By Eric S. Peterson, Megan Quiggle, Will Weber, Jacob Freeman, Andrew Luras, Gaetano Chiarenza, Whit Fuller, Miken McGill, Sorina Trauntvein, Alejandro Lucero, Rhenick Edwards and Reede Nasser. The following story was developed by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project and the University of Utah’s “Cold Case” class investigating unsolved murders in the state, in partnership with...
Category: Crime
Utah businesses entangled in alleged $722 million crypto fraud scheme
The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with the Deseret News. A suspected fraudulent bitcoin mining company may have ensnared several Utah properties, according to documents from a case against the BitClub Network, a company accused by the Department of Justice of defrauding over a thousand investors out of...
Frustrated, this Utah County woman tried to investigate how police handled her sex assault allegation
The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Adyson LeeMaster remembers laughing and singing as she celebrated a friend’s birthday at a party earlier this year. Late that night, feeling tired, drunk and wanting to be safe, she said, she asked her friend to help...
In a rural Utah town, two detectives craft their own method of investigating D.V. and rape cases: empowering survivors
By Stephen Dark The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Deseret News. One late June 2021 afternoon, Carbon County victim advocate Denna Fausett drove to Mesquite, Nevada. She picked up 25-year-old Josie Powell at the trailer park she lived in and brought her back to downtown Price,...
How to protect yourself from fraud in Utah
The following story was written by Eric S. Peterson and was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with Utah Stories. Suppose you make friends with a new member of your ward, softball team, bocce club, etc. One day your new pal offers to get you in on the ground floor of an...
How a Salt Lake City pharmacy played a key role in the execution of an Idaho serial killer
The following story was reported by Rone Tempest for The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Salt Lake City pharmacist Richard Rasmuson remembers the frantic call from an Idaho prison official seeking a lethal dose of a drug for an execution in his state. A death warrant had been served...
Former Utah deaf school aide charged with multiple counts of child rape
The following story was written by Eric S. Peterson of The Utah Investigative Journalism Project and published in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Prosecutors filed 10 felony charges Wednesday against Tyler Agustin Jex, a former teaching aide for deaf children in Utah, alleging he raped and sexually assaulted multiple students. It has been a...
Prosecutor covering two counties is stretched thin–raising questions about the quality of justice in Wayne County
The following story was written and reported by Eric Peterson of The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune and The Insider newspaper in Wayne and Garfield counties. Loa • On July 31, 2018, a Wayne County sheriff’s deputy pulled up on an ugly scene: A woman stood in the driveway...
Knights of the Crystal Blade: Cultists used social media to spread doomsday revelations
The following was written and researched by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Spectrum & Daily News. Eugene Richardson is a Mormon fundamentalist who lives on a very lonely patch of desert about 45 minutes west of Cedar City. He lives in a small trailer on 80 acres of sand and sagebrush...
There’s evidence missing from Salt Lake City’s cold case files. But police have never done an audit to know how much
The following is the second in a two-part series that was written and researched by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Read Part 1 here. Anthony Adams, a gay, black Socialist activist, was found brutally stabbed to death in his Salt lake City Avenues apartment on Nov. 6, 1978....