cleaning in the house and she said, and that's it.
Yet it work, so apparently that's when because I remember when I found out that they were having them, I didn't believe it. Vicky knew Patty had told Vicky. I guess herself. Vicky is Patty's other sister. She asked Alice to speak on her behalf for this podcast, and I said, no, no, I did not believe it until she admitted it to These are things. Back then, I'm thinking that my sister, No, she's not that stupid. But now I find how many believed in what your dad
needs to say. And he would do this for her and say things. And she's inexperienced. Yeah, yeah, and we were raised strict so and it's a neighbor, you know, he's just a few houses down the street. Yeah, And I'm Patricia Lee Alley was born August fourth, nineteen fifty two, in Lewiston, eleven days after Ralph had married his first wife Joy. Patty's dad, Tom, was a Lewiston fire captain. Her mom, Toots, worked at a bank and then got a job out at the lumber
mill. Patty had two sisters and a brother, Tom Junior. The three girls were especially close. The three of us were born within three years. Patty is only thirteen months older than me. Goodness, so we were cloths growing up. I mean we always shared a bedroom and so one of us gotten but we all got in trouble. There was that closeness a sister. I mean, he grew up. We played dogs who played barbies and which even though her and I were only thirteen months apart, she let me know
that she was my own sister. I had to obey. When we were little kids. Growing up, we had a neighborhood but quite a few kids in it, and we've been all of us, you know, back then big as We had to stay on our block, but we could go around in our block, and we had wagons and our bikes and we'd tie them together and have wagon frames and m But we had We had a lot of friends that we played with, and we did a lot with our other family
and all get togethers. And that's probably why she said was always so we raised family was really important. Patty was eighteen in nineteen seventy when she walked down the aisle of Lewiston's Trinity Lutheran Church and pledged to be faithful to Ralph forever. Ralph was thirty five at the time. They honeymooned in California and Mexico. A year later. Ralph and Patty's first child, Natalie, was born. Only two years after that, in November of nineteen seventy three,
Patty delivered the couple's youngest daughter, Dallas. In the next three years, Ralph and Patty fought, separated, reconnected, and fought some more. As you heard in the last episode, the longest separation between Ralph and Patty began in the fall of nineteen seventy five. That's when she got a job to help support her daughters and herself. No, I don't think she wanted to work. I think she wanted to stay home, raise her kids, their wife. I think the only time I said going to work is when they
separated. And then I think she went to business Scope because she knew sooner or later she was going to have to support him, because I don't think she kind of staying without. And then one night, while still separated from Ralph, Patty went to Van's Club. At the bar, she saw Randy Benton playing guitar on stage with his band Moving Country. Well, I seed her in there, so I went and talk to her. We've known each other for a very long time. Patty took Randy back to the place where
she and her daughters were living. She told him that if Ralph showed up, he'd have to leave. Randy later told police that when she said that, he decided to leave right then and there. It wasn't the sort of situation he wanted to get mixed up in. Less than a year later, he learned that Patty had gone back to Ralph and now she was missing. Police also told Randy that Ralph was threatening to kill him. They advised him to leave town if he could. Yeah, the police, the people that
told me, Yeah, they were serious about it. Okay, did you leave town after that? No? Not right away. I started carrying a pistol. They told me to, And so I started carrying a pistol for a while until I could get And then shortly after that, well, in that fall, I moved to Alaska. My brother came down. Somebody, somebody told him that my family was trying to protect me, I think,
