Convicted Los Angeles serial killer charged with murder in 25-year-old Utah case
Over 25 years ago, three teenagers in Salt Lake City, Utah found the dead body of a woman in a stairwell as they walked through a parking lot. She had a scarf around her neck.
Detectives later learned the victim, 21-year-old Itisha Camp, had been strangled. The case went unsolved for more than two decades until investigators finally linked the killing to a man convicted of murdering 14 women, strangling and raping most of them in Los Angeles County between 1987 and 1998.
On Friday, the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office announced convicted serial killer Chester Turner is being charged with first-degree aggravated murder in Camp's killing. Her body was found on Sept. 24, 1998.
This appears to be the first case in which Turner has been charged with murder in a case outside California.
DNA evidence led Salt Lake City detectives to Turner, who is currently sitting on death row in the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center after first being convicted in 2007. After he was found guilty of 10 murders that year, Turner was charged in 2011 with strangling and killing four more women in the Los Angeles area during the 1980s and 1990s.
He was convicted of those slayings in 2014.
In two of those later cases, another man spent 11 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted. He was released in 2004 when investigators connected the killing to Turner through DNA evidence.
According to prosecutors in Salt Lake County, investigators discovered that Turner was on parole in California in 1998 — the same year Camp was killed — and had left for Utah. They found a police report listing Turner as the victim of an assault in Salt Lake City that same year, further linking him to the area during that time.
Camp had only been in Salt Lake City for only two to three weeks before she was found dead, according to the Utah Department of Public Safety. The government agency said she supported herself financially through sex work, like many of Turner's victims.
