PRICE, Utah — A 76-year-old Colorado man who was charged four decades after police say he fatally stabbed a 23-year-old Utah woman was sentenced Tuesday to serve 10 years to life in prison.
Thomas Edward Egley, of Rocky Ford, told a judge in the east-central Utah city of Price on Tuesday that he has “always expressed remorse” for the killing of Loretta Jones in 1970.
Jones was sexually assaulted and stabbed 17 times in the front room of her home. Her then-4-year-old daughter discovered her body.
Egley pleaded guilty in October to murder as part of a deal with prosecutors, who dropped a rape charge, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
The woman’s daughter Heidi Jones-Asay, now 50, remembered as a child peering through a keyhole, then walking into a front room of their home and seeing blood everywhere when she found her mother.
In court Tuesday, she said she was terrified as a child that Egley would return to the home and kill her or someone else in the family. She also recalled her mother as a “sweet, kind, and loving young woman,” according to KUTV.
Egley’s lawyer David Allred said his client didn’t know that the girl was in the next room on the night of Jones’ murder.
Decades after the killing, Jones-Asay urged police to take another look at the case and try to solve it. Seven years ago, she reached out to a former schoolmate who was a Carbon County Sheriff’s Deputy, and asked him to try to solve her mother’s murder.
Sheriff’s Sgt. David Brewer began investigating and this summer, the sheriff’s office exhumed Jones’ body to look for DNA evidence.
Investigators found new witnesses who were willing to come forward and zeroed in on Egley, who confessed to a neighbor.
He was an original suspect in Jones’ killing, but a judge dismissed the case against him decades ago after determining there wasn’t enough evidence.
When Jones’ body was exhumed, he asked a neighbor “how long DNA evidence and semen lasted,” according to charging documents. The neighbor urged him to confess to investigators and arranged a meeting with Carbon County investigators in Colorado.
In July, he admitted to investigators that he killed Jones. He gave a more detailed confession to the neighbor several days later, where he said he killed Jones after she declined to have sex with him.
His ex-wife later told police that on the night of Jones’ death, her husband bathed with all his clothes on and acted unusual the following day. Another woman told police she witnessed Egley burning his clothes outside a laundromat the day after Jones’ killing.
Egley was arrested in August at his Colorado home and brought to Utah.
