Debbie Marie, 15, hopped a bus from Ohio to Salt Lake City two months ago so she could live with her mother. She called her mom "Dinosaur" and surprised her with breakfasts when her mom, Cindy, came home after working graveyard shifts.
Debbie Marie Grabher, 59 S. 800 West, has now become a statistic - Salt Lake City's first homicide of 1992. Her body was found early Friday morning at 750 W. South Temple in a pile of weeds, fully clothed and wrapped in a blanket.Her mother said she was alarmed when Debbie didn't come home Thursday afternoon. "She wasn't here long enough to make many friends," Grabher said. When she went out, Debbie either went to the mall or the library, and she always called home to check in.
"Besides, she just found out where her sister is living in Nevada and she was planning to mail some Christmas presents to her Thursday - the pres-ents are still in the other room," Grabher said.
Grabher called police at 8 p.m. Thursday. Officers filled out a report but told Grabher to wait and see if Debbie showed up at school Friday morning.
Debbie had run away from a foster home in Ohio to come to Salt Lake, Grabher said. "I guess police have a lot of missing teenagers."
Grabher did call West High Friday morning, just after police discovered the unidentified body on South Temple. School officials said Debbie was not at school and had also been absent Thursday.
"That means," Grabher said, "someone had her for 20 hours before she was killed."
"You know what really bothers me right now," Grabher said through tears, "is that Debbie hated snow. They found her body in snow. I asked police how her face got the way it did and they said the murderer dragged her face in the snow. I can't stand to think of that."
Detectives are following all leads in the case, Salt Lake Police Lt. Dennis Tueller said Saturday night. Witnesses saw a man in an Army coat dragging the blanketed body in the area of 800 W. South Temple.
Police declined to state cause of death, but a detective told Grabher they haven't ruled out suffocation.