Site of girls’ bodies will be excavated

BOISE – Investigators plan next week to excavate an eastern Idaho site where two bodies were found in 1981, as law enforcement agents believe they’re getting closer to pinning down suspects in the killings.

Oneida County Sheriff Jeff Semrad said he’s enlisted the help of the FBI and the Idaho attorney general’s office, as well as students from a local university, to solve the murders of Tina Anderson, 12, and Patricia Campbell, 15, who disappeared from a Pocatello park on July 22, 1978.

Semrad, who held a news conference Wednesday at a remote gorge where hunters found the skeletal remains of the two girls, said he hopes ground-penetrating radar will help locate evidence that’s long been hidden.

The case remained largely inactive until December, when an Idaho prison investigator provided still-undisclosed information about possible suspects in the disappearances and murders of the girls.

“Through that information, investigators developed key suspects,” Semrad said.

Semrad declined to release names of those being investigated, or provide further details about information provided by prison officials.

Lynn Porter, a senior in anthropology at Idaho State University, will help in the excavation that begins Monday at the gorge in the Trail Hollow area just a few miles from Malad City.

Last week, Porter, an expert dog handler, helped guide a search dog at the scene. Authorities also searched the area with a metal detector.

“We’re trying to find anything else that might be remaining out there,” she told the Associated Press. “Things get buried over time. As everyone knows, this case is 29 years old.”