The husbands of two of the victims discovered them Wednesday, lying dead in a dried-up creek bed in the Utah backcountry. Strewn near the bodies were spent shell casings and a shotgun shell. Drops of blood and footprints led from the scene to a Buick car hidden under a tree, prosecutors wrote in a charging document.
The Buick belonged to an elderly woman who lived nearby. When sheriff’s deputies went to her home that evening to conduct a wellness check, they allegedly found another trail of blood in her front room. She, too, was discovered dead, according to the charging document, her body seemingly moved by wheelbarrow and dumped in a cellar under a shed on the property.
The grisly killings upended a small community in southern Utah and set off a manhunt through the night that led to the arrest of a 22-year-old suspect in Colorado on Thursday morning. Ivan Miller, of Blakesburg, Iowa, allegedly confessed to killing the three women for money and their cars, court documents say.
“It’s going to be something that definitely shakes the community for a little while,” Cameron Roden, a spokesman for the Utah Department of Public Safety, said Thursday at a news conference.
Miller was charged Thursday in Wayne County with three counts of aggravated murder. He appeared in a Colorado court Friday, where he also faces charges for carrying a concealed weapon, vehicle theft and homicide, according to jail records. The Colorado public defender’s office, which is representing Miller, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Court records do not list an attorney for Miller in Utah, and efforts to reach family members were unsuccessful.
A few hundred people live in each of the smattering of towns in Wayne County, Utah, around where the killings took place. Visitors come for the hiking and the views of a ridge of red rock cliffs looming over the landscape.
A crime spree, much less a spate of murders, was hard to imagine here. The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office posts court schedules to its Facebook page in an album titled “Nothing happens in Wayne County.”
Linda Dewey, 65, and Natalie Graves, 34, an aunt and niece who lived in the area, had gone to hike Wednesday before they were found dead, according to court documents. Their husbands set out looking for them when they did not return in the afternoon and found them near a trailhead.
Dewey and Graves did not appear to be linked to the third woman killed in her home, 86-year-old Margaret Oldroyd, the Utah Department of Public of Safety said Thursday.
Investigators zeroed in on the suspect by tracking the vehicles he allegedly stole from the women, according to Roden and court documents. As law enforcement traced the Buick found at the scene to Oldroyd, the families of Dewey and Graves reported that the pair had driven to the trailhead in a white Subaru Outback, which was missing.
A family member used an app to track the Subaru’s key fob Wednesday night. It pinged in New Mexico, according to court documents. Investigators also used automated license plate readers to track the vehicle overnight as it wound through Arizona and Colorado, Roden said.
On Wednesday night, fear rippled through Wayne County as news of the killings spread. The sheriff’s office told people to remain home with their doors locked and lights on. The Wayne County School District closed its schools for the rest of the week.
At around 2:45 a.m. Thursday, officers in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, found the Subaru abandoned and apprehended Miller, who fled on foot, court documents say. Miller was allegedly carrying bank and ID cards belonging to the victims, as well as a .45-caliber pistol. Officers also found .45-caliber ammunition and shotgun shells in the Subaru that matched the evidence found in Utah, court documents state.
Upon arrest, Miller allegedly confessed to killing someone and stealing a car and described a strange itinerary before the attack. He said he struck an elk days earlier while driving in Wayne County and that he then sold his truck and stayed in a nearby hotel for a few days, according to court documents.
Miller had no connection to the Wayne County area or any of his alleged victims, Roden said.
In a second interview with an FBI agent described in the charging document, Miller allegedly recounted killing the three victims and said he did so for money and their vehicles. Miller allegedly said he had slept in Oldroyd’s shed one night and then saw her driving her Buick. Miller said he entered her home and shot her in the back of the head with the pistol, investigators allege.
Miller then said he cleaned up the scene and took the Buick, but did not like the car and wanted to find another vehicle, court documents state. He allegedly came across Dewey and Graves exiting their Subaru and shot them. Dewey was still moving, and Miller said he stabbed her multiple times in the heart, according to court documents.
Miller allegedly admitted to dragging Graves and Dewey’s bodies to a ditch and taking their credit cards for gas money. He said he planned to return to Iowa and had stopped in Pagosa Springs to get gas when he was apprehended, according to court documents.
Miller also allegedly said the killings “had to be done” and said one of his victims had blue or purple hair and that the victims were “lesbians.”
“When asked what he had done with the knife he had used, Miller produced the knife during the interview,” the charging document states.
The Utah Department of Public Safety said it had no outstanding suspects after Miller’s arrest. But the towns he allegedly swept through are still unsettled. Burke Torgerson, the mayor of Lyman, Utah, where Oldroyd lived, told local station KSL-TV that Oldroyd was a lifelong friend and grandmother who had “watched me grow up.”
“This has been a real gut punch for us,” Torgerson said. “We’re not used to this kind of thing.”
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