The Deck - Joyce "Tina" Gallegos & Gabrielle DiStefano (7 & 3 of Spades, Utah)

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

Our card this week is Joyce "Tine" Gallegos, the 7 of Spades from Utah and Gabrielle DiStefano, the 4 of Spades fom Utah. Joyce “Tina” Gallegos is believed to have been murdered sometime around August 11, 1982. Ten days after being reported missing on August 11, a fisherman spotted her body on a sandbar in Utah’s Ogden River. A month after Tina’s body was found, a construction worker just outside of Ogden discovered another body —this one wrapped in plastic and left in a ditch. Law enforcement have long suspected Tina and Gabby’s cases are linked, and a recent discovery has solidified that suspicion for good. If you know anything about the 1982 murders of Joyce “Tina” Gallegos and Gabrielle DiStefano, please call the Weber County Sheriff’s Office at 801-395-8221. To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org

Our hearts this week are Joyce Tina Gallegos and Gabrielle Distofano, the seven and three of spades from Utah. In 1982 Tina and Gabby mysteriously disappeared from the same northern Utah city only days apart. When their bodies were found just miles from each other, many people took notice of the similarities in their cases, and a recent development in the case has permanently linked their two murders. For 40 years, their cases have been unsolved, but police are still hopeful the right person is out there, who has the power to bring their killer or killers to justice.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. It was 2005 at the Weber County Sheriff's Office in Utah. The agency's stack of cold cases were piling up. So then Sergeant Janice Van Orden decided to revisit some of the cases that she'd been watching collect dust on the shelf for years, particularly two of the county's coldest cases that had been brought to her attention by a friend of hers who was an investigator at the Weber County's attorney's office. This was the 1982 murders of Joyce Tina Gallegos and Gabrielle Distofano.

Law enforcement in Weber County had long suspected that the two cases were related, but today no one could prove it. It was just a feeling. Gabby and Tina didn't know each other, but they ran in the same circles. Both girls were killed in 1982 within a few days of each other.

Their bodies found within the same five-mile radius, and both of them were killed with the same kind of weapon. But Sergeant Van Orden wasn't satisfied with just a feeling. A mere theory wouldn't even get them close to finding the monster who did this. If they were connected, she wanted to be able to prove it. So she and other detectives with the Weber County Sheriff's Office dove head first into Gabby and Tina's cases, refamiliarizing themselves with the two investigations that hadn't seen any movement since 1984, a whopping 21 years earlier.

They started with Tina's case, since she was the first one to be killed. And when they went to dig up Tina's files, they realized it would be a bit more difficult than they thought to revisit her case, because most of the initial reports were missing. They just completely vanished. That meant tons of vital information was just gone, and it meant that they'd have to gather the decades-old information they needed another way.

So Sergeant Van Orden reached out to the original detectives on the case, hoping that maybe they had the files tucked away in their basement somewhere, or at the very least, hopefully they remembered enough information to give her a summary of the case and the initial investigation, but her hopes were dashed.

I didn't learn anything from them. All I thought was, I can't remember. It's been too long ago. I don't know how you could lose a murder investigation, a report of a murder investigation and not know what you did with your report. That is your report. Don't give it away. You don't go to a meeting and say, oh, hey, take this. It just blows my mind that anything like that would ever happen with a homicide. But Sergeant Van Orden wasn't giving up. She knew that there were two other agencies in Weber County that had a hand in the initial investigation.

The Harrisville and Ogden police departments. She reached out to both agencies, and thankfully, they both still had reports on Tina's case. Sergeant Van Orden assembled a team of other investigators, and together, they combed through the reports to figure out what happened to Tina all those years ago. And here is the timeline that they were able to piece together. On August 21, 1982, a fisherman in Ogden, Utah was enjoying a bright summer day at the Ogden River when something unusual caught his eye. Out in the middle of the river,

resting on a sandbank was what looked to be a person just laying their motionless. When the person didn't move for several minutes, the fisherman started to fear the worst. So he left to go find a phone and call police. Soon after, deputies with the Weber County Sheriff's Office arrived on scene. The person on the sandbank was a young woman, and unfortunately there were no signs of life.

