A true-crime synchro

Price, Utah

I’ve  been editing a true crime story about a woman from a small town in Utah whose mother was murdered in 1970 when she was four years old. Her mother was stabbed multiple times and her throat was slit. Heidi Jones-Asay spent decades trying to solve the case and bring the killer to justice after authorities had given up. But one detective took up the cold case and he would help her obtain the justice she sought.

Along the way she met a psychic, Jo’Anne, who became a friend and a guide in her search. One day they met at the county attorney’s office and Jo’Anne put her hand on a file on the desk in front of the county attorney. She told him that killer is in this file, his name and picture. She saw a number and told him the page number. The skeptical county attorney refused to open the file.

A fter they left the county attorney’s office and Heidi was picked up by her husband, Kevin, Jo’Anne told her sister that she thought Heidi was going to die. But it wasn’t something she was going to tell Heidi…not until much later after Heidi barely escaped death.

Heidi had broken a tooth around that time and her face had begun to swell, and it continued to get worse. Kevin took her that same day to the emergency room in Price, Utah. She spent five days in the hospital and after she was diagnosed with a flesh-eating disease called necrotitis phasiaitus, she was taken to a hospital in Provo where she had five surgeries, three blood transfusions, and flatlined once.

It looked like Jo’Anne’s prediction was about to come true, when a message came through to Heidi that she wasn’t done with work here, that she had to accomplish something for her mother. She woke up and said, “What about my mom?”

She remained for seventeen days in the Provo hospital, then came home. Her neck bears the scar that looks eerily like a slit throat, which Heidi sees as ironic – a meaningful coincidence with her mother’s death. Heidi knew she still had work to do for Mom.

That same month, the killer was arrested. He confessed to the murder and remains imprisoned.