Janice Ann Blackburn-Ott was born on February 14, 1951 in McMinnville, Oregon to Dr. Donald Edwin and Ferol Lorraine (nee Hunter) Blackburn. Donald was born on May 14, 1922 in Lovell, WY, and during WWII he was in the US Navy; when he was done serving his country he continued with his education and earned his PhD from the University of Idaho. Ferol was born on August 2, 1921 in Moscow, ID and the couple were wed on July 18 1946. They had two children together: Janice and her older sister, Illona Lynn (who was born in February 1949). Dr. Blackburn was a high school teacher and coach in Idaho before the family relocated to Washington state, where he became a counselor and administrator for the Spokane School District (specifically at school #81).

Well-liked by her peers, Janice was bright and bubbly (this trait even earned her the nickname ‘Sunshine Girl’ at her job), and had a very busy schedule while she was a student at Shadle Park High School: she was a member of the ‘Hi-Lassies’ (which looks like some sort a cheerleading squad), the ski club, the ‘Eldah Tra Art Club,’ and helped out in the library. In a strange twist of fate, she was high school sweethearts with Susan Rancourt’s (another Bundy victim) older brother, Dennis. She graduated from high school in 1969 with high honors and went on to earn her Bachelor’s degree in social work from Eastern Washington State University.

Janice was a petite girl, and only stood at 5’1” tall and was estimated to weigh less than 100 pounds; she had long blonde hair that she wore long and parted down the middle and had smokey green eyes. Affectionately nicknamed ‘Jan’ by her loved ones, she married James Douglass Ott on December 15, 1972 and at the time of her murder worked as a probation case worker for the King County Youth Service Center. After her car was broken into while living in Seattle, Janice felt that living in a smaller community would be safer and moved in with a roommate in nearby Issaquah (located just two doors down from ‘The Issaquah Press’). At the time of his wife’s disappearance, Jim Ott was in graduate school in California (some articles reported that he was in medical school, where others said he was earning ‘an advanced degree in prosthetics’).

On the morning of Sunday, July 14, 1974 Janice spent a few hours washing her clothes at the laundromat, and from there she had a cup of coffee with a friend. After her chores and errands were finished, she went home and put on her black bikini, cut-off shorts, and a white blouse she wore tied at her midriff. Before leaving she made sure to leave a note for her roommate, one that read, ‘I’ll be at Lake Sammamish sunin’ myself. See ya.’ The park is still a popular destination for Issaquah locals, which is a suburb located right outside of Seattle. It contains several beaches and is known to get very crowded during the hot summer months. Ott then hopped on her yellow 10-speed Tiger bicycle and rode to the park; when she arrived at roughly around 12:00-12:30 PM, many beachgoers noticed the attractive young woman, and some even said they remembered her stripping down to her bathing suit and applying a layer of cocoa butter to her skin. That day at the park, Rainier Beer Company was hosting its annual summer picnic, and it was said that there were upwards of 40,000 people there. In addition to happy park goers, Theodore Robert Bundy was there as well, prowling for his next victim (or in this case, victims).

Before Bundy abducted Ott, he approached a young park goer named Janice Graham at the bandstand area. After he said hello and introduced himself to her as Ted, he asked the 22-year-old if she would be able to help him load a sailboat onto the top of his car. She initially agreed, however once the pair reached his vehicle she quickly noticed there was no sailboat, and it was then that her new friend shared that it was actually at his parents’ house that was ‘just up the hill.’ Realizing it was going to be more than just a quick favor, Janice told Ted that she was unable to help him because she was supposed to meet up with her husband and parents shortly. Bundy replied ‘Oh, that’s OK. I should have told you that it wasn’t in the parking lot.’ He then walked the young woman back to the bandstand area, apologized one last time then took off to his right. Graham later reported to law enforcement that the man was wearing a ‘beige sling’ and on three separate times during their short walk from the bandstand to the VW he stopped to rub his ‘injured’ arm, claiming it was from a racquetball injury. Immediately after he parted ways with Graham was when he ran into Janice Ott, as she lay in her black bikini soaking up the rays on Lake Sammamish’s Tibbett’s Beach.

