How DNA testing helped detectives solve a cold case from 1982

    SALT LAKE CITY (KSTU) -- It took over four decades, but Provo police say they’ve finally solved a nagging, missing person case. And it’s now a murder investigation.

Robby Peay ran away from a group home in 1982. But it wasn’t until this past week detectives were finally able to say what happened to him.

The twists and turns in this case could fill a novel. Provo Police Sgt. Cameron Nelson says it took a lot of old-fashioned investigation and a little bit of luck to bring it all together.

“It was years and years of effort and work from our detectives,” he said.

It all began in the fall of 1982 when 17-year-old Peay ran away from a Salt Lake group home. Since he was from Provo, local police issued a bulletin about a missing person.

In the spring of 1983, the body of a young man who had been shot was found in Arches National Park. From early on, police believed the two cases were connected but couldn’t say for certain because the body was decomposed, there were incomplete dental records and DNA testing was a brand-new science.

Nelson says the case went cold for nearly 40 years.

"In 2018 or so we saw some relations to that death and our missing person, Robby Peay,” Nelson added.

That presented another roadblock due to the DNA from the autopsy conducted on John Doe being lost. It was then that Nelson said police got a break… a call from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs)

NamUs, unknown to anybody; us, the medical examiner’s office, the detectives in Grand County … they had DNA that was submitted to them many years ago from Summit County,” Nelson explained.

The group had DNA from a similar missing person case around the same time and that sample appeared to be a match for Peay.

It also presented a new challenge for Provo police after they learned Robby had been adopted but also discovered both parents were deceased.

“We had to go through a long process of unsealing court records, writing search warrants, and getting this information released by the courts," said Nelson, "and that took a span of probably over a year.”

At that point, detectives were about to start the process of exhuming the John Doe buried in a Moab cemetery to test for DNA when they got their final break. Nelson says they located a maternal uncle of Robby’s who lives In Roosevelt, “It was kind of a shot in the dark when we called the Uncle to tell him about this because he had no idea about any of this.”

The uncle's sample was a match and allowed police to confirm, after more than 40 years, that the John Doe homicide victim found at Arches was missing person Peay.

“It’s a very rare thing to be able to close one of these cases," Nelson said. "And I think everybody put their all into it and it’s hard not to be proud of it."

The story isn’t over as Grand County Sheriff's Office detectives now want to know who killed Robby and why.