DNA from rock, cigarette helps crack 1995 cold case

SALT LAKE CITY A cigarette butt proved to be the undoing of a man suspected of killing a girl in Utah 18 years ago, after a sheriff trailed him for four days to grab the DNA evidence.

Without the efforts of Wasatch County Sheriff Todd Bonner, the case would have been forgotten long ago. For Bonner, however, it was personal. As the original investigator in the bludgeoning death of the teenage prostitute in 1995, he couldn't let it go.

"It was haunting me my whole career," Bonner told The Associated Press on Friday. "It doesn't matter that she was a street girl. This is a 17-year-old girl a human being. I could care less what she did for a living. She was doing what she had to survive."

The body of Krystal Lynn Beslanowitch was found Dec. 6, 1995, along the Provo River near Midway.

Bonner said Joseph Michael Simpson, who was arrested Tuesday, was "never on our radar" until earlier this year, when a lab extracted "touch DNA" from the granite rocks used to crush the teen's skull.

Bonner flew to Sarasota, Fla., to help arrest the unemployed 46-year-old, who was living with his mother there.

A convicted murderer, Simpson had been paroled from Utah State Prison months before Beslanowitch's slaying and probably encountered her on a gritty Salt Lake City street. A shuttle-bus driver for a Utah resort, he would have been familiar with the area around Midway, a mountain town 38 miles southeast of Salt Lake City where she was killed, Bonner said.

Beslanowitch, originally from Spokane, Wash., had been in Utah for five months before her death.

Jeff Beslanowitch, a retired 61-year-old steelworker from Spokane, told the AP that Krystal Beslanowitch was a runaway daughter of his ex-wife, but no blood relation to him, and she "never had a chance in life."

"Krystal had a troubled upbringing with drugs and prostitution. It was quick, easy money," Jeff Beslanowitch said Friday. "I'm glad they got him. It took a long time, but this guy deserves to sit in a cell for the rest of his life."

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DNA from rock, cigarette helps crack 1995 cold case