Victims' families, law enforcement and a nonprofit coalition seek answers to Utah's unsolved murders 

• Derek Carlisle

At first glance, the lumpy shape didn't look like a body.

A hiker in Butterfield Canyon, west of Herriman, found the form wrapped in heavy plastic and tape. On closer observation, there were also dark red stains that appeared to be blood.

Alejandro Reyes' family reported him missing three hours after the hiker found the corpse. The next day, Reyes' red 2002 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck turned up in Riverton's Legacy Springs apartment parking lot.

The plastic and tape that wrapped the body couldn't conceal that Reyes had been beaten to death in a vicious attack. "He was bludgeoned—throughout his body, but mainly about the head," said Sgt. Ben Pender, a member of the Unified Police Department's cold case unit.

Fatal beatings are rarer than murder with a gun or a knife, Pender said while relating how an unknown killer in 2016 stole the life of the 26-year-old Reyes, who was a caring uncle who often brought gifts to his nephew and helped his sister with schoolwork. An assailant—perhaps more than one, based on inconclusive DNA results—shattered Reyes' dreams of rising in his career and someday having his own family.

"This isn't such an old case," Pender said. "We believe someone out there would remember information and be willing to help."

Pender's cold case workload currently includes 34 unsolved homicides and 14 long-term missing persons where foul play is likely involved. He usually works on between four and six cases at a time for about three months each. "What's going on in that particular case determines whether I continue," he said.

Pender said he rotates through all his cold cases each year and does what he can to progress them along. "Sometimes, they take off, and we resolve the case," he said, adding that resolution "is very satisfying because they are so challenging. But, they're difficult for a reason."

Making a Case
There are currently 250,000 cold cases in the United States, according to Karra Porter, one of three founders of the Utah Cold Case Coalition. A nonprofit, volunteer organization, the Cold Case Coalition is working on more than 400 cases and helping others to investigate cold cases independently.

Porter—along with private detective Jason Jensen and retired Salt Lake Tribune reporter Tom Harvey—initially founded the coalition to help bring awareness to the unsolved 1995 murder of 6-year-old Rosie Tapia. Tapia's killer cut through her bedroom window screen, entered her bedroom, then sexually assaulted and later drowned her.

• Courtesy Photo
• Unified Police Department Sgt. Ben Pender

"We arose out of a mother's need for answers 22 years after the murder of her daughter," Porter said. "Through our efforts, the case was reactivated and is near resolution."

Other coalition cases include a rape and murder that reopened when they proved the person who confessed could not have been the killer. The coalition's resume includes locating missing persons, uncovering new evidence, presenting suspect information to law enforcement and finding the location of bodies, along with working with victim's families.

"We operate the country's only nonprofit forensic DNA lab," Porter said. "We have extensive national and local media contacts. We can often help maximize public awareness of cold cases to help generate leads or help you work with the media directly."

She continued: "We continue to do everything we can to find a lead and try to package it up and submit it to the police."

However, Harvey explains several reasons why cases can become closed without resolution, pointing to the example of 16 young women murdered in Utah during the 1980s whose cases remain unsolved. He said it's common to attribute blame to bad police work, but he noted that investigators are limited by the evidence available at the time.

"Back in the days when there wasn't any DNA to test, there could be a complete lack of evidence," Harvey said. "Sometimes, police know who did it and don't have the evidence to go to court. Sometimes witnesses aren't cooperative."

With the encouragement of Tapia's mother, the coalition has grown to help families connected with nearly all of Utah's cold cases. Porter said the coalition is regularly contacted by individuals looking for information on their own friends and family members, or wondering about the status of different unresolved cases.

Porter's interest in cold cases stems from her own family story, with her biological grandfather having been killed by an unknown assailant at a bar in Casper, Wyoming. She and others traveled there to research the case, Porter said, but had to abandon the case after failing to make progress. The coalition plans to release a book about how to work your own cold case in March or April.

Harvey adds that the families of cold case victims can remain emotionally impacted for years. He recalled one interview with a father who broke down in tears while describing the death of his daughter 50 years earlier.

