OAKRIDGE, Ore. -- When a pair of campers were found murdered last summer, investigators covered all the usual bases. But with the crime still unsolved, the Lane County Sheriff's Office decided to try something a little different.

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Jeanette Bauman as shown in a photo from police.

Sgt. Spence Slater, the head of detectives, said he didn't hesitate when producers of a new Discovery Channel series contacted him about looking into the Oakridge murders. In "Sensing Murder," two psychics, Pam Coronado and Laurie Campbell, revisit unsolved murders to bring a fresh perspective.

Slater said some of his peers scoffed, but he was curious to see what the psychics would come up with. And he also likes the idea of the case being the subject of an hourlong, nationally broadcast program.

The more publicity the case generates, the more likely they'll get a break, he said.

The psychics, who visited the campsite and interviewed investigators, felt that two people were involved and that Stevan Haugen, 54, and Jeanette Bauman, 56, were the victims of a "thrill killing," meaning the culprits hunted for someone to kill and chose the couple as their target, Slater said. The show will air this fall.

The couple and their dog were found July 1, 2005, by a man looking for a campsite. The license plates were missing from their SUV and some camping gear was gone.

Both had been shot with a long gun, or rifle, from at least 15 feet away. Both had turned to face the shooter before they died. There was no sign of a struggle or sexual assault.

"This was an overkill situation," Slater said. "These people were executed."

Detectives found no fingerprints, no useful tire tracks, no footprints. No one witnessed the crime or heard anything unusual. The couple, who'd been together about four years, had no known enemies, and there's never been evidence that they stumbled on criminal activity that led to their deaths.

Detective Mark Nelson, the lead investigator, said he is a bit more skeptical about the psychics than Slater, but he couldn't write off the results all together.

"Some of what they came up with hasn't been publicly available," he said. "They did say some things that they wouldn't have been able to know otherwise. It gave us some things to follow up on."

An FBI profile completed last month differs from the psychics' theory. The profiler thought the slayings were the work of one person, perhaps someone who felt territorial and saw the couple as interlopers, despite the fact that they were on federal land.

"There are individuals out there that consider public land theirs," Slater said. "Extreme hunter types who consider the national lands their property."

Investigators say it's possible the couple simply caught someone looting their campsite and paid with their lives. But Haugen's wallet was found with the bodies, and only some of their possessions were missing.

"We think they were in the wrong place at the wrong time," Slater said. "They didn't stumble onto somebody. It's more likely that somebody stumbled onto them."