 This photo provided by the Yuba County Sheriff's Department shows Larry Don Patterson, who was arrested by authorities in Oklahoma on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016, on charges related to the 1973 slayings of... (Associated Press) 
 
 This photo provided by the Yuba County Sheriff's Department shows Larry Don Patterson, who was arrested by authorities in Oklahoma on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016, on charges related to the 1973 slayings of Valerie Lane, 12, and Doris Derryberry, 13, in Yuba County, Calif. (Yuba County Sheriff's Department... (Associated Press) 
 
 MARYSVILLE, Calif. (AP) — An investigator "with a bit of free time" decided to send for testing DNA samples from a long-dormant cold case, which led authorities to arrest a pair of men linked to the 1973 shotgun slayings of two young girls, authorities said. According to the sheriff’s department, 13-year-old Doris Karen Derryberry and Valerie Janice Lane, 12, were reported missing on Nov. 12, 1973, after failing to return from a shopping trip to Linda the day before. She and 12-year-old Valerie Janice Lane, both of Olivehurst, California, were reported missing by their mothers on Nov. 12, 1973, after they failed to return from a shopping mall in nearby Linda that the girls had visited the previous day. Both were age 22 at the time and living in Olivehurst, a small agricultural town in California's Central Valley. Two boys were target shooting and found the girl's bodies about 20 hours later, according to news accounts at the time. A few hours later, the Yuba County Sheriff's Department was notified that the bodies of two girls had been found alongside a dirt road in a wooded area near Marysville, north of Sacramento, where they had been shot at close range with a shotgun, Sheriff Steve Durfor said. Authorities then and now said a large-scale investigation was immediately launched and some 60 people interviewed over a three-year period before the case went cold for a lack of solid leads and was shelved in 1976. In March 2014, an investigator doing a routine look through cold cases decided to send semen samples found on Derryberry's body and preserved for 43 years to the state Department of Justice forensics lab for analysis. Durfor said both have since served prison sentences that resulted in their DNA being collected: Harbour for drug offenses in 1997 and 2003, and Patterson for a 1976 arrest on charges of raping two adult women in Chico, also in northern California. Patterson, who was convicted of rape in 1976, was also wanted for failing to register as a sex offender and was hiding from law enforcement for that reason, she said. William Lloyd Harbour, 65, was taken into custody on Tuesday morning at a traffic stop in Linda, California, 40 miles south of Sacramento, the Yuba County Sheriff’s Department said in a written statement. Durfor said the victims' families were told of the arrests Tuesday morning and have requested privacy. The families "have endured decades of suffering and grief for not knowing who was responsible for the brutal murder of their loved ones," Durfor said. Some of the family members are now elderly and "have waited for something for 43 years for an answer as to what happened to their kids," Yuba County District Attorney Patrick McGrath said. There will be a lot of frustration, there will be a lot of anger, a lot of things that we need to be concerned about." The girls' slayings made headlines around the nation at a time when such killings seemed rare, McGrath said. The DNA hit prompted a lengthy new investigation which culminated in the arrest of the two men, who were expected to face murder charges, the sheriff’s department said. It took more time to reopen an investigation so old that several of the investigators and the pathologist who conducted the autopsy have since died, McGrath said. They then had to locate Patterson, who is being held as an unregistered sex offender while he awaits an extradition hearing from Oklahoma to California. "We literally were looking in five different states," McGrath said. ___ 
 
 Talley reported from Oklahoma City.
– Authorities have finally made arrests in the death of two girls in California more than 40 years later. Police say 65-year-old cousins Larry Patterson and William Harbour murdered Doris Derryberry, 13, and Valerie Lane, 12, after they vanished from a shopping mall in 1973. The girls were found dead, each shot by a shotgun, beside a dirt road in Marysville hours after they were reported missing, per the AP. Doris had been sexually assaulted and semen was collected from her body. However, it was only sent for testing in March 2014 by an investigator who "had a bit of free time and really looked very closely at this case," Sheriff Steve Durfor tells the AP. The semen matched DNA samples taken from Patterson and Harbour during previous arrests, police say. Patterson—convicted of rape in 1976 and wanted for failing to register as a sex offender, per Reuters—was arrested Tuesday in Oklahoma. Harbour, who has felony drug convictions, was also arrested Tuesday in the girls' hometown of Olivehurst, Calif. The men were 22 at the time of the murders. After "decades of suffering and grief," Durfor says the girls' families can finally have some closure. They "have waited ... for 43 years for an answer as to what happened to their kids," adds a Yuba County DA. (This missing woman could be buried on the Cal Poly campus.)