"The situation of not knowing what happened is—hard, hard, hard," Harvey said. "It's like the death goes on and on."

Edgar Reyes—Alejandro Reyes' brother—agrees with the reality of long-lasting grief. "It stays in your heart, and you think about it constantly," he said. "We wonder when we will know more. We want answers."

To that end, the Reyes family is currently offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Harvey adds, "while a lot of such victim's families learn to live with their grief, still, it nags at them year after year. Some of them are angry. They don't think law enforcement has done enough on the case."

Popular true crime podcasts have speculated that people's fascination with cold cases and murders stems from a hope that if they study crimes enough, they will be better prepared if a murderer comes after them. But Harvey and Porter think there's a different draw.

"I think it's more the mystery of it and the danger depicted in them that's fascinating and repulsive at the same time," Harvey said. "It's more like finding a hidden world under our noses that most of us will never experience in person."

He said that a cold case is defined as a death or missing-person case that police have closed after three years of active investigation. And the availability of DNA testing has made an incredible difference in solving cold cases, he said.

• Courtesy Photo
• From left to right: Utah County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Spencer Cannon; former Salt Lake Tribune reporter and Utah Cold Case Coalition co-founder Tom Harvey.

"An Internet search will bring up dozens of cold cases that have been solved with DNA, some from decades ago, and it is constant and ongoing," Harvey said. "DNA analysis has proven a game-changing tool for cold cases."

Harvey explains that cold cases are likely to be solved depending on several factors, such as whether the original police investigation was thorough, whether evidence and records were preserved and if the evidence contained DNA that can be extracted and analyzed.

Hoping for Closure
Elizabeth Salgado's story sounds like a Netflix mystery plot—a gorgeous, accomplished Mexican girl moves to the United States, bringing along her hopes and dreams, until someone mysteriously murders her three weeks later. Salgado disappeared from State Street in Provo on April 16, 2015, after she left a class at the Nomen Global Language School.

During the three short weeks Salgado lived here, she only met a few people. One of them probably killed her, theorizes private detective Jason Jensen, a co-founder of the Cold Case Coalition.

"Her murderer was someone she was familiar with," Jensen said. "She wouldn't get in a car with a stranger."

Jensen also predicts that the killer likely spoke Spanish. On April 12, 2015—four days before Salgado's death—Jensen says Salgado attended a Latter-day Saints church activity at Kelly's Grove Park pavilion at the base of Hobble Creek Canyon. Jensen speculates that a member of the church group may have invited Salgado to go up the canyon in the days after the party and attacked her once the two were in a secluded area.

The last text that Salgado's family received from her didn't sound like her. "It was out of character," Jensen said. "We believe her killer could have written it."

Sgt. Spencer Cannon, a spokesman for the Utah County Sheriff's Office, said that most missing persons cases are solved within days. "A child who wanders off or a person who is hiking in the mountains or a 17-year-old teenager who stays gone for a while but doesn't know how to hide well enough are usually resolved quickly," he said.

Salgado's body was found on May 18, 2018—more than three years after she disappeared—at the top of Hobble Creek Canyon, miles from where the church activity was held years earlier. A man who pulled off the road to use a remote area of scrub oak as a bathroom called the Utah County Sheriff's Office to say he had found human remains.

Cannon notes that police often receive calls from people who feel they have found human remains when it is a deer, elk, cow or dog. The man was asked how he knew the remains were human, Cannon said, and he responded that he could see a skull and clothing and sent a photograph to the sheriff's office.

"If he had stopped 20 yards in either direction, she would still be a missing person," Cannon said.

Cannon said the Salgado family feels it was something like a miracle that a person found her body in such a remote place. "It's not an area that anyone would walk by. It's not even likely for hunters," Cannon said. "Although her family is grieving a horrible tragedy, finding the body brings some odd measure of relief—they know for sure that she is gone, and they have a place to go to mourn her."

Still, speculation surrounds cold cases such as Salgado's, and there are continuing questions and possibilities to consider. Cannon illustrates: "How long was she there? Was she killed at that spot or just moments after being abducted? Did the person who killed her visit the site where she was left?"

