Utah’s Cold Cases: Investigators hope to solve homicide at Ogden junkyard

Utah’s Cold Cases is a series of KSL TV stories and podcasts that highlight unsolved homicides, deaths and disappearances in our state. The stories can be found on KSL 5, the KSL+ app and ksltv.com. Utah’s Cold Cases KSL Podcast can be found wherever you listen.

OGDEN — Left for dead in a junkyard.

A man’s murder remains unsolved more than six years later, and Weber County investigators said they are hoping for information and potential DNA evidence that can pin the crime on a killer.

“I believe we’re going to get somewhere,” said Steve Haney, investigator with the Weber Metro Cold Case Task Force.

On June 1, 2019, police received a 911 call from a junkyard at 790 West 17th Street.

“There’s a man laying on the ground in our junk yard with a bloody head and a baseball bat,” the caller said. “I have no idea what happened to him.”

Haney said officers found the man, later identified as 56-year-old Scott James Perkins, gasping in a pool of his own blood with a baseball bat near his feet.

He died in the hospital three days later, and investigators said the medical examiner determined the cause of death was blunt force trauma.

According to Haney, Perkins was the main caretaker at the junkyard.

“There were other people who wanted Scott’s job,” Haney told KSL TV. “They wanted to be the head guy down at the junk yard and they wanted to be allowed to stay there and get a small stipend.”

Haney said the night prior to the killing, there was a "pseudo-party" on the property where alcohol was involved.

The property owner showed up and wasn’t happy,” Haney said, and so Perkins told everyone to leave.

Witnesses said they saw an unknown person departing from the property between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m.

“There were two people who ... slept overnight in a vehicle right outside the front gate,” Haney said. “They saw a silhouette exiting the fenced area and then getting on a bicycle and riding east on 17th Street.”

Haney said detectives interviewed multiple people who had been in and around the property, had developed a handful of potential suspects, and collected DNA evidence, but to date, investigators have not been able to pin the crime on one person.

He said the Weber Metro Cold Case Task force has been raising money through its website for advanced testing in this and other cases and planned to submit the bat’s grip to be tested by an "M-Vac" system, which is described online as a “wet vacuum based forensic DNA collection device.”

“The wrap that goes in almost a circular motion up there (around the bat's handle) is very porous,” Haney said. “We’re going to take that wrap off and we’re going to send it into this M-Vac system which basically vacuums all of the DNA that can get down in that porous material and we can take that DNA out and now we can do that advanced testing.”

Family of Scott Perkins

Perkins’ sister, Lisa Perraglio, told KSL TV her brother had a “kind heart” and that children and pets loved him.

She said he dealt with “hyperactivity” or ADHD as a teenager and eventually went off of Ritalin, which led to significant addiction issues.

Addiction, Perraglio said, led her brother to a nomadic lifestyle on the fringe of homelessness.

He moved to Utah a couple years prior to his death to take roofing jobs.

“I could always tell when he fell off the wagon because I would not hear from him,” Perraglio said. “Then when he was getting straight again, he would contact me. It could be several months that I wouldn’t hear from him.”

Perkins had a son and tried to stay up to date on his life through family members, Perraglio said.

She said she had been concerned she was going to receive a call someday from police that something bad happened because of his lifestyle.

“You always have that fear in the back of your mind — that phone call you’re getting,” Perraglio explained. “It’s going to be the one saying, ‘You’ve lost your loved one.’”

Perraglio said she still didn’t expect to receive a call that her brother had been attacked.

“He left my brother there all night long, bleeding out, with nobody helping him,” Perraglio said. “All he had to do was call 911 — that’s all he had to do.”

She said six years later she was still holding onto hope that police would bring her brother’s killer to justice.

“I have such hatred for that person that did that, left him like that,” Perraglio said. “That takes an evil, evil person to walk away and leave someone like that.”

Anybody with information on these cases is asked to call or text the Weber Metro Cold Case Task Force at 801-399-8672.

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