Anatomy of Murder - Desert Shadows (Kylen Schulte & Crystal Turner)

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

A young couple are murdered while camping in Moab. Tracking down their elusive killer would not prove easy. For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/ Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

When they were talking to their friends at the bar, they were honestly joking around about, if anything bad happens to us, it's the guy that's camping next to us. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. Murphy. Who among us has not dreamed of the open road? Packing a backpack, gassing up the RV, and leaving it all behind forever. Okay, or at least for a long weekend in the woods. There is a certain allure to what has been referred to as the van life. No mortgage, no fixed address, just nights under the stars in the hometown of your choosing.

But with that freedom also comes increased risks from theft to assault and even murder. And in places like Moab, Utah, famous for its splendor and its solitude, a call for help can go unheard, sometimes with fatal results. I got looped into the fact that we had two missing individuals, possibly in the county, and patrol had gone to what was believed to be where they were camping with no contact, no sign of the vehicle, no sign of any secondary vehicles that they were known to drive or anything like that. That's the voice of Nate Whitney, an 18-year veteran of law enforcement in Grand County, Utah, a jurisdiction roughly the size of Rhode Island, but with only 1% of the population. But despite its small, permanent population, the city of Moab and the nearby arches and Canyonlands National Parks have always been a huge draw for tourists, adventure seekers, and other transient travelers who make camp for a few months before moving on. We've got a lot of people who live the van life,

and they're only here for season or until they get tired of the place and then they leave. When they were first reported, I believe a lot of people thought, ah, they probably just moved on. It's not a big deal. We'll end up making contact with them. That being said, we did take it seriously. year old Kylan Schulte and 38 year old Crystal Turner, two free spirited new Lueds who had recently made camp in their shared van just outside Moab at the foothills of the LaSalle Mountains. We have to sidestep a moment because we can't talk about anyone camping without us talking

about camping. So Scott, are you a camper? Have you ever been? I knew this was coming. Actually, I haven't done it for a really long time. I was a Boy Scout as a kid, so I think maybe that was a big deal. Not surprised. Thank you.

But I really did enjoy it back in the day. I did enjoy the freedom and the fishing and the eating outdoors. But once the animals and the insects came, I was like, I'm done. And I think I'm similar. I'm not a camper. I love the idea of sleeping under the stars and it's beautiful and everything about it. But for me, it's that idea. It's like after I go to sleep at night, I don't want to have to go outside if I have to use the bathroom. I don't

know. It's just one of those things, but maybe one day I'll try it again. But back to our campers, 24-year-old Kylan was originally from Montana, and her friends described her lovingly as a hippie who adored butterflies, mellow vibes, and all things outdoors. So it seemed only fitting that she would fall in love with a woman named Crystal. 38-year-old Crystal was originally from Arkansas, but she too heard the call of the open road. And after meeting Kylan while hiking, the two decided to hitch their fates to each other, living the van life in campgrounds outside of Moab and commuting into town for work. They often rode their motorcycle together. Kylan would ride on the back, Crystal would drive the motorcycle. They kind of stood out in the community. When not hiking or sleeping under

the stars, Kylan worked at the Moonflower Community Co-op, a health food store in town, and Crystal worked night shifts at the local McDonald's. Both jobs allowed the women the exact flexibility they were looking for, you know, to pay the bills but not really tie them down? It still didn't go unnoticed, though, when on August 15th, 2021, Crystal failed to show up to work for her Sunday shift. The manager at McDonald's believed that they may have just started going back to church because Crystal had talked about that and had made mention that she might want Sundays off. And so they kind of took it as, ah, maybe they went to church. And while managers in Moab were really shocked when their seasonal employees seemed to disappear overnight, in Crystal's case, it was completely out of character. Crystal was always on time for the shifts that she did show up for, and she had never been a no-call, no-show. So when

she didn't show up the second day, that's when people started to get nervous. According to Kylan's father, his daughter had also missed her shift at the Moonflower and had abruptly stopped answering his phone calls and texts. By the morning of the 16th, he was worried enough to call the police and report his daughter missing.

