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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. April 20th, 1998 started as an ordinary morning in Maidenwater Spring, Utah. But an unexpected driver made an alarming discovery on a desolate stretch of highway.
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Thank you.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases, conduct in-depth fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. You can support my work in two simple ways. Become a valued patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales and leave a positive review. Before we get to the episode, we have two new supporters that I want to thank.
Thank you so much to Chris P. and Amy J. for becoming the show's newest supporters on Patreon. Now, let's get to this week's episode. Hi, everyone. Before we get to the Maidenwater episode, there's been a significant update in a case that we covered in an earlier episode of the show. And that is the case of AJ Armstrong from episode 181.
Without talking about the entire story, here's a quick rundown. AJ's parents, Antonio Sr. and Dawn, were murdered inside their home in 2016. Pretty quickly, the police arrested their teenage son, AJ Armstrong Jr., for the murders. Although there wasn't any solid forensic evidence linking him to the double homicide, cell phone and alarm system data suggested otherwise.
The first trial ended in a mistrial after jurors couldn't reach a unanimous decision. They were deadlocked. Then there was a second trial, which also ended in a mistrial. Once again, jurors couldn't agree on AJ's guilt. Now, just a few days ago, there was a decision in AJ's third murder trial. This time, they found him guilty of both murders and sentenced him to life in prison.
Despite two previous mistrials and very little evidence against him, A.J. is now sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. But is this the end of the road for A.J.? Maybe. Immediately following his conviction, his defense attorneys filed an appeal. But that process is likely to take months, if not years.
So as it stands today at the time of this recording, A.J. Armstrong has been found guilty of murdering his parents back in 2016. If you'd like to listen to the episode, please go back and listen to A.J.'s story in episode 181. Okay, now let's get to the Maidenwater mystery.
The morning of April 20th, 1998 started like any other morning in Maidenwater Spring, Utah, a remote part of Garfield County, about 38 miles north of Lake Powell, Utah. But the normalcy of the morning didn't last long. No one knew it yet, but the tranquility of Maidenwater Spring was about to be lost forever.
On April 20th, 1998, a driver passing mile post 8 of Highway 276 near Maidenwater Spring in southern Garfield County, Utah, called the police after spotting something suspicious on the side of the roadway. This particular highway was only two lanes and didn't get much traffic, so it seemed suspicious for anything to be off the side of the road.
The driver wasn't sure what it was, but something about it bothered him. So he decided to call the police to come take a look. When the authorities got to that section of the highway, they were immediately taken back by what they saw. A woman's body. But it wasn't only the discovery of the body that shocked investigators. It was also how her body was concealed along the highway.
The woman's body had been covered in plastic bags, wrapped in duct tape, tied with rope, and placed inside a sleeping bag before being wrapped in a rug. Whoever did this didn't want to make it easy for investigators to find out that there was a body there. Luckily, the rug and plastic wrap possessed several important details.
First, the rug had a design of houses and roadways, like some type of rug that children might play on. So this told investigators that whoever disposed of the body probably had children or at least access to them. Or maybe the female victim herself was a mother. And the rug used to wrap her body in came from one of her own children.
When Garfield County investigators finally got to the body from underneath the rug, sleeping bag, and the plastic bags, they took her to the medical examiner's office for an autopsy. They learned exactly what happened to her before she ended up alongside the highway. At the autopsy, the medical examiner determined that the woman had been shot once in the head, killing her. But the gunshot was just the beginning.
After she was shot, the ends of her fingers and thumbs were cut off. Whoever did this didn't want anyone to be able to identify her. After being shot, she was shoved inside the rug, sleeping bag, and plastic bags. She was then driven to a remote spot on the highway, and her body was dumped alongside the road. She didn't have any identification on her. All she had were the clothes on her back. That was it.
Although the autopsy provided Garfield County investigators with a cause and manner of death, there were still so many questions. Who was this woman? What was she doing in this remote part of Utah? And who attacked this woman? There was almost zero forensic evidence for investigators to try and answer any of these questions. They didn't have DNA or blood, or at least not that they could test in 1998.