so I had to go to Alaska. So I have to ask, because there have been so many rumors about what could have happened to Patty, and some people believed that she went to Alaska or she went to Canada. Did you ever see her again after she disappeared? No? No, no, no, I did not. You may be wondering now, who told us that Patty had gone to Alaska and Canada. It was Ralph's sister in law, Dody, the woman Mary to his brother Ray. This is where the
rumors in theories start going in strange directions. Not long after Patty disappeared, Dodie and her husband hired a private investigator to try to find Patty to prove that Ralph couldn't have killed her. They said they believed she was still alive. We haven't seen any of the notes that private investigator Jack Prim gave to the couple after he completed his work for them, but Dodie shared with us
pages and pages of notes she and Ray compiled during that time. Some of the notes indicate what Prim told them in his report, and other notes were related to Dodie's own amateur investigation. In her notes, Dodie said someone she knew told her he overheard a truck driver say that he gave Patty a ride to Alaska and he knew who she was with. Dodie also told us that the PI gave them some shocking news. So we fally hired a private investigator,
and he'd worked on it for about two three days. This is Doatie Talking's house and who told me that he found out that Patty was a high classic call girl, that she had a sugar daddy and I said, what's the sugar daddy? Had no idea what a sugar daddy was. She's into drags, high proscyle girl and she had a sugar daddy, and I wouldn't believe it. I said that that's not true, that's not patty. But anyway, and along, to make a long story short, there's just evidence
to prove that that's exactly where she was. And we have a statement from um this gentleman herey just passed away, Steve Ken, his wife Debbie Lowby, and it's all in here is the one. We got the handwritten note from the Statium that they had found her in Canada. A doctor had say the information and he recognized her from a poster and she was Andrew drugs and
choosing to prostitution. And that's the last I know. It's so choosing Dawson Creek, Canada, Dawson and I truly believe that she got wrapped up with the Rong people and they took her out here and put her into human trafficking. And where they put her from Dawson Creek, Canada, I have no idea. We were dubious, to say the least. Dodi's claims that Patty was a prostitute. Sounded pretty far fetched, but we didn't want to overlook anything, so we asked a few more people, including Ron Rody. Ron
babysat Natalie and Dallas not long before their mother disappeared. He was a teenager then, and his dad had been a friend of Rolph. This is Ron. He initially talked to my dad. They said they wanted to boy babysitter because they didn't trust girls, and so he initially out ahold of my dad got me lined up to babysitting for him, and so yeah, he would get a hold of me. I just lived to see balks down the street, okay. And I never really felt We never really felt with Patty at
all. Okay. Do you remember about what year it was that you started babysitting for them? God, I couldn't even tell you. Okay. Do you remember how old the girls were? Dallas was just a little wing diaper. She was probably too maybe at the most, Okay, Natalie was probably five. I'm not sure what the age of difference was between them. Okay. And so what were your impressions of the family of Ralph and Patty? Did they get along well? He and I it was when I first started
babysitting for him. When I first met him, everything was great, it seemed like, I mean, they were happy, perfect couple, and then it spiraled downward pretty fast after maybe six months, and they got pretty pretty bad at the end. I didn't see Daddy a lot. She was always in the house. I was always dealing with Ralph. But you know, just he became a her end us alcoholic. It was miserable. Yeah, things things kind of spiraled out of control pretty fast. Now you you said
that things got pretty horrendous pretty fast with his drinking and stuff. Can you describe any of that to me? Well, I mean the whole story. Daddy was a wild child. It's it's as simple as that. You know. Ralph was probably twice her age, and the rumors got around that she was having a pretty wild life outside of their marriage, and I'm sure it was true. And then Ralph found out that she was working as a prostitute.
