Fugitive Oregon Woman Caught in Remote Washington Wilderness After Husband Found Slain

Tracked Down Off a Forest Service Road

Federal marshals arrested a Keizer, Oregon woman on a charge of second-degree murder in the death of her husband after finding Shelly R. Peca, 56, off a U.S. Forest Service road in a remote area of Chelan County, Washington, on July 27. The arrest closed a ten-day manhunt that had stretched across state lines and gripped the small community of Keizer, just north of Salem.

In the early afternoon of July 27, members of the U.S. Marshal Service Portland Pacific Northwest Violent Offender Task Force for the District of Oregon and Western District of Washington located Peca in that remote stretch of Chelan County. She was lodged in the Snohomish County Correctional Facility in Everett, Washington. She is awaiting extradition to Oregon.

A Timeline of Disappearance and Discovery

The search for Shelly began on July 17 when police started investigating the suspicious death of her husband, 59-year-old Walter Arthur Peca, after he was found dead at his home in Keizer. Officers had responded shortly before 10 a.m. to the area of River Road Northeast and Cummings Lane North, where they discovered Peca deceased inside his Keizer home. Authorities quickly determined the death was a homicide, and attention turned to his wife, who was already gone.

Investigators said Shelly's car was reportedly seen leaving Keizer at 6:30 a.m. on July 16 — a day before Walter was found dead — and appeared in Brewster, Washington, at 10 p.m. on July 17. Brewster is about 120 miles northeast of Seattle. That trail of breadcrumbs — a dated timestamp and a distant camera sighting — pointed investigators north into Washington state, where Peca had apparently vanished into the wilderness.

A Family Torn, and a Community Watching

As the search intensified, a voice emerged from an unexpected place. A woman claiming to be the daughter of Walter and Shelly Peca posted publicly on Facebook, writing that her parents had been together since her mother was 17 years old and describing Walter Peca's years of declining health. The post struck a complicated emotional chord, with the daughter expressing sympathy for her mother even as a murder warrant hung over her head.

The woman wrote that watching someone you love go from "happy and joyful" to unable to do anything on their own, suffering slowly and painfully with no one to help, might help people "truly understand what's going on." The post did not explain or justify the alleged killing, but it painted a portrait of a family enduring prolonged hardship — and raised questions about what, if anything, drove the events of mid-July.

What Comes Next

Peca was charged with second-degree murder and booked in the Snohomish County Correctional Facility, and will eventually be extradited back to Oregon. Authorities say no further information is being released at this time. The extradition process will return her to Marion County, where prosecutors will move the case forward.

The case raises broader questions that go well beyond Keizer. When a spouse vanishes into remote wilderness days before a partner's body is found, the investigative challenge is immense — and the human story behind the crime is rarely simple. As the legal process unfolds, the full picture of what happened inside that Keizer home in mid-July will eventually be presented in court. For now, a ten-day search is over, and a community is left to reckon with the grief on all sides of this story.