Before Bundy abducted Ott, he approached a young woman named Janice Graham at the bandstand area, and after he said hello and introduced himself to her, he asked the 22-year-old if she would be able to help him load a sailboat onto the top of his car. She initially agreed, however once the pair reached his vehicle she quickly noticed there was no sailboat, and it was then that her new friend shared that it was actually at his parents’ house that was ‘just up the hill.’ Realizing it was going to be more than just a quick favor, Janice told Ted that she was unable to help him because she was supposed to meet up with her husband and parents shortly. Bundy replied ‘Oh, that’s OK. I should have told you that it wasn’t in the parking lot.’ He then walked the young woman back to the bandstand area, apologized one last time then took off to his right. Graham later reported to law enforcement that the man was wearing a ‘beige sling’ and on three separate times during their short walk from the bandstand to the VW he stopped to rub his ‘injured’ arm, claiming it was from a racquetball injury. Immediately after he parted ways with Graham was when he ran into Janice Ott, as she lay in her black bikini soaking up the rays on Lake Sammamish’s Tibbett’s Beach.

Janice was only at Lake Sammamish for about twenty minutes before she was approached by a tall, dark-haired man dressed in tennis shorts (white with a red stripe on the side), a white shirt, and tennis shoes. People nearby that overheard small pieces of their exchange reported that he asked Ott for her assistance with putting a sailboat on his car, which was ‘just down the road’ at his parents’ house in Issaquah. She invited the handsome stranger to sit down next to her so they could ‘talk about it,’ and he did. Fellow beach goers heard Jan say to Bundy that she always had an interest in sailing but never really tried to learn, and flirtatiously asked if she could ‘have a ride in the boat;’ she seemingly agreed to help if he would take her out for a ride afterwards. People also overheard her tell the man that she had her bike with her and she didn’t want to leave it behind out of fear that it would get stolen. He assured her that there was lots of room in his trunk for it, and she then said to him, ‘OK, I’ll help you.’ As the pair walked away, one witness overheard Ott say, ‘hi, I’m Jan,’ to which the man responded, ‘hi, I’m Ted.’ She was never seen alive again.

There were a few people that were sitting close to Ted and Ott that had a first hand account as to what happened: Jerry/Kelly Snyder is a retired DEA agent that was sitting roughly 30 feet away when the exchange occurred, and he has said that he noticed Bundy was only asking women for help, and that he appeared to be ‘trying to find someone who met certain qualifications.’

About the exchange, Snyder said: ‘I noticed a guy that was walking down the beach. A young man. Probably in his mid-to-late twenties. He was wearing white shorts and they had a red stripe, which immediately caught my eye. When he got close, I noticed he had really curly hair and his left arm was in a sling. It piqued my interest because every time he approached a woman, or a group of two or three women, he was getting turned down. And I just kept watching him and he eventually ended up being right in front of me, where he approached a young girl. She was a young and attractive blonde girl. And he asked her… words to the effect of… ‘I need some help.’ She’s saying that she just got here… So obviously, going through her mind is ‘I’d like to help you out, but I’m here to relax.’ He kept on and on and on, and he talks her into whatever he talked her into. He said something about a catamaran. And ultimately, she gets up… reluctantly… because her head is down and she is like ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ And then she started walking back past me. She had this frown on her face, like, ‘I’m helping this guy when I should be enjoying myself on the beach.’ And the end, the result is, she’s no longer with us because she was a nice person.’