They didn't have the woman's fingertips because they had been cut off, so they couldn't run her prints through any fingerprint database. They didn't have anything else in the way of forensic evidence. So not only did Garfield County investigators need to figure out who did this, but they also needed to figure out this victim's identity. The first tactic investigators performed was to set up a roadblock along Highway 276 in Maiden Waterspring.
They wanted to speak with anyone and everyone who regularly drove this part of southern Utah. But the roadblock didn't do much to move the case forward. Highway 276 is extremely remote and quiet. It doesn't get much traffic. So the chances of finding any witnesses who heard or saw anything were pretty much slim to none. In fact, the police couldn't find a single witness.
No one was able to tell them anything. Not the type of car, used to dump the body, no driver description, nothing. Without witnesses or forensic evidence to help identify the woman, the Utah Department Public Health's State Bureau of Investigation joined the case alongside Garfield County Sheriff's Office.
At the time, this was Garfield County's largest unsolved homicide case. And many of the officers within the department didn't have much experience with this type of case. So the State Department was brought in to not only help identify this woman, but also try and figure out who shot and dumped her body. But not even Utah State officials could crack the case. State and local officials worked the investigation tirelessly for two years.
If a tip came in, they investigated it. If they were aware of a new type of forensic testing that could be done on any of the evidence, they did it. They even contacted the media to help get the word out about the unknown woman's story. But not every news channel was willing to show a picture of the woman. The only photo the police had of the woman's face was from her autopsy.
They didn't actually have a picture of her while she was still alive because they didn't know who she was. So not every news channel in Utah was willing to show a photo of a dead woman. With so little evidence to go on, the case turned cold after two years. The unknown woman simply became known as the Maiden Water Victim.
Over the next two long decades, no one from Garfield County or the State Department could forget about the case. They just couldn't forget about what was done to this mystery woman. Not only had she been shot and killed, but her killer was so careful and so methodical not to leave behind any forensic evidence. He cut her fingers off.
He wrapped her body in three different wrappings to conceal her body, a sleeping bag, a blanket, and trash bags. And then he dumped her body along one of the most remote stretches of southern Utah. This was all done to conceal two identities, hers and his. But they needed to identify her before county investigators or the State Bureau of Investigation could find her killer.
The evidence was retested as forensic technology improved over the next two decades. Hopefully, the new testing would reveal something that earlier testing might have missed. Investigators also brought in a knot expert to examine the rope tied around her body. There could be something about how the knots were tied that could shed some light on who this person might be.
Were they a sailor? Did they have some type of military background or maybe they were a hunter? But nothing new was uncovered after a complete analysis was done by this knot expert. They also tried special hair analysis techniques using isotopes. This process involves using isotopes found in human hair to determine geographical regions of the country where the person might be living based on the type of water they're drinking.
Water supplies have unique isotopic signatures that are captured in human hair. For example, if a person drinks their local water, the isotopic record of that water is recorded in their hair. And from there, scientists can figure out where that person was living. In the cases of John and Jane Doe's, this is quite useful for investigators. Suppose scientists can study the hair of an unknown person.
In that case, they might be able to determine what part of the country they lived in based on the water they were drinking, which can drastically narrow down a search to a particular state or county. When it came to the Maiden Water Woman, investigators performed this type of hair analysis. They knew her body was found in southern Utah, but that didn't necessarily mean she lived there.
So they analyzed her hair to see if they could see where she was from. But none of the tests revealed much. They couldn't pinpoint any specific geographical region by simply looking at her hair. So the case was back at square one. By 2018, 20 years had passed since the Maiden Water victim had been discovered. And investigators in Utah were still no closer to identifying her or her killer.
So in 2018, NBC investigative series Dateline profiled convicted serial killer Scott Lee Kimball in one of their episodes. At the time, Scott Kimball was serving a 70-year prison sentence in Colorado for the murders of three women as well as his uncle.