He said that they were camped up by Warner Lake. Warner Lake is one of the man-made lakes in the LaSalle National Forest. It's quite a ways up into the LaSalles. Unfortunately for law enforcement, none of their family or friends knew the actual location of Kylan and Crystal's campsite. And in a potential missing persons case, that posed a huge problem. It is a huge, huge swath of land. It's a 45-minute drive from Moab proper up to Warner Lake. And that's on a mountain road with other roads branching off of it, with campsites all along it. We sent deputies up there. We had people contacted at the camping sites between Moab and there.

We looked at some of their other old haunts. But with such a vast search area, they had no luck locating the couple's campsite. And while their van was likely supplied with plenty of food and camping gear, not being able to locate the women was still disconcerting for law enforcement and upsetting for their families. Living off the grid was one thing, but going completely radio silent was another. Even for a couple of van lifers like Kylan and Crystal, not showing up for their jobs or staying in touch with family and friends was not like them at all, and the possibilities felt ominous.

Kylan's dad started going on Facebook and asking people on, like, Moab Classifieds and the local Moab pages on Facebook to keep an eye out for the girls, and if you see them, make sure that they contact friends and family. The search for Kylan and Crystal extended beyond social media as friends and neighbors organized search parties to scour the surrounding areas. Then, by what must have seemed like divine luck, 64-year-old Cindy Sue Hunter stumbled upon what she believed to be the couple's campsite. But from the state of it, it was clear that something was terribly wrong.

The site was, for lack of better wording, a mess. Just total disarray with drink bottles littering the ground, clothes scattered under the trees, and their tent just off kilter with its doors left open. Fearing the worst, she looked inside the tent only to find it empty. Upon finding their campsite, she called Sean Paul, Kylan's dad.

He told her to call 911. But before police could arrive, Cindy would make a terrible discovery. In an irrigation ditch bordering the campsite, Cindy spotted a woman's body partially submerged in the water. And then shortly after that, she called back and reported that she had found one of the bodies. Law enforcement officers from the Grand County Sheriff's Office arrived and were able to positively identify the body as that of 24-year-old Kylan

Schulte. The body of Crystal Turner was also discovered in the same ditch further down from the campsite. They were found away from the tent. They were separated by a number of yards. You could see one body from the location of the other body. Both women had suffered what appeared to be multiple gunshot wounds in their sides, backs, and chests. Natesgut told him that they hadn't been dead for very long. The girls hadn't been moved around by animals at all. They hadn't been touched by animals.

The camp is called Bear Camp. There wasn't any signs of bear in the area. But there was evidence of something just as savage. Both women were found undressed from the waist down. A medical examiner would later determine that they had both been sexually assaulted post-mortem. Honestly, I just wasn't expecting a homicide. I'd been doing this for eight years, and then when I saw the injuries on the bodies, it was readily apparent that it was a double homicide. And for the veteran detective who had looked for his share of lost campers, the fate of Kylan and Crystal came as a complete shock, and solving their double murder would require all of the resources that their small agency could muster up.

So attempting to solve these murders would begin with creating a timeline of when these ladies had last been seen up until the time they were killed, tracking down any potential witnesses, and starting to create a list of potential suspects. The actual location of where the car and the tent were at, if you didn't know exactly where to look, you would miss them every time. I knew that we had driven the entirety of the loop road looking for their vehicle. But again, if you didn't know right where to look, you wouldn't be able to find it.

Which had police immediately suspicious about how Cindy Sue had been able to locate their campsite in the first place. And I've got to say, Anastasia, that was what came to my mind as well. How would she know exactly where to go? I mean, I'd have a lot of questions about that, about how was she able to find that exact spot? And I think what you said is probably the thing that everyone thought when they first heard that this woman had found the site, but the answer she gave investigators didn't make things any more clear-cut. She told us that she was directed to the site by otherworldly forces. So the first kind of sense for me is, well, maybe she knew where they were camping because Cindy hadn't come up in the original missing persons investigation.

Kylan's father did eventually vouch for Cindy Sue, that she was a family friend, and her alibi did check out. But in the early stages of the investigation, the small police force just couldn't afford to take any chances. Everyone's story would have to be checked and rechecked, and that's exactly how it should go. Because in one of these, especially when it's out in the middle of nowhere, everybody's a suspect until you can prove otherwise. The good thing about it being in the middle of nowhere is it's in the middle of nowhere. So if somebody is up there, you have a pretty good, well, why were you here? The bad part about being out in the middle of nowhere is unless there's something like cell phone forensics

or security camera footage from a cabin, for instance, it's really hard to place somebody at that location. The remote location would also make finding any potential witnesses a real challenge. There were other campers down in that location at the time of the homicide too. But those other campers, they said they didn't hear a thing, not a scream, not even one of the 12 gunshots that was fired into the women's bodies. The trees and everything around the campsite kind of messed with the sounds that were going on. And a lot of people out here can't tell the difference between a handgun going off in the distance and a car door shutting.