Theresa Marie Sharpe was much closer to Ott than Snyder, and thankfully she was able to give investigators a detailed description about the exchange between the two strangers and what exactly they said. Sharpe also shared with LE that she ‘didn’t feel his arm was really hurt. I do remember he took his arm out of the sling and moved it around.’ A second young woman named Sylvia Valint was sitting closest to the pair, and where she was incorrect about his height (she said he was roughly 5’6” to 5’7”) she got the rest of his physical description correct. The fifteen-year-old was also able to tell detectives what was said between the two almost verbatim and provided them with details that no other witness was able to. Per a police report, ‘at about 12:30 hours, Sylvia Valint was laying on the beach at the park with her two friends. Jerry Snyder was about 15 feet from Valint with his wife. Theresa Sharp was with her family about 10 feet from Valint. They were all on the beach, about 200 yards directly in front of the east restroom. The above three witnesses all observed Janice Ott arrive on the beach and position herself between them.’

As we know, Bundy returned only four hours later and abducted Denise Naslund from the same park at around 4:30 PM, and it is the first time that he drastically switched up his MO and took two victims in the same day. It is strongly speculated that he abducted Ott, incapacitated and gagged her, then returned to Lake Sammamish to hunt again. Many TB scholars have theorized that by doing so he was attempting to increase the ‘high’ by taking one woman and returning to the scene only a few hours later to take a second one.

Although Bundy did (sort of) admit to journalists Hugh Aynesworth and Stephen Michaud what happened on July 14, 1974, it was during one of his third person, pseudo-confessions that didn’t directly incriminate him. When asked about Ott and Naslund, the killer theorized that ‘one of the women would probably have watched the other die; he later admitted that it was true while speaking to FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier during his time on death row. Despite finally (maybe… possibly??) telling the truth about how the two women were killed he refused to tell investigators the exact location of where he held them, or if the murders took place indoors or outside in a wooded area. We know that Ted was a liar and a narcissist, so we really need to be careful about taking his word as fact. It’s also possible that Ted tied Ott to a tree somewhere and left her there while he went and hunted for Naslund, and since the area he took the women to was most likely secluded and off the beaten track, it was highly unlikely that anyone would have stumbled upon her, especially if she was silenced (gagged).

Another possible theory is that Bundy lied completely, and he murdered Ott right away, then returned to Lake Sammamish to abduct Denise. Logically, there is a large chunk of time between when she was abducted at 12:30 PM and Ted’s return to Lake Sam at around 4 PM, and if we consider the length of the journey (12 miles, each way) between the park and the Issaquah burial site it means that he was most likely with poor Ott for a good 2-3 hours. If the original plan was to kidnap two women then attack them at the same time, it seems like a lot of time to spend with just one victim. I am including this thought while editing this article in July 2024, but I wonder if he did unspeakable horrors to the poor young woman for the entire 2-3 hours, and brought her to the brink of death over and over… only to revive her each time, so that she was alive when he brought Naslund back. Or, maybe Bundy took a second victim that day because something happened during Otts murder that prevented him from achieving complete sexual gratification. Or… perhaps the event wasn’t planned out at all, and he just wanted to try something brand new, right then and there. We will most likely never know.

A few hours later (at roughly 4 PM), Bundy returned to the same parking lot that he parked in earlier and began his ruse all over again. He approached Sindi Siebenbam and asked her for help getting his sailboat. The 19-year-old was on her way back from the bathroom when a visibly nervous Ted approached her asking for help. She immediately asked what happened to his arm, and he told her that he sprained it. Siebenbam also said that the man used his injured arm to gesture with his elbow, and even tugged on her arm in a way that somehow seemed to point her in the direction of his car. When she looked into his cold, dark eyes, she finally had enough of him and firmly told him, ‘no, I’m sorry. I’ve got people waiting.’ Even still, Ted almost seemed reluctant to accept her answer, and even tried a few more times to get her to go with him. The last time she saw him he was wandering towards the restrooms. 

Patricia Ann Turner reported a very similar encounter with a stranger that matched Bundy’s description: at around 4:15 PM a tall, dark haired man with his arm in a sling approached her on her way to the concession stand. They chatted briefly and it didn’t take long for him to ask ‘a really big favor.’ Turner told him that she was in a hurry and wasn’t able to help and after that he just sort of wandered away. Approximately five minutes later, Jacqueline Plischke arrived at Lake Sam wearing a bikini and cut-offs, and as she was locking up her bike she noticed a man just staring at her from a short distance away. He quickly walked up to her and asked for help, but she was quick to tell him that she wasn’t very strong and was waiting for someone. Plischke also advised him that he might be better off if he asked someone that was alone (as she was waiting for a friend). Not willing to waste time on someone unwilling to help him, Ted quickly moved on and approached Naslund, who (as we all know) unfortunately agreed to help him.

