June 11th, 1955. Salt Lake City, Utah. 22-year-old Jocelyn Hickenlooper, who suffers from developmental

disabilities and scoliosis, vanishes of that explanation from her home. Over two weeks later,

Jocelyn's decomposed body is discovered in a shallow grave located near Parley's Canyon.

After a two-year investigation, a developmentally disabled suspect named Burt Murphy confesses to

killing Jocelyn, but after he recants his confession and the murder charge against him is dropped,

a judge rules Burt to be legally insane and he is committed to the Utah State Hospital.

When the Utah Supreme Court overturns this decision in 1988, Burt is released from the hospital,

but there is a lot of doubt about whether he was actually responsible for Jocelyn's murder.

After that, the trail went cold.

Hello everyone and welcome to our latest episode of the trail went cold.

I'm your host Robin Warner and on today's episode we're going to be exploring a very sad and

unusual cold case from Utah, the 1955 murder of Jocelyn Hickenlooper. This is officially the

first episode of our seventh year as a podcast and the main reason I'm covering this one now is

because Utah is the last remaining state from where the trail went cold has yet to cover a case.

So now that this episode has been released, I'm happy to announce that our podcast has hit the

milestone of featuring at least one cold case from all 50 American states. When I was searching for

cases to cover, I came across a very interesting post at the Unresolved Mystery subreddit written

by a poster with the username Jewels in Utah who once co-hosted a true crime podcast of her own,

whether sister titled Zion's Lost, which did their own episode about this story and is a great

resource to learn about lesser known cases from Utah. The story of Jocelyn Hickenlooper really stood

out to me because it involved a victim and an accused killer who both suffered from developmental

disabilities and since this took place back during the 1950s when the world wasn't exactly in

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