Layton police name new person of interest in complicated 40-year-old cold case shooting

LAYTON — The diesel engine of Edward Wilkinson's tractor trailer rumbled at idle on the side of Main Street as he stepped into the 7-Eleven hours before dawn on Friday, April 25, 1986.

Wilkinson followed the same path through the convenience store he did every morning, walking to the coffee machine in the back. He took a cup. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted something amiss: a young woman in a 7-Eleven smock on the floor behind the counter, motionless in a pool of blood.

Wilkinson ran to a payphone outside and dialed 911. A Layton dispatcher received the call at 3:46 a.m.

"There's blood all over the place," Wilkinson said, his voice panicked and urgent. "I don't know if she's been shot. … She's in bad shape, I'll tell you that."

Police officers arrived within minutes. They rushed to provide first aid but discovered the clerk, 20-year-old Carla Maxwell of Ogden, was already dead.

For 40 years, detectives and amateur sleuths alike have tried to piece together the mystery of who shot Maxwell, and why. Now, Layton police are publicly identifying a new person of interest in the hopes it well at last allow them to answer that question and put the case to rest.

A new person of interest

Figuring out who killed Maxwell hinges on learning who held the gun on that April morning in 1986. The weapon, believed to be a .38 or .357-caliber revolver, has never been located. Ballistic analysis of the bullets in the Maxwell case revealed the gun was also used to kill two other women in Salt Lake City during the mid-1980s, one prior to and the other after Maxwell's killing.

Last year, Salt Lake police announced they'd definitively linked a man named Rickie Lee Stallworth Sr. to the first of the three homicides using DNA and investigative genetic genealogy. That means the gun was in Stallworth's possession about 11 months before Maxwell's death.

"He lived the area where our homicide took place," Layton Police Sgt. Zachary Jones said in an exclusive interview with KSL. "At some point, he did have the gun."

Those circumstances are alone enough for Layton police to now call Stallworth a "person of interest" in the Maxwell case.

Stallworth, who died in 2023, was an airman who first moved to the Layton area in 1982 while stationed at Hill Air Force Base. Several of Stallworth's friends and ex-wives told Salt Lake police he owned many guns throughout his life and frequently spent nights away from home, soliciting sex workers.

It's not clear whether Stallworth still possessed the gun at the time of Maxwell's death. If so, it would cast significant doubt on the conviction of a man who is currently incarcerated on a murder conviction from the third case tied to that same gun, which took place only three weeks later.

No motive for the shooting of Carla Maxwell

Police records obtained by KSL reveal the officers who responded to the 7-Eleven on Layton's Main Street that rainy morning in April of 1986 saw no signs of a robbery. The first responding officer wrote in his report that "both cash registers were closed and nothing appeared to be in great disarray within the store itself."

An autopsy did not reveal any tell-tale indicators of a struggle prior — no bruising on Maxwell's body, no scrapings under her fingernails. There were no signs to suggest Maxwell might've been sexually assaulted prior to her death. It appeared someone had simply walked into the 7-Eleven during the 3 a.m. hour and emptied a six-shot revolver into Maxwell, for no obvious reason.

Layton detectives spent the early days of the investigation identifying, tracking down and interviewing Maxwell's friends and romantic partners. They hoped to learn who might've held a grudge against her over some past slight. They didn't find any such person.

Maxwell graduated from Ogden High School in the class of 1983. She was standout student, an editor for the school newspaper and an accomplished member of the school's swim team. A relative who asked not to be identified told KSL Maxwell aspired to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. She'd only been working the graveyard shift at the 7-Eleven for a couple of weeks.

"All the opportunities were taken from (Maxwell) that night," Jones said. "No college, no family. It just ended abruptly."

3 killings tied by ballistics

The lack of any DNA evidence in Maxwell's case leaves investigators today with few methods of identifying her killer.

"It is almost the only evidence we have, is the bullets," Jones said.

