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One part of mystery of woman’s death solved
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
Now that police know where Lina Reyes-Geddes wound up and how she died, a new phase in her 20-year case begins: to find the person who killed her.
Police in Utah and Youngstown announced Thursday that Reyes-Geddes, 37, of Austintown, who went missing in April 1998, is the person whose body was found about 40 miles north of Lake Powell in Utah with a gunshot wound to the head and wrapped in both a carpet and a sleeping bag. Her fingerprints had been obliterated.
To find her identity required an email blast from city police Detective Sgt. Dave Sweeney to several states in the southwest, investigations by police in Youngstown, Utah and Mexico, a “super sleuth,” a Spanish-speaking Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent, a four-hour bus ride and a DNA sample.
Sweeney, who investigates homicides, felonious assaults and financial crimes, also investigates missing-person cases after he was assigned the case of Amy Hambrick earlier this year. She was last seen Nov. 10, 2017. As part of his investigations, Sweeney is trying to get in touch with relatives who can provide dental records or DNA samples to help identify missing people.
One of the cases he was given is that of Reyes-Geddes, who went missing from her Austintown home in April 1998, but was not reported missing until September of that year by family members who asked retired Detective Sgt. Jose Morales to help them. At the time she went missing, she was reported to be going to Laredo, Texas, to visit family.
Morales took the case partly because the woman’s husband, Edward Geddes, had a business in Youngstown, but also because at the time he was one of the few police officers in the area who was fluent in Spanish, and Reyes-Geddes was from Mexico.
Sweeney said a language barrier was part of the reason the case got off to a slow start in 1998.
“I think that’s why our department took charge of it and it sat with us,” Sweeney said.
Sweeney got a photo of Reyes-Geddes from the Department of Immigration in Cleveland and uploaded it to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System in early October. He then emailed several newspapers and other media outlets in Laredo, Texas, with her photo asking for information.
About the same time, the Utah Department of Public Safety announced they were reopening the case of a Jane Doe who was found on a highway in April 1998 with a gunshot wound to the head.
That is when the person Sweeney referred to as the “super sleuth” contacted him and Utah police, saying that their cases were similar and should be checked out. Sweeney got several messages back from the emails he sent, and had to have an officer at the police department who is fluent in Spanish translate for him. From one of those messages, one of Reyes-Geddes’ relatives said they recognized her and Sweeney then contacted police in Utah.
Agent Brian Davis of the Utah Department of Public Safety said he did not have a Spanish-speaking officer in his department, but he knew a Spanish-speaking ATF agent in Mexico, who contacted the family and asked them to meet him at the U.S. Consulate in Monterey, Mexico. They had to take a four-hour bus ride to get there, but once they did, they gave a DNA sample. Days later, authorities got a DNA match with the remains of Reyes-Geddes.
Sweeney said he did not want to speculate on who might have killed Reyes-Geddes, saying he did not want to hamper any investigation by authorities in Utah. The Garfield County Sheriff’s Office in Utah, where the remains were found, announced she had been identified and that the suspect in her death committed suicide in Nevada in the early 2000s. They did not name who that person was or why he was considered a suspect, but Davis said that person is her husband, Edward Geddes, who is deceased.
Davis said in the past, his department had thought before she was identified that Reyes-Geddes was the victim of a suspected serial killer in the Southwest, Scott Kimball, who is suspected in several murders and is serving a 70-year prison sentence. But he said Thursday that investigators are now looking at new leads and a new theory on the case because they now have an identification to go with.