Part 1

I never intended to be the “other man.” I never intended to be the key witness in a tragedy that would tear a family apart and shock the entire state of Utah. My name is Jason, and for a few intense, confusing months, I was in love with a woman named Vanessa.

We met the way a lot of people do these days—just two people crossing paths, looking for a connection. Vanessa was beautiful, 42 years old, and lived in a stunning million-dollar home in Cottonwood Heights, Utah. On the surface, she had it all: a successful life, three beautiful kids, and a husband, Eric, who was a respected Green Beret in the National Guard. But Vanessa spun a different story. She told me she was trapped. She told me she was scared.

She painted a picture of a marriage that was crumbling, filled with shouting matches and fear. She told me Eric was volatile. In August, she even filed for a protective order. I wanted to be her hero. I wanted to protect her. I didn’t know then that the court had dismissed her order, noting that she wasn’t the victim she claimed to be—that she was actually the one instigating the conflicts, sending demeaning texts, trying to provoke him. I didn’t see the court documents that described their marriage as “highly dysfunctional.” All I saw was the woman I was falling for, crying on my shoulder.

Things started getting strange in mid-September. The intensity of her emotions shifted from sadness to something colder, something calculated. On September 19th, just two days before everything changed forever, she came over to my place. We were talking, and she casually showed me something she had in her bag.

It was a gun. A Glock 19X.

“I need this for protection,” she said. I remember staring at the weapon, a cold pit forming in my stomach. Utah is a place where many people own firearms, especially military families, but the way she held it… there was a detachment there. A lack of fear. It didn’t feel like a shield; it felt like a promise. I brushed it off, telling myself I was being paranoid. I told myself she was just a stressed mother going through a messy divorce.

The weekend of September 20th rolled around. Vanessa told me she had arranged for her three kids—ages 11, 7, and 5—to stay at her parents’ house. She said she needed space. She said Eric was coming home, and they needed to “talk.”

That Friday night, I knew they were arguing. I knew Eric had found out about us. I sat in my apartment, staring at my phone, waiting for her to text me that she was okay, that the fight was over, that she had asked for the divorce. I imagined a screaming match. I imagined tears. I never imagined the silence that would follow.

Saturday passed. Then Sunday.

On Sunday night, September 22nd, just before midnight, there was a knock at my door. When I opened it, Vanessa was standing there. She looked exhausted, her eyes wide and frantic, but her voice… her voice was eerily calm.

I noticed bruises on her arms immediately.

“What happened?” I asked, ushering her inside, my heart racing. “Did he hurt you? Did Eric do this?”

She walked into my living room and sat down, looking at her hands. She shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “He didn’t do this.”

“Then who did?”

She looked up at me, and the look in her eyes is something that will haunt me until the day I die. It wasn’t fear. It was a strange, hollow relief.

“I got these while I was cleaning,” she said. “And while I was burying him.”

The world seemed to stop spinning. I couldn’t process the words. “Burying who? What are you talking about, Vanessa?”

She took a breath and told me everything. She told me how they had argued. How he had yelled at her about the affair. And then, she told me what happened in the early hours of Saturday morning. She told me that while Eric, a man who had served his country for over a decade, a father to her children, was sleeping in their bed… she walked in. She took his own 9mm handgun. And she sh*t him.

My blood ran cold. I was sitting next to a woman who had just confessed to taking a life. But she didn’t stop there. She described it like she was reading a grocery list. She told me how she dragged his body down the stairs. How she put him in a rooftop storage container. How she loaded him into the back of their minivan.

She told me she drove his truck to a neighborhood blocks away and abandoned it to make it look like he had left. Then, she drove north. somewhere into the darkness of Davis County, and buried him in a shallow grave.

“I bleached the walls,” she said, rubbing her bruised arms. “I rented a carpet cleaner. I ordered a new mattress.”

I sat there, frozen. Every instinct in my body was screaming at me to run, to get out of the house, to call the police. But I was terrified. She was sitting right there, confessing to m*rder, and she was speaking about Eric—a human being, a father—as if he were trash she had taken to the curb.