When a bullet travels through the barrel of a gun, grooves in the barrel cause the bullet to spin. These grooves, called rifling, leave marks on the bullet. Forensics experts trained in ballistic analysis look for these tell-tale marks when attempting to identify bullets that have been fired from the same gun.

On the day Maxwell was shot, police recovered six bullets. Ballistic experts from the Utah State Crime Lab examined them, and determined they came from the same gun that'd been used to shoot 18-year-old Christine Gallegos 11 months earlier.

The murder of Christine Gallegos

A private security officer discovered the lifeless body of Gallegos near 1300 South and Jefferson Street shortly before 4 a.m. on May 16, 1985. Gallegos had been stabbed 11 times, with such force the blade broke off its handle, then shot twice. The knife blade and some jewelry were found in a separate location from Gallegos' body, suggesting the killer had moved Gallegos after the stabbing to better conceal her.

On the evening prior to her death, Gallegos told her mother and her boyfriend that she was headed from their home in West Valley City to her work at a tavern in Salt Lake City. Police determined this was not true, that Gallegos was unemployed and had been living a double life.

In a report dated about a month after her death, a Salt Lake homicide investigator wrote Gallegos made up the story about the job "so that she could get out of the house occasionally and get away from her mother and boyfriend." Police believed Gallegos had been engaging in sex work, meeting Johns at a bar in the area of 1700 S. Main, a few blocks south of where her body was discovered.

Gallegos was seen last prior to her death at the home of a friend, at about 10:30 p.m. She the friend she planned to hitchhike into Salt Lake City. Roughly an hour later, people living in the area of 1300 South and Jefferson Street heard gunshots.

Salt Lake police submitted information about the Gallegos case to ViCAP, the FBI's violent criminal apprehension program. An FBI profiler wrote the unidentified killer "will have no guilt or remorse" and that it was very likely "Christine Gallegos was not his first victim."

The investigation into Gallegos' death quickly stalled, however, as police were unable to develop any solid suspect information. They didn't receive a break until nearly a year later, when Maxwell was shot to death in Layton with the same gun.

The murder of Lisa Strong

The Utah State Crime Lab sent Salt Lake police a notice on May 1, 1986 stating the bullets recovered from Gallegos' body matched those found in the Maxwell case from Layton, which had occurred just days earlier.

That gun was about to claim yet another life.

Lisa Strong, 25, had the heart of an artist. Raised in Ogden, she'd studied art at Weber State College before marrying and moving to Salt Lake City in her 20s to pursue a career in modeling.

Her marriage soon soured though. She and her husband divorced in late 1985. By the spring of 1986, Strong was living alone near 1500 South and 700 East. She worked for a company called Angel's Answering Service in Sugar House and often walked the mile and a half between home and work.

Strong was walking home from an unusually late night at work when, shortly after midnight on May 12, 1986, someone confronted and shot her.

The shooting happened near the corner of 800 E. Kensington Ave., about a block from Maxwell's home. Some of the bullets fired in her direction went wide, hitting wooden porch steps of a nearby house, but one struck Strong in the head, killing her.

Several neighborhood residents told police they'd heard a woman scream or shout "no, no" before four or five gunshots in rapid succession. Some also reported seeing a car speed away from the scene of the shooting with its headlights off, suggesting the person who pulled the trigger might've done so from a vehicle.

The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms subsequently examined the bullets from Strong's case, and compared them to the bullets from the Gallegos and Maxwell shootings. In a formal report, the ATF noted the bullets in the three cases were all .38 special, 125 grain copper-jacketed hollow-point bullets made by CCI. The bullets shared identical rifling characteristics, meaning they'd all been fired by the same .38 or .357 six-shot revolver.

Salt Lake police search for a serial killer

These three linked homicides, occurring within the space of a single year, prompted speculation that a serial killer might be again stalking the streets of northern Utah, as Ted Bundy had done a decade earlier.

