No suspects have been identified, but investigators said they were encouraged by leads in the theft of a teenage girl's body from her fresh grave in the Ammon Cemetery.
"Things are proceeding really well," Bonneville County Sheriff's Sgt. Paul Wilde said Friday. "I can't offer any reasons for this happening, but we still have plenty of leads that we are following, and we feel hopeful about being able to come to an arrest."He would not elaborate on the nature of the leads being pursued.
The body of Sara Anne Shick, 14, the daughter of Robert and Sherry Shick of Idaho Falls, was stolen from her grave sometime Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning. She was buried Tuesday afternoon after dying at home on Feb. 18 of complications related to a neuromuscular disease.
The girl's older brother found the grave dug up and the coffin opened when he returned to the cemetery Wednesday morning. Someone broke into a shed at the cemetery and used tools there to pry the lid off a concrete vault around the girl's coffin. Only her body was taken.
Wilde and other deputies have been investigating the grave robbery almost nonstop since it was reported by the Shick family's LDS bishop.
"In our work, you just keep getting tougher, but we are all totally amazed that something like this could happen," Wilde said. "We are trying to look at it as just a job and to see the vault and casket as evidence, but this is hard on everyone. We've never had this kind of case before."