You know, Anastigua, we've all seen the movies and the TV shows where they depict a killer, take someone out to the middle of nowhere, like a desert, and commit a murder or they bury someone. The real reasons why those locations do become a popular place for killers is just that. No one's out there. There's no reliable witnesses. There's no CCTV, no doorbell cameras, or even neighbors to create a timeline or to ID things out of the ordinary. What about you? That's exactly it. It's in the wide open spaces where you aren't going to get all the other things when you have congestion and people close together. So really investigators here, without all those things at their fingertips at least, are going to have to rely heavily on any potential physical evidence at the scene.

I was looking for tracks of vehicles and tracks of people, mainly because the ground wasn't exactly dry. That weekend and all the way till Wednesday, it had rained four times during that time period. So I was looking to see if tire tracks were left or if a footprint was left. The things that I noticed that I thought were out of place always ended up being Cindy Sue. I caught her tracks a couple of times as she was walking around and trying to check the campsite for the girls. And the tire tracks that I was able to find did belong to Cindy's and or Chief Deputy Mecham's vehicle. As with any crime scene, time was of the essence. But with an outdoor crime scene in a remote area where the weather was unpredictable, it was even more crucial to process this scene quickly.

At a small agency, you wear a lot of hats. We do our own crime scene processing primarily, unless we have time to call somebody in from Salt Lake or Utah County Sheriff's Office, their crime scene techs, or if it's the state, to call somebody in from Salt Lake or Utah County Sheriff's Office, their crime scene techs, or if it's the state to call them in. But that's a four and a half, four hour drive for anybody up there to come and help us out. But with the storm coming in and a lot of evidence being outside and in the elements, it was elected that we would document everything as well as we could, preserve as much evidence as we could, and get it out of the elements as fast as we could.

Investigators scoured the campsite for crucial clues, and soon they hit pay dirt. During our processing of the scene, we found a number of shell casings, one of which was inside the tent. The shell casing from a nine millimeter gun would help identify the kind of weapon used to kill the two women, but identifying the person who pulled the trigger, now that would require more.

We left all the contents that could be left in the tent in the tent, and then we bundled it up, packaged it, and moved it down to our emergency operations center so we could process it in a good contained area. During that bundling process, we actually recovered one of the bullets that had passed through somebody and was caught in the bottom floor of the tent. Heavy rainfall over the previous two days

made it unfortunately likely that any potential forensic evidence would have been obscured or even destroyed. But the single bullet fragment spoke volumes about this crime. Not only could police potentially match the bullet to a murder weapon, it also spoke to motive because it appeared that the women were ambushed while they were still inside their tent. Their car was there. It didn't look like anything had been stolen from them. Their vehicle was still locked. The keys were in the tent. Their phone was still there. They had photography equipment in their car that wasn't touched. Which really makes it clear that Kylan and Crystal were not victims of a robbery turned fatal. They were most likely unsuspecting, defenseless victims. Had they been watched? Had they been stalked? We know they were cornered and killed in cold blood. And their killer

was still at large. Kyle and Schulte and Crystal Turner were shot and killed at a remote campsite in the Utah woods. With robbery ruled out as a motive, detectives from Grand County turned to their friends and family for information about who may have had any reason to hurt them. We asked if the girls had had any problems with anybody, asking if they had any enemies, if somebody had talked bad about them, if there was anybody in their past that didn't like them. According to friends, the women were both well-liked without an enemy in the world. So police focused on piecing together the timeline of the night the women were last seen alive. They had gone to Woody's Tavern, a local bar. Prior to 9 p.m., they'd left the bar. Crystal and Kylan had left to go hang out with another friend. And that friend said that they left around midnight.

