Solved cold cases in Wyoming
2 documented cases.
Ronald Holtz
Ronald Holtz, a 25-year-old Vietnam veteran, disappeared in late 1974 or early 1975, only months after marrying Alice Louise Prunty, a psychiatric nurse he had met at a Veterans Administration hospital in Wyoming. No one reported him missing and no body was found, so for decades there was no homicide investigation at all. The case broke not through forensic science but through people who finally talked: as early as 1989 a witness told police that Alice had confessed to shooting Holtz in the head while he slept and dumping his barrelled body down an abandoned mine, and Alice's own son later testified to the same admission. After that witness eventually led investigators to the right mine, Holtz's skeletal remains were recovered from a shaft on a ranch between Cheyenne and Laramie in August 2013. Alice Uden, by then 74 and living in Missouri, was arrested in September 2013, convicted of second-degree murder in May 2014, and sentenced to life in prison. She died in custody in 2019.
Vincent Vehar
Evanston, Wyoming attorney Vincent Vehar, 67, his wife Beverly, 51, and their son John, 18, were killed when a dynamite bomb planted in the crawlspace of their home detonated before dawn on August 7, 1977. Another son, Tony, survived. The bombing grew out of a years-long feud between attorney Vehar and Mark Allen Hopkinson, a former federal drug convict who had lost legal disputes in which Vehar represented his adversaries. The case broke when Michael Hickey, the man Hopkinson had hired to plant the bomb, confessed before a Uinta County grand jury and turned state's evidence against Hopkinson in exchange for a plea deal, after a second witness, Jeff Green, who had also implicated Hopkinson, was tortured and murdered days before he was to testify. Hopkinson was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder in September 1979, received three life terms for the Vehars and the death penalty for Green's killing, and was executed in 1992 in Wyoming's only modern execution.