"That guy needs to be stopped," Gallegos' mother, Leah Gallegos, told KSL in 1986. "How many more? Two Ted Bundys?"

Salt Lake police, in cooperation with Layton police and the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office, launched a task force that summer. They solicited information from the public and other police agencies across the country about any cases of missing or murdered women. The task force placed particular focus on cases involving .38 or .357 revolvers.

In March of 1987, a murder spree in southeast Idaho drew the task force's attention. A man named Paul Ezra Rhoades had killed a pair of convenience store clerks and a schoolteacher he'd abducted from a grocery store parking lot. The victims were all shot with a .357 revolver. Handguns chambered for .357 Magnum can also fire .38 Special bullets, like those used to kill Gallegos, Maxwell and Strong.

The Salt Lake task force members began focusing on Rhoades, who was arrested in Nevada and extradited to Idaho. Detectives learned Rhoades had spent a night in Salt Lake City in January of 1986, staying just a few blocks from where Strong died several months later.

"We understand Mr. Rhoades was in Salt Lake off and on, he's done some construction work here," the task force's lead detective Jim F.G. Bell told KSL in April of 1988.

Bell and another detective interviewed Rhoades in Boise, where he was awaiting trial. Bell's notes, obtained by KSL through an open records request, show Rhoades was aware of the task force's work from reading newspaper reports. Rhoades told the detectives he did not commit the Utah killings.

That didn't prevent Bell from telling the Deseret News in 1989 that he was "100% sure" Rhoades was the man who shot Gallegos, Maxwell and Strong. This statement would prove to be incorrect.

The task force concluded its work and disbanded in 1989, having made no arrests.

The Chosen Few

In May of 1989, a Salt Lake patrol officer named Frank Hatton-Ward and two former police crime analysts filed papers in federal court accusing the police department of bungling the investigation into the three homicides. The trio claimed to have developed information showing the shooter was affiliated with a street gang called the Barrio Chosen Few.

Hatton-Ward's chief complaint was that he'd learned a .38-caliber RG-40 revolver had been sold to Pahl's Pawn on State Street shortly after Strong's death in May of 1985. He reportedly passed the information on to the task force, which took no action to seize the gun. It was subsequently sold and has never been located.

Several months later, in October in 1989, Salt Lake's police chief terminated Hatton-Ward on the grounds of insubordination and numerous other causes. Hatton-Ward retaliated by filing a $6 million wrongful termination suit against the city.

Hatton-Ward's public criticisms against the task force, and the broader Salt Lake City Police Department, took root in the press. He also held strong sway with relatives of Gallegos and Strong, who likewise made repeated public attacks on the department.

Factions within the Salt Lake City Police Department started coming around to at least a portion of Hatton-Ward's theory however, all because of a tip they received in August of 1991.

Michael Staples and Forrest Whittle

On the night Strong was shot, Tina Schroyer and her boyfriend, Timothy Robinson, were living in the basement of a home about a half a block away to the south. Schroyer and Robinson were both contacted by officers that night, but provided only vague information about hearing the gunshots. Robinson had been one of the people to first point police to Strong's body.

By 1991, Schroyer and Robinson were in Pennsylvania, where Robinson had landed himself in jail. Schroyer had an ace card to play. She told a drug enforcement officer that she and Robinson had information they could provide about an unsolved homicide in Utah. The agent alerted Salt Lake police, who traveled to Harrisburg to speak with Schroyer and Robinson.

In separate interviews, Schroyer and Robinson said they'd been visited on the day of the shooting by two men: Michael Ted "Squirrel" Staples and Forrest Lee Whittle.

Robinson was a fence, who sometimes traded drugs for stolen property. He associated with members of the Chosen Few gang. Staples and Whittle were not members of the gang, but Robinson claimed Whittle attempted to trade a .38-caliber revolver for marijuana, which Robinson refused.

