Joy Kathleen ‘Kathy’ Harmon was born on October 30, 1953 to James Donald and Joy Loraine (nee Caldwell) Jones. Her father was born on September 21, 1925 in Sanford, Colorado, and at the age of nineteen he was drafted into the Navy during World War II. He was a signalman in a landing craft vehicle personnel and served on the USS Dade until the end of his enlistment. Loraine was born on July 29, 1930 in Leeds, Utah and the couple were married in a SLC Temple on July 16, 1948; they briefly relocated to Alamosa, CO then Sheridan, Montana before eventually settling down in Southern Utah. The couple had six children together: Kathy, Whitney, Elbert, Jennifer, Matthew, Jackie, and Wesley. The Jones family was deeply involved in the Kearns 4th Ward in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and Kathy married David George Harmon on August 9, 1975 in Elko, NV. Harmon was born July 12, 1948 in SLC and served in the Army during the Vietnam War as a ‘Specialist Four’ (which is a military rank in the US Army that is one step above a Private First Class); he was honorably discharged after being injured and his military decorations for his heroism in battle include one Purple Heart, one Bronze Star Medal, and The Army Commendation.

Harmon had brown eyes and brunette hair that she cut short just before her murder; she stood 5’4” tall and weighed 115-pounds. According to ‘thedeckpodcast,’ she had a reputation for being a little rough around the edges, and was ‘definitely no shrinking violet.’ Her husband was the chapter president of a notorious local outlaw motorcycle gang called The Sundowners (he went by the nickname ‘Easy’), and because of this no one was overly concerned about her being left alone when David was out on the road for work (he also worked PT at a supermarket as a meat wrapper).

In the early spring of 1976 twenty two year old Kathy Harmon had been married for six months, and on the evening of March 2nd the twenty-two year old newlywed (along with her roommate Vicki) stopped by the Better Days Bar in downtown SLC for a nightcap. The two were regulars at the establishment, and when they stopped that rainy Tuesday night they were greeted by owner Van Brown, who was a longtime friend of the Harmon family. When David was out on the road he knew his wife was in good hands, as she had a close knit group of girlfriends that frequently checked in on her when he was away. On that quiet evening out, Vicki said that Kathy seemed unusually sad, and according to her: ‘they were the only ones in there for a while. I sat with them for a while. We just talked. She seemed kinda down.’

Around midnight Vicki decided to call it a night but her friend wasn’t quite ready to leave yet, so she left Kathy behind and made her way to her boyfriends house; despite living together she had recently started spending a large amount of time with her boyfriend and had plans to move in with him shortly after Kathy’s murder. According to public records, by the time Harmon decided to leave the temperature had dropped to a frigid 21 degrees, so she asked Brown for a ride home, who said: ‘all right. But she had to wait till I closed up; that was the deal.’ He then went into the kitchen to wash some dishes and when he came back Kathy was gone. No-one saw her leave the pub that evening, and what happened to her after is  mystery.

In case Kathy didn’t want to sit and wait for a ride, Vicki left behind her very warm, thick coat so she didn’t have to walk home in the light jean jacket that she brought with her. When Vicki arrived at their shared residence the following morning she noticed that Harmons purse was there along with her winter jacket. The strange thing is, she not only missed work on the day she disappeared, but she wasn’t there the day before either. Harmon’s uncle owned the store that she was employed at, so Mrs. Jones was kept well informed when it came to the comings and goings of her daughter. Kathy’s parents grew worried, as it was out of character for her to blow off work and after they couldn’t reach her by phone, they decided to call the police and report her as missing. Law enforcement disregarded the usual customary waiting period and took the report immediately, and stopped by her Salt Lake City apartment later in the day. While there, they talked to her roommate about her purse and coat that was found at the residence, which pointed to the concept that she had made it home from the bar the night before but something happened between the time of her arriving and when she was supposed to leave for work. When questioned, one of her neighbors gave officers testimony about a strange car they saw idling outside Harmon’s residence in the early morning hours of March 6: a blue Volkswagen Beetle, with a tall, thin man in his 20’s standing next to the passenger door.

