Delia D'Ambra

Initial information obtained by homicide detectives suggested that Rusty had been camping near Ray and Omer around the time of the crime, and his vehicle had also been discovered not far from their bodies.

By the night of May 4th, authorities had tracked Rusty to a motel in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they were confident he was hiding out.

A tense standoff ensued, and later that night, Rusty eventually agreed to surrender, but shortly before cooperating, decided to die by suicide.

When investigators got into his motel room, they found four handguns, but initially weren't sure if any of those firearms were related to Ray and Omer's murders.

Further ballistics testing had to be done to determine if Rusty's father's service weapon was the gun used in the killings.

But it's unclear from the available source material if that was ever established.

What is clear, though, is that Rusty's suicide essentially brought Ray and Omer's murder investigation to an end.

However, no one could ignore the fact that the circumstances of the crime were strikingly similar to what had happened to Lisa and Brandon nearly seven months earlier.

But the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office was very quick to stamp out any suggestion that the cases were connected.

Detectives stated to the press that they did not believe the crimes were linked.

And really, it seemed like that was that, because several more months passed before any kind of update came in with regards to Lisa and Brandon's case.

Tony Laxon reported for the East Valley Tribune that in mid-August 2004, 10 months after the couple's murders, law enforcement investigators and representatives from the Silent Witness program released a videotaped reenactment of the crime in hopes of enticing additional witnesses to come forward.

A sergeant with the sheriff's office told the press that detectives suspected there were still some witnesses out there who had yet to provide information to authorities.

The sergeant wasn't sure why those witnesses had not come forward yet, and waiting for answers was painstaking for the victim's families during this time.

Paula, Lisa's mom, said that she thought about the case every single day, and she hoped that whoever was responsible would be captured.

Her hopes were seemingly raised right after that, when information about another young couple slain at random while camping in Northern California made national news.

Those victims were Lindsay Cutshall and Jason Allen, whose case I covered in a previous episode of Park Predators titled The Sand.

Because Lindsay and Jason's shooting deaths happened under similar circumstances, investigators working their case initially considered whether their deaths might be linked to whoever had killed Lisa and Brandon.

Jason and Lindsay were murdered execution-style while they slept in their sleeping bags on a beach.

Lisa and Brandon were killed in an eerily similar manner, but just in a desert environment.