Schroyer reportedly told police she hadn't seen Whittle with the gun, but claimed he told her after-the-fact that he'd recently obtained the gun and wanted to try it out. Schroyer said Whittle told her he killed Strong.

Robinson had been the person who told Hatton-Ward about Michael Staples pawning the gun at Pahl's Pawn. Both he and Schroyer believed Staples was the person who could link the weapon to Whittle.

Back in Salt Lake City, detectives met with Staples. Case records show Staples confirmed much of what Schroyer and Robinson had said: he and Whittle had visited the neighborhood where Strong died on the night of her shooting.

Staples' story was not consistent, though. Detectives wrote Staples told three different versions, sometimes claiming to have personally witnessed the shooting and other times only claiming to have heard the shots from inside Robinson and Schroyer's basement apartment. Staples told the detectives he'd purchased the gun, an RG-40, from Pahl's Pawn about two years prior to the shooting and given it to Whittle.

Detectives checked pawn slips and were unable to locate any record of Staples purchasing an RG-40 from Pahl's Pawn. They also noted Staples would've been too young to legally purchase a gun in 1985. When they confronted Staples with these inconsistencies, he changed his story. Staples instead stated he and Whittle had stolen the gun during a burglary in West Valley City approximately three to six months prior to Strong's death.

Detectives informed Staples he may be called to testify about what he'd said, at which point Staples reportedly recanted and said he didn't know anything about Strong's death.

A key witness recants

Staples and Whittle had a history together. They'd both been arrested in early 1987, less than a year after the Strong shooting, for robbing and raping a male acquaintance. Staples was out on parole by the time of his interview with detectives in 1991, but Whittle remained incarcerated on an aggravated sexual assault conviction.

The shifting nature of Staples' account presented problems for investigators. They attempted to locate several other people who Staples claimed had been present on the night of Strong's shooting. Those included two alleged members of the Chosen Few gang: James Pernell "Shoe" Sherard and Frank Chris "Chico" Martinez.

Sherard had been an informant for Hatton-Ward, but he'd also landed in prison in 1987 after admitting to the murder of Madeline Beltran. In that case, Sherard had crept through a window at Beltran's apartment near 2500 South and 900 East, surprising Beltran awake before stabbing her to death.

The detectives interviewed Whittle, who according to case documents "denied any knowledge or involvement in any murder." Salt Lake police did not believe Whittle's denial. They had no physical evidence linking Whittle to Strong's killing, but their witnesses placed him in the area on the night of the shooting with a gun in his hand.

Detectives took their findings to the Salt Lake County Attorney's Office, which declined to file criminal charges due to concerns over the reliability of Staples' testimony.

Working backward from a conclusion

Undeterred, police in 1993 obtained a warrant for Whittle's hair and blood in the hopes DNA might link him to the Gallegos homicide, the only one of the three cases connected by ballistics with any offender DNA.

Whittle's DNA did not match any of the evidence in that case.

Hatton-Ward's wrongful termination lawsuit against the city was continuing to move forward, drawing considerable interest from the news media. The Private Eye, an alt-news weekly tabloid, published a series of articles supportive of Hatton-Ward and critical of Salt Lake police leadership. The paper lended credence to Hatton-Ward's theories, which had expanded to suggest Chosen Few gang members were also responsible for the February 1986 stabbing death of Tiffany Hambleton.

The insinuation caught the attention of Hambleton's mother and grandfather, who met with Salt Lake police in March of 1993 to discuss the case. Their meeting was audio recorded. KSL obtained a transcript of the audio through an open records request.

According to the transcript, Sgt. Mike Roberts told Hambleton's family there was no evidence to link Hambleton's killing to the shooting deaths of Gallegos, Maxwell and Strong.

"Those three homicides are linked by physical evidence," Roberts said. "There is nothing, not one shred of evidence, not M.O., not anything that ties those three with Tiffany (Hambleton)."