Just by looking at her, it was easy for deputies to tell that she had been dead for a while. She was dressed in a pair of Levi's jeans and a plain shirt with her jewelry still on, though she didn't have any idea on her, so it wasn't immediately clear who she was. But officers could tell that she was maybe 20, 30 years old and she had suffered some kind of trauma to her head. Once she was taken for autopsy, her exact cause of death was immediately clear.

The medical examiner found that she had been shot twice, once through her lower eyelid and once through the back of the neck. I mean, to police, this looked like an execution. The ME determined that the weapon used was a large calibre gun, a 38. One of the bullets that was still lodged in her skull was extracted to keep as evidence. The Emmy noted that the woman was badly bruised, but it didn't seem to be because of a beating. The bruising seemed to have been post-mortem, likely from hitting rocks and debris as she floated down the river. Now, in 2005, when her case was being re-examined, detectives couldn't find any information on how the woman was identified.

There weren't any missing person's reports matching the woman, so it couldn't have been through that route. So it's likely that she was identified through fingerprints or maybe dental records. Whichever way it happened, within a few days of the woman being found, authorities confirmed her identity. She was 21-year-old Ogden resident Joyce Tina Gallegos. When police first learned her name, it probably sounded familiar because for the past week, they'd had her purse in their possession.

On August 13th, someone had come to the police station and turned in a purse that they found in the Ogden River. Once again, detectives in 2005 don't know who exactly it was that turned it in. That's another part of Tina's case that's been lost to time. All that was written down was that someone who found it somewhere came in and turned it in on the 13th. Anyway, once Tina was identified, her family was located and notified of her death. No one had reported her missing, but she hadn't exactly been missing for a concerning amount

of time. Friends and family had just seen her out and about on the 11th, which is just 10 days before she was found. One relative told deputies that they'd seen Tina at a bus stop in downtown Ogden. As those original detectives interviewed friends and family, one detail about Tina's final days stuck out to them. She'd recently been in a fight, and interestingly enough, the fight happened to be at the same bus stop where she was last seen at, just a day before she disappeared. Tina was interviewed by police the day of that fight.

And this is what she said happened. She was waiting for the bus after leaving the Weber County Vocational Workshop when she saw a man who was later identified as Shannon Hale. And this man was pushing people around. Tina said when she asked him to stop, his aggression turned toward her. He slapped her several times, which caused her to fall to the ground and bump her head. That's when a counselor from the workshop came running outside to break up the fight. When police arrived and talked to Shannon, he told them that Tina started it, though Tina denied instigating things,

but she did decide not to press charges. As those original investigators continued to look further into Tina's life, it seemed that other than Shannon, Tina didn't really have enemies. Our reporting team spoke with Steve Haney, an investigator with the Weber County Attorney's Office. He's re-examining the case today alongside the Weber County Sheriff's Office. And Steve said that even though Tina lived a rather quiet life, she was known to have a dangerous habit. She was a free spirit.

Everybody seemed to like her. She, you know, would, like I said, hang around Ogden and stand there and tell somebody rolled up and then hop in with them. She knew a lot of people. She usually jumped in with somebody she knew, but sometimes it was just some random person who would just give her a ride. But then again, Ogden was also a lot different.

You know, everything was. America was different back in 1982. You know, and there was a lot of trust that you could jump in a vehicle with somebody and not be putting yourself in danger. Just three days after Tina's body was found, police were already hitting a wall. Detective Mike Wells was interviewed by the Daily Herald and said the case was puzzling.

He said, quote, we're following up on routine leads, but we have nothing definite. It doesn't appear that robbery was the motive since her jewelry was still intact, and it doesn't appear it was a sex crime because she was fully clothed. End quote. But the setback in the investigation didn't last long. 24 hours after that article was published, an arrest was made. A 35-year-old man who will call Raymond was arrested on a warrant all the way over

in San Jose, California, 800 some miles away from Ogden, Utah, and he was charged with second-degree murder in Tina's death. So you're probably wondering the same thing everyone else was wondering when news of his arrest broke. What did a California man have to do with a Utah woman's murder? Well, Raymond had actually lived in Utah with his mother for quite some time before moving to California. They lived in clear field together, which is about 15 minutes south of Ogden. Not only that, but Raymond had known Tina when he lived in Utah. They only knew each other for about two months, but sometime within those two months, they

went on some dates. It wasn't fully explained what Raymond's motive would have been for killing Tina or why police zeroed in on him so quickly, and it's something that's deeply puzzled detectives who were reviewing the case in 2005. But according to court documents, our reporting team got, he was charged with second-degree murder and held on a $100,000 bond. On September 16th, 26 days after Tina was found, Raymond's preliminary hearing was held. I'd imagine Raymond's defense team thought this would be a pretty open and shut case. There was no evidence that their client had anything to do with the murder.