I’m not going to get super in-depth about Denise Naslund’s background because I’m going to write a separate piece on her (but for obvious reasons, it’s important to discuss her in some capacity as she plays an important role in the murder of Jan Ott). Naslund was a 19-year-old student studying software development at night school. She worked in an office setting during the day to make money to help pay for college, and at the time of her abduction she was living with her mother and seeing a man named Ken Little.

At around 1 PM, Denise and Little arrived at Lake Sammamish along with her dog and another couple, Bob Sargent and Nancy Battema. The small group of friends decided to sit on the lawn on the east side of the park, roughly 200 feet north of the restrooms. According to Battema, Naslund took four Valium tablets when they arrived, and at some point in the afternoon she and her boyfriend got into an argument. Shortly after 4 PM, Ken and Bob fell asleep after the group had eaten hot dogs and potato chips and Denise then told her friend that she was ‘feeling high’ and after a short discussion about the time, she got up and walked towards the restrooms. It was the last time Battema ever saw her. Naslund had driven her friends to the park in her car, and as it got later and later in the day her vehicle stood out in the lot by itself. Over the next couple of days, it started to dawn on investigators that not one but two women had gone missing from Lake Sammamish on the exact same day, just hours apart from each other. Denise was well known for her sweet nature and friendly personality, and her family said she would have most likely agreed to help any person that was in need without a second thought, especially if they were hurt or handicapped.

After Bundy killed Ott and Naslund, he left their bodies along the side of a service road near Issaquah. Roughly eight weeks after their abduction on September 6, 1974, a pair of grouse hunters stumbled across their remains scattered amongst a grassy patch in a wooded area near Issaquah, roughly seventeen miles east of Seattle and two miles from Lake Sammamish. The hunters reported to police that they ‘found two shallow graves, and there’s one with long, black hair.’ King County police immediately sealed off the area and after a three-day search found two skulls as well as some other bones, teeth, and tufts of reddish blonde and dark brown hair. By that time, the remains had fully decomposed and had been dispersed throughout the area by forest critters. An absence of clothing and jewelry on or near the victims made investigators believe that the bodies were left at the scene completely naked. Using dental records as well as hair samples (taken from the victims hairbrushes), the skulls were identified to be those of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund. In addition, there was a third set of remains discovered in the form of a femur as well as several vertebrae believed to have belonged to Georgann Hawkins, but sadly they were impossible to identify.

As the investigation heated up investigators learned that Ted had scoped out the park the weekend before the murders, which would have been July 6/7, 1974. They were also able to place him in Issaquah on July 14 by matching up his credit card receipts, and it has been confirmed that he filled up his car at a gas station located at the northwest corner of Front Street and Sunset Way, where the Issaquah Library now stands. Before he murdered Ott it’s speculated that Bundy may have stopped at ‘The Issaquah Press,’ and after his mugshot was released to the public, their bookkeeper insisted that she had sold him a copy of the newspaper (if you recall, I brought this business up earlier as it was two doors down from where Janice was living at the time).

By this time in the summer of 1974 most Washington residents were aware there was a predator targeting young women in the Pacific Northwest, but despite this the abductions at Lake Sammamish still came as a huge shock to locals. But thankfully, because Bundy had asked several women for help before finding Ott and Naslund, for the first-time law enforcement was able to put together a composite sketch of the infamous ‘Ted:’ Fliers were hung up throughout the Seattle/Issaquah area and women were told to be cautious of men matching the description.

