A green winter coat, soaked with the runoff of melting snow, caught a snowmobiler's eye Sunday and led him to a young woman's frozen body.
Investigators identified the woman as a 20-year-old Salt Lake prostitute who was four months pregnant and had a record of numerous drug- and sex-related offenses. She had been stabbed several times and her body left at the edge of Rockport Reservoir in Summit County.Her identity had not been released Wednesday pending notification of her family.
Earl Walsh and his father spent Sunday afternoon tinkering with a snowmobile at the older man's home inside Rockport State Park. Walsh had taken the machine for a spin at nearby Rockport Reservoir when he spotted the green coat.
Believing a fisherman had left the coat behind, the 29-year-old Kamas man made a pass by the reservoir bank but wasn't prepared for what he saw.
"I went past it first and just caught a glimpse," Walsh said. "I saw what I thought was a face."
He stopped for a closer look and realized the coat was worn by a young woman also dressed in jeans, snow boots and a stocking cap. She was frozen in the bank.
"It looked like she had been placed there," he said. Investigators later found footprints in the snow surrounding the body.
"My first thought was to get my father there and make sure that was what I saw," Walsh said.
"It makes me feel pretty sad something like that had to happen," he said. "She wasn't even concealed. She was just lying out there on the beach."
Walsh estimated the woman's body had been there for some five days. There was snow underneath her, and she was covered with snowfall from a weekend storm.
Investigators do not consider the woman to be the victim of a serial killer believed to have slain six prostitutes and dropped their bodies along highways in Utah, Nevada and Wyoming.