And what's more, he currently lived in an entirely different state. But what the defense team didn't know was that the prosecution was preparing to drop a bombshell. They had a key witness who was ready to go public. Now, I want to pause for a moment and let you know that the information you're about to hear is something that has completely fallen through the cracks over the past few decades. It's been entirely forgotten.

Like I said earlier, because Tina's case file was lost, that means a ton of vital information disappeared from law enforcement's eyes. Vital information like potentially damning testimony from their primary suspects preliminary hearing. Detectives on the case today weren't even aware that this witness existed until our investigative team uncovered old archived newspaper articles

detailing the court proceedings against Raymond. So what I'm about to tell you has been, by a complete accident, one of the best kept secrets in Lieber County history. At Raymond's preliminary hearing, the prosecution called to the stand a 28-year-old man named Frank Galey. According to reporting done by both the Salt Lake Tribune and the Daily Herald, Frank was introduced in the hearing as a quote-unquote, Ogden Police undercover narcotics officer. And what Frank told the court put an end to the looming question of why police had gotten tunnel vision for Raymond.

You see, Frank testified that back on August 12th, the day after Tina was last seen, Raymond confessed to him that he killed Tina and then dumped her in the Ogden River. Frank also said that during this interaction interaction Raymond tried to sell him a large caliber pistol. Now this is where things get really confusing. After Frank testified, Raymond's defense attorney pointed out something in an attempt to tarnish Frank's credibility. He noted that Frank himself had two felony convictions on his record. And that's what stumped me. Like I said earlier, Frank was referred to as an undercover narcotics officer.

So how is he also a felon? Like that is actually one of the few stipulations for becoming a police officer. You cannot have any felony convictions. Our team spoke with Sergeant Terrence Lavley with the Weber County Sheriff's Office for this episode. And we asked how in the world a man with two felony convictions could have been a law enforcement officer. And Sergeant Laveley said that it might have been a case where newspaper reporters misunderstood

who Frank was. Perhaps Frank was actually a confidential informant, not an undercover narcotics officer, as newspapers at the time reported. But that explanation is also baffling, because if that were the case, if Frank were a confidential informant, then why would the newspapers openly name him? And the court documents we have don't clarify this whatsoever. But okay, whether Frank was an undercover officer or a confidential informant,

either way his testimony was damning. But Raymond maintained his innocence and pleaded not guilty. In fact, he said that he couldn't have killed Tina because he was in California at that point, hours away from where Tina was killed. It took a while for his defense team to prove his alibi, but according to reporting by the Daily Herald, by early November, the judge was satisfied with the proof and actually dropped the charges against Raymond altogether, less than two weeks before his trial was scheduled to begin.

It's not clear what alibi was so convincing for the judge to drop all charges before the trial, but whatever the case, Raymond went on to file a $350,000 lawsuit against the Weber County Sheriff's Office. Also against a handful of individual deputies, the county and the state of Utah for being wrongfully accused. There are many things about Tina's case that are frustrating, but this is the part that leaves my head spinning. If Raymond's alibi was proven to be airtight beyond a shadow of a doubt, then that means that Frank was flat out lying. So, why would this Frank guy lie about something so serious? Was he trying to cover his own tracks?

