Editors Note: This article was originally published in the Jan. 24, 2024 issue of the Chronicle Progress. Some information may be outdated.
Sheriff’s captain delivers man’s remains to 90-year-old daughter in North Carolina
A new twist emerged in the case of the long-missing North Carolina man whose remains were discovered in Millard County in the 1950s and identified on Christmas Eve.
Less than a week before a local sheriff’s captain returned Robert Holman Trent to his 90-year-old daughter, Peggy Trent Elmore, he discovered a dusty case file buried in the sheriff’s office archives. It revealed a much richer story than previously reported, including that Trent’s skeletal remains were not found anywhere near Kanosh, but by a trio of deer hunters in 1953 on the Scipio Summit.
Published accounts of the discovery exist, too, hidden in plain sight among the state’s digital newspaper records.
They are short stories, but tell of three brothers, Jay, Chester and Lon Memmott, hunting about dusk on Oct. 26, 1953, about two miles off of U.S. Highway 91 west of Scipio. They came upon the skeletal remains of a man, still wearing a shirt, shoes and socks, but without any identification. About 75 feet from the skeleton was a shopping bag with a brown sweater and several potatoes inside. A newspaper from Salt Lake City was also found there, dated April 14, 1952, according to the accounts.
Within days of the skeleton’s discovery, the sheriff at the time, Culbert Robinson, was already contemplating sending the bones off to an FBI lab for analysis—they eventually would be. He told reporters he wasn’t sure if chipped bone from the skeleton’s skull indicated the person died by violence.
The find launched a near 16-year effort by local law enforcement to learn the identify of the remains, a fruitless endeavor followed by 54 years of anonymity—until Christmas Eve, 2023.
A DEEPER DIVE
Millard Sheriff’s Capt. Pat Bennett missed the case file the first time he looked for one. He was operating on scant information provided by Utah’s Office of the Medical Examiner, who alerted authorities locally a few years ago that there was a set of unidentified bones found in Kanosh in 1958.
Bennett looked and looked, but could find nothing to indicate who found the remains, where they were found and when they left the custody of the sheriff’s office and entered the custody of the medical examiner’s office. All he knew was that sometime in 1979, the bones found their way to the medical examiner, ending up at the University of Utah for a spell as well.
When a Houston-area forensic lab, Othram, began crowd-funding last year to pay for cutting edge DNA testing on the bones, it was simply a matter of time before a name emerged. Othram’s work has closed so many cases lately that not a week goes by its work isn’t heralded by one community or another somewhere in the country, solving mysteries decades old and at a rocket’s pace.
But Bennett wasn’t going to give up just because the bones had a name. So he tried the archives again, stacks of case files six inches deep at a time. And then the Scipio Summit file caught his eye.
“They are not in any kind of order,” he said of the records, which have moved from building to building as the collection and the county has grown. “It literally took me going through an entire section of these records file by file to be able to come across this.”
Bennett said he scoured records from the early 1950s all the way into the 1970s. The 1953 file ended up being the one that fit the best. Eventually a comparison of dental records contained in the file matched the dental records from the medical examiner on the bones once thought from Kanosh.
“The details in that examination match the medical examiner report I had from Utah Medical Examiner that was done. The dental records and all that match,” he said.
And what’s more, the file showed the giant effort authorities exerted attempting to find a name for the bones.
Letters back and forth between J. Edgar Hoover and the local sheriff—eventually Calvin Stewart, who replaced Robinson. Letters to the departments of the army and navy. Letters to the families of missing people, descriptions of whom were compared to the bones that sat in a vault below the county courthouse.
“It never seemed to pan out,” Bennett recounted. “The case file goes from starting in 1955 (around the time the FBI sent the remains back to Millard County) through 1969.”
The story of the bones largely morphed and was likely forgotten altogether between 1969 and 1979.
A 2018 state law requiring law enforcement agencies to enter all unidentified remains in their custody into a state and national database is what created the greatest push to get the bones identified. Even that took a few more years.
Peggy Trent Elmore is seen here with Capt. Pat Bennett, who flew into North Carolina to meet with the Trent family and return Robert Trent’s remains.
FINALLY, SWEET CLOSURE
By that time, Peggy was settled into a comfortable home at a retirement community in Greensboro. She had last heard from her father in 1946, when she was 13 and he was 33. But almost alone among her family she never stopped looking for him, even well into the 1990s.
A gravestone was even placed inside the Trent family’s cemetery, the date given for his death at the time was Aug. 25, 1964.
True closure came for Peggy a few weeks ago. That’s when Bennett delivered a small box containing Trent’s cremated remains to her and her daughter, Cindy Joseph.
He also brought the case file and shared the new information with the family.
They were overwhelmed. Bennett, too.
“We were thrilled that he (Bennett) was willing to come. The funeral home there did a wonderful job,” Cindy said. “My mother was overwhelmed with gratitude and grief. She was very happy to have him home.”
Bennett called the experience “unforgettable.”
“They are just the sweetest, kindest people. Having any part of bringing them some answers is just amazing,” he said. “It was such a good experience to meet with them.”
Cindy says her mother is holding her father’s remains tightly for now. But when the weather warms, the family intends to place him in the spot where his gravestone sits.
“Right now, she just wants them with her. She’s very protective of them…I’m just so grateful and thankful that she had some closure before she too passes,” she said. “Because she is 90 years old. Who would have ever thought that DNA from her at her age would have solved his whereabouts.”
Bennett said his search for more answers is not yet complete. He plans to reach out to more agencies for information, specifically trying to find out why Trent was in Utah. He said the IRS may be helpful in locating records about where Trent worked and lived. The FBI, he said, long ago disposed of their records from the case.
The sheriff’s captain said a definitive cause of death also remains elusive. The FBI could not pinpoint one and neither did the case file contain a reference to one.
Cindy and her family say they believe Trent was likely murdered.
“We’ll never know the entire story. Obviously somebody apparently murdered him and dumped his body there off of the highway. Based on all these findings, how he was clothed and that kind of thing,” she said.
