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PROVO — Leah Scharp taught her daughters to appreciate each other from a very young age because she knows what it is like to live without her sister.
“Her loss was something I never got over,” Leah Scharp said Saturday, more than 41 years after her sister, then-26-year-old Marla Rae Scharp, was raped and murdered in her downtown Provo apartment.
“It’s so outrageous that someone can do something like that and leave a huge hole in your family, something that can never be replaced,” she said.
Provo Police have agreed to reopen the case, as the Utah Cold Case Coalition has introduced potential evidence that convicted serial killer Henry Lee Lucas is not likely responsible for the young woman’s murder on June 29, 1978.
Lucas, who confessed to around 600 murders after he was convicted for killing his mother in 1960 later said he falsely confessed to most of them and he denied ever being in Utah. But, Utah police have always held to the belief that he killed Marla Scharp.
Lucas died in a Texas prison in 2001.
“It’s stunning to me because I thought all along that it was this famous serial killer who did this,” Leah Scharp, 67, said. She pleaded with police agencies and the public to come forward with whatever information they might have that could lead to finding the “real killer.”
“Somebody killed my sister and they need to be brought to justice. I want the person who is responsible for this to be behind bars,” Leah Scharp, who now lives in Pittsburgh, continued. “If it isn’t Lucas, it’s somebody else.”
The Utah Cold Case Coalition was alerted to the case by an extended member of the Scharp family in June to some contradicting information regarding Scharp’s murder. The organization worked to piece together evidence from other cases across the country involving Lucas that have since been debunked.
Karra Porter, coalition co-founder, said they’ve provided police “two types of new evidence that cast significant doubt on the legitimacy of Lucas’ confession.”
It has taken months to present the information because Porter said, “we wanted to be sure.”
“What Henry Lucas did by claiming he had murdered these people was he stopped these investigations,” said Craig Scharp, Marla Scharp’s younger brother who lives in Salt Lake City. “For Provo police to reopen the case is huge.”
He’s confident that with the work done by the Utah Cold Case Coalition, the police will agree that “it was someone else.”
It’s stunning to me because I thought all along that it was this famous serial killer who did this.
–Leah Scharp
And, if Marla Scharp’s case is reopened, Porter believes a number of others, maybe even 80 cases, all over the country should be as well.
“Every case Lucas pleaded guilty to is really a cold case,” she said. “Because it has not been solved.”
Marla Scharp, a former BYU student and returned missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was reportedly raped, strangled and suffocated in her second-story bedroom at 45 W. 200 South, after two roommates had left for about 30 minutes. They believed she had gone to bed early and had slept in late the next day, according to family, but, after checking on her, the roommates found Marla Scharp unresponsive and called police.
Leah Scharp, who is 13 months older than Marla Scharp and was very close with her sister, said she was “dumbfounded” by the news.
“It was so unbelievable, it was not real,” she said, adding that she and her sister had plans, like they always did, to get together that weekend.
“You just don’t get over something like that,” Leah Scharp said. “I miss her every day.”
She now just wants the truth.
“It never goes away for these families,” Porter said.
One of Leah Scharp’s daughters, Adrienne Rae, who now lives in Michigan and was 5 years old at the time of Marla Scharp’s death, said she remembers spending a lot of time with her aunt. She will never forget the day she learned what happened and “the hole it left in our family and especially in our mother’s life.”
“It changed our lives in a way that can never be changed back,” she said. “We’ve never moved on.”
Her sister, Meagan Alder, of Pittsburgh, said the horrible memory will last for generations.
“(Her killer) cannot possibly understand what they’ve taken from this family,” she said.
The two sisters, now grown, never really believed that Lucas was responsible, but feared telling their mom because it might upset her. Leah Scharp’s parents, who lived in Farmington most of their lives, were also quite content with the fact that a convicted killer, who was ordered to spend his life behind bars, was blamed for their daughter’s murder.
Another Utah woman, Janelle Hanna Peat, of West Valley City, said her father was also believed to have been murdered by Lucas in Texas in December 1979. Because Lucas was later found to have been in Florida at the time of that death, the case has also never been solved.
“It would have meant the world to give my grandma and mother some closure,” Peat said Saturday. “I will always wonder who did it and why.”
Lucas’ was ordered to be executed but his death penalty sentence was actually commuted by then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in 1998 because of the uncertainty of at least one of the cases to which he confessed. At Lucas’ death, he remained convicted for the commission of 11 murders.
One of the “key pieces of evidence” found in Marla Scharp’s room after her brutal murder, Porter said, was a uniquely multicolored Budweiser beer tap, about 6-inches in length and double-sided.
“Not many of them were sold and especially not in this area,” she said, adding that the item is “an important clue.”
“If you know someone who had one of those, please come forward,” Porter pleaded.
Alder and Rae also ask that anyone who has any information about the location or the night their aunt was killed, to call police.
“Someone out there knows something or talked to someone,” Rae said. “It’s time for them to be accountable for what they’ve done.”
