Belynda May Grantham was a 20-year-old single mother still finding her footing when her partially clothed body was recovered from the bottom of the North Platte River outside of Glenrock, a rock tied to her neck, in August 1982.
Grantham had been strangled. She lay submerged for days before a passing bicyclist spotted her.
It would take nearly a month and a newspaper sketch before anyone could identify her.
Her murder has never been solved.
For her only remaining sibling, Rebecca Grantham, her sister’s death remains a source of pain. At 67 and in ailing health, she’d like to see someone brought to justice.
“She was a really good, smart girl who could have literally done anything with her life if given the chance,” Rebecca said of her younger sister.
Her hope is to get answers before she dies.
The investigation remains active and ongoing, according to Ryan Cox, a commander with the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation who also oversees the agency’s cold-case team.
Cox, too, said he believes it’s not too late to finally solve this crime and asks anyone with information to come forward.
Push For Answers
The murder has never stopped haunting her. Now living in Sacramento, California, Rebecca has teamed with Amanda Patterson in her quest for answers.
Patterson is the daughter of Bonnie Jones, Grantham’s best friend from their teenage years in Casper.
The two women were each carrying their own unresolved grief when they first connected on Facebook. Patterson had been helping her ailing mother type messages online and, through that, formed a bond with Rebecca.
After Jones passed away in February, they remained in touch. In early June, the two created the Facebook page “Justice for Belinda May Grantham.”
At some point during her teens, Grantham began spelling her first name “Belinda,” though never had it legally changed. For this reason, her name appears both ways in news stories about her murder.
The page shares news articles about the murder and the long-unidentified body, along with pleas for anyone with information to reach out to authorities.
Their hope was to renew interest in Grantham’s case and to invite people who knew her to share their memories and photographs — something Rebecca is especially eager for, as she has only one of her sister from childhood.
Putting Together Pieces
Much like her death, the details of Grantham’s life in her final years remain a mystery to those who loved her.
She was born in Washington state and her family moved through the Pacific Northwest before settling in Casper in 1963.
When Grantham and her siblings were teenagers, their mother, Jeanette, died, upending their lives. According to her obituary, Jeanette died after a lengthy illness at age 36 in November 1974.
Before her mother’s death, Grantham had been a straight-A student. She competed in the Future Farmers of America and took home ribbons for her homemade clothing at the 1977 Central Wyoming Fair. She made the honor roll at East Junior High School.
After losing her mother, Grantham struggled to find her bearings and ran away from time to time.
Their father remarried quickly, and the children, unable to get along with their new stepmother, scattered to relatives’ homes. They drifted in and out of group homes and foster care.
There she met a tight group of friends, including Bonnie Jones.
Grantham and Jones had an instant connection, Patterson said. In fact, they were so close that Jones gave Grantham a friendship ring, which would be used to help identify her later.
Somewhere around 1978 and 1979, Grantham left Casper to work with a traveling carnival headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She did that for two years before returning to Wyoming.
By then, Jones had moved to Wichita, Kansas, and the best friends stayed in touch through letters and phone calls.
In April 1981, Grantham gave birth to a baby girl, according to a birth announcement in the Casper-Star Tribune, which listed her address as Mills, Wyoming. It’s unclear if the father of the child was in her life at the time.
Piecing Together Mystery
More than 40 years later, Belinda’s final days continue to baffle her family.
Just as mysterious as her murder is what Grantham’s life was like during that time. This was the era before cell phones, social media and surveillance cameras and the modern trappings that log peoples’ every move and help them stay connected to friends and family.
In 1980s, people communicated with landline telephones in their home and through letters.
Because Grantham tended to move around a lot, her loved ones didn’t piece together that she was missing.
“Because of this established pattern, her absence did not immediately alarm her family and friends,” Cox said.
Then they saw the sketch of the unidentified dead women in the paper and reality hit them hard.
Writing about that moment years later, the girls’ aunt, Jean Henry Mead, spoke of the shock of seeing the drawing in the paper.
“I gasped when I noticed the drawing of a murder victim in the newspaper one morning ...,” Mead wrote on the “Murderous Musings” blog page in 2008.
Not long after, she received a frantic call from her mother-in-law, Grantham’s grandmother.
