They died of strangulation or after looking at a gun aimed at them by boyfriends, lovers and husbands. They died in cruel and vicious ways -- stabbed 46 times, shot 19 times, beaten with a baseball bat. They were shot in libraries, in their office or outside a bowling alley.
They were the victims of homicides in 1999, a horrible year for domestic violence, a year that shook our faith in the safety of libraries and our own workplace.Excluding police-involved shootings, 42 people died last year in homicides -- 11 of them women who were killed by their boyfriends or husbands. The figure does represent a significant decline from the 65 homicides recorded in Utah in 1998 -- about a 65 percent drop.
But 1999's homicide total of 42 is also darkened by a dozen more victims of the past, people buried long ago whose deaths were initially denied justice, whose voices were finally heard despite the passage of years.
They are the ones investigators and prosecutors refused to forget, the ones who required tedious investigation, the ones who finally got their day in court in 1999.
Lucille Westerman lived in a lime green house with white shutters. Vivienne Smith, at times, lived in a tent.
Lucille Westerman was 73 when she was murdered in 1988, attacked in her own home by a stranger.
Vivienne Smith was 11 months old when prosecutors say her parents, on an August day in 1998, left her in a bathtub to drown after injuring her spine so severely she likely was paralyzed.
They may be years apart, but Vivienne and Lucille are a lot alike.
"They are the most vulnerable in our society: the aging and our infants," Cache County Attorney Scott Wyatt said. "They are the most deserving of our tender care, and the most vulnerable for abuse."
They are also victims who didn't have their cases introduced to the court system until 1999 because, until then, there wasn't enough evidence to bring a charge.
In Vivienne's case, it took the better part of a year to plow through medical reports and other information Wyatt feels is sufficient to support a conviction. "Everyone is presumed innocent, but finally, all the known facts surrounding the death of Vivienne Smith will be presented to a jury and accountability can be had."
This spring, Vivienne's parents are scheduled to go on trial on charges of child abuse homicide, a second-degree felony.
Wyatt said they told police their daughter drowned after being put in a tub with two
siblings. Medical evidence says something much uglier happened. There was a brain injury and trauma to her spine so severe it would have caused intense pain and left her paralyzed. Wyatt said it couldn't have happened by accident or by the older children.
"I have a photograph of this baby that has sat on my desk for months that I can't put away," Wyatt says. "When I look into the eyes of this baby, I think of my own children. I think of a sweet and tender child who had her life snuffed out at an age far too young."
But just as our children deserve our nurturing, the elderly deserve our gentle assurance they can live out their days in peace, safe from harm.
That assurance was destroyed after two men were charged in 1999 with killing the elderly.
Daniel Ray Troyer pleaded guilty in June to killing two women and confessed to three more slayings, including one death that happened as far back as 1982 and was never classified as a homicide.
One of his victims was Lucille Westerman, whose family knew she had been brutalized from the start but never could be sure who was responsible.
On the day after she attended a funeral of another of Troyer's victims, Lucille Westerman was attacked in her home.
She lived alone, loved to garden and seldom drove except to do her temple work and her grocery shopping. Her sister, who had come to take her to lunch, found the yard gate open and the door unlocked, extremely uncharacteristic for her sister.
Mary Jane Cook, now 87, remembers walking inside the home calling out her sister's name. She found her propped on the bed, unconscious, bleeding from the mouth. There was a single nylon stocking in the garbage. A broken palm frond was on the floor, next to a pair of scissors. Lucille died six weeks later.
A measure of comfort
Her family says the resolution of the case in June of 1999 gives them some measure of comfort.
"I think the whole family feels she was never resting because no one could say what happened," said Westerman's niece, Mary Sainsbury. "We were always looking over our shoulder."
Drucilla Ovard was another of Troyer's victims whose family saw justice this past year.
Ovard died in 1985. She had been a popular and adored schoolteacher, a mother and a wife who buried her husband of more than 50 years.
