After the rapist carried the 22-year-old woman's body in the dark 300 yards up the still-frozen slopes of Emigration Canyon, he dropped her in the snow.

That's where he left her blue jeans.

He dragged the 115-pound, half-nude body the rest of the way — 96 more yards between skiffs of sagebrush up to the top of the hillside overlooking Dell Valley, just north of I-80.

When the man drove away from the strangled and bruised body of young Joy Kathleen "Kathy" Jones Harmon early that bitter 14-degree March morning in 1976, he took at least 33 years — and counting — of absolute freedom with him.

But he left something, too: his genetic signature, soaked into the waistband of the pants he unabashedly discarded at the scene, inside out. Detectives also discovered the man's DNA beneath Kathy's fingernails as apparent evidence of her struggle to fight off her choking attacker, according to court documents.

He didn't take cash in Kathy's jeans pocket, police say. He ignored a necklace hanging over her thin jacket on her fully clothed upper body. He left rings on her hand — one of which represented her just-budding 6-month-old marriage to George Harmon, a meat wrapper, truck driver and chapter president of the notorious Sundowners bike gang, who went by the name "Easy."

Sheriff's investigators confirmed that Harmon was out of town the night of the slaying.

Salt Lake County sheriff's detectives hit one dead end after another and eventually closed the case.

But even when the cold case was reopened a couple years ago, due to its useful DNA evidence, modern-day detectives still needed a suspect with which to compare the new-aged genetic fingerprint.

That opportunity came two months ago when a woman from the past called detectives. She told them her then-20-year-old boyfriend in 1976 came home one night with scratches on his face and an excuse that his sister caused them.

The woman met with detectives and recounted a harrowing three-decade-old alleged memory of her boyfriend coming home a week after the scratching incident "quite upset" and "crying," according to a new search warrant filed in 3rd District Court.

She told detectives her boyfriend "told her that he had been with his friend (name withheld) and the two of them had picked up a girl at a party in Salt Lake City … then took this girl up Emigration Canyon where they had sex with her … and left her there," the warrant states.

The woman's said she remembers her boyfriend told her "she had been found, and he felt bad," according to the documents.