“No, it can’t be Belinda,” she wrote.
What Happened That Night?
Her friends and family scrambled to sort out the mystery of Grantham’s last steps.
In July, Grantham and a male friend took a trip to Kansas to see Jones but were unable to connect with her because she wasn’t home when they arrived, Patterson said.
For this reason, many of her friends had assumed Grantham was still in Kansas at the time of her disappearance.
Her living situation was fluid at that point, Cox said, but Grantham was reported to have been staying on and off with a family in Mills in the months leading up to her death.
Also unclear are her final moments.
Multiple witnesses report seeing her at the Husky Truck Stop and, later, at the Central Wyoming Fair, he said.
Her last sighting was at about 8:30 p.m. Aug. 2 at the fair.
Cox further stated that records indicate Grantham was unemployed, but given the nature of carnival work could not rule out that she might have been at the fair working that night.
Rebecca told Cox that it was highly possible she may have been.
Cox declined to say who reported spotting her and who she was seen with that night out of fear of jeopardizing the investigation.
Also unclear is when she was killed. Her body had likely been in the rushing water for anywhere from two to five days before being discovered by the bicyclist at about 10 a.m. the morning of Aug. 6.
Her body was recovered from the North Platte near a bridge and road that once connected Glenrock to the adjacent community of Rolling Hills before it was rerouted in the 1990s.
The Natrona County Coroner’s Office recorded her cause of death as asphyxia, the manner of death as homicide, according to the Verdict and Case Docket provided by the office.
Delayed Response
News articles at the time reported the discovery of the body and a plea for help in identifying her.
An Aug. 11 article reports that the Converse County Sheriff’s Office was seeking the public’s help in identifying a partially clothed white female found in the North Platte River near Glenrock.
Grantham went unidentified for more than three weeks until a sketch was finally released to the media.
Grantham’s family has no clear answer as to why the sheriff’s office waited so long to release a sketch, but once itappeared in local media on Aug. 27, friends and family identified her immediately.
An Aug. 31 article in the Casper Star-Tribune confirmed Grantham had been named.
Rebecca said the early coverage was painful for her family, who felt it reduced her sister to her circumstances.
The Star-Tribune, reporting on Aug. 31, quoted former Converse County Sheriff Chuck Widick, who had characterized Grantham as “a known runaway from an early age” and a ward of the state “several times.”
He also called it running away to join a carnival, Rebecca noted — rather than moving to New Mexico to take a job.
Evidence
That Grantham’s body had remained in the water for several days in a rushing river complicated the investigation.
In March 1983, five unnamed pieces of evidence collected from Grantham were submitted to the DCI’s crime lab, but the biological volume of trace evidence was insufficient to produce a DNA profile, according to a source within the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office familiar with the case who asked not to be named.
Whether Grantham was sexually assaulted cannot be shared under state statute that prevents releasing the identities of these victims, though investigators did confirm the absence of a semen sample for DNA testing.
The source said this left investigators with little to go on.
When short tandem repeat DNA analysis emerged in the 1990s — a technique using short, repeating sequences of DNA to generate a genetic profile — the evidence was resubmitted for testing in 2006, again without result.
Investigators remain hopeful that future developments in forensic technology might yet yield answers, but in the meantime they are counting on someone with knowledge of what happened to Grantham to finally step forward.
“We would welcome them with open arms quietly and get them to the right place very quickly,” one source said.
Rumors Abound
In the absence of answers, rumors abounded about who was responsible for her murder.
According to Mead’s blog entry in 2008, she heard stories about Grantham’s boyfriend strangling her and dumping her body in a bathtub filled with water.
“But why hadn’t the police arrested him?” she asked.
Rebecca also heard these same rumors and said several people in Grantham’s circle of friends were questioned, as were family members. She recalled one of her male cousins being questioned and asked to give a sample of DNA.
The initial investigation focused on Grantham’s immediate circle, Cox confirmed, but he declined to provide any names of those questioned or potentially still on the suspect list.
“The investigation turned up numerous potential suspects,” he said in an email. “The certainty of the early suspects' involvement definitely wavered as time passed. Initially, the investigation focused on Belinda's immediate circle. However, as the investigation of those persons progressed it failed to definitively link any of them to the physical evidence at the scene.”