Cannon also noted that the area where Salgado's body was found is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, which uses gates to close off access during the winter and early spring.

"It seems unusual for someone to go there who wasn't at least familiar with that road," Cannon said.

• Courtesy Photo

Without knowing precisely how Salgado disappeared, the questions continue there, too. "Because there were no reports of a Hispanic woman being pushed into a car, something like that happened in a way where nobody saw it, or it happened in a way that initially appeared to be voluntary," Cannon said.

Cannon has his own theory for Salgado's disappearance and death. He speculates that Salgado was possibly walking along the sidewalk toward her apartment when someone she knew—from school or church or her apartment—pulled a car over and rolled down the window. "She leans down to the window and recognizes the person, and maybe she gets in the car voluntarily," he suggested. "At some point, maybe that connection or social interaction turns bad, and she becomes an unwilling abduction. We have to assume that she was taken against her will because she ended up dead."

He also noted that investigators never learned who drove Salgado to and from the church activity before her death.

"It would be good to find out about that," Jensen said. "It's more than a 20-minute drive from there to her apartment."

The DNA at the site of her body's recovery was too degraded to provide sufficient information to connect it to a person. And the man who found Salgado was serving an LDS mission when she was murdered.

"So, he had a good alibi," Cannon said.

The Utah County Sheriff's Office identified Salgado through her dental records, Based on the condition of Salgado's remains, there was no sign of injury, gunshot or stab wound and no apparent indication of strangulation.

"It's possible, maybe even likely, that she experienced a moment when she realized, 'this is going to be the end of my life.' That must have been terrifying for her," Cannon said, adding that it breaks his heart to think that Salgado—or anyone—would experience that.

Cannon said that sheriff's detectives remain committed to pursuing Salgado's case. "In our profession, we're fixers," Cannon said. "When we encounter a problem, we look for solutions and do the best we can to solve whatever problem we're facing. So, it's incredibly frustrating that, despite our best efforts, we haven't been able to solve this case."

Often when someone commits a violent crime like a murder, they'll share aspects of the incident with someone else. Cannon suggested that a perpetrator's ego can be piqued when public reporting or the police description of events falls short of their reality, or they're compelled to confess their remorse.

"Maybe they find God, or maybe they are afraid of going to hell, or they have a case of the guilts and they tell somebody, or they report it," Cannon said. "It may be something like that that we can hold out hope on, that will give us a solid direction to go in."

If someone out there has even a partial description or memory of a car they saw on Provo's State Street that April day, or a recollection of a young Hispanic girl walking with someone on the sidewalk, Cannon encourages them to come forward. "A vague description of a car or a person would be appreciated," he said.

The Sheriff's Office went door to door in the area seeking just that sort of information. Cannon advises people who feel they have information to contact police dispatch.

"It's not an emergency," he said, "but it could be—if someone knows of somebody who has evidence they are threatening to destroy." "

What should a person do if they encounter what appears to be human remains? Porter recommends they call the police or, if they don't feel comfortable doing that, reach out to the Cold Case Coalition tip line. "We get a lot of calls about possible human remains because law enforcement agencies often don't have time to check those out," she said. "Because of our lab, we can document and test the bone quickly to see if it's human or animal."

Cannon also agreed that information on cold cases might not be the kind of emergency that necessitates a 911 call, but that it is important that any available evidence be collected quickly, by professionals.

"From the moment they're found, we want the area preserved," he said, "and to avoid the possibility—however slight—that someone else might come and disturb it, or take a souvenir."

The isolated area where Salgado was found didn't match her vision for the future. "Elizabeth heard great things about Utah, and she had this beautiful dream that she wanted to find somebody with the same religious beliefs and marry in the temple of Salt Lake City," her uncle, Rosemberg Salgado, said. "She wanted to open more doors for herself and be able to progress in her life."

For more information on the Utah Cold Case Coalition or to share any information on these or other cases, visit coldcasehelp.com or call 385-CLUE-313 (385-258-3313).