Still, Staples expressed frustration over the inability of his detectives to secure criminal charges against Whittle in the Strong case. He said they were "totally 100% convinced" Whittle was involved even though no physical evidence proved that.

"In police work you're supposed to keep an open mind, gather the evidence to a conclusion. Well, I took a conclusion," Staples said, "Let's go from the killer backward. So that's in essence what we did."

'Not a political issue'

A state judge dismissed Hatton-Ward's wrongful termination lawsuit against Salt Lake City in April of 1994.

Weeks later, on the ninth anniversary of Gallegos' death, her family staged a protest. They, along with loved ones of Strong, felt disillusioned with Salt Lake police. The years of mudslinging in the news media between Hatton-Ward and the task force leaders made it appear political infighting had scuttled the investigation.

"The damn homicides are not a political issue. It's homicide," Gallegos's father, Danny Gallegos, said during a hearing before the Salt Lake County Council.

The families pleaded with county leaders to get involved and take over the investigation. Salt Lake County's sheriff at first seemed receptive, but pulled back after Salt Lake City's police chief refused to cooperate. The county leaders said they could not compel Salt Lake police to surrender control.

Undeterred, Gallegos' family worked with civil rights attorney Rocky Anderson, who would later serve as Salt Lake City's mayor, to advance the case against Whittle. Anderson, working pro bono, succeeded in convincing the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office to convene a state grand jury in March of 1995.

While common in federal prosecutions, grand juries were rarely used at the state level in Utah, where prosecutors more commonly filed criminal charges themselves. Cases filed this way, by information, require a preliminary hearing before a judge who determines whether sufficient evidence exists to support the charge.

Grand juries by contrast are made up of laypeople who, after being informed of the evidence, vote on whether to indict the suspect. Salt Lake County's district attorney told the news media he'd elected to take the Strong case before the grand jury in order to show 15 independent citizens believed there was sufficient evidence to indict Whittle for the murder of Strong. That's exactly what happened.

The trial of Forrest Whittle

Whittle stood trial a year later, in March of 1996. The case against him relied entirely on witness testimony. Prosecutors relied primarily on the accounts of Michael Staples, Tina Schroyer and Timothy Robinson.

Schroyer testified she'd heard Whittle shouted at Strong earlier on the day of the shooting, as Strong walked by on her way to work. Strong ignored Whittle, which Schroyer said enraging him. Strong said later that night she heard gunshots and saw Whittle run past her basement bedroom window.

Staples testified he was also inside Schroyer's house at the time of the shooting and came outside to see Whittle lowering a revolver.

The detective who'd led Salt Lake City's task force during the late 1980s testified in Whittle's defense. Bell noted Schroyer and Robinson had provided different accounts when first contacted by police on the night of the shooting. On cross-examination, Bell conceded that Schroyer had in the past provided him reliable information against Sherard in the Beltran case.

Bell pointed out that some other witnesses had reported hearing a car leaving the neighborhood at a high rate of speed. Bell also said the angles of the shots that missed Strong and impacted the nearby porch steps suggested they'd been fired from a vehicle at the intersection of 800 E. Kensington, not from a half-block to the south.

Whittle's defense attempted to call Sherard to testify, expecting Sherard would say he was at Schroyer and Robinson's home when Strong was shot and that Whittle was not there. However, Sherard invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and did not answer any questions.

The jury deliberated for two hours before returning a verdict of guilty against Whittle, finding him responsible for the death of Strong.

A private sleuth led astray

Salt Lake police records show detectives spent the better part of the next two decades attempting to build a case against Whittle for the death of Gallegos. They interviewed and reinterviewed numerous former associates of Whittle, Staples and Sherard, but were unable to prove a nexus between them and Gallegos.

Gallegos' family, meanwhile, turned to attorney D. Bruce Oliver and his office manager, Jason Jensen, to continue their own investigation. Oliver and Jensen largely followed the Hatton-Ward theory that the Chosen Few gang was responsible for a whole swath of unsolved murders, including Gallegos and Maxwell's.

