Business consultant James "Jim" Olive and his wife Naomi were murdered in their home by their 16-year-old adopted daughter Marlene and her 20-year-old boyfriend Charles "Chuck" Riley, who then attempted to dispose of the bodies by burning them in a barbecue pit at a nearby campground.

Riley was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and received a sentence of death, which was later changed to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.

[1][3] Riley and Olive have also been the subjects of continuing coverage in connection with his repeated bids for parole[5] and her subsequent convictions for numerous other crimes.

[1][4][7][8][9] When Marlene was 14, her father lost his job and moved the family back to the United States, settling in Marin County, California in the Terra Linda community of the city of San Rafael.

Marlene had difficulty adjusting from her relatively sheltered life in Ecuador to the unfamiliar, permissive Northern California teen culture.

[1][4] Over time, Marlene also developed resentment toward her father for siding with her mother in disputes and suspected him of informing police about her friends' drug activities.

She shoplifted, stole her parents' credit cards, used and overdosed on drugs, ran away from home, and received stolen goods from burglaries committed by a boyfriend.

[11] Riley provided her with free drugs, gifts, and transportation, listened to her problems, and sometimes helped her carry out sexual or criminal fantasies.

[1][4][11] At Olive's suggestion, the couple carried out a prolonged shoplifting spree, stealing approximately $6,000 in merchandise (primarily women's clothing and accessories) from local stores over several weeks until they were caught in the act and arrested for grand larceny in March 1975.

[11] Jim and Naomi threatened their daughter with juvenile hall,[7] planned to send her away to school, and forbade her to see Riley again, the prohibition also being included in a court order.

[1][4][7] Olive and Riley tried to dispose of the bodies by transporting them to a wooded area at nearby China Camp[13] and burning them in a barbecue pit with gasoline and logs in an attempt to make them unrecognizable.

A fireman who arrived shortly thereafter to put out the unattended fire initially mistook the partially burnt remains for a deer carcass.

They allegedly planned to wait for Jim and Naomi to be declared dead, collect the life insurance money, and move to Ecuador.

The friend who had helped clean informed the police about the blood in the room and the couple's statements about killing the Olives and burning their bodies.

[1][4][8][14][15] Acting either on information from Olive or her friend, police searched the China Camp barbecue pit and determined that it contained fragments of burnt human remains.

However, Olive claimed that Riley had killed her parents of his own accord and that afterward he had held her hostage and forced her to take drugs.

[1][9][12][16] Based on his initial confession, Riley, who was an adult over 18 (aged 20) at the time of the crime, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder for killing Jim and Naomi Olive and faced the death penalty.

[1][19] The court ruled that she had violated Section 602, stating that she "did encourage, instigate, aid, abet, and act as accomplice in the homicides of her parents.

[3] In 2011, Riley, now 56 and physically disabled, appealed his most recent denial on the grounds that there was no evidence he continued to be a danger to the community, that the parole board did not consider his age, and that his sentence had been unconstitutionally excessive.

However, on February 6, 2015, the parole board's decision was reversed by California Governor Jerry Brown, who explained that "although [Riley] professes to accept some responsibility, he continues to downplay his role in this crime.

[27] In 2003 in Kern County, California, she pleaded guilty to passing a fictitious check in Bakersfield and was sentenced to seven years in prison.

[28] A 1992 Los Angeles Times article called her "the queen of the trashers" due to her alleged skills at committing forgery and fraud and creating false identities based on documents, such as voided checks, obtained from discarded garbage.

[38][39] Olive continued to be, in the words of Maud Lavin, the "chief protagonist" of the series,[40] and at least one exhibition of McCarty's work focused solely on her and the barbecue murders.