Business consultant James "Jim" Olive and his wife Naomi were murdered in their home by their year-old adopted daughter Marlene and her 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. Marlene, tried as a juvenile, received a sentence of three to six years in a California Youth Authority juvenile facility, from which she was released at age 21 having served a little over four years.
The case gained worldwide attention because of the perpetrators' ages, the details of the crime, and the wide disparity in sentencing between the two perpetrators. She was adopted as a newborn by a middle-aged childless couple James "Jim" and Naomi Olive and spent her childhood up to her early teens in Guayaquil, Ecuador , where Jim Olive worked as a marketing executive for Tenneco and Gulf Oil.
She was very close to her adoptive father but had a troubled relationship with her adoptive mother, who reportedly had alcoholism and a mental illness commonly thought to be schizophrenia. 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.
Jim Olive became a self-employed small-business consultant and spent less time with his daughter as he tried to make his business succeed. Marlene had difficulty adjusting from her relatively sheltered life in Ecuador to the unfamiliar, permissive Northern California teen culture.
She developed a stomach ulcer that required prescription pills and soon began to use the pills and other drugs recreationally and socialize with other teenage drug users. The relationship between Marlene and Naomi Olive worsened after the move to the United States, and their arguments erupted into domestic violence. 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.