Just four days after she was last seen at 11:30 AM on March 6, 1976, the remains of Kathy Harmon were found by a University of Utah student that was out walking his dog in between Emigration Canyon and Parley’s Canyon; she was fully clothed on top but her pants and underwear had been removed. After parking his vehicle her killer had carried (then eventually dragged) her body (most likely at dark) nearly 96 yards up the still-frozen slopes of the canyon just north of I-80. It was clear to detectives that an intense struggle had taken place between Harmon and her killer, and that she had put up quite a fight: investigators found skin fragments underneath her fingernails and she had cuts and bruises all over her face, arms, and hands. Although she had a wound on her head, she died from strangulation.

Located next to Kathy’s remains, detectives found her underwear, turned inside out, with semen on the waistband (presumably from her attacker). Robbery did not seem to be the motive of the crime, as detectives found cash in her jeans pocket and her necklace and rings (including her wedding ring) were still present. The Utah state medical examiner said that Harmon had suffered from extensive bruising and had a large amount of abrasions on the lower half of her body, injuries that most likely occurred post-mortem. According to (retired) SLC Captain Pete Haywood, ‘we feel she was carried about 300 years south of the lookout off Utah-65, where her jeans were found, and dragged 75 additional yards to where her body was eventually recovered. The dragging could account for some of the bruises and abrasions inflicted upon her after death.’

It was easy for detectives to rule out David Harmon as a suspect for the murder of his wife, as they quickly determined that he had been out of town for work when she was killed. The homicide investigation soon became bogged down by the discovery of a similar murder that took place at almost exactly the same time as Harmon: on March 6, 1976 on the same day that her body was discovered, the battered, raped, and strangled remains of 24-year-old Carolyn Sarkesian were discovered by SLC police in a trailer in a vacant lot behind a prison halfway house on the 300 West block of North Temple. At the time nineteen year old Gayle Gilbert Benavidez was considered a ‘person of interest,’ but despite being looked at closely by detectives there was no evidence that linked him to Sarkesian’s murder and he was released.

In February 2004, the cold case unit of the Salt Lake City Police Department reviewed Sarkesian’s files and sent the suspect’s DNA to the Utah state crime lab; it came up as a match to genetic material that was left behind at the crime scene. Benavidez pleaded guilty to ‘murder in the first degree’ (which was the law at the time the capital crime took place), which carried a penalty of either death or life in prison with the possibility of parole; he accepted a plea bargain that recommended life in prison. At the time of the homicide took place he was residing in SLC after serving a brief prison term for the 1974 rape of a 15-year-old girl, who had been beaten and choked during that attack. Police say Benavidez had a second rape charge on his record and was in and out of prison until 1991.

In addition to Sarkessian there was a third homicide that was initially tied to the murder of Kathy Harmon, a young woman I have brought up on this blog multiple times: Debbie Smith, whose remains were found by a Utah Power and Light employee in an open pasture near the Salt Lake City International Airport on April 1, 1976. Debbie was born on December 26, 1958 in Mansfield, OH and had been arrested three times in her short life on minor charges, including being a runaway. She ran away from SLC home on an unknown date and was last seen alive in February 1976. In the early stages of the investigation it was believed her remains belonged to an older woman, and she died from three blows to the head. Smith’s murder has also been linked to Ted Bundy and as of December 2024 remains unsolved.

According to a news clip provided by Captain Borax, a man was seen near Kathy’s apartment complex that matched Bundy’s description on the night of her murder, and over the years I’ve seen her name included in a few different sources listed as a Ted Bundy victim. A quick glance at the ‘TB MultiAgency Report 1992’ tells me that he was already in custody by the time she was killed, and as far as I can tell, there is no real evidence linking him to Harmon’s murder, and it’s unknown when the theory was first presented.

