True Crime On This Day July 24th

Last Updated on September 27, 2022 by Ben Oakley

July 24th

On July 24th in true crime, death sentence, cold cases, macabre discoveries, murder, serial killers, unsolved mysteries.

1978

In Hendry County, Florida, the skeletal remains of a 40 to 50-year-old male were discovered 75 feet west of Collinswood Drive, in a rural area of LaBelle.

An autopsy proved difficult due to the decomposition of the body. The cause of death remains unknown, but he was suspected to have been killed in early 1978.

As of 2022, the body remains a mystery and is an active cold case in the State of Florida.

1979

In Salt Lake City, Utah, 18-year-old Louise Cottle Valdez was shot dead in her vehicle after she left work at the Taco Time restaurant.

According to investigators, she had been murdered by her own brother-in-law who was paid to kill her for reasons unknown. Julio ‘Gary’ Valdez was later arrested for the murder.

Details of the case have been hard to come by but the murder is listed as solved with the Salt Lake City Police Department.

1980

In Texas, Bobby James Moore was sentenced to death for the murder of 73-year-old grocery store owner Jim McCarble, during a robbery on April 25^th.

Moore, along with two accomplices, Willie Koonce and Everett Anthony Pradia, had entered the Birdsall Super Market in Houston with the intention of robbing it.

Frustrated by the number of witnesses, Moore shot McCarble at point blank range, killing him instantly. Pradia and Koonce were sentenced from 20 years to life in prison.

Moore was sentenced to death and despite numerous appeals, remains on death row.

1981

In Boulder County, Colorado, 18-year-old Jon Truscott Haynes vanished without a trace. He had recently moved from San Francisco, California, and arrived in Boulder on July 22^nd.

He called his father on the 23^rd asking for some money and promised to keep in touch. He was last heard of when he phoned a friend on the 24^th then disappeared shortly after.

A sheriff’s deputy remembered seeing Haynes’s vehicle on a country road in the small town of Nederland, he stated the windows were rolled down even though it was pouring with rain at the time.

However, because Haynes wasn’t reported missing until August 10^th, the deputy had no reason to believe the car was suspicious. When police returned to the location the car had been seen, there was no trace of it.

There have been multiple theories surrounding Haynes’s disappearance. Some investigators suspected Haynes had owed money to a drug dealer in Boulder and was murdered as a result.

While others believe he joined an unknown cult who were active in the area at the time. Haynes’s father had him officially declared dead in March of 1983.

But he is still listed as a missing person with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. The circumstances surrounding his disappearance remain a mystery.

1982

In New York, 35-year-old State Police Trooper and U.S. Navy veteran Thomas L. Pryme was killed by a drunk driver. He had just finished his shift and was driving home when an oncoming vehicle crashed into him head-on.

The van pinned Thomas in his car where he died of his wounds before emergency vehicles arrived. The suspect later died of his injuries.

In 2019, police dog handler Michael P. Flaherty and his police dog, joined Troop B in Northern New York. The dog was named Pryme, to honour the death of Thomas.

1983

In Utah, serial killer and sex offender Arthur Gary Bishop was captured after investigators learned he had lived in the vicinity where four abductions had taken place.

He claimed his first victim in 1979. Four-year-old Alonzo Daniels was lured from the grounds of his family’s apartment complex and was drowned in Bishop’s bathtub.

Bishop later buried the body in the desert. He confessed to the murders of five young boys and was sentenced to death for his crimes. He was executed by lethal injection in Utah on June 10^th 1988.

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