BRIGHAM CITY — Twenty-one years after gas station clerk Bradley Newell Perry was robbed, stabbed and beaten to death while working the graveyard shift, prosecutors filed murder charges Thursday saying DNA matching finally pinpointed a suspect in the slaying.
Glenn Howard Griffin, a 47-year-old man with a long criminal history in Logan and serving a federal prison sentence in California, has been charged with murder in the first degree, a capital offense, and aggravated robbery, a first-degree felony, in 1st District Court.
For the family, who saw dozens of investigators work the case and one county attorney get voted out of office over it, there is a sense of relief knowing investigators have a suspect.
"This actually brings closure to our family," said Lee Perry, Brad's younger brother. "It's almost impossible to put into words how happy they are. . . . You don't have to worry about this happening to someone else now."
Utah and California authorities are working out the details of bringing Griffin to Utah to face charges, Box Elder sheriff's Chief Deputy Lynn Yeates said.
Charging documents state Griffin, who is serving time for weapons violations, has been an inmate at the Utah State Prison and has a record in Logan of 27 criminal charges. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
More than a dozen detectives have worked on the Perry murder case since 1984, Yeates said.
The most recent is sheriff's Sgt. Scott Cosgrove, who reopened the investigation in 1997. Cosgrove's persistence, coupled with advances in criminal investigation technology and some plain luck, helped investigators narrow their suspects to Griffin.
In 2000, an elite group of DNA and fingerprint experts, with the assistance of the Utah Attorney General's Office, gathered in Brigham City to go over evidence Cosgrove had gathered in the case.
Despite forensic evidence, including more than 150 fingerprints, investigators only had a circumstantial case against a handful of suspects.
Then what Cosgrove calls "a miracle" happened about three months ago. Workers at the State Crime Lab put evidence gathered from the murder scene into the national criminal DNA database. DNA from all federal prisoners is put into the system.
About three weeks ago, a match came back on Griffin. After a second test, it matched again.
"We hit gold," Cosgrove said. "Because of technology, we solved this."
Maj. Stu Smith, who runs the crime lab, gives the credit to Pilar Shortsleeve, a criminalist who worked the DNA analysis of a blood sample taken from a dollar bill at the crime scene.
According to court documents, a car with two people pulled up to the Perry Texaco Short Stop Convenience Store in Box Elder County at 4 a.m. for some gas. Cosgrove's affidavit states that they arrived either during or shortly after the murder and robbery.
When the car arrived at the gas station, a man came out, pumped gas for them, took an order for cigarettes and came back with change for the order, Cosgrove said.
The affidavit states that one of the $1 bills had "a wet, red substance" on the face and a similar substance was on the man's clothing and shoes.
The occupants drove straight to police, who later found Brad Perry in a back room of the convenience store. He had been stabbed multiple times, bound and bludgeoned to death. Charging documents state an undetermined amount of money was taken from the cash register.
Cosgrove said as he had a federal judge in California sign his warrant on Griffin, the judge commented, "You can't get away with anything nowadays," referring to DNA technology solving the 21-year-old case.
But the investigation is not over for Cosgrove and his team. He hopes this arrest will lead to the arrests of others.
One of the primary people of interest prior to Griffin was Craig Lee Martinez.
Martinez was already serving time at the Utah State Prison in 2003 for drugs and weapons convictions when he was charged in 1st District Court with four second-degree felony counts of obstruction of justice and four third-degree felony counts of witness tampering in connection with the Perry case.
The Perry family, who were neighbors of the Martinez family when Craig Martinez was identified as a person of interest, has been through a roller coaster of emotions since the slaying of their son.
The family's complaints against the county attorney became a public feud here and led to John Bunderson losing his re-election to the Perry family's attorney.
The family was not at Thursday's news conference, but they issued a statement:
"We truly appreciate the hard work and dedication of all the law enforcement officers, the attorneys and many forensic experts who have spent numerous hours working on and investigating this crime. We know many of those involved in this case have made many personal sacrifices to get this case to where it is today."
Contributing: Pat Reavy and Geoff Fattah
E-mail: jdougherty@desnews.com