The Barbeque Murders of California

Jim and Naomi Olive’s disappearance leads to a gruesome discovery.

No one stops
to step into my life
and those in it have long ago
fallen asleep.
I have been empty for so long.
- Marlene Olive’s poetry

Early on the morning of Sunday, June 22, 1975, a firefighter found a smoldering flame in a barbeque pit at China Camp State Park in Marin County, California. As it wasn’t uncommon for hunters to roast deer in the pits, he thought nothing of the bone fragments in the ashes. He would have had no idea that those bones were tied to a missing San Rafael couple by the name of Jim and Naomi Olive, who lived less than ten miles to the west with their teenaged daughter, Marlene.

Marlene Olive had been born in Norfolk, Virginia in January of 1959 to an unmarried mother. When she was a day old, she was adopted by Jim and Naomi Olive. Jim and Naomi had married in 1944, when Jim was an Army recruit. Once the war ended, he wanted to get in on the housing boom and so the couple moved to Panama. They both wanted a family but as the years passed, it did not happen and so they adopted Marlene. Naomi’s vigilance as a parent was excessive from the start. Worried about what the baby might be exposed to, she insisted that everyone around the baby, even herself and Jim, wear a surgical mask and repeatedly sterilized anything and everything that her daughter might come into contact with.