Oregon Husband Found Dead in His Keizer Home, Wife Captured off a Washington Forest Road

Found on a forest service road

The search ended in the deep woods of central Washington, where US Marshals located a woman authorities had been tracking for more than a week. According to KPTV FOX 12, Shelly Rae Peca, 56, was found off a forest service road in a remote area of Chelan County, Washington, on Monday afternoon and taken into custody. She now faces a charge of second-degree murder in the death of her husband.

Peca was booked into the Snohomish County Correction Facility, KPTV reported, and is awaiting extradition back to Oregon. The case had begun quietly, as a suspicious death, before it grew into a multistate manhunt that stretched from the Willamette Valley to the forests east of the Cascades.

A suspicious death in Keizer

The investigation started with a body inside a home. According to KPTV, the search for Shelly Peca began on July 17, when Keizer 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, Oregon.

Keizer sits just north of Salem, and what looked at first like an unexplained death soon drew scrutiny toward the movements of the dead man’s wife. Investigators have not publicly described how Walter Peca died or detailed the evidence that led them to pursue a homicide theory, and the allegations against Shelly Peca have not been proven in court.

A car heading north

What sharpened the case, according to KPTV, was the timeline of a single vehicle. Investigators said Shelly Peca’s car was reportedly seen leaving Keizer at 6:30 a.m. on July 16, a full day before Walter Peca was found dead. That same car, authorities said, appeared in Brewster, Washington, at 10 p.m. on July 17.

At that stage, KPTV reported, Shelly Peca had not been officially identified as a suspect in the murder investigation. But the reported route, from the family’s Oregon home toward the remote reaches of north-central Washington, became a throughline in the effort to find her.

From person of interest to murder suspect

The distance between Keizer and the Chelan County backcountry is substantial, and it took US Marshals to close it. According to KPTV, marshals found Peca off a forest service road, an area far from highways and neighbors, before she was arrested and jailed on the second-degree murder charge in Washington.

The arrest transformed her status in the case. A woman whose car had simply been “seen leaving” became a defendant accused of killing her husband, though the specifics of the alleged crime remain sealed within an active investigation.

Awaiting extradition and answers

As of the latest report, Shelly Rae Peca remained in custody in Washington, being arraigned and awaiting extradition to Oregon, where the death occurred, KPTV reported. Prosecutors there will decide how the case proceeds.

For now, the public record holds a stark outline and little more: a husband dead in his Keizer home, a wife tracked across two states and arrested in the woods, and a second-degree murder charge that leaves the central question, what happened inside that house, still unanswered. Peca is presumed innocent unless and until convicted.

References: Woman arrested in rural Washington after husband found dead in Keizer home | Wife of murder victim arrested in remote Chelan County, Washington