Rot In Hell: Missing Couple Found Shot to Death Near Utah Campsite

[Satanica]

The woman who last summer discovered the bodies of a newlywed couple in Moab, Utah says that police told her recently they had begun to doubt her story—until Wednesday night, when authorities publicly identified someone else as a suspect.

In the meantime, Cindy Sue Hunter lived in constant dread of being framed for something she didn’t do, and became a pariah in her neighborhood, she told The Daily Beast on Thursday.

Hunter, 64, found the remains of Kylen Schulte, 24, and Crystal Beck, 38, in the La Sal Mountains four days after they vanished last August. The two, who had earlier told friends about being spooked by a “creepy” guy they encountered while camping in the area, had been shot to death. The shocking double homicide made national headlines and set Moab’s 5,200 residents on edge. It was an especially unbearable loss for Schulte’s parents, who had already lost a teenage son to gunfire in 2015.


Hunter first met Schulte the following year, and had become friendly with her father, Sean-Paul. After the two went missing, Hunter said she became frustrated with what she viewed as a lackadaisical search-and-rescue effort by law enforcement. So, she went off to look for the women on her own.

Hunter started at the McDonald’s where Beck worked, and where she and Schulte parked their camper van. As she told The Daily Beast at the time, Hunter “wanted to feel their energy and get a sense of where they were.” She then drove up to the mountains, driving around for several hours while “talking out loud to the girls, begging them to give me a sign.” As she wound her way through the wilderness, Hunter described feeling something she couldn’t quite explain.

“When I went to turn on Lake Warner, I don’t want to say I had voices in my head, but I was told to ‘Go straight and hurry,’” she said. “It just kept repeating. I’m going toward Sand Flats Road, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of silver through the trees and I saw a campsite down a tricky little side road. Very easy to miss. And that’s when I found their car.”

Hunter then stumbled upon Schulte’s body, and ran back to her own car. She locked the doors and called police. When officers arrived, they found Beck’s remains, according to Hunter.

In the aftermath, Hunter was celebrated by the community as a hero for locating the women and bringing some semblance of closure to their families. But her small art supply store was unable to weather the pandemic, and Hunter was forced to close and leave town. Then, a week after she moved in to a new place, her life was truly upended.

“They served me with a warrant last month and told me I was a suspect,” Hunter told The Daily Beast. “It scared me so badly, I felt like I was going to be framed for this fricking murder.”

Three carloads of deputies from the Grand County Sheriff’s Office showed up at Hunter’s new home and dropped a bombshell on her, she recalled.

“They said that my story kept changing, which it did not,” according to Hunter, who said she had taken photographs of the crime scene with her phone to formally document her discovery. “They said that my phone pinged up there [near the murder scene], and I said, Of course it did—I told them that I went up there walking several times a week in the summer… They told me it wasn’t usual for people to take pictures at a crime scene. So they thought I might be hiding something.
[....]
Hunter, whose phone was seized by the deputies, said she has been treated “horribly,” and that she is considering suing the sheriff’s office over the surreal turn of events.

“All I did was find them, and because of the way I found them, that made me a suspect,” Hunter said on Thursday. “They don't believe in [the] supernatural. I found them in a way that doesn't make sense to them, so that made me a suspect.”

Yesterday, authorities in Grand County identified 45-year-old drifter Adam Pinkusiewicz as the alleged killer.

Pinkusiewicz, who died by suicide in September, worked at the same McDonald’s as Beck, according to Grand County Sheriff Steven White. In a statement, White said Pinkusiewicz was “in the La Sals and Moab at the time of the homicides,” and fled the state shortly thereafter. Before he died, Pinkusiewicz “told another party that he had killed two women in Utah and provided specific details that were known only to investigators,” White said in a statement, adding that the investigation remains open.

Since his daughter’s murder, Sean-Paul Schulte has maintained a presence in Moab, manning a “clue booth” to receive any tips people might have. He told a local radio station that he first heard Pinkusiewicz’s name “months and months ago” as “one of many persons of interest,” but said detectives had been unable to locate him. Pinkusiewicz was finally identified as a suspect on May 11, just a few days after reality TV star Dog the Bounty Hunter showed up to assist investigators.

How Life Became a ‘Living Hell’ for the Woman Who Found Camping Couple’s Corpses

FacebookThe woman who last summer discovered the bodies of a newlywed couple in Moab, Utah says that police told her recently they had begun to doubt her story—until Wednesday night, when authorities ...

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[Sugar Cookie]

Southern Utah authorities are no longer investigating the August 2021 killings of newlywed couple Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner in Moab, announcing on Thursday that the case is now considered closed.

The announcement came about seven months after the Grand County Sheriff’s Office in May first publicly identified a suspect in the case: Adam Pinkusiewicz, a former employee at a McDonald’s in Moab where Turner worked.


Pinkusiewicz died by suicide about a month after newlyweds Turner, 38, and Schulte, 24, were found fatally shot near their campsite in the La Sal Mountains outside of Moab on Aug. 18, 2021, about four months after their wedding.

When authorities first named Pinkusiewicz as a suspect, they noted his September 2021 death.

At the time, however, authorities continued to investigate. But on Thursday, citing more evidence against Pinkusiewicz, the case was formally closed.

“If he was alive, this would be a situation where we have enough to place him under arrest,” said detective Carrie Rigby, an investigator with Unified Police, “and we feel like we would be able to take him to trial and get a guilty conviction.”

In May, officials announced that Pinkusiewicz was a suspect in the case because they learned he had revealed details of the case that were otherwise only known to authorities. Investigators said Thursday that Pinkusiewicz had told his significant other of the crime, whom he had contacted a few days after the killings and later traveled to visit in Waterloo on Aug. 27, 2021.

Authorities this year traveled to Waterloo to meet with Pinkusiewicz’s significant other, whom they verified was not in Utah at the time of the killings. The man immediately told investigators that he knew they were there to talk about the two people Pinkusiewicz had killed in Utah, Rigby said.

“The [significant other] said Adam had told him that he killed the two people, and that they were women,” Rigby said. “He said that he also shot them both because one of the women that was there was a woman that he worked with, and he didn’t like her because she was bossy.”


Pinkusiewicz told the man that he shot the two women in the tent — information that was only known to authorities, Rigby said. The man also told officials that he did not do anything with the information because he was scared of Pinkusiewicz, and was unaware that Pinkusiewicz had died by suicide until authorities informed him.

Moab authorities close Kylen Schulte, Crystal Turner case, citing evidence against dead murder suspect

Grand County Sheriff’s Office investigators said Thursday that if the suspect was alive, they would have enough evidence to convict him in the August 2021 killings of newlywed couple Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner in Moab.

www.sltrib.com

 

[Sugar Cookie]