On February 14th, 1982, an officer from the Arizona Department of Public Safety was patrolling an area off westbound Interstate 40 near the town of Williams, when he came upon the body of a young woman lying beneath a cedar tree just twenty feet off the shoulder of the road. Because of the date on which the remains were found, she would later be dubbed Valentine Sally.
The victim was a white female somewhere between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, but probably around seventeen. She stood about five-foot-four, weighed one-hundred-twenty pounds, had long, straight, strawberry-blonde hair and blue eyes. She was clad in a red and white striped sweater, and a pair of size nine, Seasons brand designer jeans with a handkerchief in the pocket. The belt loops of the jeans were also notably torn, as if her killer had utilized them to drag her to the dump site.
Sally’s other distinguishing features included healed scars on her left foot and right thigh, and the fact that she had had partial root canal surgery on one of her molars approximately one week before her death, which was thought to have occurred about ten to fourteen days prior to her body being recovered. Though the state of decomposition meant that the cause of death was not certain, it was believed that she had been either strangled or suffocated, though it did not appear that she had been sexually assaulted.
The area where the victim’s body lay was adjacent to a long incline that truckers often used to pull over to cool their brakes, suggesting that whoever had killed Sally had probably been driving a semi truck, which would not appear suspicious parked at that particular spot.
The victim’s hands were too degraded to obtain fingerprints, but dental charts and later DNA were successfully extracted, and a facial reconstruction sketch was produced. Not long after the sketch went public, a waitress named Patty Wilkins at the Monte Carlo Truck Stop in Ash Fork, Arizona contacted authorities and told them that she had seen a girl matching Sally’s description at the restaurant at around three or four a.m. on the morning of February 4th.
Patty further stated that Sally had been in the company of an older white male, aged somewhere in his fifties and wearing a cowboy hat accented with peacock feathers, who gave the impression of being the girl’s father or other relative. Sally—who according to the waitress appeared to be about seventeen and was strikingly beautiful—had complained about the pain in her tooth and had asked for aspirin, but hadn’t wanted any food. Patty told police that the man with Sally seemed genuinely concerned about her welfare, and went on to say that the situation had not struck her as sinister, or even particularly unusual.
In later years, some researchers would speculate that the description Patty gave sounded similar to serial killer Royal Russell Long, who was known to prowl the area and had murdered two young women—Cinda Pallet and Charlotte Kinsey—in September of 1981. He was convicted of these crimes in 1985 and died in prison in 1993, though he never admitted to killing Valentine Sally, and investigators have so far been unable to establish a link.
Though the eyewitness sightings as well as the distinctive detail of the root canal gave investigators hope that the victim would be quickly identified, this was sadly not to be the case. Two years would go by with no leads.
Then, in the first months of 1984, Lieutenant Jack Judd of the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona believed he might have hit upon a significant clue. While poring through the missing persons files, he discovered a record of a girl named Melody Cutlip, who had run away from her home in Florida back in 1980. Thinking that the teeth in the photo of Melody looked similar to the teeth of Valentine Sally, he sent the information off to an expert to see if there was a match.
Using a rather questionable method—that is, attempting to line up Valentine Sally’s bite marks with an enlarged photograph of Melody Cutlip’s teeth—odontologist Homer Campbell declared that the two young women were one and the same, and the sheriff’s office proceeded to contact the Cutlip family in Florida to let them know that their daughter had been located dead in Arizona and would be shipped home for burial forthwith.
However, Melody’s parents did not believe that Valentine Sally was their missing daughter, and declined to have the remains shipped to them. Consequently, Valentine Sally was buried in Arizona under a headstone paid for by Patty Wilkins, the truck stop waitress who had been one of the last people to see Sally alive. The grave marker bore two names: Sally Valentine, and Melody Cutlip.
But in a happy turn of events, Melody Cutlip turned up alive and well at her parents’ Florida home in 1986. Though the family made numerous attempts to have Valentine Sally’s gravestone scrubbed of their daughter’s name, they weren’t initially successful in doing so, and in an eerie and tragic twist, Melody herself actually died twelve years later, in a 1998 car accident in Louisiana.
The identity of Valentine Sally remained unknown for many years. In 2005, her file was passed to the Cold Case Squad, a division of the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office, and the team worked through genealogical records, stepping up their efforts after the capture of the Golden State Killer in 2018.
In February of 2021, the Cold Case Squad identified Valentine Sally as seventeen-year-old Carolyn Eaton of Bellefontaine Neighbors, Missouri, who had run away from her family home in December of 1981 following an argument with her parents, after they came home and found two men they didn’t know in the house. Carolyn hadn’t been heard from since. Investigators surmise that Carolyn likely hitchhiked her way to Arizona, but the question of who killed her is still a mystery. The investigation remains active as of this writing.
Crime Immemorial 