Jensen, who would later become a licensed private investigator and help co-found the Utah Cold Case Coalition, created a public Facebook page in 2019 called "Christine Gallegos Connections." In one post on the page dated Oct. 12, 2019, Jensen shared a photo of the broken knife blade from the Gallegos crime scene, along with the words, "Squirrel, who witnessed Tree shoot Christine, was stabbed by this knife. The knife was broken off and left at the scene. Squirrel has a 2 inch scar on (his) left forearm from the incident."

"Squirrel" was an alias for Michael Staples, who had accused and testified against Whittle in the Strong case. Jensen's declarative statement that Staples witnessed Gallegos' murder, and was injured with the same knife, would later prove to be false.

Salt Lake police records show Jensen contacted the Utah Attorney General's Office in 2021, in the hopes of prompting the office to take the Gallegos case away from Salt Lake police. An investigator from the attorney general's office instead provided Jensen's research files to Salt Lake detectives on a flash drive.

"The information supplied on the flash drive does not have any eyewitness to the murders of Maxwell or Gallegos," Salt Lake police detective Cordon Parks wrote in a report. "There is no information on any physical evidence that might exist that is not already in police custody."

Investigative genetic genealogy

The long history of speculation and innuendo surrounding Whittle's suspected involvement with the Gallegos homicide presented a problem for investigators.

The Office of the Utah Medical Examiner had found seminal evidence on Gallegos' body during her autopsy. A partial DNA profile had been developed from that evidence in 2004, but it didn't match Whittle. The seminal DNA had come from a man with West African ancestry. Whittle was caucasian.

Detective Cordon Parks met with staff at the Utah Department of Public Safety in August of 2023, who expressed skepticism about the strength of the DNA evidence alone.

"There are concerns that the single male contributor found on the vaginal swabs might not be the killer of Christine Gallegos," Parks wrote in a report. "The concern comes from so much circumstantial evidence that (redacted) would be the suspect."

Though the copy of this report provided to KSL by Salt Lake police is redacted, in the context of the case the redacted name is likely Whittle.

In other words, just because DNA might show Gallegos had sexual contact with a man prior to his death, that wasn't enough to prove that man was her killer.

Scrapings collected from under Gallegos' fingernails during her autopsy were a better clue. She suggested she'd been in a violent struggle with someone shortly before she died.

The Utah Department of Public Safety agreed to provide funding for additional DNA testing, in the hopes of identifying the source of both the seminal DNA and the fingernail scrapings. Salt Lake police subsequently sent the seminal DNA sample to Othram, a private lab that specializes in DNA forensics.

Within a matter of months, Othram identified a potential suspect using investigative genetic genealogy: Rickie Lee Stallworth Sr. The discovery came six months too late. Stallworth had died in July of 2023 at the age of 65.

Rickie Stallworth's DNA

Stallworth first moved to Utah in 1982, when stationed at Hill Air Force Base. He'd lived in and around Layton ever since, spending most of that time in Syracuse.

Stallworth was married and divorced several times. Salt Lake police couldn't at first find any criminal history, beyond some minor run-ins with officers who suspected him of soliciting sex workers.

Park later learned Stallworth had gone through a book-and-release process at the Davis County Jail in December of 2022, as part of his sentencing in a communications fraud case. The jail collected Stallworth's DNA at that time, but the sample became stuck in a backlog and was still not processed.

Instead, it took until September of 2024 for Utah's State Crime lab to process that sample and confirm Stallworth's DNA matched the seminal DNA evidence from the Gallegos case.

Further confirmation came after Salt Lake police collected a DNA sample from Stallworth's son. It showed a familial DNA link to the fingernail scrapings, proving Gallegos had scratched Stallworth shortly before she died.

The State Street stalker

Salt Lake police held a press conference on May 15, 2025, 40 years since the last day Gallegos was seen alive, to announce they'd at last solved her case.

