TWIN FALLS, Idaho — Gooding County Sheriff Shaun Gough is reopening a case involving a woman whose body was found in the southern Idaho desert a decade ago.
Rose Migdal was 45 when she went missing near Gooding on Oct. 20, 1993. Her skull was found by a sheepherder in 1998.
"It would be nice to solve it," Gough told The Times-News. "It's frustrating when you don't know what happened."
How she died remains a mystery, but retired Gooding County Sheriff Jim Jax thinks Migdal was murdered, and the motive was money.
Jax said he thinks Migdal was killed in Jerome County and that another person drove Migdal's car into the desert to dump her body.
"I don't know who killed her, for sure," said Jax. "I do know who drove her body out into the desert and dumped her."
He said he's not ready to name that person.
"I do have a witness who saw the person driving the car out in that direction where the car was stuck," Jax said. "I don't want to implicate anyone without proof."
Gough and Jax plan to meet this week to look over evidence.
Migdal's 1992 Chevrolet was found high-centered on a rock pile southeast of Gooding. A search failed to find Migdal. She was declared dead in March 1997.
A year later, a sheep herder found a skull that turned out to be Migdal's.
"I think about this every day," said Migdal's son, Robert Hinman, of Colorado Springs, Colo. "I want closure on this."
Migdal was in Idaho about a week before she disappeared. Family members during the initial investigation said they were unsure why Migdal went to Idaho. They said just before leaving, she had been a patient at a mental hospital.
Migdal checked into a motel on Jerome's Main Street on Oct. 15, 1993, paying $540 for a month's stay. A week later, sheriff's deputies found her abandoned car.
In 1993, Gooding County didn't have a lot of ways to collect forensic evidence.
"We didn't consider it a homicide scene, we didn't take the pains that we should have with fingerprints," Jax said.
The four-door sedan was out of gas and the battery was dead. The side mirrors were broken and the windshield wipers were mangled. Searchers followed footprints leading 150 yards northeast from the car before losing the trail. A five-day search failed to find Migdal.
Authorities have considered suicide, but Migdal's sister-in-law, Christine Moore of Ogden said "a suicidal person would have left a body. Why was she not found?"