More than 25 years ago, three teenagers in Salt Lake City, Utah, found the dead body of a woman in a stairwell while walking through a parking lot. She had a scarf around her neck.
Detectives later learned that the victim, 21-year-old Itisha Camp, had been strangled. The case remained unsolved for more than two decades until investigators finally linked the murder to a man convicted of murdering fourteen women, most of whom were strangled and raped in Los Angeles County between 1987 and 1998.
On Friday, the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office announced that convicted serial killer Chester Turner has been charged with first-degree murder for Camp’s killing. Her body was found on September 24, 1998.
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This appears to be the first case in which Turner has been accused of murder in a case outside of California.
DNA evidence led Salt Lake City detectives to Turner, who is currently on death row at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center after his first conviction in 2007. After being found guilty of ten murders that year, Turner was charged with strangulation and murder in 2011. four more women in the Los Angeles area in the 1980s and 1990s.
He was convicted of these murders in 2014.
In two of those later cases, another man served 11 years in prison after being wrongly convicted. He was released in 2004 when investigators linked the murder to Turner through DNA evidence.
According to prosecutors in Salt Lake County, investigators discovered that Turner had been paroled in California in 1998 — the same year Camp was killed — and had moved to Utah. They found a police report in which Turner was the victim of an assault in Salt Lake City that same year, further tying him to the area at the time.
According to the Utah Department of Public Safety, Camp had only been in Salt Lake City for two to three weeks before she was found dead. The government agency said she supported herself financially through sex work, like many of Turner’s victims.
