More than 25 years ago, three teenagers in Salt Lake City, Utah, were walking through a parking lot when they discovered a woman’s body on the stairs, with a scarf wrapped around her neck.
Detectives later learned that the victim, Itisha Camp, 21, had been strangled. The case remained unsolved for more than 20 years, but investigators eventually linked the murders to a man convicted of killing 14 women in Los Angeles County between 1987 and 1998, mostly by strangling and raping them.
The Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office announced Friday that serial killer Chester Turner has been indicted on first-degree murder charges in the death of Camp, whose body was discovered on Sept. 24, 1998.
Chester Turner Francine All Pool/Getty Images
This is believed to be Turner’s first case of murder indictment outside of California.
DNA testing led Salt Lake City detectives to Turner, who was first convicted in 2007 and is currently on death row at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. Turner was convicted of 10 murders that same year and in 2011 was indicted on charges of strangling and killing four more women in the Los Angeles area in the 1980s and 1990s.
He was convicted of those murders in 2014.
Another man was wrongfully convicted in two subsequent cases and spent 11 years in prison, only to be released in 2004 after investigators used DNA testing to link Turner to the murders.
According to the Salt Lake County prosecutor, investigators discovered that Turner was on parole in California and had left for Utah in 1998, the same year Camp was killed. Investigators also found a police report that listed Turner as the victim of an assault that occurred in Salt Lake City that same year, further corroborating that Turner was in the area at the time.
Camp had only been in Salt Lake City a few weeks before her body was discovered, according to the Utah Department of Public Safety, who said Camp, like many of Turner’s victims, made a living through sex work.
Marissa Wentzke
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