So when they left around midnight, that would put them back at their camp around one o'clock in the morning. And then they were found on Wednesday. And it was a matter of trying to fill in that gap of five days and seeing who was where and when and why. So they're at a bar on Friday night, but by Sunday, Crystal had missed her shift. To me, it really just seems that obviously they're killed sometime between the early morning hours of Saturday and then by the time she misses work Sunday morning. Which is a really good reason I would want to start with who was at the bar with them. Did they have any arguments with anyone? Was there anyone suspicious checking them out or potentially even following them? At the beginning of the investigation, there was rumor that there

had been a confrontation at Woody's Tavern, but that was not the case. When we talked to the witnesses that were there with them on Friday night, they said, no, everything went good. They hung out for a shorter period of time than people were thinking that they would. Everything was fine at the bar. There was no confrontation, no bad vibes, nothing. But according to their friends, Kylan and Crystal did mention something that seemed like nothing at the time, but now sounded like a terrifying, at least potential, new lead. When they were talking to their friends at the bar, they were honestly joking around about if anything bad happens to us, it's the guy that's camping next to us. Apparently, Kylan and Crystal had experienced what they called a strange encounter at their campsite just the night before.

The couple had been relaxing together in a hammock when a man with a beard pulled up in his vehicle, got out, and let out a wolf-like howl in their direction. And if that wasn't bizarre enough, the man returned later and set up camp uncomfortably close to Kylan and Crystal's tent. It then became, well, who's this guy camping next to you? We don't know who he is, but they kind of described him. He's older, has a beard, acts weird. Everybody was like, OK, we need to focus on this creepy camper dude. So on paper, he sounded like the perfect suspect, the creepy guy in the woods.

But in reality, investigators had no idea who this mystery camper could be or what kind of vehicle he drove or more importantly, where he was now. That question was posed to me after the investigation. Well, why didn't you put more effort into finding the creepy camper? And my answer to that was actually in the form of a question. Do you know how many men with beards do the transient camping in Moab, Utah on a daily basis?

When I put it to him like that, it becomes readily apparent to everybody that trying to find one man without a vehicle description and a very vague physical description becomes nearly impossible. With Moab's transient community and miles and miles of uninhabited wilderness, it would have felt like tracking down a ghost. But as they will prove, even a ghost leaves tracks. People come to our area, most of them are having a good time, but when you're out in the boonies, there are some people who believe that they're not going to get caught because they're out and away from people. And they don't realize that their victim has a say on if they get caught. And not just the victims, but their friends and family as well.

A memorial service in Moab Old City Park drew mourners who filled mason jars with roses and sunflowers, while Kylan's father set up a clue booth inviting the public to share tips with the Moab and Grand County Sheriff's Department. The memorial was a testament to how many lives Kylan and Crystal touched, but it also provided police with several promising leads.

I got tips that Crystal had a run-in with a guy who was harassing her. I guess it could border on stalking. We ended up catching him on security camera video somewhere else at the time of the homicide. There was also the individual that police interviewed who seemed to know more than he should about the crime scene. And they had mentioned they thought that Crystal had been in the military, which wasn't true, but that she had been trained with the 9mm. Well, the reason that stood out to me is that we hadn't released the caliber of weapon at that point in time that was used in the double homicide.

And so when he mentioned the fact that she had been trained on the 9mm, it's like, why would he mention 9mm specifically? And then there was the possibility that Kylan and Crystal's murders may have been connected to another high-profile case, the recent murder of 22-year-old Gabby Petito. Gabby had been traveling by van through Moab with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie before going missing sometime during the last weeks of August 2021. So not only were they in the Moab area,

according to police reports, the couple had been seen fighting in front of the Mayflower Co-op, the same store where Kylan worked, just days before Kylan and Crystal were reported missing. Brian Loundry had even reportedly spent the night at Woody's Tavern, possibly on the very night that Kylan and Crystal were last seen alive. While these could just be coincidences, it was too striking for the public to ignore. So the Grand County sheriffs reached out to the FBI.