He had killed his victims between 2003 and 2004, and three of them were found in remote areas of both Colorado and Utah. Officials in Utah received a warrant for Scott Kimball's DNA in 2018 after they discovered similarities between Kimball's victims and the Maidenwater victim, including how he wrapped his victims and his alleged ability to tie various types of complex knots.
Kimball allegedly confessed to killing a hitchhiker 10 miles from where the Maiden Water's body was found in 1998 or 1999 on the way to a family reunion in nearby Bryce Canyon. So there was a possibility that he might have been talking about the Maiden Water victim.
Kimball's former wife and son also made statements alleging that they saw him purchase a rug similar to the one used to wrap the Maidenwater victim's body. So at that point, all signs seem to point to Scott Kimball as Maidenwater's killer, a convicted serial killer accused on the show Dateline, who also matched the timeline. All signs point to one man, Scott Kimball, a known killer.
Accusations fly. Investigators believe they finally have their man. As they wait for DNA confirmation, a shockwave completely rattles the investigation. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. The results from Scott Kimball's DNA test returned. The investigator's number one suspect was 100% not a match.
A crushing blow for detectives who were now back once again at square one. After the Scott Kimball theory fizzled out, Utah state officials returned to the media for help. But they ran into the same problems. They used forensic sketch artists to create an image of the woman's appearance if she still were alive. But that never generated any tips over the years.
Their only photo of the woman was taken during her autopsy. And just like years earlier, many news stations were hesitant to show the image on TV. It wasn't necessarily a graphic image. It didn't actually show the gunshot wound or any other type of injury. But still, it was an image of a deceased person. So at the time, only a handful of news stations actually showed the picture to their viewers to help identify this woman.
But the moment when Utah investigators thought this would be yet another dead end, a promising tip came in. Exactly five days after Utah authorities contacted the media again for help, a detective in Youngstown, Ohio, was busy working his own cold case.
An official with NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, had recently contacted the Youngstown, Ohio Police Department requesting that they update their missing person reports in their system. So one of the Youngstown detectives uploaded a photo of a missing woman who had disappeared a few years earlier. Her name was Lena Reyes-Geddes.
Right after the detective uploaded the woman's photo to NamUs, he decided to look into the case again. The only confirmed detail of the case was that the woman was from Mexico. So he called ICE officials or the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to see if they knew anything about Lina. Maybe she had been deported or maybe she was even in ICE custody, but they didn't know anything.
So this Ohio detective followed the same path as investigators in Utah. He turned to the media. He had every news station in the area show a picture of this missing woman from Youngstown. The only difference was that the photo from Ohio was of a living woman, while the photo from Utah was an autopsy. The Ohio photo was a picture of a missing 37-year-old Lena.
And the Utah photo was a mystery woman. Days later, authorities in Maidenwater, Utah, received a phone call. A woman from across the country in California had called in saying that she saw the photo of the deceased and unidentified woman found in Utah. And she also saw a photo of a missing woman from Youngstown, Ohio, that was uploaded to NamUs.
According to her, she thought the two women looked similar. She believed Lena might be the made-in-water victim based on these two photographs. But who exactly was this woman from California? Well, she told authorities that in her free time, she liked to dabble in true crime research. She could be what many people describe as an amateur internet sleuth.
She basically looked around the internet trying to identify John and Jane Doe's. When she came across the Maidenwater victim's picture, she went on the NamUs website and found Lena's picture from Ohio. Both images were sent to detectives working the case in Utah who had no idea about the Ohio case.
It had just been some weird and strange coincidence that both agencies went to the media about a missing or unidentified woman within just five days of one another. Could this be the same woman? As soon as both images came across Utah detectives' desks, they knew they were similar.
Both women had the same skin complexion. They both had dark brown hair cut to their shoulders. They had similar lips and ears. And the only feature they couldn't see was the eyes. The photo from Utah, the autopsy photo, showed the woman with her eyes closed. And the photo of the missing woman from Ohio had her eyes open and looking to the side. But there was one characteristic that stood out. The woman's mole.
