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Price • Neighbors found 4-year-old Heidi Jones crying on her front porch. Behind her, in the living room, her mother lay dead.

Loretta Marie Jones was 23 when someone raped her and stabbed her 17 times in her home. After her daughter found her body July 31, 1970, the Price police chief and the Carbon County sheriff teamed up to try to solve her murder.

They never did.

In the meantime, witnesses have died, evidence has disappeared. But 45 years later, Heidi Asay — she married in June — hasn't given up trying to solve her mother's case.

"My mom did not deserve what she got," Asay said. "My sister-in-law one time said to me, 'Just let go.' What if it was your mom? What would you do?"

Carbon County sheriff's Sgt. David Brewer is trying to do something. Since reopening the case five years ago, he has been attempting to gather long-lost evidence and re-interview those people associated with the case who are still living.

'She loved me' • Loretta Jones was the daughter of a well-known contractor and had spent her life in Price.

The chestnut-haired Jones loved wearing pink lipstick and listening to rock 'n' roll as a child. She had a lot of friends and crushes on boys at Carbon High. Whenever a particular boy would get pulled over for racing his car, Jones clipped out the newspaper story and kept it in her diary. She never missed a day in her thick, black diary — not one.

A couple of years after high school graduation, she had her daughter. They lived a few blocks from the center of town in a small, older home, with a porch and a yard, where they played together.

"She loved me more than anything," Asay said.

Asay remembers pretending to iron next to her mom. She remembers the way she smelled. She remembers how her mother sang in the car and, at home, to her records — including Elvis and Jan and Dean. Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman" still reminds Asay of her.

In a photograph, the blond Asay sits in her beaming mother's lap.

Their happy life together, just the two of them, came to an end the night of July 30, 1970.

'I think my mommy is dead' • The last time anyone saw Jones alive that night, she was talking to a neighbor on her front porch at about 9 p.m.

The next day, July 31, at about 11:40 a.m., Asay woke up and walked to her bedroom door. She looked through the keyhole and saw something she never will forget.

Her mother, lying between the coffee table and the couch, had been stabbed 14 times in the back, twice in the stomach and once in the throat. Someone also had used a knife to cut off some of her clothing, leaving only her blouse and brassiere. The state medical examiner later would determine she had been sexually assaulted.

Asay fled the house and, two doors down, ran into a neighbor boy.

"I think my mommy is dead," she told him.

According to a Sun Advocate story from that time in Price, she then went back to her front porch, sat down and wept.

Then-Price Police Chief Art Poloni reportedly was the first officer on scene. He saw neighbors standing in the street, sobbing. He went in through a side door and found Jones' body.

There were no signs of forced entry, though Poloni's wife — in an interview with her husband's department in 2008 — noted that back then, "most people did not lock their doors; that it was different than today."

Within hours, police officers began detaining potential suspects.

Poloni and Carbon County Sheriff Albert Passic worked together on the case; a photograph shows the two men kneeling over the crime scene, where a chalk outline of Jones marked where she had lain on the linoleum floor.

Despite help from FBI forensic analysts, Poloni and Passic couldn't find hard evidence to link anyone to the crime. For one, they never found the murder weapon.

The closest anyone came to being held accountable was then-30-year-old Tom Egley.

Murder charge dismissed • Egley and his girlfriend were staying at the Newhouse Hotel in Helper, a short drive up the highway from Price. Egley and Jones used to date, Brewer said.

Poloni and Passic were questioning Egley, who "began crying," when "suddenly their interview was interrupted by another investigator," according to an account that a retired Poloni gave to his department before his death.

"At this, Egley changed, and said nothing further, and wanted an attorney," according to Poloni.

Egley was charged with murder and a preliminary hearing was held Nov. 5, 1970, but Judge Tom Platis threw out the charge for lack of evidence. Egley's defense attorney also had presented evidence in his client's favor, though what that was is lost to time, said current Carbon County Attorney Gene Strate. A photograph in The Sun Advocate shows Egley, in a flannel shirt, walking out of the courthouse a free man.

Poloni had considered at least one other man as a potential suspect — a man who Jones had dated in Price, Strate said. Near the end of Poloni's life, in 2008, the former police chief said in an interview that is part of the case file that he didn't think Egley was the perpetrator and that a Price man was a better suspect, Strate told The Tribune.

Though the Price man had an alibi, Poloni said in his retirement interview that "if I knew then what I know now … I'd [have] picked him and not Egley." After Egley was freed, the case went cold.

Egley, whose last known address was in Rocky Ford, Colo., could not be reached by The Tribune for comment.

Missing pieces • "At her funeral, I remember comparing her to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty," Asay said. "There, in the coffin."

Asay also remembers how fear gripped Price in the aftermath of Jones' murder. It cast a shadow on her family, too. Her grandparents adopted her, but her grandfather died of a heart attack four years later. Asay said a lot of people believe stress over Jones' death contributed to that.

Her grandmother's eyes would well up with pain at the mention of Jones' name, too.

"She'd get really upset about it. She'd cry about it. … She hung out with my mom. They'd go to the laundromat together. They did things together," Asay said. " … One time, I came home for Thanksgiving and was asking questions about her, and all she would do is cry."

