A man reported spotting Kathy's badly abused body four days after she was last seen alive, which was at Better Days Bar in downtown Salt Lake City. Kathy and her friend slipped into the neighborhood pub for a few drinks that quiet Tuesday night on March 2.

"They were the only ones in there for a while," bar owner Van Brown told the Deseret News this week. "I sat with them for a while. We just talked. She seemed kinda down."

Kathy's friend split before midnight but not before giving Kathy, who wasn't ready to leave, her thick winter coat for the walk home. It was only six blocks from the neon lights to her front door, but it was late and temperatures downtown only hovered around 21 degrees that night. So she asked Brown, a longtime, trusted family friend, for a ride.

"I said 'All right,' " Brown remembered. "But she had to wait till I closed up; that was the deal."

Brown vanished to the kitchen to scrub dishes. And when he returned to the floor of his small 10-stool bar she was gone — forever.

No one noticed her slip into the night, but she did make her way home: Her purse and the heavy coat were found in her apartment the next day, the search warrant states.

The only other major clue to Kathy's activities between her apartment and her ultimate abandonment that night — which remains a key part of today's investigation — is shrouded in the testimony of a neighbor who described a vivid early morning scene in front of Kathy's place.

A tall, thin man in his 20s stood at the passenger door of an idling blue Volkswagen Beetle.

It was something, but it was also incredibly broad: The Beetle was an extremely common vehicle then. Its production passed Ford's Model T record a few years earlier.

An investigation was launched, but it immediately became entangled in the chaos of a similar killing. The same day Kathy's body was spotted on the hillside, Salt Lake police discovered the beaten, raped and strangled body of 24-year-old Carolyn Sarkessian. Assumed connections between the two slayings spread quickly that winter. A link, though, was later determined to be impossible.

Gayle G. Benavidez, a repeat convicted rape offender, was convicted for Sarkessian's murder in 2004 after results of a state-issued mouth swab shattered his alibi.

Some were still suspicious of Benavidez, however, but not perhaps the woman who contacted police in February. She agreed to marry the man who allegedly confessed of sexual rendezvous in the woods all those years ago.

And although they're still married today, it's turned into estrangement for at least the past couple of years, according to sources close to the family.