Do you know who murdered Iva and Kenneth Cheetham in 1991? In the late summer of 1991, a Caucasian female named Iva Cheetham, and her husband Kenneth, were on a road trip from their home in Washington state, enjoying the scenic landscapes of Montana. Their vacation, however, took a tragic and mysterious turn near Lake Inez in the Swan Valley, north of Missoula. The couple was shot and killed around the first of July, but the full scope of the tragedy would not be understood for several weeks.
On August 5, 1991, the Cheethams' van was discovered abandoned at the end of a new logging road, a detail that deepened the mystery of their disappearance. There was no sign of Iva or Kenneth. A search of the vehicle revealed that a Hitachi VM-5200A video camera and its case had been stolen. It wasn't until September 11, 1991, that their bodies were found, approximately two miles south of where their van had been located.
Both had died from gunshot wounds.
The initial investigation by the Missoula County Sheriff's Office identified some persons of interest, but no arrests were ever made, and the case eventually went cold. For years, the brutal end to the Cheethams' vacation remained an unsolved chapter in the region's history. In 2019, a renewed effort to bring closure to the case was launched. The Missoula County Sheriff's Office established a Cold Case Unit and enlisted the help of two retired federal agents to re-examine the evidence. Investigators are hopeful that advances in DNA technology and potential new leads from the public will finally solve the decades-old double homicide. To date, the stolen video camera has never been recovered, and no suspects have been officially named or charged in the deaths of Iva and Kenneth Cheetham.