A little over six months after the Issaquah burial site was discovered on March 1, 1975 forestry students from Green River Community College stumbled upon the skull of Brenda Ball on Taylor Mountain while doing field work; this is approximately thirty miles away from the Flame Tavern, where she was last seen. Two days later, King County Detective Bob Keppel found the skull of Susan Rancourt, who had vanished from Central Washington State University in Ellensburg on April 17, 1974, roughly eighty-seven miles away from where she was recovered; like Ball, her skull had been fractured from blunt force trauma. Roberta ‘Kathy’ Parks was found next: the twenty year old was abducted from the campus of Oregon State University, which is 265 miles (or a 4.5 hour drive) away from the Issaquah burial site. Like the others, her skull showed signs of trauma. The last of the remains found on Taylor Mountain were those of Lynda Ann Healy, and unlike the previous victims only her mandible was found, which was later identified through dental records. No remains of Donna Manson or Georgann Hawkins were ever recovered.

Because of the distance between them, Janice and Jim Ott would frequently write to each other, and after her death he received a letter she had sent right before her abduction. In it, she complained about how long it took for mail to be delivered from Washington to California, saying: ‘five days! Isn’t that a drag? Someone could expire before you ever got wind of it.’ Jim waited by the phone all evening on July 14, 1974, and after dozing off a bit he woke up around 10:45 PM, claiming he heard her voice calling his name over and over in his head, begging him to come help her; the following day, he woke up to learn that she was missing. In the true crime classic ‘The Stranger Beside Me,’ Ann Rule tells of a conversation she had with Ott regarding Jan’s disappearance, and in his last letter to her he begged her to be careful: ‘And then I wrote at the bottom (and I don’t know why I choose those words) ‘please take care of yourself. Be careful about driving. Be careful of people you don’t know. I don’t want anything to happen to you. You’re my source of peace of mind.’’

On January 24, 1989 Bundy was put to death by Florida’s ‘Old Sparky’ electric chair, and he confessed to both Ott and Naslunds murders less than 24 hours before his execution: he told FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier that he drove an unconscious Jan to a secluded cabin 2-3 miles from Lake Sammamish and repeatedly raped her before knocking her out again and tying her up, and when he returned with a second victim, he said she at some point regained consciousness. He then raped and murdered Denise in front of her before eventually taking her life as well. After this confession came to light Dr. Blackburn said that he would have rather not known what happened to Janice, saying ‘would you like to hear the story of what happened to your daughter?

While doing research into Dr. and Mrs. Blackburn in the years following their daughter’s murder, I discovered there was an ongoing legal battle between them and the King County Sheriff’s department over Janice’s remains: police told the Ott and Naslund families that their remains could not be turned over for burial because they were needed as evidence but unfortunately, this wasn’t true and it turned out that they were misplaced. Both families filed a lawsuit against the county in 1984, and where a trial had been set for December a settlement was reached on November 2: Denise’s mother Eleanor Rose originally sought $750,000 (she got roughly $112,500), and James Ott and the Blackburns sought $2 million each (in the end they received about the same amount as Rose, which was divided equally between the two parties). Additionally, Denise’s father Robert sought $750,000 but the county refused to settle with him (although they gave her brother Bob about $5,000).

Dr. and Mrs. Blackburn were married for 64 years at the time of his death on June 3, 2010; he was 88. Ferol Blackburn died at the age of 97 on December 8, 2018 in Spokane, WA and is buried in Fairmount Memorial Park in Spokane. Janice’s sister Illona married a man named Gary Clark in 1971 and relocated to Lompoc, CA; the couple have two children together.

* Edit, July 2024: I would like to thank an individual named Anna, who was kind enough to reach out and let me know that I included a picture of the wrong Jim Ott’s grave stone on here. Looking at it I can’t believe I made such a glaringly obvious mistake, and I’m now even more confident in my decision to put off writing any new articles until I go back and make sure that my old stuff is up to snuff. Also, thank you for being so kind about it. So many people would have publicly blasted me, via a comment at the end of the post pointing out all of my errors. Reaching out through email was very classy, and I appreciate you.