More Murdered, Missing Women
One of the names linked with Grantham’s murder by amateur sleuths and psychology researchers at Radford University in Virginia is Dale Wayne Eaton.
Eaton is notorious for the kidnapping and murder in 1988 of Lisa Marie Kimmell, also known as “Lil Miss” from her personalized license plate.
Kimmell disappeared while driving from Denver to her family’s home in Billings, Montana, and remained missing for eight days before her body was found floating in the North Platte near Casper, about 25 miles east of where Grantham’s body was found.
Her murder went unsolved for 14 years until DNA profiling linked Eaton to her kidnapping, rape and murder in 2002.
Kimmel’s Honda CR-X was later found buried on Eaton’s property. He was convicted in 2004 and faced the death penalty, which was later overturned.
Along with Grantham’s murder, Eaton is also a suspect in the murder of Naomi Kidder, who was found nude and strangled to death on a remote Natrona County ranch in September 1982.
The 18-year-old single mother had been working in an oilfield in Rawlins at the time and disappeared on June 29, 1982, while hitchhiking home to Buffalo to see her daughter. Her murder also remains unsolved.
Eaton is also suspected in the death of another young woman, Janelle Johnson, whose nude body was discovered partially buried in a shallow grave off remote road in Shoshoni in March 1983.
Johnson had been hitchhiking from Rawlins to Riverton to attend modeling school when she was killed. Her murder also remains unsolved.
Eaton also is considered a person of interest in the disappearance of long-distance runner Amy Wroe Bechtel, who vanished while running in the Shoshone National Forest, about 15 miles southwest of Lander, on July 24, 1997.
Eaton’s name resurfaced again in October when authorities took a second look at evidence found on a property in Waltman, in rural Natrona County, where Eaton had lived in his camper during that summer that might link him to Bechtel’s disappearance.
Eaton, today 81, is currently serving a life sentence at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Facility in Torrington.
He did not respond to Cowboy State Daily’s letter asking if he was involved in Grantham’s murder.
Cox was lukewarm on Eaton’s potential involvement in Grantham’s death.
“Due to the timeline and circumstances surrounding Belinda's case, Eaton is naturally someone who warrants examination,” Cox said. “However, at this stage, it is more accurate to view him as a person of interest rather than a formal suspect.”
Remembering Belinda
Rebecca’s voice still catches when she talks about her early years with her little sister and all the milestones she’s missed.
She remembers a “kind heart,” and how close the two of them were in the years before their mother died — a loss that hit them both while they were still young.
Her sister was brilliant and gentle, Rebecca said. The weight of losing her has never gone away, and she wants, finally, to have justice.
Grantham’s cousin, Deb Anderson, had few specific memories of Grantham from around the time of her death. Anderson had moved away from Casper by then, absorbed in her own life.
Still, her memories of her cousin are warm. Anderson described Grantham as “just so sweet,” with “blonde hair and big blue eyes.”
Her clearest memory is of piling into Jean’s Corvair — Grantham’s mom’s car — with she and their other cousins, pretending they were headed somewhere exciting.
“I just remember how she was always happy, smiling,” Anderson said. “There was never any drama with her, you know, and that’s why it just shocked me when I even heard about what happened.”
She, too, wants answers.
For Patterson, returning to these memories of Grantham is also a way of feeling close to her own mother, who was dear friends with Grantham.
Grantham wasn’t the only person in Jones’ life who had been murdered. Her brother, Larry Loucka, had also been killed — in Denver, in 1974. That case, too, remains unsolved.
She recalled the story of her mother sliding a pinky ring onto Grantham’s finger and joking that it meant they were married. She spoke frequently of her friend in the days and months leading up to her death, Patterson said. The friendship had defined her. It is through moments like this that Patterson stays connected to both of them.
Patterson hopes that telling Grantham’s story might move someone, after all these years, to finally come forward.
“It’s not too late,” she said. “It’s never too late.”
Cox agreed and encouraged anyone with information – no matter how small or irrelevant it may seem – to contact investigators.
Anyone with information to contact the Converse County Sheriff’s Office at 307-358-4700 or the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation at 307-777-7181. People with information can also submit an anonymous tip on DCI’s website.
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