Asay moved to California after high school, but she never gave up on the case. From the Golden State, she sent letters to Passic to stay apprised of any developments. She wrote to the FBI. She wrote to the television show "Unsolved Mysteries."

The case found its second legs after she moved back to Utah and ran into Brewer, an old schoolmate, at the 2010 Helper Arts Festival. They hadn't seen each other since attending Carbon High.

"She asked me what I was doing now, and I told her I'm a detective with the sheriff's office," Brewer said. "And so she said, 'Hey — I got a case to ask you about.' "

Intrigued by the long-dormant case, Brewer reopened it but was immediately stymied.

By 2010, almost every scrap of physical evidence, even Jones' clothing, had been lost. The detective went looking for the case file, but that, too, was missing.

In 1970, it was common practice for investigators to take their work home with them, literally. Instead of filing papers and evidence at the office, they brought cases home or kept them in the trunks of their cars.

Brewer took a handful of officers to the former county courthouse, where the sheriff's office had stored evidence in the basement, and tore the place apart.

Nothing.

"More than likely, [Sheriff Passic] took the case home with him," Brewer told The Tribune. But Passic apparently never handed the file and other evidence to his successor when he retired. He eventually moved out of his house to live with a relative. After Passic died in 2007, his family members went to clean out his old house — only to find the basement had flooded.

"They said they threw away a lot of papers and stuff," Brewer said. "They don't know if this [case file] was part of it, but there's probably a really good shot that it was probably down there."

Among the lost evidence was the most potentially crucial piece: a vaginal swab from Jones with a semen sample. DNA testing hadn't been invented in the 1970s; but nowadays, it routinely identifies suspects in decades-old cases.

"Today, that [swab] would be a chunk of gold," Brewer lamented. "That would be worth all the money in the world right now, for me, because that would just have ended this whole deal."

Brewer, armed only with Poloni's retirement interview and Jones' autopsy report — which the medical examiner's office had kept — started over from the beginning.

Still a mystery • In some ways, Jones' case illustrates the progress law enforcement has made in the decades since her death — such as the "old police procedures" of storing evidence, Strate said. "It's so much better now."

Despite the many hurdles, Brewer tracked down witnesses around the country, dug up newspaper clippings from the 1970s and produced a digital version of Jones' home. He even obtained satellite imagery of the area from around that time and tested doorway beads, which were hanging close to where Jones died, for blood.

"He flabbergasted me with some of the stuff that he found and people that he found," said Rich Walton, a Utah State University Eastern professor who specializes in cold cases and consulted on Jones' case.

Brewer still considers Egley a suspect, adding that he "holds no ill will" toward the man.

A few years ago, Brewer and his partner pulled up to Egley's Colorado home. A man of 70 at that time, Egley greeted them in a flannel shirt, Brewer said.

"I said, 'Hey, we're investigators with the Carbon County Sheriff's Office. I'd like to talk to you,' " Brewer recalled. "He says, 'OK.' I said, 'Are you curious why?' He says, 'No, it's probably something to do with Loretta's murder.' "

Egley denied any involvement, Brewer said.

The detective, nevertheless, assembled a circumstantial case against the man, which he submitted to Strate for screening in 2014.

The county attorney declined to bring charges, saying loss of the original evidence and case files would be large hurdles for the prosecution.

"The state's obligated to provide copies of the original investigation reports under discovery request to the defense," which they can't do, Strate said. "… It would certainly cause some difficulties [for prosecutors]."

Brewer concedes the case is "circumstantial, at best."

"I'll get on the county attorney's side on that. But what else do you have?" Brewer asked. When Strate's letter declining to charge Egley arrived a year ago, Brewer felt chills and his face turned red. "Nothing against [Strate], he has his reasons. He's an attorney and he knows his business. And I know my business."

"I always just thought that this case was meant to be solved and I won't give up on it," Brewer said, "because I just have that gut feeling that it's going to happen."

Brewer, who believes he has collected almost all of the evidence there is to find, said he has contacted the Utah Attorney General's Office, wanting to run the case by them. He's still waiting to hear back.

"My theory on this now is, roll with it, run it through its course. If a jury doesn't like it, then fine."

Every night, as he lies down at home, the case comes back to him.

There are times when Asay is awake at night as well, trying to re-enact the night she was 4 years old, hoping to recall any new detail.

The case's unanswered questions "really got to Heidi," Brewer said. "Talking to Heidi and knowing her through this case and stuff, it still burns in her. … She's still heartbroken and beat up over this thing."

'I miss my mom' • Asay, now 49, is losing what memories she has of her mother as the years go on. But somewhere out there, there's a recording of Jones' voice that her aunt had.

"I know I would give anything to hear her voice again," she said.

She still visits her mother's grave in Elmo, Emery County, every month. In the tranquillity of the cemetery, Asay gets to be her mother's little girl again.

"I get to decorate her grave however I want," she said. "… I mean, I went over there and I put those little decorative stickers on her headstone, you know. Because I miss my mom."

Twitter: @MikeyPanda —

Seeking tips

Anyone with information about Loretta Marie Jones' case can call Carbon County Sheriff's Sgt. David Brewer at 435-636-3251. We want your insight •

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