In the spring of 1989, a young woman named Vicki Lynn Perkins, aged 19, vanished from the streets of Portland, Oregon. She was last seen in March of that year, and as the weeks turned into months, concern for her whereabouts grew. The search for Vicki came to a grim end on May 13, 1989, when her skeletal remains were discovered in a desolate area of Emery County, Utah, not far from a major interstate.
The advanced state of decomposition made identification difficult, but investigators were ultimately able to confirm the remains as those of Vicki Lynn Perkins through fingerprint analysis.
The discovery of Vicki's body launched a homicide investigation that would soon become entangled with the crimes of a suspected serial killer. Investigators identified Scott William Cox, a long-haul truck driver who was also a resident of Portland, as a person of interest in Vicki's murder. Cox had a history of violence and was already a suspect in the murders of two other women in the Portland area around the same time. His transient lifestyle as a trucker gave him the opportunity to commit crimes across multiple states, and authorities began to look at him for a string of unsolved murders along his routes.
Despite the strong suspicion surrounding Cox, a definitive link to Vicki Lynn Perkins' death remained elusive. While he was convicted of two other murders in September 1993 and sentenced to prison, he was never formally charged in connection with Vicki's case. Investigators meticulously tracked his movements through his driver's logs and credit card records but were unable to find concrete evidence placing him in Emery County at the time of her death. While some law enforcement officials considered him the prime suspect in as many as 20 homicides, including Vicki's, her murder officially remains unsolved. The passage of time has not brought any new arrests or conclusive answers, leaving the full story of what happened to Vicki Lynn Perkins in the final days of her life a lingering mystery.
