SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — For more than three decades, the question of who killed Brigham Young University student Barbara Rocky haunted investigators and tormented her family. The 22-year-old’s naked body was discovered face down in Big Cottonwood Canyon in March 1974, riddled with gunshot wounds, her clothes folded neatly beside her. For years, the case grew cold, with a self-proclaimed psychic once sitting in an interrogation room as the prime suspect.
But a microscopic clue buried in sand would eventually shatter the original theories, exposing a betrayal that was chillingly intimate from the very beginning.
On March 11, 1974, the California native had been writing a goodbye letter to the roommates who made her life at the religious university a misery. Feeling alienated and increasingly uneasy about her safety on campus, the junior had decided she had to flee. Her disenfranchisement with the rigid Mormon culture at BYU had made her an outsider, and the tension with her seven roommates was immediately acrimonious.
At the time, she told police she had grown so fearful of being a young woman on campus that she had started taking judo classes and had purchased a gun for protection with the help of her closest friend, a male student named Jerry Hicker. She had even recently reported that self-defense tool missing.
The day she vanished, Hicker had borrowed her car for a ski trip. He returned the car to her on that moody March morning, handing over the keys just before she left for a social work class. Barbara told him they had plans to hang out later.
After hurrying to class and ignoring the whispers she felt behind her back, she left campus. Around midday, a witness in a Salt Lake City pawn shop remembers her selling a valuable turquoise necklace. She was thrilled, excited, and stated she was in a hurry because her boyfriend was waiting for her, circling the block in her car.
It was the last confirmed sighting of her alive.
Hours later, her car was found parked outside a distraught apartment complex near her home. Hicker, the very friend who had returned her car, told campus police he had spotted the vehicle by chance and went to check on it. Inside, he found Barbara’s alleged suicide letter, claiming she was leaving to be with her own people.
This prompted a brief search, but it was a utility worker who made the grim discovery on the following day. A female body was found at the top of a remote trail in Big Cottonwood Canyon, naked, folded clothes stacked rhythmically like a ritualistic placement. The gun was missing, and there was no sign of a struggle.
Captain Pete Hayward of the Salt Lake City Sheriff’s Office was the lead investigator on the case. He noted that the position of the body and the folded nature of the clothes suggested the victim removed her garments consensually or was forced to at gunpoint. But the most glaring factor to Hayward was the location.
It was accursed, far from the road. He deducted that the victim must have walked up there willingly with someone she trusted. The fatal blow for the victim came from a .
357 caliber gun, and the murder felt deeply personal given the five separate bullet wounds. The strange variables of the case led him immediately to consider the reliability of the alibi of Barbara’s best friend, Jerry Hicker, and a host of other students, but it would be a phone call that shifted the entire direction of the case.
Almost 50 miles north, a mysterious man called the station to offer his help. He was Richard Finder, a confident 30-year-old man claiming to be a psychic with a goatee. He told Captain Hayward that he couldn’t contain a feeling about what had happened and that he needed to confess that in a vision, he saw the murder weapon had been thrown in water.
The problem was, the police had not yet announced publicly that the gun was missing. It was the first undeniable clue proving this man could be a high-value suspect or an actual psychic beyond comprehension.
Finder knew the victim, as they had formed an intense romance and spiritual bond over the phone after she heard him on a radio show. He was a normal explained from California and was in Utah for a ski trip. He had a .
357 pistol to boot. Hayward checked and found that Richard had no alibi in large chunks of the day she vanished, but even as he interrogated him, he was not willing to close on a murder charge. Circumstantial evidence was everything he had, and Richard’s personal gun didn’t match the murder bullets.
To the crushing reality of the detective, the supposed psychic was cleared, and the case slowed and turned freezing cold, sitting on shelves for years and seeing suspicion occasionally fall on serial killer Ted Bundy, but the original detectives incorrectly placed him in a different state at the time.
A quarter of a century later, the utterly new homicide detective, Todd Park of the Salt Lake City Sheriff’s Department, sat on the floor of his office, surrounded by case files that would not die. He took a call from Barbara’s mother, desperate for answers and re-opened the investigation. Park was convinced the murder was emotional rather than opportunistic.
He agreed with the initial investigator that there was a specific trust involved. As he interned through the old evidence logs, he went with the possibility of the boyfriend, Richard, but was also thinking the original investigation had moved past the most logical suspect: the friend who found the car, Jerry Hicker. But it wasn’t until he tested the very last piece of evidence—the quantified soil samples recovered from underneath her body—that the real conflict was about to emerge.
In October 2007, Park placed a called to the crime lab and found a matching DNA profile. The profile had been extracted from touch the DNA in the dirt that held the victim in her final moments. The profile did not match Richard.
It was a cold hit in the criminal database that would eventually lead them to Jerry Hicker. He was no longer an innocent student who had once reported his friend missing. Despite having time to perfectly construct his alibi, one that was penned enough to fool cops for years, evidence of his violent streak emerged in the year after the murder, when he was implicated in a series of nasty rapes on the campus.
By the time they found him in 2007, he was dying of terminal cancer.
The man who watched Barbara slipped from the room but a few days ago to her death was now a frail specter. The whole construction of the narrative of the missing friend fell apart like a house of cards. The police realized they had caught the real killer in the original evidence.
In the blur of fresh summer memories, the man had been more intricate than the police ever saw. Jerry Hicker had actually harbored a deeply obsessive romantic love for the friend. That Morning word of march, when Jerry dropped the car off to Barbara, he had subsequently not gone to the library.
Instead, he apparently caught her on her way to class and watch her struggle with a decision to sell her necklace. He won isn’t the area and convinced her to take a hike before she left. He had stolen her gun out of desperation, thinking he was convinced she would reject him.
When they got to the top of the canyon on the beautiful March day, he made a move to her. He intended to make a physical connection that he’d been dreaming about. She recoiled, sure and he flew into a surge of rage and violence.
Jerry pulled out the gun that he had helped her buy as a defense against violent men, and used it against her. he forced her to undress at the isolated point, firing into her chest as she progressed through the canyon, and then fled. as if the final decision was the spy.
To hide what he had done, he took her purse and the gun and threw them to him and he never saw a ghost. The goodbye note that she had written for her roommates was a literal solution for someone feeling trapped and alienated. She planned to literally run away and get away from that place, who didn’t want her.
But her killer, the friend she trusted most, turned that into a trap. Upon being confronted, he wrote a deal for a reduced sentence and the public turned upon him, yet he avoided prison for most of his final years. He served 5 years after confession before being released and died in 2014.
It was the devastating in indictment of how proximity can sometimes be the deadliest disguise.
