Marlene Olive: The Barbecue Murders of Marin County

The Marlene Olive barbecue murders refer to the June 1975 killings of James and Naomi Olive at their home in the Terra Linda neighborhood of San Rafael, California, by their sixteen-year-old adopted daughter Marlene and her nineteen-year-old boyfriend, Charles “Chuck” David Riley. After Riley bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot the couple, the pair hauled the bodies to China Camp State Park and burned them in an abandoned sewage cistern that had been reused as a barbecue pit, a detail that gave the Marin County case its enduring nickname.¹

What Led to the Killings

Marlene was born in 1959 and adopted as a newborn by James Olive, a businessman who was fifty-nine when he died, and Naomi Olive, who was fifty. The family had lived for years in Ecuador before financial setbacks pushed them to Terra Linda in 1973.²

Naomi suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and struggled with alcoholism.³ Marlene reportedly adored her father but fought bitterly with her mother. She found her adoption papers at age ten, and by high school she was shoplifting, using drugs, and immersing herself in witchcraft and dark fantasy.²

She met Chuck Riley in 1974. He was a high school dropout who sold marijuana to gain social acceptance among local teenagers, and their relationship centered on drug use and petty crime. When he first encountered her, she was in the middle of her first LSD trip on the front lawn of Terra Linda High School.⁴

Jim Olive responded to his daughter’s behavior by threatening to ground her for the summer, send her to boarding school in the fall, and order Riley to stay away. Marlene refused to accept it. In early 1975 she began pressing Riley to kill her parents.²

How the Murders Happened on June 21, 1975

On June 21, 1975, Marlene arranged a shopping trip with her father so that Riley could enter the house alone. Naomi was asleep when Riley struck her in the head with a claw hammer and then stabbed her with a kitchen knife.³ When Jim and Marlene returned, Jim tried to intervene and Riley shot him in the back with a .22 caliber revolver.⁵

The two wrapped the bodies in sheets, drove them to China Camp State Park, doused them with a flammable liquid, and lit them on fire inside the old sewage cistern.¹ Afterward, they used the Olives’ credit cards to pay for personal expenses.²

How Police Found Out

Early on June 22, 1975, a firefighter noticed a smoldering flame in the barbecue pit at China Camp State Park. He saw bone fragments in the ashes but initially set them aside, because hunters sometimes roasted deer in the pits. The remains were later identified as James and Naomi Olive.⁶ Once investigators tied the remains to the family, Riley confessed to striking Naomi with the hammer, shooting Jim, and burning the bodies with Marlene’s help.⁵

What Happened to Chuck Riley

Riley was tried in Marin County on two counts of first-degree murder beginning in October 1975 and was convicted on both counts on January 26, 1976.⁷ His defense argued that he was susceptible to hypnosis and had been hypnotized by Marlene into committing the murders, and tapes of hypnotists attempting to put him under were played in court. Prosecutor Josh Thomas countered with an expert who testified that Riley spoke only in the past tense while under hypnosis, a sign he was fabricating rather than reliving events.⁴

Riley was sentenced to death. Soon after, the California Supreme Court struck down the state’s death penalty scheme in Rockwell v. Superior Court (1976), and an appellate court modified his sentence to life imprisonment on each count, to run concurrently. His minimum eligible parole date was set for June 27, 1982.⁷

Parole did not come. Riley was denied release more than a dozen times, including at a November 28, 2011 hearing where the Board of Parole Hearings again found him unsuitable.⁸⁷ He challenged the 2011 denial through a habeas petition, and on May 22, 2014, the California Court of Appeal, First District, ruled in his favor. The court concluded that the Board had failed to show evidence Riley remained dangerous, found he “poses little risk of violence,” and ordered a new hearing within sixty days to set a release date.

The parole board then found Riley suitable for release, but in February 2015 Governor Jerry Brown reversed that decision. Brown cited Riley’s continued tendency to “downplay his active role in planning and carrying out these murders” and concluded that he “remains a danger to the public.” The order required the board to schedule another suitability hearing within eighteen months.¹

What Happened to Marlene Olive

Because Marlene was sixteen at the time of the killings, she was processed through the juvenile system rather than tried as an adult. She was ordered held in the custody of the California Youth Authority until she turned twenty-one.⁹ The gap between her outcome and Riley’s death sentence became one of the most discussed features of the case.

In October 1978, Marlene escaped from a Los Angeles parole center and remained at large for roughly nine months. Officers from the New York City police runaway unit, Tom Dawiczkowski and Al Medina, spotted her in midtown Manhattan on July 19, 1979, while investigating potential teen runaways.¹⁰

After her return to custody and eventual release from the California Youth Authority at twenty-one, Marlene moved to the Los Angeles area and racked up a long criminal record. Police reported at least seven arrests in Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley on forgery and drug-related charges, and she served two separate one-year jail terms, one for forgery and one for a parole violation tied to drug use. In 1991 she was arrested three times on forgery charges, giving a false name each time, posting bail, and vanishing before fingerprint checks could confirm her identity.⁹

On February 25, 1992, she was arrested at a motel in Van Nuys and charged with possession of stolen credit cards, counterfeit identification, and a forged check. Investigators found 268 pieces of stolen or forged identification in the Cadillac she had been using and described her as a “cut-and-paste” artist who assembled fraudulent IDs with typewriters, color copiers, portrait cameras, laminating machines, and computers. They identified her as a primary supplier of complete sets of bogus identification, checks, and credit cards to a theft ring of about twenty people. A judge set bail at $500,000, citing her history of false names and flight.⁹

The Book That Documented the Case

The case was chronicled in Bad Blood: A Family Murder in Marin County, a 1982 book by Richard M. Levine published by Random House. Levine explored what he called the “sexually permissive, drug-oriented, occult-fascinated teenage culture of Marin County” that surrounded Marlene and Riley, reprinted poems Marlene had written expressing love for her parents, and laid out the hypnosis defense used at trial. In 1980 he arranged to have Riley hypnotized again in an attempt to assess his guilt, but the result was inconclusive. He also facilitated a 1981 prison reunion between Marlene and Riley. The book is considered a true-crime classic and has since gone out of print.⁴

1
Marin Independent Journal. Governor Reverses Parole Board Decision to Release Marin Double Murderer
2
New York Daily News. Adopted California Teen Convinces Boyfriend to Kill Parents in 1975 Barbecue Murders
3
History.com. A Teenage Girl’s Boyfriend Murders Her Parents
4
Marin Magazine. A Local Murder
5
Metropolitan News-Enterprise. Court Says 1975 Killer Should Be Paroled
6
RealClearHistory. Inside the Barbeque Murders
7
FindLaw. In Re Riley
8
SFGate. Court Says 1975 Killer of Two in Marin Should Be Paroled
9
Los Angeles Times. Olive Arrested on Forgery Charges
10
New York Times. Police Check Runaway and Apprehend a Killer