When Drucilla Ovard was found murdered in her home in 1985, police detective Ken Farnsworth had no idea whom he was looking for.
Within two weeks, though, he knew Daniel Ray Troyer had killed Ovard, that he had murdered at least one other woman and that he would kill again. Farnsworth just couldn't prove it.In fact, nobody could until 14 years and at least two homicides later.
Today, investigators believe the one-time house burglar may have been responsible for the deaths of as many as 13 older women, and they're hoping Troyer will now come clean with the details.
Last month, Troyer, 39, pleaded guilty to killing Ovard, 83, and Ethel Luckau, 88, both of Salt Lake City. He received two consecutive life sentences, one without the possibility of parole.
Troyer will spend the rest of his life in prison, but investigators aren't done with him yet. They want to know just how many rapes and homicides he might have committed. And even more, they want to know why.
"We have information from two independent sources who say Troyer killed 12 or 13 women," said Mike George, an investigator for the Salt Lake District Attorney's Office.
Like FBI agent Clarice Starling in "The Silence of the Lambs," George plans to build a relationship with the killer and dig up all the answers.
They may lie in Troyer's choice of victims. He almost always went after elderly women, usually suffocating or strangling them without leaving marks, then posing their bodies so there was no sign of struggle.
That has made it harder to detect the crimes, because the women's deaths were so often chalked up to heart attacks or old age.
Even the two murders Troyer pleaded guilty to almost passed as "unattended deaths," George said. Both women were transported to either a mortuary or the medical examiner before it was discovered they were murdered.
Evidence of the crimes was scarce. Police found semen-soaked towels near each victim. But in 1985, DNA testing wasn't honed enough to narrow the field. With no witnesses to his crimes, Troyer was getting away with murder.
That was true until Farnsworth, acting on a hunch, distributed fliers to patrol officers telling them to be on the lookout for a daytime burglar with an injured right hand.
Ovard had been beaten as well as strangled, and bore the mark of heavy blows to her left side. Farnsworth guessed the killer could have hurt his right hand delivering them.
Two weeks later, police caught Troyer breaking into an elderly woman's house a couple of blocks from Ovard's home. His right hand was wrapped, probably broken. In his other hand, he carried a towel.
After an initial interview, Farnsworth was pretty sure he had his guy.
Troyer told Farnsworth he slammed his hand in his friend's garage door, but his friend didn't have a garage.
Troyer's live-in girlfriend told Farnsworth he broke his hand working at a Holiday Inn. None of the Holiday Inns had ever hired him; in fact, Troyer didn't have a job and was lying to his girlfriend. And he was already on parole for raping and beating a 70-year-old paraplegic woman years before.
It wasn't enough to pin him to murder, but Troyer went to prison for the burglary. Then his girlfriend started to wonder. Soon she called Farnsworth with another piece of the puzzle.
Six days before Ovard's murder, she said, their next-door neighbor, 69-year-old Thelma Blodgett, was found dead.
On that hot July day, Troyer had run about a mile to the factory where his girlfriend worked. Why wasn't he at work? she wondered.
She told him to go home; she wasn't allowed visitors. He said he would wait until she could drive him home.
"So there he was," Farnsworth said, "he arrived out of breath from running, he wasn't at work, and he wouldn't leave, as if he didn't want to go home."
His girlfriend said they drove home together when her shift ended. When they arrived, police cars and an ambulance stood outside Blodgett's house.
"What happened?" she asked her boyfriend. "Oh, some old lady probably died of a heart attack or something," Troyer told her.
But after a check of the records, Farnsworth discovered that the call reporting Blodgett's death came in after Troyer left for the factory. There was no way he could have known what happened next door unless he was there, Farnsworth said. Blodgett's body was eventually exhumed and, although she was not strangled, her death is now considered suspicious.
Hers is one of the cases George wants to discuss with Troyer.
Three years after Ovard's and Blodgett's deaths, Troyer was out of prison and living at the Bonneville Correctional Facility, a halfway house. Farnsworth figured he just had to wait and watch to catch his man red-handed because, he said, "he had such an appetite for killing."
Soon Troyer said he wanted to apply for a spot at a barber college and was allowed to go. That's when he killed Ethel Luckau.
By then, Farnsworth was no longer with the Salt Lake Police Department, but his successor, Jim Bell, took up the baton. It didn't take him long to link Luckau's "suspicious death" to Ovard's.
There were only two possible suspects, Troyer and another daytime burglar -- who was in prison. Then witnesses reported seeing Troyer near Luckau's home two days before she was killed.
Jim Bell sent Sgt. Don Bell to question Troyer. Four times he asked him where he was on the day Luckau died. Each time, the answer was different. Then Troyer said he had lied because he had broken the rules of the halfway house by visiting his sister.
His sister said she hadn't seen Danny in years. But he did call and ask her to be his alibi for what turned out to be the day Luckau was killed.
The evidence was all there, until a judge suppressed the interview. Sgt. Bell had not read Troyer his Miranda rights, thinking it was unnecessary at a halfway house.
The judge eliminated the interview, Troyer's sister's statement, statements from two prison inmates who said Troyer admitted the murder to them; and DNA testing of Troyer's hair.
Prosecutor Greg Skordas was left with no case, and in 1990 charges were dropped.
"That was a long six or seven years for me," Don Bell said. "I should have known better. I let him go. I was thinking he'll walk out and kill someone else. If I heard about him murdering in Des Moines, I'd have to say to myself, 'That one I could have stopped.' "
But investigators weren't willing to let Troyer's case files close.
"When cases go this long, they usually just wither away," said Pilar Shortsleeve, supervising criminalist at the Utah State Crime Lab. This time, detectives and prosecutors never let up. "Even after they retired, they continued calling me," she said.
Shortsleeve also kept the torch burning, pushing for DNA testing as methods improved.
Finally, in 1996, the Utah Supreme Court reversed the judge's decision and ruled that much of the evidence could be used in the Luckau case.
George and prosecutor Ernie Jones began to dust off six-year-old evidence and files. For almost two years, they rebuilt their case from the ground up, focusing on the strongest evidence tying Troyer to Ovard's death.
Late last year, Shirtsleeve told them there was a new DNA test she wanted to try. It showed semen found at the scene was probably Troyer's -- there was only a 1 in 105 billion chance it wasn't.
Time and technology had won. Troyer pleaded guilty to two homicides on June 11, thus avoiding the death penalty.
Now all that's left is for George to find out if he left any more victims.