And I still can't get over who is this man? Is he an undercover narcotics officer, a now publicly identified confidential informant, or is he just some guy? And obviously at AudioChuck, we don't like not knowing, so with the help of Detective Haney, our reporting team did some digging. And we got our hands on some court documents from Raymond's trial, but unfortunately, the

documents weren't nearly as detailed as we hoped. The records say that Frank Galey did testify at Raymond's preliminary hearing because he's listed as a witness, but they don't say what he said or even who he was. So Detective Haney tried another route, city records. He went through Ogden's old records and he found no evidence that Frank was ever a police officer with the city. So Detective Haney says it's likely

that Frank was a police informant because that's the only explanation that makes sense of the fact that he had felonies on his record. But again, even if that's the case, it's still unclear why he accused Raymond of the murder. So our reporting team put in a records request to the Ogden Police Department to see if they had record of Frank's employment with the department. As of this recording, we still haven't received any such records. And we knew it would take some time. So our reporting team decided to look Frank up

and see if we could contact him directly to confirm once and for all who he was and why he testified at Raymond's hearing. But sadly, all we found was his obituary. According to Provinant Funeral Homes, he passed away in August 2018. So we tried the next best thing after that. Our reporter found Frank's widow on Facebook

and sent her a message just asking if she could confirm or deny if Frank was ever an undercover narcotics officer. And minutes after sending that message, our reporter got blocked. So our reporter tried the cell number that we found for her online, but it was actually a wrong number. Even without total confirmation, the fact that both the city and the police department didn't have record of his employment, and the fact that he had two felonies on his record,

I think it's safe to say that Frank was not an undercover narcotics officer. But it does to leave a few questions. Why did both the daily herald and the Salt Lake Tribune report the exact same wording that Frank was, a quote, Ogden police undercover narcotics officer, did both of the papers get that vital information wrong or was someone lying about who Frank was? But I don't know, maybe it doesn't matter all that much who he was, because the fact of the matter is that regardless of title, either Frank or Raymond was flat out lying. Right? Either Frank's testimony was BS or Raymond's alibi was. And whoever was lying got away

with it. That's the mystery. And frankly, it's a mystery that may never be solved, because police have never addressed it, and up until our reporter started looking into the case, it was a forgotten part of Tina's story. So after the charges against Raymond were dropped, Tina's case went cold. And that's how it would stay for decades, until Sergeant Van Orden and her team set out to warm it up. And once they'd familiarize themselves with Tina's case, they needed to learn the ins and outs of Gabby Dastofano's case.

Because while authorities in Ogden had been busy investigating Tina's murder, Gabby's body was found just 10 minutes up the road. Now, this case was a bit easier for Sargent Van Orden and her team to dive into, because the initial reports were all still intact. So in 2005, Sargent Van Orden moved from reviewing Tina's unsolved murder to Gabby's, and this is what she pieced together. On September 16, 1982, a construction worker in Harrisville, Utah about 10 minutes north of Ogden was working on a large plot of land that was in the beginning stages of becoming a residential subdivision. It was almost noon, and he was digging a ditch with a backhoe when he saw some litter in the ditch a few feet away. But when he got closer, he realized that he was digging a ditch with a backhoe when he saw some litter in the ditch a few feet away.

But when he got closer, he realized that he was looking at a shower curtain covered up by a bit of dirt, and it looked like something big was wrapped up in the curtain, so he called over his supervisor. The supervisor agreed that the shower curtain in the ditch is odd, so they unraveled it to see what was inside. And beneath, there was a towel inscribed with the words, apartment 15. They also found some clothing and something else. At first, it was hard to tell exactly what it was, but then it hit them. They were looking at a severely decomposed human body. They found the Harrisville Police Department and officers responded right away. Police confirmed that it was human remains wrapped up in the curtain, but the decomposition

was so severe that it was impossible for them to know the person's gender or age. This also meant that they couldn't immediately tell how the person died. In fact, a local newspaper reported that officers weren't even sure whether or not they were dealing with foul play. I mean, for me, the fact that a person was wrapped in a shower curtain screams foul play, but it's possible that police were just trying to protect the integrity of the investigation by saying that. But regardless, it didn't take long for authorities to know for sure that there was foul play involved. The ME found that the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head,

and the person was identified through dental records as 14-year-old Gabrielle Distofano, who'd been missing for a full month. Once police knew they had a homicide on their hands, they got to work right away. Detectives needed to determine Gabby's last movement, so they interviewed family and friends. Gabby's mom, Edie, had last seen her in mid-August, but she actually hadn't reported her missing until August 25.

