Vicky Lynn Perkins, a 19-year-old white female, was found dead off the eastbound lanes of Interstate 70 near Green River, Utah. Passersby discovered her nude body in the brush on May 9, 1990, and the state medical examiner ruled the case a homicide, noting evidence that she had been strangled and beaten. Based on the condition of the remains, investigators believed she had been dead for roughly three months before she was found.
She was ultimately identified by fingerprints after Utah adopted a new computerized fingerprint system, which matched her as Vicky Lynn Perkins of Portland, Oregon.
In the months surrounding her death, Perkins had been hitchhiking through the West and spending time around truck stops; Utah authorities publicly warned that her killing bore the hallmarks of a serial offender. Contemporary reporting described her as a young woman who had been on the streets of Portland before catching a final ride sometime in late winter, consistent with the medical examiner's estimate that she was killed weeks before her body was located.
Two years later, Emery County investigators announced they were examining whether her death connected to a suspected serial killer then in Oregon custody. Their attention focused on Scott William Cox, a 28-year-old long-haul trucker charged in Oregon with murdering two Portland women; task-force investigators documented that Cox traveled extensively across the West, including routes through Utah, during the relevant period. Utah officials emphasized that the inquiry was preliminary but that nothing at the time ruled Cox out as a suspect in Perkins's homicide.
Despite the lead, no public record indicates that Cox—or anyone else—was arrested or charged in the Utah case. Decades on, the file remains an open homicide with the same grim outline: a teenager's life cut short along a remote stretch of highway, identified only after a belated fingerprint match, and a shadow of suspicion cast over an itinerant trucker whose documented movements overlapped with hers. The absence of an arrest has left Perkins's killing unresolved, preserved in periodic cold-case appeals that still point back to that discovery beside I-70 near Green River.
