ROOSEVELT — More than 31 years have passed since a 14-year-old Roosevelt boy glanced through the window of the home where he was mowing a lawn and saw what appeared to be a dead body slumped on a bed.
Lynn Casto ran to the next-door neighbor's home with the alarming news. After Roosevelt police were called, his discovery was confirmed. Fontella Galloway, a 65-year-old former schoolteacher who lived alone, had been tortured, sexually assaulted and bound with ropes. She died of suffocation from the weight of her own body.
Galloway was found on June 19, 1969, the same day that a crime conference was being held in Roosevelt Junior High.
The conference was being attended by city, county and state law-enforcement agents, who were summoned to the murder scene. From that point, Roosevelt Police Chief Dave Roberts essentially turned the investigation and evidence over to the Duchesne County Sheriff's office, which relied heavily on help from the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Department, which in turn coordinated with city and county law-enforcement agencies.
Although there were several suspects, no arrests were ever made.
It was recently discovered that over the years, critical evidence, such as clothing, fingernail scrapings and documentation, had been lost as they were sent off to other law-enforcement agencies and to crime laboratories for testing. Roosevelt Police Chief Cecil Gurr has tracked down what is left of the evidence, some of which was located by Duchesne County sheriff's detective Sgt. Wally Hendricks. They are working with a new state agency to re-examine the unsolved murder.
"You always open a case like this, hopefully to solve it. We had hoped to track down some of the evidence that had been misplaced over the years and use the advancements in DNA technology so we would have something to rule some people out," Gurr said.
Even with the depleted evidence, there are still photographs, reports and other information that will aid in the reopened investigation. Assisting are experts with the Utah criminal Tracking and Analysis Project. UTAP serves as a statewide coordinator and central clearinghouse for all Utah cases involving unsolved homicides, missing persons and unidentified bodies.
Under the agreement, police agencies from across the state upload their cases to the attorney general's case analysts, who will compare them with similar cases. If similarities are discovered, the attorney general's office will notify the agencies involved and encourage their cooperation.
The attorney general's office forwards all Utah-based cases to the national database house at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Va. Once there, the Utah cases are compared with cases from around the nation and world.
The vicious nature of the Galloway murder shook the community. Ruby Allred, a neighbor who had known Galloway for 20 years, described her as "very quiet and independent and did not neighbor very much."
Allred said she hadn't noticed any lights on at the Galloway house since about 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 15. She told investigators that she tried to phone the victim on June 17 at 10 a.m. The phone rang only once, she said. She recalled that "it sounded as though someone picked it up and then hung it up." On June 18, Allred told police she was on her way to town around 11 a.m. and noticed a gray cat sitting in the window of the Galloway house. She noticed that the screen was off and the window was open.
Galloway's partially clothed body was found the next day. Investigators believed the murderer entered the home by using a nearby shovel to pry open a rear window so he could climb in and surprise the victim. They say evidence shows that Galloway fought hard to ward off her attacker, sustaining bruises and a broken fingernail in the process. At some point Galloway was rendered unconscious, her hands were bound behind her at her waist and tied to the headboard of her bed, causing her upper body to slouch forward, which cut off the circulation to her lungs.
Police estimate that Galloway's death went unnoticed for a few days, probably because the 5-foot, 120-pound woman was "a loner who stayed by herself."
The fact that a woman had been brutalized in her own home by an unknown assailant who was still at large must have generated a huge amount of discussion in the community, but it resulted in just two short news stories in what was then the Roosevelt Standard.
The crime also resulted in two editorials, one of which implored citizens to end rumor and speculation about the murder and quit spreading gossip, stating that when there was something factual to be reported it would be released by police.
According to remaining police records, the primary suspect in the case was a 58-year-old man who lived near the Galloway house. The man, who was from Cedar City, was working in town at Jack Rasmussen's landscaping business.
On June 16, 1969, he unexpectedly called his boss at 7 a.m. and asked for a week of vacation time. He left and never returned.
Former Duchesne County Sheriff George Marret recalls trying to interview the man in St. George, but was thwarted by the man's daughter, who was furious with police for contacting her father regarding the murder.
There apparently were no other attempts to interview the man. The man would be 89 years old today, if he is still alive.
The Galloway murder case was profiled in 1980 by police consultants who said that the execution of the crime pointed to someone who was possibly just starting a killing spree.
They said this was the killer's first attempt and that he probably lived nearby, said Gurr, noting that the case was reviewed just as profiling was in its infancy as a law enforcement tool.
The profile suggested the killer may have been in his 40s and called him an "unorganized killer" because of the way evidence was haphazardly left at the scene.