(NewsNation) — For more than 40 years, Suzanne Timms believed her mother left the family for another man, but memories of the night she disappeared has left Timms searching for answers.
When Timms was just three years old, she witnessed a violent argument between her parents. She never saw her mother again, and her father said her mother left them.
But just two years ago, Timms found an image of a Jane Doe online that felt like looking in a mirror.
“I read the details and it describes a short, caucasian blonde female with red pants and a white blouse found two years after my mother disappeared and I’m like, ‘This isn’t my face, this is my mother’s face!'” Timms said.
Timms has been haunted by the fight she saw between her parents the last night she ever saw her mother.
“I was scared because I could hear upstairs there was crashing and sounds and yelling and my sister’s 5 and I was 3. And I’m curious so I crept up the stairs,” Timms said. “My mom and dad were having a physical and verbal fight and my mom hit him in the face and my dad hit her back and he put his hands around her neck, pushed her up against the wall and drug her out of my sight.”
Her sister, Natalie, told her their mother would come back. But her father, Ralph Otto, said Patty Otto was gone for good.
He told family and police in Lewiston, Idaho that his wife abandoned them. Police began an investigation, but after a search of the house, Otto claimed investigators were harassing him and complained about it to friends at his local bar.
“Dad goes into his regular old bar that he’s been drinking in for years and he’s telling them he’d like to get rid of this Captain Aylor who’s harassing him. The bartender had previously said, if you ever want to get rid of someone. I know people. He was just trying to be cool,” Timms said.
Otto took the bartender up on it, but that hitman turned out to be an undercover police officer. Otto was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to prison, where he died five years later.
But on Jul. 28, 1978, while Otto was serving his time, a woman’s body was discovered in the woods in Portland, Oregon. The description of the body was similar to Patty’s, and police in Lewiston sent Patty’s dental records for comparison. The day before those records were being prepared to go out, another body was discovered in Oregon at Finley Creek.
Lewiston police were told Patty Otto wasn’t a match, but could her body have been that of the Finley Creek Jane Doe?
Finley Creek Jane Doe’s identity remains a mystery to this day and is the subject of Facebook posts and speculation.
Timms stumbled across one of those posts two years ago and it changed her life.
“I run across an unidentified Jane Doe forensic image and the image is so much my face that it literally pulls me out of bed and I think why would someone draw me as an unidentified Jane Doe?” Timms said.
She began searching for articles on the Finley Creek Jane Doe and had another shocking revelation.
“She saw in a newspaper article, one of the names of the hunters who’d found her and she recognized the name as her husband’s grandpa. So she said, ‘I think my father-in-law was there when they found the body of the Finley Creek Jane Doe,'” said Mel Jederberg, with the Finley Creek Jane Doe task force. “Within the week, he went out to the site and said, ‘Yeah I went right to it. There’s more growth there but I remember it like it was yesterday.'”
Timms believes Finley Creek Jane Doe is her missing mother, but she has no body. Oregon state police closed the case in 1990, sending the remains of Finley Creek Jane Doe to be cremated. A few remains were never found, including her hands, an arm and a pelvic bone.
In the last two years, cadaver dogs have caught a scent near the grave site and Timms is hoping to find the resources to sift through the woods for that missing DNA.
“Nobody anywhere has been able to extract DNA from the cremains,” Jederberg said.
Timms fears she’s running out of time.
“We’re at the point where I’m just begging someone who has to have the information to solve this case because otherwise it leaves me with what? The hope that I think I’ve found her? I think I’m not the only one who needs closure. Her parents are gone, my sister’s gone, but I’m still here,” Timms said.