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SALT LAKE CITY — Salt Lake police are hoping advances in forensic technology over the past decade will help them finally solve a trio of 27-year-old murder investigations.
On April 18, 1994, Juan C. Felix (also known as Emilio "Juan" Beltran Felix) and Jose Estrada (also known as Jose Lazaro Espinoza) committed a million-dollar robbery at a South Ogden jewelry store. Employees were tied up at gunpoint and knifepoint during the violent robbery and one employee was raped.
Both men were arrested weeks later, and in 1995 they were convicted on 10 first-degree felonies. They were sentenced to the Utah State Prison for the charges that carried penalties of 10 years to life and 15 years to life. A judge ordered many of the sentences to run consecutively as well as concurrently.
Felix, now 63, isn't scheduled to have his first parole hearing until 2024.
Four days after the jewelry store robbery, the body of Jose Dimas Lopez, 32, was found along the side of the road near 300 S. Orange Street. Police believe he was shot in the head at another location and his body dumped.
Then on May 27, the bodies of Jose Gomez Mendez, 34, and his roommate Tomas Palma, 17, were found in an apartment near 650 South and 1650 West. Both had been shot to death.
Felix has long been the lone person of interest in all three killings.
Felix bragged to friends that on May 27 he went to an apartment to collect on a debt and then killed two men when they refused to pay, according to search warrant affidavits filed in 3rd District Court in 1994 and again in July.
Felix followed one man into the bathroom and shot him in the chest, according to the warrants, then found another man hiding under a bed and shot him. One warrant says that Felix showed others a newspaper article the next day about the shootings and "allegedly bragged about it and made remarks about shooting the two men."
He also bragged to several people about killing Dimas and dumping his body, one warrant states. Another alleges that Felix has bragged about killing four or five people.
But detectives said "hearsay" wasn't enough to arrest Felix in 1994. He was questioned about all three killings on the day of his arrest for the jewelry store robbery, but "denied he had anything to do with them."
In 2012, Salt Lake police made a public plea asking anyone with information about the crimes to step forward, hoping that enough time had passed by that point that someone would be willing to talk. DNA tests were also conducted in 2012 on some of the evidence collected in 1994.
"The results of the testing indicated that there was a mixture of DNA profiles and would be enough to exclude a possible suspect profile but did not have sufficient DNA to include a suspect profile," the warrant states.
Now police want to compare DNA evidence again.
"Since 2012, there has been substantial improvements in DNA technology," Salt Lake police noted in their latest affidavit.
On July 20, a Salt Lake police detective went to the Utah State Prison and served a warrant on Felix, collecting buccal swabs of DNA to be compared with DNA taken from two guns and a holster collected as evidence in 1994 as well as from the pants Gomez was wearing when he was killed.
The results of those tests were still pending as of Thursday.
