Scott Carter stood atop the Benjamin Cemetery, on the only hill in the small southern Utah County community, and tried to decipher the engravings on the weathered tombstones of Andrew Johnson, Albert Enstrom and Alfred Nelson.
Some of the writings are difficult to read, but clearly legible on each marker are the words "Said to be massacred." All three were killed on Feb. 16, 1895, while staying in a cabin on the west side of Utah Lake.A few feet from the three graves is the tombstone of Enstrom's stepfather, Harry Hayes. Once convicted of killing Enstrom, Hayes spent four years in prison before being pardoned on May 6, 1899. He died 12 years later.
"The interesting thing about this case is there were really four victims," said Carter, a Utah County sheriff's detective.
Hayes was pardoned because George Storrs, Utah County's first sheriff following statehood, convinced the Board of Pardons that the real killer was a man named George Wright. Even though Storrs was able to gain freedom for Hayes, he never could prove that Wright committed the killings.
The sheriff's office lost interest in the case long ago when all the participants died. However, to satisfy his own curiosity and perhaps to comfort a few descendants of those involved, Carter wants to prove Storrs' theory.
"It's an interesting historical case, and I think it would be fun to try and solve it with today's technology," he said.
Most of what Carter knows about the case comes from old court documents, old newspaper clippings and a book titled "Murder in any Degree," by Delila Williams and LaNora Allred.
According to the book, Enstrom, 23, Johnson, 20, and Nelson, 17, were staying at the cabin while working on Enstrom's mother's ranch. They were last seen at the ranch by a neighboring rancher on Feb. 16, 1895.
When the boys were discovered missing, no search was launched because Hayes insisted they had simply left for a short vacation. Two months later, however, a sheepherder found Enstrom's body floating face down in Utah Lake. When pulled from the water, Enstrom had a bullet hole in his neck and one in his chest.
For the first time, police searched the cabin and found bloodstains on the floor and a bullet hole in the wall. The bodies of Johnson and Nelson were found three days later, also on the edge of the lake.
Because Hayes had a bad relationship with his stepson, and because he refused to search for the missing men until Enstrom's body was found, most accused him of being the killer. He was indicted by a grand jury on Dec. 4, 1895, and charged with killing Enstrom. Despite no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, and an alibi of being at home with wife at the time of the killings, Hayes was convicted and sentenced to death. His sentenced was later commuted to life in prison.
When Storrs became sheriff a few weeks before Hayes' sentence was commuted, he was bothered by a few facts of the case: mainly, the whereabouts of a missing wagon, a team of horses and several other items from the cabin.
Using a detective's oldest trick, Storrs found some of the items and traced them back to George Wright, who at the time went by the alias of James Weeks. From Wright's wife, Storrs learned that Wright shot and killed a team of horses near the Jordan River in February 1895 and then sold the wagon to a Salt Lake man. Storrs found the wagon and identified it as being the one taken from the Hayes ranch.
Wright had since left the state, jumping bail on a charge of stealing horses. Storrs tracked him to Colorado, Indiana and Illinois, but he lost Wright's trail in Chicago and Wright was never heard from again.
"Knowing the evidence that Storrs discovered, there's a lot of things we could do now to scientifically verify that (Wright) was the killer and that Hayes was an innocent man," Carter said.
Carter said he can use the same technology used to re-create the battle at Bull Run to determine if Wright was the killer. If he can find the slug in the cabin wall and one of the slugs that killed the horses, he can match them to determine if they came from the same gun.
"It's likely that the bullets are still there, it's just a matter of finding them," Carter said.
Now that almost 100 years have passed since the three young men were gunned down, most no longer care who committed the crime. But Carter takes unsolved murder cases personally, no matter how old they are.
"I feel very strongly about murder," he said. "Government should never accept it, and everything possible should be done to solve every single case."