According to an article published in The Salt Lake Tribune on October 18, 1983,’ notorious killer (and liar) Henry Lee Lucas was investigated for the murder of Kathy Harmon. In December 1971, he was charged and sentenced to roughly five years in prison for the attempted abduction of a 15-year-old girl at gunpoint, and while serving his sentence he became penpals with a family friend (and the widow of his cousin), Betty Crawford. After being released in August 1975, he moved to Port Deposit, Maryland where he married Crawford and moved in with her and her two daughters in Pennsylvania. Their marriage didn’t last long and ended the following year when Betty accused him of molesting her children. He then relocated to Jacksonville, Florida in 1976, where he met fellow transient and PT transvestite Ottis Elwood Toole in a soup kitchen and struck up a friendship with him. Lucas roamed the US with Toole and went on to kill three more women before the law caught up with him again and he was arrested in 1983. While in custody he confessed to killing hundreds of people, despite there being no evidence linking him to any more than his three known victims. Lucas was sentenced to death which was later commuted to life in prison by then Texas Governor and complete shitbag George W. Bush, and he died from natural causes at the age of 64 on March 12, 2001. No evidence was ever found tying Lucas to the death of Harmon.

In February 2009,  a witness came forward to LE and told them about her (then) 20-year-old boyfriend who had come home one night in early March 1976 with scratches all over his face; at the time he told her that his sister was responsible for his injuries, but she never believed him. She also shared that a week after the incident he was acting unusually and at one point was ‘quite upset’ and ‘crying.’ She also said that he had been with a friend (name withheld) and the two had picked up a girl at a party in SLC then took her to Emigration Canyon, where they had sex with her and left her there.’ She also reported that she remembered that her boyfriend told her ‘she had been found, and he felt bad.’ Strangely enough, despite his horrifying confession she still married him and they were still together when she went to police in 2009 (although in the few years prior their relationship had turned into estrangement). Within days of the eyewitness coming forward, a warrant was issued to collect saliva samples from her 68-year-old Taylorsville resident, and according to witnesses, the woman was there when he was swabbed by LE, and at the time was ‘being treated (by paramedics) because she was having an anxiety attack.’

During the execution of the search warrant investigating officer (retired) Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Don Hutson confirmed that there was a yellow VW Beetle found on the side of the friends house, but it was not the same one that he owned in 1976, which was a vehicle she told investigators her then-boyfriend drove ‘from time to time.’ Detectives also took saliva samples from the friend, whom the witness also claimed may have somehow been involved in Kathy’s murder. Lieutenant Hutson also said that ‘some of the DNA testing may be items that were collected at the scene, at the time of the incident. There is also some evidence that we have collected since then that is also being analyzed. This is something that occurs in a lot of cold cases where we develop new information.’ … ‘and we have techniques available to us to make it possible for us to take the case in a new direction. There’s nothing imminent. In cold cases we want to take our time and not rush anything. They are very complicated and very complex. It may be weeks if not months before we actually come to a conclusion with this particular case.’ Hutson said that at the time that Harmon’s body was recovered, due to the weather and the mountainous terrain it was difficult to collect evidence at the scene, and that ‘we would not open a case, or re-invigorate it so to speak, unless we felt there was something that would really work associated with the case.’

Mr. Jones died on October 4, 2018 Kearns, UT, and Kathy’s mom passed away on June 28, 1998. Joy was active in her local 4th Ward as the Relief Society President, Young Women’s President, and had even earned the prestigious ‘Golden Gleaner Award.’ David Harmon went on to remarry a woman named Laura, who he was with for 33 years before he died at the age of 75 on January 29, 2024. The couple had two daughters together, Brandy and Angela (who has also passed away), and he also had a stepson named Cody Golden. As of December 2024 Kathy’s murder remains unsolved.

Works Cited:
Thompson, Linda. “Life term given for ‘cold case’ killing.” (May 27, 2005). Taken December 6, 2024 from deseret.com/2005/5/27/19894623/life-term-given-for-cold-case-killing/
thetruecrimedatabase.com/case_file/kathy-harmon/, article written by the user ‘Nucleus.’
victims-of-serial-killers.fandom.com/wiki/Kathy_Harmon