The excitement was palpable when it was announced that officials had begun digging for the body of Kiplyn Davis near the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon. To the outsider, this was reason to believe that this endless mystery would soon be solved.
But Rich Davis, a man who has cried literally buckets of tears since his daughter disappeared 13 years ago, has been here before. At the same time they began digging near the canyon, city officials also were digging a hole in Center Street near the high school. A psychic was so convinced that this was where Kiplyn's body had been hidden that she offered to pay the expenses of the dig.
"She said Kiplyn was buried near a water line, and that jibed," says Davis. "A water line had been placed there in 1995 (the year Kiplyn disappeared), so it sounded legit."
Nothing came of it.
An estimated 20 to 30 leads for Kiplyn's whereabouts have come to Davis and legal authorities. About a month ago, Davis and the police department received a letter from someone who purported to know where Kiplyn's body could be found. It even provided GPS coordinates. Following the coordinates, police were led to the mouth of an abandoned mine, and hope soared again. The letter said the body was 150 feet inside the mine.
"If someone writes a letter like that, with that kind of detail, you think, 'This is it,"' says Davis. "Nobody would do that (write a false letter)."
At great expense, the officials maneuvered a backhoe through the snow and searched the mine in vain. All that money, manpower and effort was for naught.
So here they are again, digging for the body in Spanish Fork River Park. "This is going to be a thousand times more expensive," says Davis. The latest letter purports that Kiplyn's body was buried under a collapsed cornice of riverbank. After searchers drain the ravine — no small feat with the threat of spring runoff — they will let it dry and then begin sifting the dirt. It will be tedious, painstaking work.
"They're going to have to go through shovelfuls of dirt looking for any bones that might be there," Davis said. "She could be scattered all over that area. It's a wash, and that's 13 years of washing. This could take months."
Davis knows this could be another "wild goose chase," as he terms it, but what else can he do?
"You've got to look," he says.
Davis would join the search himself, but he has been barred from the digging site. "They won't let me go down there," he says. "I want to. The deal is, if they ever do find her, they stop digging and they call me up, and I get to go down there just to see it."
There are probably at least two men, and probably three, who could save everybody a lot of trouble in the search for the body and what ultimately happened to Kiplyn, but they're not talking. Tim Olsen, Rucker Leifson and Chris Jeppson are sitting in jail for lying to a grand jury.
Davis offered them a way to mitigate their legal troubles. Through lawyers, he offered those black-hearted men a reduced charge of manslaughter and seven to eight years in prison if they would simply tell what they know. They turned him down cold.
Instead, Olsen received an enhanced 12 1/2-year sentence for perjury and still faces murder charges, as does Jeppson, and Leifson is awaiting sentencing for perjury.
"I just want her home," says Davis. "That's all I still want — up until we go to the murder trial. Then there are no more deals. I told them you can tell me where she is and what happened; you can even tell me you murdered her; just don't lie any more."
Davis even offered to provide Jeppson an education in prison "so he could learn a trade and have a job when he got out of jail," says Davis. "His son would be 13 then, and he could still raise him. I promised him all these things, and he turned me down. We offered his partner in crime, Rucker, the same thing. They just feel like they can get away with it."
The search for Kiplyn has consumed Davis and his wife, Tamara, for 13 years. It has worn them down, the worry and pain etched plainly in their faces. But Davis is everywhere, even turning up in an Oklahoma appeals court. He will not let go.
Over the years he's had hundreds of leads, including 20 to 25 calls from psychics. He chases down each one of them accompanied by an FBI agent, because, as he notes, "if I went up there and found the body by myself, then it looks like I'm guilty."
Davis used to wander the canyon alone with a shovel, digging at anything that looked like it could be a grave.
So the digging continues. Every time another tip arrives, city, county and FBI officials mobilize and begin digging — cost and time be damned. Davis feels so indebted to the community that he ran for a seat on the Spanish Fork City Council and won by a landslide, despite no previous political experience.
"How do I pay back a community that's doing this for me?" says Davis. "I decided I would give them my time."
Davis, a cement contractor, performs community service projects around town. He joined forces with a number of other contractors to build a ballpark. He also underbid all bidders by $10,000 to build a second ballpark. He left the labor out of the bid and performed the labor himself, gratis. His project this year is to restore a pioneer cemetery. He's poured new sidewalks, located old graves and built new monuments.
Almost everything he does — talks for church groups, renewed religious faith, charity work, political office, court appearances — is driven by Kiplyn. Even the passing of 13 years has not eased his family's pain.
"My wife is really struggling," he said the other day. "I've got to hold up for both of us. I can't let this get to me."
Doug Robinson's column runs on Tuesdays. Please e-mail drob@desnews.com.