When Lina Reyes-Geddes left her home in Ohio on a chilly April morning in 1998, she got in her car and started a long drive to Texas to see her family.
She never made it there.
Two days after leaving, she should have arrived in Dallas. No one heard from her. Six days later, panic set in among her relatives. This wasn’t like her to just vanish. Why wasn’t she there yet? What was the holdup? Was she still coming?
Twelve days later, a passerby driving through southern Utah spotted a slender package sitting on the side of the road and called the sheriff. When detectives peeled back the wrapping, they found Reyes-Geddes’ body. Except they didn’t know it was her body.
For 20 years, they had no idea who she was.
They didn’t have any I.D. They didn’t know how she got there. They had no one coming forward to claim her. They had few leads on who could’ve killed her and even fewer pieces of evidence to base those on.
But now — after reviving the cold case this fall and asking the public for tips — officers say they were finally able to positively identify Reyes-Geddes and offer the small amount of closure that remained in naming her.
“The Garfield County Sheriff's Office is very grateful to give our victim a name and peace to her family,” the office wrote in a Facebook post announcing the victim’s identification Wednesday.
The sheriff’s office did not return requests for comment and the State Bureau of Investigation, which led the investigation, declined to talk about the case ahead of a news conference scheduled for Thursday.
It’s unclear how detectives made the connection to Reyes-Geddes or how she ended up in Utah, a ways west from her destination. The statement released Wednesday said that the suspect in her murder died by suicide in Nevada in the early 2000s. It does not name the person.
When the Utah Department of Public Safety announced the new push in the case last month, officers said the only person of interest was convicted serial killer Scott Kimball. He is currently serving a 70-year sentence in a Colorado prison after confessing to four murders committed between 2003 and 2004. It is believed that he killed as many 25 people across the West.
But detectives are no longer tying him to Reyes-Geddes’ death.
Her body was discovered on April 20, 1998, about 38 miles north of Lake Powell near Maidenwater Spring. She was wrapped in a blue sleeping bag, a few garbage bags and a play mat for kids patterned with roads and houses. She was taped up and tied in with several pieces of rope in intricate knots, according to the original investigation report, obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune through a public records request.
“The ends of the thumbs and all the fingers had been cut off at a right angle,” the report states, further complicating any efforts to identify her.
The Garfield County Sheriff’s Office released the cause of her death Wednesday, saying Reyes-Geddes died after being shot in the head. She was 37 years old.
Until she was identified this month, she was known only as the “Maidenwater victim.” For 20 years, the woman from Ohio on her way to Texas was going by a Utah nickname.
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/2Pazem2
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