Officials in Utah knew from the autopsy report that their Maiden Water victim had a mole on her upper right ear. If they could match that mole to Lena, the missing woman from Ohio, they knew it was her. They sent the two photos to an expert to compare them, and the results came back as a 95% match. More than likely, Utah's Maiden Water victim was missing 37-year-old Lena.
But a 95% probability based only on a photo comparison just wasn't good enough. They needed to have the forensic evidence to back it up. So next, investigators set out to get Lena's DNA. But they also needed to track down family members so that they would have someone to compare the DNA against. But where was Lena's family?
And why didn't they know she was the Maiden Water victim, the unidentified woman that investigators had spent almost two decades searching for? Utah officials partnered with law enforcement in Youngstown, Ohio, to get additional press coverage for the case. But this time was a little bit different. That's because they weren't looking for an identification anymore for this woman. They were more interested in looking for family members so that they could get DNA.
They knew Lina once lived in Mexico. She had immigrated to the U.S. So Utah and Ohio authorities wondered if she had any family in the bordering states like Texas. So they had the media run stories about Lina, asking any potential family members to please come forward. And one week later, they got a phone call. A woman had called the Youngstown, Ohio Police Department and left a voicemail in Spanish saying,
In the voicemail, she said she was Lina's sister, Lucera Reyes. As soon as they got the voicemail, they called Lucera back, who was living in Mexico at the time. They started the conversation by asking her basic questions about Lina, her date of birth and where she was born. And at that point, everything seemed to check out. Authorities felt confident that this was Lina's real sister.
Although Lucera was only 11 when her sister went missing, she knew Lina hadn't been seen or heard from in almost 20 years. But getting a DNA sample from her was challenging. Lina's family was from a tiny and remote town in Mexico, and the idea of providing law enforcement with a DNA sample was almost unheard of. So initially, Lucera wasn't willing to give her DNA, although it was needed to help identify her.
But eventually, after a bit of persuasion, she finally agreed. A few days later, the police arranged for Lucera to take a three-hour and 300-mile bus ride to the nearest U.S. embassy in Monterrey, Mexico, where she provided authorities with a DNA swab so that it could be matched to the Maiden Water victim. Once Lucera's DNA was collected in Mexico, it was returned to the U.S. to be compared against the Maiden Water victim.
A few days later, the test results came back from the lab. 100% match. Lucera was the biological sister of the Maiden Water victim, 37-year-old Lena Geddes. Over 20 years later, officials finally ID'd her in November of 2018. But identifying Lena was only the first step. The second was figuring out who murdered her.
Lina was born in a small town in Mexico, but she didn't let that stop her from pursuing all of her dreams in life. According to her family and friends, she had big aspirations for her life. She was an accomplished ballet dancer and earned a degree in international business. By 20 years old, she became the shining star of her family.
In 1996, she met Edward Geddes while living in New Mexico, and six months later, they were married and moved to Youngstown, Ohio. Despite their noticeable age difference, Edward and Lena seemed like a normal, loving couple, but all of that changed after Lena disappeared in April 1998.
According to Lena's family, on April 8, 1998, Lena was about to fly from her home in Youngstown, Ohio, to Mexico by way of Texas to visit her family. She had packed a blue sleeping bag as a gift for her younger cousin, along with a suitcase and a cosmetic bag. But she never arrived in Mexico as she planned.
Instead, she was found murdered several days later on April 20th, wrapped in the same sleeping bag she was going to give her cousin in Mexico. A few days later, Lina's family in Mexico reported her missing to the police in Ohio. But when the phone call came in, detectives were surprised to find out that Lina's husband, Edward, hadn't reported her missing yet. Like Lina's family in Mexico, he hadn't heard from her in a few weeks either.