I tried to keep my voice steady. “Vanessa… do you realize what you’ve done?”

That’s when she said the words that broke me. She looked me dead in the eye and said, “If you think I could hurt a fly… you’re wrong. But he wasn’t a person anymore. He wasn’t Eric.”

She had dehumanized him completely. In her mind, she was the Queen of Hearts, off with his head. She actually told me that if she could, she would “round up the scum of the earth and k*ll them all.”

She asked me not to look at her like a monster. She asked me to remember the woman I loved. But that woman was gone. Sitting in front of me was a stranger capable of unspeakable things.

I knew I had to do something. I knew I couldn’t let this slide. But I was scared she would turn on me next. So, I did the only thing I could think of. I played along. I told her I understood.

But the next time she called… I hit record.

Part 2: The Queen of Hearts and the House of Bleach
The Weight of a Dead Man’s Secret
I didn’t sleep that night. After Vanessa left my apartment, the air felt heavy, suffocating. I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the spot on the couch where she had sat—where she had calmly confessed to ending her husband’s life. The cushion was still depressed, a physical reminder that this wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.

My mind was racing at a thousand miles an hour. Every instinct I had as a human being was screaming at me to call 911 immediately. “She k__lled him,” a voice in my head kept repeating. “Eric is dead. He’s in a hole somewhere in Davis County.”

But then, a darker, colder fear washed over me. Vanessa was calculating. She was methodical. She had just told me she drugged, sh__t, and buried a Special Forces soldier—a Green Beret—without blinking an eye. If I called the police right now, would they believe me? It was my word against hers. She was the grieving, beautiful mother from a wealthy neighborhood. I was the “other man,” the secret lover. She could spin this. She could say I was crazy, or worse, she could pin it on me.

I realized with a sickening jolt that I was walking a tightrope. One wrong move, and I could fall. I needed proof. I needed her to say it again, on the record.

The next 24 hours were a blur of paranoia. Every time my phone buzzed, my heart hammered against my ribs. Was it her? Was it the police? Was it Eric’s friends looking for him? I had to act normal. I had to go to work, buy groceries, and breathe, all while carrying the knowledge that a man’s body was decomposing in the dirt because of the woman I thought I loved.

The Recording
I decided to call her. My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped the phone. I set up a secondary recording device—an old tablet—next to my phone, just in case the app failed. I needed every word.

When she answered, her voice was startlingly normal. “Hey,” she said, as if she were just checking in after a grocery run.

“Vanessa,” I started, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. “I… I can’t stop thinking about what you told me. About Eric.”

There was a pause. “What about him?”

“I’m scared,” I said, and for once, I wasn’t acting. “You told me you… you ended it. That you buried him. Vanessa, how can you be so calm? Aren’t you afraid?”

What she said next chilled me to the bone. It wasn’t the voice of a scared abuse victim. It was the voice of someone who believed she was above morality.

“Wow,” she scoffed, the sound distorted slightly over the speaker. “If you think I could even hurt a fly, you don’t know me. But… he just… he wasn’t a person anymore. He wasn’t Eric.”

I stared at the recording timer ticking up. 01:15… 01:16…

“He wasn’t a person?” I repeated, prompting her.

“No,” she said firmly. “He was an obstacle. I’ve always preached that I was like the Queen of Hearts in my past lives.”

I froze. “The Queen of Hearts?”

“Yeah,” she laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “Because I’m like, ‘Off with their heads!’ I’m like, if we could just round up the sc*m of this earth and put them on an island or just k__ll them all, I could ship-shape this country back to a good place.”

I felt bile rise in my throat. She wasn’t just talking about self-defense or a crime of passion anymore. She was talking about a worldview where she decided who lived and who died. She was God, judge, and executioner. She saw Eric—a man who had served his country in dangerous war zones—not as a hero or a father, but as “sc*m” that needed to be removed so she could “ship-shape” her life.