Hey, we've got this double homicide down here. Can you tell us where Brian Laundrie was on this date and time? And Scott, when I think about like Laundrie as a suspect, it is these odd coincidences, but it was also this case that was everywhere all over the news. Like I remember like myself and every other legal analyst out there, we were being getting calls like left and right

to give our take on just every little thing that was being released to the public. So it just almost seems natural when he is so in the public eye and then you start to put these pieces together that people are going to at least want to connect the dots. We do know that during the Gabby Petito case, the FBI was fielding thousands of tips from sightings to, you know, you name it. And here we have a fresh double homicide, whether it was a far stretch to connect them at all together. It doesn't mean that the media won't be all over

it. And the one solid thing with Lowndry that then evolved was this. Lowndry's body was eventually found near his parents' home in Florida, where he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And inside the notebook found next to his body, he confessed to killing his girlfriend Gabby, but there was no mention of any other victims. He was about four hours away from my understanding, but that didn't stop people from speculating online and believing that Brian Laundrie was actually the homicide suspect. In this age of 24-hour news and internet sleuths, the small sheriff's office in Grand County found themselves overwhelmed with rumors, conjecture, and tips from the public. I had one man call in and say he was convinced that his wife had done it while she was on a girl's trip to Moab. I had one woman call in and say she swore it was her father-in-law

who had killed these girls while he was traveling from Colorado to Washington. In an all-too-familiar scenario, substantial rewards being offered by local businesses only served to add to the deluge of dubious leads. The problem is that everybody would call in with tips all the time. And they kept on pointing to all your drug dealers and drug users, try and get the other drug dealers and drug users in trouble for whatever reason. So we had people pointing fingers at local users and local dealers. And so we had to interview them, look at cell phone histories and stuff like that. But as we've discussed, you have to track down every single tip and lead, or you risk jeopardizing not only the investigation,

but also securing a conviction down the road. We had conducted well over 100 interviews, and we ended up tracking down a whole lot of people that live all across the country and making contact with them by phone or having local agencies go and talk to them for us just to be able to say that, nope, we followed up on every potential lead that we possibly could and we eliminated them because of A, B, or C, just in case this had gone to trial. But despite incredible efforts by local law enforcement, Kylan and Crystal's case was also in danger of going cold. We ended up asking for help from the Unified Police Department out of Salt Lake. And they sent down three of their detectives. And those guys, that's all they do.

They just investigate major crimes, usually homicides, end or gang shootings, stuff like that. They were a lifesaver because the amount of work that those guys got done was phenomenal. And one area where local investigators could use some more manpower was in collecting and examining any and all video surveillance footage they could find from in and around Moab before, during, and after the murder of Kylan and Crystal. Because while there weren't cameras in the campgrounds, there were cameras on some of the businesses in town and on the roads leading towards and away from the LaSalle Mountains where the women were camped. It was a long shot, but investigators were determined to leave no stone unturned.

We were going through the security camera footage, and one of the detectives, Greg, he's kind of an old-school guy, he's all, that car doesn't make sense to me. And he points at this black Toyota Yaris. For us here in Moab, it's just another transient hoopty. We deal with those type of vehicles all the time, so we didn't think much of it, but he's like, that one just doesn't fit. That one doesn't fit with the other ones on the road.

We need to look for that car. In the meantime, investigators were still determined to track down as many people as possible that had any contact with the victims in the months prior to their murder. And there was still one person they had yet to locate. Adam Pinkusevich. He wasn't a friend of Kylan or Crystal's, nor had his name come up in any of the hundreds of tips police had received so far. But he did have something important in common with one of the victims. Adam Pinkusevich worked at McDonald's on the night shift. Crystal and Adam worked together, so my next question would be, were they friendly or were there ever any issues between them?

There was no direct history between them. Crystal would go to work at five in the morning, get off work around one or two. Adam wouldn't go to work until three or four in the afternoon, so there was actually no overlap in their schedules ever. He knew who they were because Crystal and Kylan would come into McDonald's often at nighttime and get mistake sandwiches or make themselves sandwiches. But according to some of the employees, Adam was a bit of a hothead,

yelling at Crystal for helping herself to free cheeseburgers during an off shift, getting belligerent with another co-worker, and even threatening to beat her up. Behavior that eventually got him fired and potentially left him with a volatile grudge. Whether they had an issue with the guy or not, the girls are missing. And it raises the question that could easily be answered. Did they know him? Were they aware of him? Could he be this creepy camp guy?