So they thought it was a little strange that he didn't call the police to report her missing. When questioned about his missing wife months later in October 1998, Edward told state investigators that he last saw her when he dropped her off at the airport in Pittsburgh on April 8th. He said they said goodbye, kissed each other at the airport, and that was the last time he saw her.
But instead of pressing Lena's husband any farther, the cops in Ohio let him go after they interviewed him. He was never brought back into the police station for any more questioning. And for the next 20 years, the police in Utah had no idea their made-in-water victim was Lena.
Lena's family in Mexico had long suspected her husband Edward had something to do with her disappearance and ultimate murder, but they couldn't prove it. But now that authorities in both Utah and Ohio know the Maiden Water victim was Lena, they decided to reach out to forensic experts to see if they could identify her killer.
By 2019, investigators began working with forensic specialists to find genetic material on the rope that was used to bind her body. They figured this was their best piece of evidence to try and collect DNA because her killer had likely touched it to tie the knots. And DNA testing had come a long way since 1998.
Utah investigators contacted Francine Bordahl, a retired West Jordan police CSI turned freelance forensic specialist and cold case expert in Murray, Utah. They asked her if she would be willing to work on Lena's case and see if any genetic material could be lifted from the rope. And Francine quickly agreed. Francine used the M-VAC system on the remaining pieces of rope.
Created in the early 1990s, the MVAC is simply a sterile wet vacuum. It works by applying a collection of solution to a piece of evidence. While the solution is being applied, the MVAC is vacuuming the surface of the evidence. It essentially creates a mini hurricane that looses the DNA material, which is transferred to the collection bottle on the MVAC.
It's then filtered, and if DNA is collected from the evidence, it's eventually analyzed. The MVAC can be especially useful for collecting DNA on otherwise tricky surfaces, porous-type surfaces like rock and granite. So in Lina's case, investigators were interested in finding genetic material on the rope, which makes the MVAC the perfect tool.
Once she used the MVAC to collect DNA from the rope used to bind Lena, the samples were sent for testing. But when the results came back, they didn't just find one DNA profile on the rope. They found a mixture of DNA. Additional testing revealed that one of the DNA profiles belonged to the knot expert who had studied the rope years earlier. This expert had inadvertently left his DNA behind.
But the second profile was more of a mystery. Detectives wondered if this second DNA profile belonged to Lena's husband, Edward. But getting Edward's DNA directly would be impossible. Shortly after Lena was murdered, Edward committed suicide in 2001. So sadly, investigators would need to get his DNA from some other way. Authorities reached out to as many as Edward's family members as possible.
If they couldn't get his DNA, his relatives' DNA would be the next best thing. Eventually, three of them agreed to do it. After two decades, the police are finally on the verge of solving Lena's murder. Will the new DNA test lead them to the hidden truth? Or is it just another heart-wrenching dead end?
The results were in after the three samples were collected to the unknown DNA profile collected from the rope using the MVAC system. All three samples matched Edward's DNA. With 100% certainty, it was Lena's husband, Edward Getty's DNA on the rope. The news was extremely emotional for Lena's family and law enforcement in Utah and Ohio.
Both agencies had spent decades looking for Lena's true identity and her killer. And finally, through the use of the M-VAC system, they were able to identify the person responsible. But getting justice is an entirely different story. Since Lena's husband committed suicide in 2001, prosecutors won't be able to bring any criminal charges against him.
Edward's suicide means he has escaped the law of justice. We probably won't ever understand the motive behind Lena's murder, and we don't know why her body ended up in Utah. The police's best guess is that he dumped her body there because he had absolutely no connection to Utah, and he wouldn't be considered a suspect. He also went to great lengths to try and conceal her identity by cutting off her fingertips.
But not even a calculating Edward Geddes could pull off the perfect murder. After two long decades, advancements in forensic science, including the MVAC, were used to finally identify him. And if he were still alive, that same forensic evidence would be used against him to secure a conviction.
We might not have a motive or a suspect to hold criminally accountable, but we have finally solved the Maidenwater mystery, all thanks to forensic science. To share your thoughts on the story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales.
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