“Don’t think of me as a monster,” she added, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Remember who I was before I opened my mouth.”

It was a masterclass in manipulation. She wanted me to separate the act from the actor. She wanted me to love the shell of the woman while ignoring the rot inside. But I had what I needed. The recording was saved.

The Charade of the Grieving Wife
The days that followed were a masterclass in deception, but this time, the audience was the entire state of Utah.

On September 28th—a full week after she told me she had m__rdered him—Vanessa finally called the police. She didn’t call to confess. She called to report a missing person.

I watched from the sidelines as the news broke. “Green Beret Missing,” the headlines read. “Family Concerned for Safety of Matthew ‘Eric’ Johnson.”

I saw Vanessa on the periphery of these reports. She told the police a story that was so believable it was terrifying. She said Eric had packed a bag. She said he told her he was leaving for a week to cool off and that she shouldn’t contact him. It was perfect. It played into the narrative of their rocky marriage. It made him look like the one who walked away.

Meanwhile, the Utah National Guard was mobilizing. These were men who had served with Eric for over a decade. They described him as brilliant, reliable—a man who would never abandon his post or his children. They were organizing search parties, combing through canyons, putting up flyers.

I saw a post from one of his friends, a guy named Kevin. “This isn’t like him,” Kevin wrote. “Matt wouldn’t just vanish.”

Reading that, I felt a crushing wave of guilt. I knew exactly where he was—or at least, I knew he wasn’t “missing.” He was gone. Every day I stayed silent was another day his friends wasted searching the wrong places. It was another day his children waited for a dad who was never coming home.

But I had to be smart. I was gathering more than just audio. I started taking screenshots of our texts. I looked back at the timeline. I realized she had been referring to him in the past tense days before she even reported him missing.

“He was…” she would say. Not “he is.”

I realized something else, too. The “bruises” she showed me. She used them to garner sympathy, to claim self-defense in her narrative to me. But in the police reports I later saw regarding the protective order she tried to get in August, the judge had ruled that she was the aggressor. She wasn’t the battered wife she played on TV. She was the one poking the bear, trying to get a reaction she could use in court. When the court didn’t give her what she wanted—a divorce on her terms—she took matters into her own hands.

Walking Into the Lion’s Den
By October 2nd, I couldn’t take it anymore. The walls were closing in. I felt like I was an accessory just by breathing the same air as the truth.

I walked into the Cottonwood Heights Police Department. The lobby was sterile, smelling of floor wax and stale coffee. I approached the desk sergeant, my heart pounding so hard I thought he could hear it.

“I have information about the Matthew Johnson case,” I said. My voice sounded foreign to my own ears.

They took me back to an interview room. Small, windowless, exactly like you see in the movies. I sat down and placed my phone on the table.

“I need you to listen to this,” I told the detectives.

I watched their faces as I played the recording. I watched their expressions shift from professional curiosity to shock, and then to a grim, steely resolve. When Vanessa’s voice said, “He wasn’t a person anymore,” one of the detectives stopped writing and looked up, his jaw set tight.

I told them everything. The affair. The gun she showed me on the 19th. The confession on the 22nd. The bruises. The details about the cleaning.

“She said she bleached the walls,” I told them. “She said she replaced the mattress.”

That was the key. Physical evidence. Stories can be fabricated, but a brand-new mattress in a house where a man supposedly just “walked away”? That was a smoking gun.

The Raid on the Million-Dollar Tomb
Based on my statement and the digital evidence I provided, the police obtained a search warrant for the home in Cottonwood Heights.

I wasn’t there when they kicked the door down, but I learned the details later, and I can envision it clearly. This house—this beautiful, expensive symbol of the American Dream—had been turned into a slaughterhouse.

When the investigators entered the master bedroom, it looked pristine. Too pristine. It smelled faintly of harsh chemicals, the scent of a swimming pool mixed with floral air freshener. Vanessa had scrubbed. God, she had scrubbed.

But modern forensics is harder to beat than a simple scrub brush.

