The last time Linda Griswell spoke to her daughter, she was saying goodbye.
That was March 17. Griswell was bound for California to vacation with family members. Her daughter had hoped to go but couldn't get the time off from work.As was their habit, mother and daughter exchanged "I love yous" before the final click of the receiver.
"She was very tenderhearted with me," Griswell said, softly. "She was so sensitive. I used to worry about what would happen to her if something happened to me. In that respect, I'm glad she went first."
Griswell's daughter, Rachel Karren, was shot and killed about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Riverton home of Darren Bluemel, a man she'd known only a few hours. It was a place she had gone with a female co-worker to party with friends.
"It was just to hang out and have fun," Griswell said. "The other people there were older and could buy beer. Rachel and the other girl were only 20."
After Karren was shot -- once in the head and once in the stomach -- her killer rolled her body up in an area rug and dropped it down a vertical concrete culvert pipe that had been built to house electrical wiring.
"It was almost by accident that she was even found," Salt Lake County Sgt. Jerry Townsend said. "It was about 10 feet deep."
Following a trail of blood from the door of Bluemel's house, 4350 W. 12750 South, a detective moved a board that was covering the open end of the pipe, looked down and found Karren's body.
Police say an argument precipitated the shooting, but won't say what it was about, only that "things got very out of hand."
"We're lucky we didn't have a triple homicide," Townsend said.
About an hour passed between the time of the shooting and the 911 call from Karren's co-worker to police. The woman, whose name has not been released, would have called sooner, but she said Bluemel had refused to let her leave the house.
Bluemel, 37, was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail for investigation of murder and evidence tampering. He surrendered to police without incident Tuesday morning. He has a criminal history that includes arrests for aggravated assault, mayhem and carrying a concealed weapon.
Griswell, 45, isn't sure she'll ever know exactly what happened that night. Nor is she sure she would want to know.
"I've heard so many variations . . . two of which make sense to me. Whether I find out the full thing or not, I don't know," said the mother who reared Karren and her older sister, Bridget Wakluk, 23, on her own. "Knowing won't fix it. I do know I still want someone to fix it."
Griswell would also like it if someone knew there was more to Karren than the brief words related in news reports about her death.
News reports don't say that Karren was a prolific writer who kept copious journals, a musician who couldn't read music but played the piano by ear and sang with perfect pitch. Or that she loved yellow roses.
Nor do police reports tell us that Karren was a young woman on the brink of finding her place in the world.
After about three years of wrestling with her self-esteem, battling a drug addiction and a barrel of financial woes, Karren finally had a stable job that she liked in the claims department with Farmer's Insurance. She had medical insurance and was getting caught up on her bills.
"For a long time she just seemed so unsettled. She was searching. But I felt like she was just about to turn a corner," said Griswell, who remarried in 1996 and moved to Georgia, leaving her daughter in Salt Lake City to finish high school. "It's ironic. It's like, oh. . . . now?"
Independent and private by nature, Karren had also begun to reconnect with family members along the Wasatch Front and was sharing the details of her life more easily and frequently. During the week before she died, she had called an aunt and several cousins whom she hadn't spoken with in several months. She spent hours talking with her grandparents.
"She was really reaching out. It's really quite amazing," Griswell said. "It's like she knew she needed to touch them all a little bit before she went."