That's because Edie initially assumed Gabby was staying with friends, but after a week and a half of not seeing her, she knew that something was wrong, so she reported her missing to the Ogden Police Department. So in 2005, as Sergeant Van Orden was reviewing Gabby's file, she was relieved to see that former detectives had documented their initial interviews. According to reports in the case file, Edie told detectives that the last interaction she had with Gabby was around 6 p.m. on August 15.

Gabby was gathering her things and preparing to leave the house. And she said she was going to a friend's house and promised to be home by 11. But when those detectives interviewed Gabby's friends, they heard a different story. They reported seeing Gabby that evening at Paramount Bull, which is this popular hangout spot for teens in the Ogden area. But there was some speculation that she wasn't there to bull.

Police caught wind of a rumor that Gabby was meeting some friends at the bowling alley so they could all carpool to a house party in Riverdale, which is 10 minutes south of Ogden. That story was never confirmed, but it's something the original detectives kept in mind as they continued investigating. Whether Gabby went to the Paramount Bowl that night, or if she was going to a party, or even if she was telling the truth and went to a friend's house, Edy told investigators she actually saw Gabby again, later that same night in the wee hours of the morning on August 16th.

Edie said that around 1am, she heard a car pulling into her driveway. You see, her bedroom window faced the driveway, so she peeked out to see who it was, and it was a car she recognized, a candy apple red low rider. Maybe a Chevy Impala. She etching Gabby get picked up by that car before. As Evie watched out the window, she saw Gabby and someone else in the front seat and two other people in the back seat. But what she witnessed next was kind of odd.

The car sat there in the driveway, break lights on for five minutes. But no one got out of the car. Then after five minutes, the car's headlights flipped on and it's sped out of the driveway. Edie didn't know it at the time, but that was the last time she would ever see her daughter. A few days after, detectives talked to Edie, one of Gabby's friends who had seen her

the night of August 15th was formally interviewed. She said that she saw Gabby around 9 p that evening at Paramount Bull. Just like Edie had told police, the friend also had seen Gabby in a red, low-rider car with a few other people, maybe four or five. And what stood out to this friend is that she didn't recognize the people that Gabby was in the car with, and they didn't look like people Gabby would normally be hanging out with. Now for a few months, that is all the initial investigators had to go on. They were looking for a that Gabby was in the car with, and they didn't look like people Gabby would normally be hanging out with. Now, for a few months, that is all the initial investigators had to go on.

They were looking for a bright red, low-rider car. Again, maybe it was a Chevy Impala. From what Sergeant Van Orden could tell from Gabby's case file, police didn't receive their next big tip until November. The tipster who came forward named not one, but two potential suspects. The first being a girl were going to call Teresa, who apparently had some major beef with Gabby. It was rumored that

there was some sort of love triangle between Teresa Gabby and a boy named Pat Klein. Teresa and Gabby were both interested in Pat, and Teresa had supposedly threatened to kill Gabby if she didn't stop seeing him. The tipster thought Teresa should obviously be considered as a suspect, but it took investigators like one minute to figure out Teresa was actually in youth lock-up at the time of Gabby's murder, so the tipster offered up a second suspect. Teresa's ex-boyfriend, 16-year-old Sammy Mora. Sammy was also Gabby's ex-boyfriend, and it's not clear why, but the tips were thought

that he was suspicious and should be looked into. But it seems like police initially kind of brushed this tip off, likely because they were so busy chasing other leads that were flooding in. It seemed that Sammy's name completely fell off detectives radars over the next few months until April 24th of 1983, when two teenage runaways from Ogden were picked up in Montana. We're gonna call these two Chloe and Brooke. From what Sergeant Van Orden could tell us

from the case reports, police in Montana found the girls at a truck stop asking people for money and makeup. And since the girls looked so young, the officer knew something was up. They took the girls to a local police station, and that's when they started talking, and not about what anyone was expecting them to talk about. Chloe and Brooke started discussing their friend Gabby's murder back home in Utah, and