Salt Lake police detective Cordon Parks said his "best guess" was that Stallworth had picked Gallegos up as she was hitchhiking to work, but instead took her to a secluded area where they fought. Stallworth stabbed Gallegos outside of his car, then she stumbled away to the position where he shot her twice in the head.

KSL's review of case records show Parks question Stallworth's ex-wives and a close friend about whether he'd ever owned a .38-caliber revolver. The woman Stallworth had been married to in the mid-1980s reportedly said Stallworth had owned "lots of guns." Another ex-wife recalled Stallworth bought and sold many guns during their marriage, and that he'd owned $80,000 worth of guns when he became ill in his late 50s.

That same ex-wife reportedly told police Stallworth was often gone all night, without reason. She claimed he'd drained her $400,000 retirement account and spent all of the money on sex workers. She believed Stallworth would be capable of murder.

During the press conference, Parks called Stallworth a "State Street stalker," noting he had a habit of leaving his home in Layton or Syracuse, traveling to Salt Lake City to troll for women, then returning around 5 a.m.

KSL reporter Pat Reavy asked Parks whether Stallworth could be a suspect in the Maxwell or Strong cases. Parks replied that detectives believe Stallworth discarded the gun after killing Gallegos.

1 gun, 2 shooters

Stallworth's name had never been part of the investigation, prior to Othram identifying him through genetic genealogy. He had no known ties to Whittle or anyone in Whittle's orbit.

KSL's review of case file materials from all three deaths — Gallegos, Maxwell and Strong — raises questions about how and when the gun used to kill Gallegos could've made its way from Stallworth to Whittle.

During the interviews with Stallworth's ex-wives and friend, Salt Lake police learned Stallworth sometimes pawned firearms at Hy and Mike's, a shop on Main Street in Layton. There is no mention in police files of Stallworth pawning guns at Pahl's Pawn in Salt Lake City, where Michael Staples first told police he'd purchased the RG-40 revolver he claimed Whittle used to shoot Strong.

Staples later changed his story, stating he and Whittle stole the gun during a home burglary in West Valley City. Stallworth never lived in West Valley City.

The woman who'd been married to Stallworth in 1986 told detectives he'd owned a midsize Honda sedan. That's consistent with one of the witness descriptions from the Strong case, in which a woman said she'd seen a "dark blue fastback" car leaving the area with its headlights off. The woman said the car was not a sports car. That description could fit a mid-1980s Honda Accord.

KSL attempted to contact Whittle following Salt Lake City's 2025 press conference to ask if he had any comment on the identification of Stallworth as Gallegos' killer. KSL's letter to Whittle was returned by the Utah Department of Corrections. It is unclear whether Whittle received a digital copy of it, but KSL received no reply.

What it all means for Carla Maxwell

The convoluted 40-year saga of the investigation into the three cases leaves Layton police without answers or direction in the Maxwell case.

Salt Lake police have closed their two cases, but provided no theory as to who killed Maxwell shortly before 3:45 a.m. on that April morning in 1986.

Layton police are left with only circumstances and suggestions. Rickie Lee Stallworth lived in the Layton area at the time of Maxwell's shooting. He'd killed a girl with the same gun 11 months prior. But Whittle is imprisoned for shooting someone to death with that gun just two weeks later, though the story of how the gun allegedly ended up in Whittle's hand depends on the testimony of witnesses who've told inconsistent and conflicting stories.

Jones, the Layton police sergeant who inherited the Maxwell case three years ago, hopes naming Stallworth will prompt new witnesses to come forward, helping him turn those circumstances into facts.

"I believe there's people out there that were friends with him, that knew about places he'd been, places he liked to go and have more information just about his character in general," Jones said.

Time is running short to reach those people, and to provide answers to Maxwell's family. Maxwell's mother died in 2023, without knowing the truth of who killed her daughter.

"We would like to help bring some closure to them and obviously justice for her," Jones said.

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