They lifted the new mattress—the one records showed was ordered on September 24th, just three days after the m__rder, and delivered two days later. Underneath, on the carpet, they found it. A large, dark stain.

They pulled up the carpet. The bl__d had soaked through to the padding. It had seeped into the wood of the bed slats.

It wasn’t just a spot. It was a pool. It corroborated everything she had told me. He had been sleeping. He had been defenseless.

Then there were the walls. She had bleached them, yes. But Luminol tells a different story. The reddish-brown spots were still there, faint traces of high-velocity spatter on the drywall, on the blinds, on the bed frame.

The violence of the act was written in the invisible ink of DNA.

But the most disturbing discovery wasn’t the bl__d. It was the realization of who had helped her.

The Family Business
As the police dug deeper, tracking GPS data from Vanessa’s phone and reviewing neighborhood surveillance, a horrifying picture emerged. Vanessa hadn’t acted entirely alone in the aftermath.

Her parents.

Thomas and Rosalie. People who were grandparents to those three little kids.

The police found that Vanessa’s parents had been at the house on the days following the m__rder. They claimed they were there for less than an hour, just to pick up some clothes. But the digital footprint doesn’t lie. They were there for over five hours.

Five hours in a house that smelled of death and bleach.

Investigators discovered that it was Rosalie, Vanessa’s mother, who had purchased the new mattress. It was a frantic attempt to replace the evidence. And when they checked Rosalie’s phone? It had been remotely reset. Wiped clean. All the location data, all the texts from that weekend—gone.

Why would a grandmother wipe her phone unless she had something terrible to hide?

When they questioned Thomas, her father, he slipped up. He said, “I did not go in the room where the incident happened.”

The incident.

He knew. He knew there was an “incident.” He knew where it happened. He knew his son-in-law wasn’t missing.

In a plastic tote bin at the parents’ house, wrapped inside a child’s onesie—innocence wrapping death—they found the gun box. The box for the Glock 19X. The same gun she had shown me.

It was a conspiracy of silence. A family pact to protect the “Queen of Hearts” no matter the cost. They were willing to let Eric rot in the ground, willing to let his parents grieve without answers, willing to let his children grow up wondering why Daddy left them, all to save Vanessa from the consequences of her own evil.

The Arrest
The net tightened. On October 2nd, the same day I went to the police, they moved in.

Vanessa was arrested.

I saw the footage on the news. She didn’t look like the Queen of Hearts then. She looked small. But there was still that defiance in her eyes. Even in handcuffs, she held her head up, as if she were the victim of a great injustice.

She was charged with first-degree m__rder and obstruction of justice. Her parents followed soon after, charged with obstruction.

But the victory felt hollow. Because even though they had Vanessa, and even though they had the blood evidence, one crucial thing was still missing.

Eric.

Vanessa wasn’t talking. She lawyered up immediately. She sat in her cell, tight-lipped, likely convinced she could still outsmart them. She had admitted to me that she buried him, but she hadn’t given the exact coordinates. She had driven north, that much we knew from the GPS. Davis County. Maybe near the border.

The search radius was massive. Hundreds of square miles of rugged Utah terrain. Mountains, deserts, ravines.

I thought about what she said to me that night in my apartment. “I could ship-shape this country.”

She thought she was cleaning up a mess. She thought erasing a human being was like taking out the trash.

As the weeks turned into months, the search parties grew desperate. Winter was coming to Utah. The ground would freeze. The snow would cover everything. If they didn’t find him soon, they might not find him until spring—or ever.

I sat in my apartment, the recording of her voice still echoing in my head. I had done the right thing. I had turned her in. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the nightmare wasn’t over.

The courts were getting involved now. The bail hearings. The custody battles for the children who had lost everything. And the life insurance policy—$500,000 that Vanessa was still technically the beneficiary of.

She had k__lled him for freedom, for control, and maybe for money. And she was still fighting for it.

I realized then that this wasn’t just a murder case. It was a war. A war between the truth and a woman who believed she could rewrite reality to suit her needs. And I was the one who had fired the first shot by pressing “record.”