Chloe said that she knew who killed her, a boy named Sammy Mora. Chloe said that she and Brooke had been at a party with Sammy and Gabby the night before Gabby disappeared, and she was pretty sure Sammy was the shooter. Now, it's unclear if authorities in Montana relayed this information to police in Utah at the time, or even what came of the information, but it did eventually land in Gabby's case file. But it took almost a year after the girls were picked up in Montana for police to contact them again. Specifically on March 5, 1984, Detective Norman Sokai contacted Brooke again, and she corroborated Chloe's

story. She said she was at the party in Riverdale with Chloe, Sammy, and Gabby, and that she never saw a gun, but she always thought Sammy was the one who killed Gabby. Detective Sokai noted that Brooke claimed to have been threatened by someone and she seemed nervous. It was the talk in town at the time that Sammy was one of the three guys involved in Gabby's death. The other two were older guys, named Larry Lucero and Pete Romero. And interestingly enough, Sammy, Pete and Larry all did drive red cars.

Now for some reason, the initial investigators kind of zeroed in on Pete. And they actually went and picked up his car to be taken to the crime lab. And get this, in the trunk of his car, they found a blood stain and hair. When Pete was asked about the blood, he said that it must have gotten there when he loaned his car out to a friend. Obviously, technicians analyzed the blood, and they were able to determine that it was Type A, which didn't match Gabby's blood type. And the hair also didn't match Gabby's either. But after that interaction with police, Pete stopped talking and refused to return to the police station without a lawyer.

So later that month, police interviewed Sammy. He denied any and all involvement in Gabby's murder. He even denied being with her on August 15, 1982, even though two witnesses put the two of them together. At one point, during the interview, Sammy became angry and belligerent, but once he calmed down, he agreed to take a polygraph. So they set one up for the following day.

But Sammy didn't show, and instead he loyered up. They tried to do interviews, they tried to do polygraphs, they tried to use informants, they tried to use the technology that they had at the time and nothing kind of got any traction that way. The case goes cold at that point. New homicides happen. Detectives get get, they retire. And a lot of the times these cases go on to shelves.

And just like Tina's case, Gabby's got tucked away on a shelf for decades. That's where Sergeant Van Orden found both their cases in 2005, just growing colder by the day. Once she and her team had learned the ins and outs of both cases, they decided to try some new investigative methods that hadn't been tried before and wouldn't have even been available in the 80s. And when they did this, what she uncovered confirmed what police had suspected all along.

In 2008, Sargent Van Orden and her team sent bullets from Tina's and Gabby's cases to the crime lab. And the results proved, once and for all, what Sargent Van Orden set out to determine. The ballistics testing showed that both bullets came from the exact same gun. But as great of a discovery as this was for both cases, when police dug the bullets out of evidence, they realized something important was missing.

Almost every other piece of evidence in Gabby's case had vanished. Perclothing, the apartment 15 towel, the shower curtain, even the blood found in Pete Romero's car. Everything that was found with her body and everything that possibly had usable DNA on it was gone. To this day, detectives don't know what happened to the evidence, but Detective Haney has a theory. There was a flood of the Harrisville police department, is sometimes in the middle to late 80s. And there was a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, ruined, thrown away in that.

And that's a guess of where it went to. The stories that we heard, the stuff was left out to dry out and it disappeared. So I don't know that was really kind of a weird situation with evidence. It's just going to show you that people aren't doing their job properly. Sergeant Van Orden was so frustrated at this point. She had spent the better part of three years by now, between 2005 and 2008, reinvestigating Tina and Gabby's cases,

only to realize that Tina's case file was missing and all the physical evidence in Gabby's case had also been lost. Our reporting team talked to a relative of Gabby's and she expressed her deep frustration with the loss of evidence and whatever mishandling led up to it. Losing the evidence in Gabby's case was certainly a massive blow to the investigation, but Detective decided to make the most of the evidence they did still have in their possession,

particularly Tina's purse and its contents. In 2012, police sent her purse and everything in it to the Utah State Crime Lab, hoping to get a DNA profile that they could it to the Utah State Crime Lab hoping to get a DNA profile that they could link to the killer. And specifically, they were most hopeful that they could get DNA found off a joint in her purse. I mean, detectives thought it was bound to be loaded with DNA. But when the items were finally tested, investigators hopes were dashed.

