On a hot July morning in 1970, in the small town of Price, Utah, the life of 23-year-old Loretta Jones came to a brutal and tragic end. A single mother, Loretta was diligently working and taking accounting classes to build a better future for herself and her beloved four-year-old daughter, Heidi. That morning, young Heidi would make a devastating discovery. Peeking through the keyhole of her bedroom door, she saw her mother lying on the living room floor in a pool of blood.
Loretta had been sexually assaulted and stabbed 17 times. In a final, desperate act, it is believed she tried to write her killer's name in her own blood.
The initial investigation quickly focused on a man named Thomas Edward Egley, who Loretta had briefly dated. Egley was arrested a month after the murder, but the case against him was dismissed due to a lack of evidence. On the same night as Loretta’s murder, a 10-year-old girl in the same neighborhood reported an attempted abduction by a man fitting Egley's description. Despite these suspicions, the case went cold, and for decades, Loretta’s killer remained free. Egley moved to Colorado the year after the murder and lived his life without consequence for the crime he had committed.
Decades passed, but Loretta's daughter, Heidi Jones-Asay, never gave up hope for justice. In 2009, a chance encounter with a high school friend, David Brewer, who was now a sergeant with the Carbon County Sheriff's Office, reignited the investigation. Brewer took a fresh look at the cold case, piecing together old files and re-interviewing witnesses. The renewed investigation led them back to Thomas Egley. In a significant breakthrough, a neighbor of Egley's in Colorado came forward. Egley, growing paranoid about the reopened case, had confessed to her that he had killed Loretta in a fit of rage after she rejected his sexual advances.
In August 2016, 46 years after the murder, 76-year-old Thomas Edward Egley was arrested in Colorado and extradited to Utah. Faced with the evidence against him, Egley pleaded guilty to murder in October 2016 as part of a plea deal that saw the rape charge dropped. The following month, he was sentenced to 10 years to life in prison. The sentencing brought a long-awaited sense of closure to Heidi Jones-Asay, who had spent a lifetime haunted by the brutal loss of her mother and the knowledge that her killer walked free.
