Our place
Random murders unite a tight but complicated remote Utah county

If I look south from my living room in Torrey, Utah, I see the sandstone spine of the Cockscomb below the 11,000-foot-high horizon of Boulder Mountain. When I look north, I see Linda and Alan Dewey’s house.

On March 4, in senseless acts of violence, Linda, my neighbor, and her niece Natalie Graves were murdered at the base of that mountain.

The murderer, on a road trip from Iowa, had been stranded in Wayne County after hitting an elk and totaling his truck. Broke and in need of a car, he allegedly killed 86-year-old Margaret Oldroyd in nearby Lyman. The much-loved elder had the fatal luck to live at the edge of town, in the first house the murderer came to. 

After killing Mrs. Oldroyd, the killer apparently decided her Buick Regal was unsatisfactory. When he encountered Linda and Natalie setting out on a hike, he allegedly murdered them both, took their Subaru and went on his way, leaving behind nothing but grief.

Using an app connected to the Subaru’s key fob, authorities tracked the alleged killer for 400 miles to Pagosa Springs and arrested him the next day. The killings were brutal and senseless – and utterly random. Any of us could have been pulling into that trailhead.

Linda and her husband, Alan, retired here five years ago, to revel in the wild country surrounding Capitol Reef National Park. Natalie, 34, was visiting from Massachusetts.

The Deweys were the exceptional retirees who quickly became embedded in the community. Alan volunteers for Capitol Reef’s biologists, scouting for bighorn sheep and cougar. Linda, a spirited connector, ran yoga classes and helped found a public service group, Rural Voices of Utah. 

Margaret Oldroyd was a connector, too. Hundreds attended her LDS funeral, both newcomers and the extended Mormon families who had known her throughout their lives, all honoring this kind “guardian at the edge of the town’s heart,” as her memorial card put it. 

Neither Torrey nor Lyman contains more than 300 residents. I-70 is 35 miles away – with no services for 110 miles. The county has no stoplights. In 1940, there were 2,500 people living in Wayne County’s 2,500 square miles. We’ve since added just 100 people. 

Relationships among these scattered communities are tight but complicated. Legacy Mormon families dominate. Torrey is the anomaly, full of newcomers. The murderer struck all three county demographics: proud settlers, thrilled move-ins, and one joyful and awestruck visitor. 

These violent acts by a stranger who knew nothing about these people or this place disrupted our sense of safety. As I grapple with raw sorrow, I try to imagine the flood of grief following a mass shooting or a community devastated by war. Unimaginable, we say. Now, I understand viscerally.

Even as we all were texting updates and talking in the aisles of the county’s sole grocery store, our community felt quiet, pulled inward. 

Utah’s canyon country has always been a source of rejuvenation and connection for me – the kaleidoscope of rocks, raucous piñon jays, the legacy of millennia of inhabitants. I picture these connections as a web of humming cables, vibrating through time in unique chords, leading outward to every being, every person, every influence. This vast bundle of life and existence whirrs continually, creating the comforting harmonic tone that defines this place. 

There’s tension, sure, between the conservative politicians who rule the county and the conservation-oriented move-ins. But the violence that came unbidden eclipses our differences. We are leaning on each other in our loss. Maybe some of that solidarity will last.

Pink ribbons now encircle every post and sign as a gesture to our loss. As Tonya Moosman, who works at the grocery store, told a reporter: “When somebody asks where you’re from, you don’t say Bicknell or Loa. You say Wayne County. We are one community.”

In Navajo culture, such fracturing violence requires a ceremony to restore balance, to heal. For those of us who are not Native, we’ll need the powers of both land and community to get back to the reassurance and resonance of this place.  

The women we lost knew something of that power. The solidarity of the community after their deaths amplifies that power. We’ll be looking for ways to reconnect with everything that makes this place special, as this place – our place – helps us to heal what a heedless person has broken. 

Utah writer and photographer Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. His book, “The Capitol Reef Reader,” is a tribute to his home landscape.