She was 83 when Troyer strangled her.
"When you think of these women you think of love and sweetness and everything that was right in the world," said Michael George, an investigator with the Salt Lake District Attorney's Office.
"The way he met most of them is they were out working in their gardens because they were interested in the beauty of life. Troyer takes what we see as being right in the world, of being able to have our mothers and grandmothers doing what they should enjoy doing . . . he takes all of that and destroys it by his actions."
Although comforted by Troyer's lifelong prison sentence, Cathy Lambert said her life was irrevocably changed the day he brutalized Ovard, her grandmother.
"He destroyed me. She was the love of my life," she said.
Lambert enjoyed a close relationship with her grandmother and was grateful the two spent the afternoon together the day before she died.
She described her grandmother as a sweet and gentle soul who would have been horrified at the idea of hurting anyone.
But she managed to hurt her killer. Ovard, in her struggle, broke her killer's arm and gave him some bruises.
"For her to physically hurt him, she must have been terrified," Lambert said.
In the end, Troyer admitted he killed Ovard and Westerman as well as Ethel Luckau, 88; Thelma Blodgett, 85; and 52-year-old DeEsta Easthope, who was thought to have died of congestive heart failure in 1982.
George said the family always had unsettling questions about the circumstances of Easthope's death. With Troyer's confession, the answers came, even if they were ugly.
"It was something they had been living with since 1982," George said. "How did their mom really die? Why was the door open? All of those questions lingered in their minds for years."
George, too, was glad to see the case reach a conclusion by catching up with a killer who had eluded justice for years.
"We try to give the family some sort of finality," he said. "I think it is something as police officers and investigators we tend to forget. We tend to forget about the victims because they are silent. We don't see them, we don't hear from them. But these family members live with it day in and day out."
Speaking for the dead
For the relatives of Troyer's victims, 1999 was a year of resolution. For others, the pain of murder was just beginning.
The families of five elderly people buried their loved ones in 1996, only to see many of them exhumed last summer, the focus of a homicide investigation.
What relatives thought was a gentle passing due to age is instead alleged to be the deliberate act of a doctor who was overloading the victims with morphine.
One victim worked at Hill Air Force Base for 33 years. He had been married for 56 years, and when he checked into the specialized unit for treatment of age-related mental health problems, it was with the thought of getting better, not dying.
Ennis Alldredge was 83 when he died.
Another victim, Mary Crane, had worked as a licensed practical nurse, raised three children and had seven grandchildren. She was 72.
Layton police detective Joe Morrison said none of Dr. Robert Weitzel's alleged victims checked into the unit for physical problems.
The family of Judith Larsen says she was healthy and spry, determined at 93.
But in a span of just 16 days, five patients in the unit were dead.
Authorities believed it was too odd to be simply coincidental, but their skepticism meant going up against someone in the medical profession, and second-guessing a doctor's judgment.
They did.
Morrison worked on the case for well over year, sifting through two box fulls of information and compiling even more. By September, Weitzel had been charged with five counts of murder, all first-degree felonies.
Morrison said it was difficult telling the families what he had learned.
"It is one thing to show up at the scene of a homicide where it is obvious," he said. "These homicides were basically undiscovered until an investigation. Then you go back to the family and tell them their mother or grandmother was allegedly murdered. They didn't take it well. They already suffered with the idea of someone who had deteriorating mental health had died. I come along years later and tell them, 'I'm sorry. It wasn't what you thought.' "
One family member said having his mother's body exhumed was like experiencing the trauma of her death all over again.
"I don't think the families will ever be the same," Morrison said.
A veteran of the department for 18 years, Morrison said the pain associated with the investigation troubled him as well, but he expects it.
"It's part of the job. I've conducted several death investigations and none of them are easy. The reward is getting something done, getting closure for families. That is the reward I get out of it. I am the last person who speaks for this dead person, for the victim.
"If I don't speak for them, who is going to?"