And if he was, why wouldn't Crystal have recognized him? When I first hear it, I'm like, it's kind of a long shot, right? How many times are you going to start looking at all the people that are in someone's world and find someone who's a hothead or who's giving someone a hard time? However, when they started to look at him, there were certain things that were lining up, even if just small things on their face or in this case on his. For example, Adam had a beard. So we do a deep dive search on him and come up with a potential address in Hollywood, Florida. So Grant County investigators set off from my old stomping grounds in South Florida

to track down Adam Pinkusevich at his last known address. But it didn't prove so easy. We went to a couple of addresses that were associated with Adam. He ended up not being at any of those addresses. But then Hollywood Homicide started looking through their records for Adam. I remember sitting in Hollywood Homicide's office in their bullpen. And they said, well, this Adam guy has a black Toyota Yaris registered to him. And that's when the snowball started rolling in my mind. Like, no way, no way. That's not Adam's car, is it?

A black Toyota Yaris. The same car caught on camera in the vicinity of the crime scene. When Hollywood Homicide said, he's got a Toyota Yaris and it's black in color. I was like, oh my gosh, no way, no way, no way, no way. And then they ran the van and found out it had been sold. to Yaris and it's black in color. I was like, oh my gosh, no way, no way, no way, no way. And then they ran the VIN and found out it had been sold. At that point in time, I'm like, he sold the vehicle. He's on the run. We need to find out who sold the vehicle, what he traded it

in for, the VIN number on that vehicle, and just start hounding this guy. Wherever he's at, that's where we need to be. Homicide detectives in Hollywood, Florida have helped their brothers in blue from Utah in connecting one of Crystal's ex-co-workers to a car spotted near the campground where she and Kylan were killed. But apparently Adam had swapped his Toyota Yaris for another car and was possibly on the run, a run that, as it turned out, wouldn't last long. Myself and Deputy Honor went and took that information and we started calling people and we found out that the vehicle was recovered by a tow company at the scene of a suicide. We contacted the local PD in Iowa and found out that it was Adam who had committed suicide. To be in a position of really starting to connect the dots, feeling like you've identified

the person who may be responsible for a double murder, only to find out that they've taken their own life dying by suicide, really takes the winds out of the investigative sails. If Adam was responsible for the murders of Kylan and Crystal, he was taking that secret to the grave. But hold on. Even if their prime suspect was now dead, it's about the evidence. So the question that needs to be asked is, was there evidence that pointed to him as the killer? Vankuzovic worked with Crystal and potentially held some kind of grudge against her. His Toyota Yaris was spotted near the crime scene. He fled town to Florida, where he sold the car, and then he died by suicide.

Taking together, his death sounds like the actions of a guilty conscience. That was the biggest signal for me that Adam was the guy that we were looking for. He had no reason to really commit suicide, other than if he was feeling very, very guilty for something. The suicide note found in the motel room where Pankusevich's body was recovered mentioned getting fired over an altercation with what he calls the, quote, lefty liberal bosses. But there was also something else. There was also, of course, the gun. There was a weapon located at his suicide.

That weapon was actually sent off to the FBI crime lab to analyze against the recovered projectiles, both from the scene and from the autopsies. While the lab worked on matching Pancusovich's gun that killed Kylan and Crystal, law enforcement got to work trying to establish hard evidence of his guilt. And it would not be easy. We examined the vehicle with alternative light sources, got a couple of hits on it, but it had been detailed cleaned a couple times before we got to it. We made contact with some of Adam's family. They were very helpful. They gave us documentation. They gave us Adam's phones. Armed with a search warrant for his phone records, investigators were able to uncover a disturbing digital trail. His phone was very revealing as far as cover his tracks and delete his data.

Location data indicated that not only had he fled Utah immediately after the murders, he went to great lengths to hide it. But despite these efforts, police were able to recover enough data from his phone to paint a troubling picture of his mental state. There were descriptions of violent fantasies. One of the notes even read, and I quote, I'm afraid I have an impulse to kill or rape people. Adam was in general an angry individual, unless you met a certain standard that he had in his own mind for everybody that he met. If you didn't meet his standards or didn't align with what his political views were, you were not worth his time. It's not that he wouldn't give you the time of day, but he wouldn't give you any sort of respect.

