Police name killer in cold case murder, rape of a Utah teenager that went unsolved for 40 years
A killer has finally been identified in the shocking rape and murder of a Utah teenager that baffled investigators for 40 years, according to police and reports. Christine Gallegos, 18, was last seen alive hitchhiking to downtown Salt Lake City on her way to work on May 15, 1985.Her body was discovered early the next morning by the driver of a passing car, according to reports from the Salt Lake Tribune at the time. Investigators arrived and found a grisly scene in the neighborhood now known as Ballpark. Gallegos had been beaten, raped, stabbed and shot twice in the head.
She reportedly put up a fierce struggle against her attacker before she was killed, police said. “She left a blood trail up to the gutter of Jefferson Street,” Detective Cordon Parks said at a press conference Thursday announcing that the cold case was solved.With the help of good old-fashioned detective work and cutting-edge genetic technology, police announced that the likely killer who evaded them for decades is Ricky Lee Stallworth — an Air Force vet who went on to marry five times and have three children before his death in 2023. Stallworth, 27 at the time of Gallegos’ murder, was an airman at Hill Air Force Base in May 1985 when the teenage girl was killed. Before his death, Stallworth was reportedly known to police for his alleged interactions with prostitutes along State Street, the commercial strip that runs through downtown Salt Lake City, in the last two years of his life.During the press conference last week, Parks posthumously dubbed him a “State Street stalker” for his late-night rendezvous.Even though he was married, Stallworth was known to leave his house at the dead of night and come back early in the morning, police said.
He’d never tell his wife where he had been or what he had been doing, according to Parks.Stallworth, whose name never came up in the different rounds of investigations into the murder over the years, died of natural causes in July 2023, so...