But the war was far from won. The trial was coming. And Vanessa Gledhill had one more card to play. She was going to try to convince the world that she was the victim, and that Eric—the man she executed in his sleep—had deserved it.

I looked at the snow falling outside my window, covering the city in white, hiding the dirt, hiding the secrets. Somewhere out there, Eric was waiting to be found. And I knew I wouldn’t find peace until he came home.

Part 3: The Queen of Hearts vs. The Brotherhood of Green
The Courtroom of Cold Stares
The arrest wasn’t the end. In many ways, it was just the beginning of a different kind of hell.

Salt Lake City in late October is beginning to turn cold. The air gets crisp, the mountains start to gather snow at their peaks, and the sky turns a piercing, unforgiving blue. I remember walking toward the courthouse, the wind cutting through my jacket, feeling like every eye in the state was burning a hole in my back.

I wasn’t on trial, but I felt like I was. I was the witness. The “lover.” The man who had unknowingly walked into a spider’s web and barely made it out with his soul intact.

The bail hearing was the first time I saw Vanessa since the night she confessed in my living room. I expected to see a broken woman. I expected tears, hysteria, maybe the realization of what she had done finally crashing down on her.

I was wrong.

When she was led into the courtroom, wearing the jail-issued uniform, her hands cuffed, there was no remorse on her face. Her chin was up. Her eyes scanned the room with a terrifying sharpness. She looked… annoyed. Like this was all a massive inconvenience to her schedule. This was the “Queen of Hearts” in the flesh. She wasn’t sorry she k__lled Eric; she was furious that she got caught.

The courtroom was packed. On one side, there was her family—her parents, Thomas and Rosalie, who were now co-defendants, looking pale and shaken, their comfortable retirement shattered by their own complicity.

On the other side sat the brotherhood.

Dozens of men in uniform or wearing the insignias of the 19th Special Forces Group. These were Eric’s brothers. Green Berets. Men who had trusted Eric with their lives in combat zones halfway across the world. They sat in stony, disciplined silence, a wall of grief and anger. They weren’t there to intimidate; they were there to bear witness. They were there to make sure the woman who erased their brother didn’t get to erase his memory.

I sat in the back, trying to make myself invisible.

The Prosecution’s Hammer
The prosecutor didn’t hold back. They laid out the case that I had helped build, but hearing it all at once was physically nauseating.

They talked about the GPS data. They showed the map of her phone’s movements on that dark morning of September 21st. The red line on the screen traced a path from their home in Cottonwood Heights, north toward Davis County, weaving through backroads, pausing in desolate areas. It was a digital map of a burial.

Then, they played the audio.

My recording.

The sound of my own voice filled the courtroom, shaky and scared. “Aren’t you afraid?”

And then, her voice. Clear. Arrogant. Cold.

“If you think I could even hurt a fly… Like he just, he’s not a person. He wasn’t a person anymore. He wasn’t Matt.”

A gasp went through the gallery. I saw Eric’s fellow soldiers stiffen. One of them put his head in his hands. To hear a wife speak about her husband—a man they respected, a man who served—as if he were nothing more than a broken appliance she had discarded… it was a violation of everything decent.

The prosecutor turned to the judge. “Your Honor, the defendant has demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a frightening capacity for violence. She dehumanized the victim to justify his execution. Furthermore, she has threatened self-harm to avoid consequences.”

They revealed another detail I hadn’t fully processed. In her desperation, Vanessa had told me she would “sh__t herself” before going to jail.

“She is a danger to the community,” the prosecutor argued. “She is a danger to herself. And she has the means and the mindset to flee or obstruct further if released.”

Vanessa’s lawyer tried to paint a picture of a frazzled mother, a victim of a bad marriage. But the judge wasn’t buying it. The evidence of the cleanup—the bleach, the carpet cleaner, the new mattress ordered before the body was even cold—pointed to a calculated, icy mind, not a panicked victim.

“Bail is denied,” the judge ruled.