But the most damning evidence came when investigators tracked down a friend who admitted that Pinkusevich had shown up at his door in Waterloo, Iowa, unannounced on August 27th, 2021. After a couple of weeks, he sensed something was very wrong. Adam's friend had confronted Adam because Adam would not get a job, would not support himself. So they confronted Adam and basically said, what the heck's going on? Adam then said that I can't go and apply for a job because they'll find my name. Who's going to find your name? The cops. Why would the cops be looking for your name? And then Adam told his friend, because I killed two women in Utah. Killed two women. According to the friend, Pinkusevich went into enough grisly detail about the murders to convince that friend that what Pinkusevich

had said was all true. The friend knew details about the homicide, specifically where the girls were when they were shot, that he couldn't have known unless Adam had told them or if they were there. Specifically, how Pinkusevich had shot the women in their tent before dragging their bodies to where they were found by the water's edge, which actually brings up another possibility. Did Pinkusevich have an accomplice? What are the chances that this person who has intimate knowledge of the crime scene that no one else could have could have been there? Well, there's only two ways that he knows that. He was either told that information or he was there.

So you have to eliminate him as a suspect. And we then confirmed through cell phone records that Adam's friend was not in Utah and that they were in Iowa at the time of the homicide. Leaving Adam Pankusevich as the lone killer of Kylan Schulte and Crystal Turner. And so, like in so many other senseless murders, we are left to wonder why. Why did this disturbed young man with fantasies of sexual assault and murdering people finally act on his darkest impulses. The reason that Adam gave his friend is he was angry at the girls for telling him what to do. Adam was angry at them for telling him what to do in his camp. Of course, we want to always avoid making

generalizations because every murder is unique and every killer has their own distinct, often very dark motives. But it is worth pointing out that it does seem here, yet like it's an example, again, of an angry young man being triggered, and in this case by two strong, independent women, and then acting out on his most deranged and violent fantasies. When we asked the friend, why didn't you tell anybody that Adam confessed to you? The friend was like, I was afraid that he would hurt me. Well, then we asked the friend, did you know that Adam's dead? And the friend was actually shocked and got emotional. They thought that Adam had just left town again because that's what Adam did.

When Adam got tired of a place, he just left. Given the circumstantial evidence and his alleged confession in May of 2022, officials in Utah announced that Adam Pinkusevich was their only suspect. And if he was alive, he would have been charged with the murders of Kylan Schulte and Crystal Turner. Due to his death, of course, it wasn't possible for him ever to be found guilty in a court of law. But investigators were confident enough

to officially close this case. And even after his death and his definite connection through this investigation, more information continued to pour in. After we announced Adam as the suspect in the double homicide, I actually had contact with another woman. She had come down to Moab for a family reunion. They had like three or four RV campers and they had parked in this

one camping area, which had one black small car in this large camping area. Adam's behavior at that campsite, along with the descriptions that the girls gave to their friends at Woody's the night before they were murdered, all led us to believe that Adam was not only the homicide suspect, but he was also this creepy camper dude that was camped next to Crystal and Kylan and that they had warned their friends about. Kylan and Crystal were simply unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time, tragically crossing paths with this savage killer. It wasn't an animal out in the wild, nor the unforgiving landscape of the mountains that they loved,

but a person, a person, a man with a dark mind and a loaded gun. The closing of the investigation was bittersweet for the families of both victims, since they would never be able to see Kylan and Crystal's killer face justice for his crimes. But there was still relief, a feeling best summed up by Kylan's father. Sean Paul was just so happy that somebody had been found, even though Adam was gone and wouldn't stand trial. He was just happy that there was that closure for him and that he wouldn't have to stay awake at night wondering where this person was at if they were out there doing it to somebody else's daughter. For Kylan, it was always about flowers

and butterflies. And for Crystal, Harleys and medium rare steaks. Their friends and family said they were just perfect for each other. And for Kylan, their relationship and their love could not have come at a better time. Before Kylan and Crystal met, Kylan was still suffering from a tragic event that happened just years before. The untimely death of her younger brother, Seth, six years earlier, who at only 15 years old was shot and killed when he knocked on a friend's window in the middle of the night, the loss of her brother and trauma only healed by love. Kylan and Crystal brought happiness to each other and to the many who loved them both. While their bodies are gone, obviously the love for these women is not. One of their family members, in talking about their beautiful souls,

she ended what she said with this, let their love light shine. So we will end with that too. Kylan and Crystal, let their love light shine. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an Audiochuck original. Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer.

So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?