The joint did contain some DNA, but it was just a tiny amount. In fact, the sample was so minestual that it didn't even meet the requirements to be uploaded to Kodis. It also was so small it couldn't even be used for direct comparison. The only helpful information police got from the joint is that it contained partial DNA profiles from at least two men. But even with this information, police couldn't test the DNA against their prime suspects because, again, the sample simply wasn't big enough. So, they were kind of back to square one. And after that,

there really wasn't much movement in the cases for a few years. In 2015, the woman who led the efforts to warm up two of the county's coldest cases, Van Orden, who is a lieutenant at that point, reluctantly retired. I didn't even want to retire. I thought about thinking, no, do I need to really retire? I could be working on these a little longer,

but then I ended up going anyways. After lieutenant Van Orden left, the cases would remain motionless for another two years. But in 2017, things picked back up again. The Weber County Sheriff's Office and the Harrisville Police Department joined forces and started re-examining murders in the area from the 80s, including Gabby and Tina's.

Their cases were revisited once again and investigators wanted no stone left unturned. So they started tracking down key players in the cases from suspects to witnesses. In January of 2018, police re-interviewed Chloe, one of those girls who had run away to Montana in 1984. When she was re-interviewed, she told police something that she hadn't before.

Not only did she double down on her accusation against Sammy Mora, but she also said that she was present when Gabby was killed. And what's more, Chloe said she was a victim herself. She told police that she had been sexually assaulted by a group of men back in the 80s, which included Sammy. Chloe's statement was a major breakthrough for the case. I mean, up until this point, no eyewitnesses to the murder had come forward.

But just as unexpectedly and quickly, as Chloe came forward with her story, she walked it back. She called these same investigators back up and gave a statement that says, I do regret to inform that after 34 years of brain injury seizures where I've hit my head multiple times sometimes on concrete. So I do not have a great memory. And I do not have memory of 34 years ago, except pain and fear. I've struggled with alcoholism addiction. And schizophrenia, please leave me alone.

I have nothing more to say. I'm not sure it happened. Whether Chloe was telling the truth the first time or not, investigators were still suspicious of Sammy, now more than ever. And they wanted to track him down to hear his side of the story once again all these years later. So they did just that. Later that same year, detectives located Sammy in Texas and re-interviewed him about Gabby's

case. But just as he did three decades earlier, Sammy maintained his innocence. He swore up and down, he had nothing to do with Gabby's death. But Detective Haney isn't so sure. When it comes down to it, it's not that I've never been fooled before because I have, but I do have some success on instincts being interviewed so many people in my career. And I think he knows what happened, whether he was the one directly involved in it or he was just a part of it, but I believe that he knows what happened." But without solid evidence, like a DNA match, or an eyewitness who's willing to testify, there is not much police can do. In hopes that DNA technology would advance and be able to make something out of the mixed

sample from the joint-founded Tina's purse, detectives collected a DNA sample from Sammy while they were interviewing him. They also tracked down Pete to gather samples from him, and since Larry was a felon in a separate crime, his DNA was already on file. In 2020, Detective Haney found a lab that might have the technology capable of doing what everyone's been waiting for. I started throwing out inquiries and doing searches and going through all of our cold cases to just review them, get a fresh

in my mind, but also to look for new technology that we could use. And I found this new technology. But it wasn't coming online yet. It wasn't accredited yet, but it is now. That kind of testing is only available through DNA Labs International. And Detective Haney allowed us to tell you that he was just recently awarded a grant through the nonprofit I founded called Season of Justice. So they're going to be able to test their sample from the joint and see if they can make something of it. He's got his fingers crossed that this new technology will allow them to create a full DNA profile that can be compared to DNA from their prime suspects.

But that's not the only recent development in these cases. Detective Haney is currently working another lead that he thinks may rattle the investigation to its core. Now since nothing certain yet, he asked us not to disclose what that development is, but know that if and when it comes to fruition, we'll keep you updated. If you know anything about the 1982 murders of Joyce Tina Gallegos and Gabrielle Distofano, please call the Weber County Sheriff's Office at 801-395-8221. Gabby and Tina's families have waited far too long for justice. And if you're out there listening and you work in law enforcement and have a case where you two have DNA that needs to be tested,

don't forget about the nonprofit season of justice. You can apply for a grant for funding at seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the Deck, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?