LAKE TAHOE, Nev. / Calif. – Turquoise coves, bubbling creeks, breathtaking vistas and restoring forests, Tahoe is a paradise embraced by many. Yet, this paradise destination isn’t void of the darker parts of humanity.
Here are a few harrowing incidents from Tahoe’s true crime history.
Zodiac connections?
Donna Lass gained worldwide attention due to the perception that her disappearance was linked to the Zodiac Killer after authorities received a postcard of a Sierra scene. The notorious killer was known for sending taunting letters and making phone calls to newspapers and police following a murder. Lass’ sister also received a mysterious Christmas card.
“Many theories exist and have been reviewed by our agency,” the South Lake Tahoe Police Department says, but a definitive link to the notorious killer actually has not been identified.
Lass, a nurse who provided first aid patient care at a casino near South Lake Tahoe, went missing from the area at the age of 25 in September of 1970.
In 2023, her case went from a missing person case to a homicide after advancements in DNA technology positively identified an unknown skull, found in 1986 in Placer County, as hers.
Despite the discovery, her case remains unsolved and is listed as a cold case with the South Lake Tahoe Police Department.
A stolen life
On June 10, 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was walking to her bus stop on Washoan Boulevard in Meyers, Calif., when she was pulled—reportedly kicking and screaming—into a steel-gray sedan.
That was the last time anyone in the region, including her family, would see her for close to two decades.
Around 18 years later, Dugard was found alive in Antioch, Calif. She had been held captive in a hidden backyard compound of a sex offender named Phillip Garrido. Garrido and his wife had kidnapped her, and Garrido repeatedly raped her.
She was living in the compound with her two daughters, fathered by him. By the time she was found at 29, her daughters were 15 and 11.
Dugard’s identity became known after a run-in with a parole officer of her captor, Phillip Garrido, who was on parole for another kidnapping and rape he committed in the seventies.
The case caused California parole officials to come under scrutiny over how a sex offender parolee under supervision managed to conceal a victim with children for so long.
Dugard recounts her 18-year captivity in a memoir called A Stolen Life.
South Lake Tahoe Strangler
It was a question that went unanswered for close to 40 years: who killed 27-year-old Brynn Rainey and left her body nude and partially buried near Sunset Stateline Stables in the summer of 1977? Authorities asked a similar question for Carol Andersen, 17, whose body was found on the side of a road in South Lake Tahoe in the summer of 1979.
The almost 40-year secret is something one South Lake Tahoe resident took to his grave when he died in 2014.
Due to evidence pointing to strangulation on both bodies, the unknown killer became known as the South Lake Tahoe Strangler.
In 2018, four years after he died, DNA advancements and evidence finally revealed that South Lake Tahoe resident Joseph Holt was responsible for both murders.
Holt had been a South Lake Tahoe resident since 1974, when he moved to the region to pursue a real estate career.
Following the DNA reveal, a search warrant for a garage where his personal property had been stored following his death turned up evidence that he may have been involved in other crimes. It’s something investigators are still looking into.
According to investigators, Holt’s family, including his son, who helped supply DNA evidence, was unaware of his alleged criminal activity.
Trailer terror
What started as an opportunity for two young models to appear in a commercial turned into three days of terror.
On May 16, 1987, a 12- and 14-year-old girl, chaperoned by Maybelle Martin, a 69-year-old owner of a Reno modeling agency, and her friend, Dorothy Walsh, 73, met South Lake Tahoe resident Herbert James Coddington at a casino.
Coddington told the young models that they would be in an anti-drug commercial he had planned.
He brought the models and their chaperones back to his rented trailer at Tahoe Verde Mobile Home Park, telling the group that it was a photography studio. That’s where he proceeded to murder Martin and Walsh and sexually assaulted the girls for three days.
Coddington had built a soundproof plywood case in one of the trailer’s bedrooms and confined the girls there.
Upon a tip from another teenage model, who notified police when the group did not return from the modeling job, which she had originally planned to go to, the FBI raided the trailer.
Coddington was also linked to the 1981 murder of a 12-year-old girl in Las Vegas.
The suspected serial killer received the death penalty for his crimes. The Supreme Court upheld his death penalty in 2001 after an appeal. In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom instituted a moratorium on the death penalty. Coddington remains on the condemned inmate list with the state, along with 567 other inmates.
A missing pair
In January of 1982, two Harrah’s Lake Tahoe blackjack dealers, roommates and friends, Julie Schossow, 25, and Marilyn Putt, 27, went missing from their South Lake Tahoe home sometime between the late night and early morning of Jan. 12 and 13.
Around six months later, on June 6, 1982, a recreational rafter found Putt’s body in the south fork of the American River near a popular rafting area approximately 60 miles from South Lake Tahoe.
Her body was weighted with a chain and bound. The cause of death appeared to be ligature strangulation.
Just over a month later, Schossow’s body was found approximately 150 yards from Putt’s with a cord tightly wrapped around her neck twice. The cause of death also appeared to be strangulation. It’s possible the two were bound together.
Investigation revealed their estimated time of death to be 6-8 weeks prior to the discovery of their bodies.
This leads Investigators to believe the two friends were kidnapped, held captive for around three months at an unknown location, likely between South Lake Tahoe and Placerville, before they were killed.
The double homicide continues to be a cold case in El Dorado County.
Putt was closely associated with several leading members of the “Church of Scientology,” though not a member herself, leading investigators to seek information from anyone associated with the church in the South Lake Tahoe area in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Investigators have also sought information from employees at the Harrah’s around that time, who frequented the Rendezvous Bar or lived near Putt and Schossow’s home at the intersection of Los Angeles and Bellevue in South Lake Tahoe.
The Tribune has also highlighted three cold cases from the South Lake Tahoe Police Department involving missing persons: Frances Hatadis, Bobette Ulrich, and Brian Ranken.
