Solved cold cases in Utah
2 documented cases.
Krystal Beslanowitch
Krystal Lynn Beslanowitch, a 17-year-old runaway from Spokane, Washington, was found bludgeoned to death with a granite rock along the banks of the Provo River near Midway in Wasatch County, Utah, in December 1995. The case went cold for nearly 18 years until investigators used a new wet-vacuum forensic tool, the M-Vac, to recover touch DNA from the rough surface of the rock weapon. The profile matched Joseph Michael Simpson, a paroled killer, who was arrested in Florida in 2013 and convicted of aggravated murder in 2016.
Loretta Jones
Loretta Jones, a 23-year-old mother, was stabbed to death in her home in Price, Utah, in July 1970, and her body was found the next morning by her 4-year-old daughter, Heidi. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed seventeen times. Police quickly focused on Thomas Edward Egley, a man Loretta had briefly dated, but a judge dismissed the murder charge in November 1970 for lack of evidence, and Egley moved to Colorado. The case sat cold for nearly four decades, and much of the original physical evidence, including a swab that might have yielded usable DNA, was lost over the years. The case was not reopened until 2009, when the victim's grown daughter asked a high-school acquaintance who had become a Carbon County sheriff's sergeant, David Brewer, to look again. Brewer rebuilt the case without DNA: he re-examined the single surviving crime-scene photograph and made out the letters T and O that Loretta had written in her own blood, he tracked old witnesses across the country, and he finally obtained a recorded confession from Egley with the help of one of Egley's own neighbors. Egley pleaded guilty to murder in 2016 and was sentenced to ten years to life.