When Ruben Ortega became Salt Lake police chief, he inherited a major departmental blemish: the unsolved slayings of several young women during the mid-1980s.
Besides that spot on an otherwise good investigative record, the department has been plagued by a multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed by a former police officer who says the department botched the murder probe.Now, an outside police agency wants to step in to try to succeed where the city has failed.
The Salt Lake County sheriff's office has begun organizing a special, multijurisdictional homicide task force to investigate unsolved slayings in the county, including some in Salt Lake City.
But Ortega wants nothing to do with the task force, County Attorney David Yocom said Monday.
"It was my impression up until this morning that Ruben was on board," Yocom said. "But now that's not the case."
Three sheriff's detectives have been assigned to a newly formed unit that was going to revisit - among others - the killings of Christine Gallegos, Carla Maxwell and Lisa Strong. Their efforts will be assisted by an attorney's office investigator, a Department of Corrections investigator and detectives from numerous other local police agencies.
Though it's unusual - and politically unpopular - for one agency to investigate crimes that occurred within another agency's jurisdiction, police Lt. Marty Vuyk, who on Friday hadn't heard of the task force, said he doesn't anticipate the police department would mind the sheriff's inquiry.
"One thing we try to do is keep egos out of investigations," Vuyk said Friday "I don't imagine we would have any real problem with (the sheriff's office) conducting an investigation, if they deem that necessary."
Something apparently changed over the weekend.
"In talking to Ruben this morning, he's not going to participate or allow the task force to look at any unsolved cases in the city," Yocom said.
As a result, Kennard said his new task force would not investigate the city homicides but will concentrate on other unsolved killings in the county, Yocom said.
"I don't think this task force should try to solve any jurisdiction's cases without their permission," Yocom said.
The Salt Lake City cases were the initial impetus for the task force's creation. Gallegos, 18, was found May 15, 1985, near the old Derks Field; she had been shot and stabbed. Maxwell, 20, was shot April 25, 1986, while working at a Layton 7-Eleven store. Strong was shot May 12, 1986, walking home from work near Kensington Avenue and 800 East.
Police later linked the homicides after determining that bullets recovered from the bodies were fired from the same handgun. The slay-ings may also have been linked to several other killings of young women along the Wasatch Front.
A special police homicide task force was unable to solve any of the killings, but the lead detective said he believed they may have been committed by Ezra Paul Rhoades, a serial killer on Idaho's death row. The county attorney's office, however, refused to file charges for lack of evidence.
A maverick patrolman, Frank Hatton-Ward, believed the three homicides - along with many of the other unsolved killings - were committed by members of a local street gang. After going public with allegations that police detectives ignored his leads, Hatton-Ward was fired in 1989 but continues to pursue a "whis-tle-blower" lawsuit against the city.
Meanwhile, the families of the victims have come to believe that the police department has given up trying to solve the homicides.
Christine Gallegos' father, Danny Gallegos, said he has been lobbying the police for several years but with limited success.