Vanessa didn’t cry. She didn’t collapse. She just stared ahead, her jaw tightening. As the bailiffs led her away, she glanced toward the gallery. For a split second, her eyes locked onto mine. There was no love left in them. Only a promise of vengeance.

The Floating Coffin
While the legal battle raged in the warmth of the courthouse, the physical battle was happening out in the freezing waters and rugged terrain of Northern Utah.

The police had a theory. They knew she had transported him. They knew she had used the minivan. But they needed to know how she moved a 200-pound man without leaving a massive trail of evidence in the car.

The answer came from the depths of a local reservoir.

Investigators had been searching water bodies along her GPS route. They were looking for anything unusual. And they found it.

A vehicle storage container.

You know the kind—those hard-shell cargo carriers that sit on the roof racks of SUVs. They are sleek, aerodynamic, and designed to hold luggage, skis, camping gear.

They found one floating, half-submerged in the water, bobbing like a dark buoy.

When they dragged it to shore and cracked it open, the smell of the swamp wasn’t the only thing that hit them. Inside, there were traces. Residue. And DNA.

They ran the tests. It was a match.

Matthew “Eric” Johnson’s blood.

The realization of what she had done hit the investigators like a physical blow. She hadn’t just dragged him. She had stuffed her husband’s body into a rooftop cargo box. She had sealed him inside it like a piece of luggage.

The indignity of it was staggering. This was a Green Beret. A warrior. And she had packed him away in plastic and dumped him, likely hoping the container would sink to the bottom and never be seen again.

But plastic floats. And truth rises.

This discovery was the climax of the investigation’s physical evidence phase. It proved the “how.” It linked the blood in the bedroom to the disposal site. It connected the dots between the clean house and the missing body.

But it didn’t give us Eric. The container was empty.

The Shallow Grave
The search parties redoubled their efforts. I watched from afar as Eric’s friends, the men from the National Guard, took time off work, leaving their own families to trudge through mud and snow.

They organized grid searches in Davis and Weber counties. They used drones. They used cadaver dogs. They were driven by a singular, burning purpose: Leave No Man Behind.

“We broke bread with her,” one of his friends, John, told a reporter. “She welcomed us into their home. And the whole time, she was capable of this.”

The betrayal cut deep. These men are trained to spot enemies. They are trained to see danger. But the danger had been hiding in plain sight, wearing a smile, pouring coffee, playing the role of the supportive military wife.

The weather turned against them. Snow began to blanket the Wasatch Front. The ground froze hard as iron. Every day that passed made it less likely they would find him before spring.

I remember driving out to one of the search sites, staying on the perimeter. I saw the breath of the volunteers steaming in the cold air. I saw them poking the ground with probes.

Somewhere out there, in a shallow grave that Vanessa had dug in the frantic darkness of that Saturday morning, Eric was waiting. The thought kept me up at night. I kept replaying her words: “I buried him.”

Where? Where did the Queen of Hearts hide her secret?

The Betrayal of Blood
As if the m__rder wasn’t enough, the depth of the family’s corruption began to surface in the media, and it was sickening.

The police released details about what they found in Vanessa’s parents’ home. We knew about the mattress Rosalie bought. We knew about Thomas lying about entering the bedroom.

But there was one detail that broke the hearts of everyone who heard it.

In the parents’ house, near Vanessa’s old bedroom, police found a plastic tote bin. Inside the bin was a child’s onesie. A piece of clothing meant for an infant—soft, innocent, representing new life.

Wrapped inside that onesie was the hard plastic box for a Glock 19X.

The symbolism was horrific. They had used the symbol of a child to hide the instrument of the father’s death. They had literally wrapped the m__rder weapon’s case in the clothing of the children whose lives they had just destroyed.

Thomas and Rosalie Gladhill weren’t just protecting their daughter. They were actively participating in the erasure of their son-in-law. They had chosen their side. They chose the m__rderer over the truth. They chose to let their grandchildren grow up believing their father abandoned them, rather than admit their daughter was a monster.

