Solved cold cases in Wyoming
3 documented cases.
Christine Thornton
Christine Ruth Thornton, 28, of San Antonio, Texas, who had earlier lived in the Hancock, Michigan area, vanished in 1977. The Sweetwater County prosecutor's office said she and a boyfriend travelled to Wyoming to pan for gold, argued there and separated. In April 1982 a rancher found human remains in a remote area northeast of Granger, in rural Sweetwater County. Investigators decided the person had been the victim of a homicide, but the remains stayed unidentified for 33 years. In 2013, after Huntington Beach police released photographs found in the possession of the California serial killer Rodney Alcala, a relative who had been searching recognized her in one. That year a Sweetwater County detective also sent a tissue sample from the 1982 remains for DNA analysis and entry into a national missing-persons database, and in July 2015 her siblings' samples led to a positive identification. Detectives determined that the photograph of her was taken a short distance from where she was found, and said other evidence, which they have not described, linked Alcala to her death. On September 20, 2016 the sheriff and county attorney announced a first-degree murder charge against Alcala, then 73. Wyoming did not extradite him because of his health. He died on California's death row on July 24, 2021, and the county attorney said he would dismiss the charge. Alcala was never tried for her death.
Ronald Holtz
Ronald Holtz, a 24-year-old Vietnam veteran, was last seen by his family at Christmas 1974, the day after his release from the psychiatric unit of the Veterans Administration hospital in Sheridan, Wyoming, where he had met and, in September 1974, married a nurse, Alice, who already had five children and two marriages behind her. She filed for divorce in February 1975 and it was granted because he could not be found to be served. Nobody reported him missing. In 1989 one of her sons told police that in the 1970s she had told him she shot a husband named Ron in the back of the head with a .22 rifle while he slept, put him in a cardboard barrel and dropped it down a mine shaft on the Remount Ranch between Cheyenne and Laramie, where she had once been a caretaker. Agents searched the shaft three times and found animal bones, identified Ron as Holtz, confronted Alice in Missouri in 2005, and were shown the right shaft by her son in 2007, but had no money or safe way to excavate it. In August 2013 they dug forty feet down and recovered a nearly complete skeleton with a .22 bullet in the skull; DNA matched Holtz's relatives. Alice Uden, 74, was arrested at her home in Chadwick, Missouri on September 26, 2013. The next day her husband Gerald Uden confessed to the unrelated 1980 murders of his ex-wife Virginia and her sons Richard and Reagan. At trial in Cheyenne in May 2014 Alice said she shot Holtz as he reached into her daughter's crib; prosecutors said he was asleep in bed. A jury convicted her of second-degree murder on May 8, 2014, and she was sentenced to life. She died in custody on June 12, 2019, aged 80.
Vincent Vehar
Vincent Vehar, 67, an Evanston, Wyoming lawyer, his wife Beverly, 51, and their son John, 18, were killed at about 3:35 a.m. on August 7, 1977, when thirty sticks of dynamite thrown through a basement window destroyed their home. Their older son survived. Vehar was suing Mark Hopkinson, a trailer-park developer, on behalf of a sewer district over unpaid hookup fees and threats, and was due to depose him two days later. The case broke in 1978 and 1979 when two young men in Hopkinson's circle talked: Jeff Green, a carpenter who testified that Hopkinson had tried to hire a killer for Vehar, and Mike Hickey, who confessed to a grand jury that he had thrown the bomb on Hopkinson's orders. Green was tortured and shot in May 1979, two days before the grand jury opened, while Hopkinson was in a federal prison in California; prosecutors proved through telephone records and money transfers that he had arranged it. In September 1979 a jury in Jackson convicted Hopkinson of all four murders. He received three life terms for the Vehars and death for Green, and was executed on January 22, 1992, Wyoming's first execution since 1965 and still its last. Nobody has been charged with killing Green.