The story of Christine Gallegos’ murder is one of tragedy, pain, perseverance, and finally, bittersweet resolution. For four decades, her family lived with unanswered questions, their grief left to linger with the silence of a cold case. In 1985, Christine was just 18 years old when her life was brutally cut short in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The brutality of the crime shocked the community — she had been sexually assaulted, beaten, shot, and stabbed. Her body was discovered the next morning by a passerby, discarded near an old stadium.
No suspects were identified, and the case grew colder with time. But in 2023, a breakthrough in DNA technology reignited the investigation. The suspect was finally identified — but the police were too late. He had died two years earlier, taking his secrets with him to the grave.
Police Came to Arrest Murder Suspect After 40 Years
On the night of May 15, 1985, Christine Gallegos made a decision that would end her life. She had told her fiancé and family that she would be hitchhiking to her workplace in downtown Salt Lake City. It was a common practice among some young people at the time, especially those who lacked reliable transportation. Christine was last seen walking toward the freeway around 10:30 p.m., along 4000 West.
Sometime after, she was picked up — not by a friend or kind stranger, but by someone who would become her killer. Within an hour, Christine Gallegos was dead. Her body was discovered at 3:50 a.m. the following morning on Jefferson Street, brutally assaulted and murdered.
Her family was shattered. Investigators launched an extensive search for leads, combing through witnesses and forensic evidence. But nothing materialized. Despite their best efforts, police couldn’t find the perpetrator, and the case gradually faded from the public eye.
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Christine Gallegos’s mother, Leah Gallegos, never stopped grieving. Every birthday, every holiday, every wedding she attended reminded her of what was stolen — her daughter’s life, her potential, and the future that was supposed to be. For years, she wondered if there would ever be justice.
DNA Technology Unmasks a Hidden Killer
In 2023, nearly four decades after Christine’s death, the Salt Lake City Police Department launched a renewed effort to solve the cold case. Encouraged by the Utah State Cold Case Review Board, investigators turned to forensic investigative genealogy — a modern technique that uses civilian DNA databases built for ancestry research. With help from Othram, a Texas-based DNA lab specializing in this type of work, they revisited evidence collected from the original crime scene.
The results were astounding. Through genealogical mapping and DNA comparison, investigators zeroed in on a potential suspect: Ricky Lee Stallworth. Born in 1958, Stallworth was a 27-year-old airman stationed at Hill Air Force Base in Utah at the time of Christine Gallegos’s murder. He had never been a suspect. His name had not come up during the original investigation. In fact, there was no known connection between him and Christine.
Detective Cordon Parks and his team contacted Stallworth’s family. With permission, they obtained a voluntary DNA sample from one of his sons. The results matched the DNA evidence from 1985. The mystery was finally solved — at least scientifically. The killer had been found.
But there was one problem: Ricky Lee Stallworth had died of natural causes in 2023 at the age of 65, just months before he became a person of interest. The arrest that had eluded the police for 40 years would never come. There would be no trial, no opportunity for the victim’s family to confront the man responsible. Justice, while partially served, remained incomplete.
A Life Taken, a Community Haunted
Investigators believe that after Stallworth picked Christine Gallegos up, he drove her to a secluded area near the old Derks Field, far from her intended destination. There, he assaulted her before shooting and stabbing her to death.
But Christine didn’t go down without a fight. Detective Parks described signs of a struggle — she had been stabbed outside the car and left a blood trail leading to the gutter on Jefferson Street, indicating her desperate effort to escape or resist.
Over the years, police had interviewed multiple people, but no one was charged or seriously suspected. It wasn’t until the application of genealogical DNA technology that the pieces finally came together. And with this new evidence, a darker picture of Stallworth emerged.
Though not on police radar in 1985, later investigations revealed that Stallworth was likely the infamous “State Street Stalker,” a man known for harassing sex workers in the area. During the last years of his life, police had multiple contacts with him over suspicious nighttime activity.
He would leave his home at night, telling his wife he was going out, only to return in the morning without explanation. One of his ex-wives, when told about the investigation, reportedly expressed no surprise — a telling sign that something about his behavior had always been troubling.
What remains most tragic is that Stallworth’s actions didn’t just end one life. They created a ripple effect that devastated a family, a community, and ultimately, left a young woman’s dreams forever unrealized. Christine Gallegos had plans.
She was engaged to be married to a man named Troy, and they had talked about starting a family. Leah Gallegos, her mother, still wonders what her daughter’s children would have been like. “You never quit thinking about it, you never quit crying about it,” Leah said at the recent press conference, her voice trembling with emotion. “It’s just always there.”
Despite the sadness, she expressed gratitude to the officers who never gave up, even when she had begun to think they had. “They have never given up,” she said. “Even though I had thought they had given up, they’d never given up.”
Bittersweet Closure
The announcement of Stallworth’s identity brings a kind of closure — not the kind delivered by a courtroom verdict, but the kind that can only come from knowing the truth. For the Gallegos family, this development offers some peace.
It doesn’t bring Christine back, and it doesn’t deliver the full measure of justice. But it does close the loop on a story that had remained agonizingly open for 40 years.
Leah Gallegos still misses her daughter every day. “They took so much away when they took her away,” she said. And yet, in the face of unimaginable loss, she continues to honor her daughter’s memory with dignity and strength.
The persistence of investigators, the advent of DNA technology, and the power of a mother’s love have finally given Christine Gallegos a voice — one that speaks across decades.
Her story reminds us of the dark corners of human nature, the resilience of those left behind, and the remarkable tools that science now offers to seek justice. Though delayed and imperfect, the solution to Christine’s case shows that even after decades of silence, the truth can still surface — and sometimes, it does so just in time to be heard.