Bashed, Slashed & Scattered

Sharon Lucille Sant was nineteen in the summer of 1985. She came from Fillmore, Utah, and was studying police science at Southern Utah State College in Cedar City, where she also worked as a custodian for the Iron County School District through a CETA work programme. Friends described her as tough and independent, a girl who had been teased at school and had learned to answer back rather than shrink away. In late July two of her friends from Fillmore, Kathy Moore and Bart Rustin, were killed together in a car accident. Sharon wanted to get home for the funeral but had no car, and the drive from Cedar City to Fillmore took about four hours. Her boss, John Larry Smith, offered to lend her bus money and told her hitchhiking was too dangerous. details of the account remain covered until revealed She refused the boss's offer, saying she had hitchhiked before and could look after herself, and told him she would be back on Monday.

On the morning of 1 August 1985 a co-worker saw her at about 11.45 standing on the median of the northbound on-ramp of Interstate 15 in Cedar City. Later that day she was seen at the M&D Market in Parowan in the company of two men in an old flatbed Dodge pickup. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed

No one in Fillmore saw Sharon. A missing person report was not filed until 7 August. On 16 August a Utah Department of Transportation employee working near a frontage road and the northbound on-ramp of Interstate 15 at Cove Fort, where it meets Interstate 70, noticed curious marks leading off the road into scrub trees, as though something had been dragged. He and his colleagues followed them and found a small mound of dirt with sticks and an oily residue coming through it. A dried intestine lay on top. They called the Millard County Sheriff's Office.

What the deputies uncovered was a grave only a quarter to half an inch deep. Inside was the unclothed body of a woman with no head, no hands, no feet, no breasts and no left arm; the severed left arm had been laid between the legs of the torso, apparently for no reason other than that there was room. The torso had been cut open from breastbone to pubic bone and the uterus, stomach and sexual organs had been removed. A drag trail about two hundred feet long ran from the road to the grave, marked with type O positive blood, hair and a mutilation point where the ground was covered in blood. Thirty-nine feet away a breast was found under a bush, located by a German shepherd called Sue Bear. Seventy-five feet away lay a heavy wood-splitting maul with blood on the head and handle. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it A can packaged on 5 August 1985 showed that somebody had come back to the site with fresh beer after the killing.

The remains were identified from a spinal feature visible on an X-ray taken while Sharon was a student in Cedar City. The medical examiner found that the head had been cut off about two inches above the shoulders, the hands at the wrists, the feet above the ankles, and the left arm partly amputated, with the wounds suggesting a crushing removal consistent with the maul. The breasts had been removed with a sharp instrument. The cause of death could not be established without the head, but the blood and hair in the gravel implied a heavy blow to the head, and the absence of bruises suggested she was dead or incapacitated before the mutilation.

this part of the story is covered for now Agents described an organised, planned crime by a violent man who worked with his hands, drank Budweiser, smoked Marlboro Reds and drove an old pickup truck, and warned that he would kill again. For five months there was nothing. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now

details of the account remain covered until revealed In April 1986 he changed his story and admitted that he had been there, that he had sexually assaulted Sharon before the killing, and that he had helped dismember her and hide the body parts. He believed he had been granted immunity. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed

In 1994 a deer hunter found a sun-bleached skull with a single tooth still in its socket within a quarter of a mile of the grave, along with a small piece of bone that may have come from a hand or wrist. Dental records could not be found, and the skull was never formally identified, though the sheriff was all but certain it was Sharon's. She was buried by her family in the Fillmore Cemetery. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now