There was a couple of police detectives in Lewiston, but it was common knowledge that they were running a call girl ring out of the top floor of the tap of Era hotel, and Paddy and Dwayne Eyler were kind of seeing each other, and then Ralph found out that she was working for them as a prostitute. Dwayne Tyler was a police captain and was working with Tom Selene on the investigation into Patty's disappearance. Okay, so how often would she be
working as a prostitute? Did you get an impression about that? All right? I have no idea. And I was always around during the day on the cars I heard. Okay. I just remember Ralph one day coming out to the shop. I mean, when when all that started happened, she started running around and he knew about it. That's when he started drinking. I think trying at Trader smooth it over, and his drinking just got out
of control that he was. I mean, he was drunk the first thing in the morning all day and I don't know if that's that was his way of dealing with it or what. But he came out to the shop one day and it was just it scared me. I'd never seen him like that before, and he was just hitting mad. He was telling me that he found out. He said, how would you like to find out your wife's a freaking prostitute? And he said, I just found that out and he said, I'm gonna kill her. I'm gonna kill her, and it was
like a few days later she was gone. We wanted to dig more into this prostitution rumor, since we had heard it from more than one person. We did some online research, googling Lewiston, Idaho prostitution. As strange as it was, the two seemed to be indelibly tied together, so we reached out to an expert on Lewiston's history to learn more. It turns out that Lewiston was actually once a hot spot for prostitution, but that was decades before
the time frame we're discussing. Here's historian Stephen Branton talking about it. Well, I think I can speak to that pretty quickly. It wasn't an issue that prostitution had pretty well been stamped out in Lewison by the mid nineteen fifties. It was an old problem that dated from the territorial days when the city was found into May eighteen sixty one and had gone through su pretty raucous days.
They were up to eighteen brothels here at one time, more brothels in churches, I should say, But by the by the late nineteen fifties, and I had moved here and was being educated here. At the time, there was you know, there were a lot of jokes about prostitution. We never had street walkers here. They were always houses of prostitution, but no
street walking. Police wouldn't allow it. The police were really kind of on the take in many ways for decades and decades until that was probably stamped out and it moved. Some of the prostitution problems moved into Clarkston, Washington, across the state line which the two cities are other than a river would be
abutting each other. So even if the rumors about Patty being a prostitute or false, there was enough real history of prostitution in Lewiston to understand why some people, especially those who were old and have to remember it, might believe it to be true that Patty had gotten involved in it. Here's a retired
police detective, Tom Selene's take on the prostitution theory. At that time period in Orpina, Idaho, they had a house of ill repute called the Wreck and it was the only one that I know of an area, and further up the river earlier they had one at Maggie's Been, So prostitution was allowed in Clearwater County, but not in the Lewiston area. But as a house
of ill repute in Lewiston. You know, there may have been a case there or there, but there was nothing with anything of that would bring anybody's attention to it. No, Patty was, in my opinion, Patty was out a prostitute. She's a twenty four twenty six year old, this young girl, and she has two kids, and she's close with her family. She's close with a parents. She wants to get her a further her life and get an education, and she's working on that. And she's, to
all our knowledge, was a wholesome young woman. Now she may she may have had it some time with someone else, and that was fairly popular in the seventies, and with her being a run around whore, I would say zero zero chance. Then there's the angle of Patty having an affair with a police captain. It appears that Dodie and a man named A Meal Fliger may have been the people who originally told Ralph that Patty had been hanging out at
the wood Shed Bar in Winchester with Duane Ayler. Flagger had helped with construction work on the Woodshed Bar and knew a lot of people in Lewistowon. Dodie insists that Fliger told her he saw Patty and Duane Ayler together at the bar. Patty's sister, Alice, doesn't believe it, but she never knew about the fling between Patty and Randy, so it's possible she'd be unaware if Patty
had other extramarital relationships. The rumor about Patty and the police captain became so widely circulated that at one point Stayed investigators who began assisting with the search for Patty Otto asked Lewiston police about it. Duane Ayler submitted a written statement swearing
that he had never met Patty and had never been involved with her. A new Lewiston investigator who had been assigned to Patty's case in nineteen eighty seven, interviewed Fliger because Dody was still insisting that police follow up on that angle. Here's producer Christine Hughes reading a portion of the report written by that police officer.
My purpose in contacting Fliger was to verify the accuracy of several statements concerning the Patricia Otto missing person case as related to you by missus Dolores Dodie Otto. Upon initial contact with Fliger, I did verify that he was in fact a former employee of a mister Jack Roadie, a contractor who was responsible for some of the construction on the Woodshed Tavern in Winchester, Idaho. Fliger also indicated he was in fact familiar with Patty Otto and her family the O'Malley's.
