It has been eight years since 26-year-old Pamela Ellen Page was last seen alive, jogging along Center Street on the first warm spring day following a cold winter.
Though law enforcement officials still believe her killer will be caught, her husband, Rick Page, has adjusted over the years and harbors no bitterness."I've always felt that whoever did it will have to answer to someone a lot more important than me," said Page, who still lives in Mapleton. "I dealt with it a long time ago but it seems to have had some repercussions with (Adam) - growing up without a mother."
Adam Page, now a sixth-grader, was 3 when he was told his mother was missing.
"It's hard to pinpoint (Adam's) feelings. He's felt cheated, or whatever you want to call it, that someone was taken away from him so young in life," said Page, 42.
The Pages met after Rick hitchhiked west from Washington, D.C., and landed in eastern Idaho. He was playing the pedal steel guitar as a member of the Grand Targee ski resort's house band when they met.
They married in 1979 and moved to Utah.
Pamela Page was last seen jogging on the evening of April 21, 1984. The 5-foot-4, 115-pound woman was taking her daily jog, on which she usually was accompanied by her husband on a bicycle.
"We think that's when the abduction occurred," said Oliver Nielsen, assistant chief of police in Springville. "A woman (on 900 East) never saw or heard any struggle or confrontation, just a honk."
According to other witnesses, the honk was believed to have come from a black van or a blue car.
Rick Page didn't accompany her that day because company had arrived, said Nielsen. When Rick went to catch up with her on his bike, his tires were flat so he just waited for her return.
Nielsen believes Pam Page probably knew the people in the van because there was no sign of struggle. Her decomposed body was found four months later, Aug. 24, embedded in tangled tree branches in Hobble Creek.
Her clothing was found three miles upstream on a river bank.
The state medical examiner was not able to determine a cause of death.
"I don't think we'll ever get a murder conviction on the case because we can't prove a murder took place," said Nielsen. "We can prove a kidnapping and I feel we'll someday break (the case)."
In 1987, two men awaiting sentencing in a multimillion-dollar federal drug case were identified as suspects in Page's death. Keith Lynn Jenkins, then 28, Provo, and Guy J. Robertson, then 26, Salt Lake City, were never charged with the slaying and never served time in the Utah State Prison, said prison spokesman Dave Fran-china.
The link between the suspects and Page was made in a memorandum submitted by state and federal prosecutors who were working on the original drug case. According to the memorandum, largely based on an interview with an inmate at the prison, Page was abducted and killed because of a cocaine debt of more than $13,000.
"I never had any reason to believe that (it was drug-related)," Rick Page told The Daily Herald in his first interview since the incident. "I have no idea what the motive was."
As for the inmate's account in the memorandum, Nielsen said his department has written the inmate off as a liar.
The only time Rick Page became a suspect was when he was questioned, as a matter of routine, by the FBI.
"It didn't bother me," he said.
Page has not remarried, but dates off and on.
Over the past eight years, police have received a number of tips from anonymous sources who say they have information about Pam's killer. Nielsen revealed the latest tip, one mailed in December 1991, which identifies the killer through cutout magazine words pasted on a white sheet of paper.
"We've already looked at that suspect but there's no evidence to tie him into it," said Nielsen. "Usually the case reaches an inactive status but we've consistently received bits of information on this case."
The Utah County sheriff's office received information this spring on a possible murder weapon. The weapon, a shovel, was taken to a crime lab but it couldn't be linked to the slaying.
What did Rick Page think of the initial investigation?
"Maybe it was just a little bit more than they could handle," Page said of the first homicide ever in Springville. "They did the best they could with what they had."