Fliger further confirmed that he does know Duane Ayler. Fliger indicated he does recognize Ailer by sight, however, his not seen him for approximately ten to twelve years. I asked Fliger if there was any validity to Dolores Otto's statement that he had observed Patty Otto and Dwane Ayler together at the Woodshed Tavern in Winchester, Idaho, a short time before Patty's disappearance. Fliger indicated he could positively
not say in any way that Otto's statement had any validity. The report said Emil Fliger had worked for Jack Roadie, who was the father of Ron Rody, the Otto's babysitter. The rumors about Patty seemed to be growing like a real life game of telephone. Why would Dodie be so convinced that Patty was still alive and that Ralph hadn't harmed her, especially if she thought Ralph was a crook and knew he had a bad temper. We'll get to that.
If Patty had in fact simply left Ralph and the girls, we could see why Ralph would no longer want Patty back, especially if he truly believed she was a prostitute or had been having an affair with a member of the police force. One of the cops who was investigating him. This is Ron Roady again. After she disappeared, the police started hounding him. I mean they were they were after him, so you know they were. They were hounding
him relentlessly. That he was always he was just constantly drunk. Nothing really changed. He didn't talk about her to me, and they just are asked him, and they are asked me because I was involved with him. It was it was pretty bad. The cops was pretty corrupt back he super corrupt, like say, two of the head detectives were running a prostitution ring. But I'm sure Dwayne Aylor was having an affair with Patty because they had been
steaming together. By people out and about him. There was pretty much no doubt that happened, and I think that's why Blaine took her disappearance so seriously and started harassing Ralph so bad. Oh yeah, it was quite a big deal. We think it's important that you know the details of the seemingly convoluted theories about Patty because it helps give context to the afternoon of October twenty sixth, nineteen seventy six, not quite two months after Patti Otto vanished without a
trace. On that day, Ralph went to the Long Branch Saloon in Lewistown, where he had several drinks with a friend and his brother Ray. At one point in the evening, a waiter came to the table and told Ralph that he had a phone call that he could answer at the bar. Ralph got up and went to the bar, and Ray continued talking with Ralph's friend. After talking on the phone briefly, Ralph stepped outside, out of sight of Ray and his friend. While he was outside, Ralph left an envelope
of cash inside a pickup truck with California license plates. The cash was a down payment for a professional assassin to kill Lewiston Police Captain Duane Ayler. Next time on Still everywhere we went those cuffs on our tail. Vick told my husband, who worked for the guard, that he better watch out when he was doing because he made his job. Anyone with information pertaining to the disappearance of Patricia Otto should contact the Lewiston Police Department's tipline at two zero eight to
nine eight three nine three nine. Anyone with information pertaining to the identity of the Finlay Creek, Jane Doe, or other information related to that case should contact the Union County District Attorney at DA at Union hyphen County dot org. If you, or anyone you know is a victim of domestic abuse, please contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at eight hundred seven nine nine. Safe Still
is a production of The Reporter's Notebook and Grayson Shaw Media. You can connect with us online at the Reporter's Notebook dot com or via email at info at the Reporter's Notebook dot com. Still was researched, written and produced by Karen Shaw Anderson. Additional research and script editing provided by Christine Hughes. Original music by Smith Uosa, Additional narration provided by b. J. Blackburn. I'm
your host and associate producer Gary Anderson. Special thanks to everyone who graciously provided interviews and help with our research. We would specifically like to thank the advocates for Patricia Otto and the Finlay Creek Jane Doe Task Force. Like Follow and subscribe to Still on your favorite podcast platform, and follow us on Facebook or
Twitter to join the conversation. Ezekiel thirty four sixteen. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the stray, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the week.