This was the moral climax of the story—the realization that this wasn’t just one “bad apple.” This was a family unit that had rotted from the inside out.

The $500,000 Question
And then, the final insult. The money.

Even as she sat in jail, denied bail, charged with first-degree m__rder, the legal machinery regarding Eric’s death benefits was grinding on.

Eric had a $500,000 life insurance policy through Prudential. He had taken it out to protect his family, to ensure that if anything happened to him on a deployment, his wife and kids would be safe.

Vanessa was the named beneficiary.

Prudential filed a motion with the court. They were in a bind. They couldn’t pay the m__rderer, but until she was convicted, she was technically still the claimant. And Eric’s body was missing, complicating the death certificate process.

It was a sick joke. She k__lled him to be free, to be with me (or so she claimed), and to keep the assets. Now, she was fighting to get paid for the hit.

The court had to step in to freeze the funds, to determine who should actually receive the money. It should go to the children. The children who were now living with relatives, their world completely shattered.

The Silent Victims
I can’t tell this story without talking about the kids. The 11-year-old, the 7-year-old, the 5-year-old.

They are the true tragedy here.

On the night of the m__rder, Vanessa had sent them away to her parents. They slept safely in their grandparents’ house while their mother was executing their father a few miles away.

Now, they have no one. Their dad is “missing” (though they are old enough to understand the whispers). Their mom is in prison, accused of being the monster in the night. Their grandparents—the people who were supposed to be their safety net—are facing felony charges for helping cover it up.

Who explains this to a 5-year-old? Who explains that Mommy hurt Daddy? Who explains why Grandpa and Grandma lied?

I often wonder if they remember me. “Mr. Jason,” the guy Mom introduced them to. I wonder if they hate me. I wouldn’t blame them. I was the catalyst. If I hadn’t come into the picture, maybe Vanessa would have just divorced him. Maybe she would have just left.

Or maybe it was inevitable. Maybe the “Queen of Hearts” was always going to demand a head eventually.

The Long Wait for Justice
As 2024 bled into 2025, the case moved into the slow, grinding phase of pre-trial motions.

The trial date was set: December 8, 2025.

That is where we are now. Waiting.

Vanessa sits in the Salt Lake County Jail. She has pleaded not guilty to all charges: Murder, Obstruction of Justice, Desecration of a Human Body, Witness Tampering.

She is sticking to her story. Or maybe she’s concocting a new one. Maybe she’ll claim self-defense again, despite the forensic evidence proving he was asleep. Maybe she’ll try to blame me. Maybe she’ll blame her parents.

I’ve been subpoenaed. I know I will have to take the stand. I will have to sit in that chair, a few feet away from her, and look into the eyes of the woman I slept with, the woman who showed me a gun and told me she wanted to “clean up the country.”

I will have to tell the jury about the bruises that were fake. About the bleach. About the chilling calmness in her voice when she said, “He wasn’t a person anymore.”

But the hardest part isn’t the impending trial. It’s the empty space in the world where Matthew “Eric” Johnson used to be.

The snow is melting now. The search teams are gearing up again. The Green Berets haven’t given up. They never will.

There is a resolve in the community now. We aren’t just waiting for a verdict. We are waiting for a homecoming. Because there is no justice without truth, and the whole truth is buried somewhere in the dirt of Northern Utah.

I live with the ghosts of this case every day. I see Eric’s face in the news. I see Vanessa’s mugshot. I hear the recording.

And I know that the climax of this story hasn’t truly happened yet. The legal climax was the bail hearing, yes. The investigative climax was the storage container. But the human climax? That won’t happen until Eric is found.

Until then, we are all just trapped in the Queen of Hearts’ twisted game, waiting for the final card to turn.

Part 4: The Empty Chair and The Long Road Home

The Trial Has Begun

It is December 2025. As I write this, the snow is falling again in Salt Lake City, just as it did the winter I realized I was sleeping with a monster.

The date we have all been waiting for—December 8, 2025—has finally arrived. The trial of Vanessa Gledhill is currently underway.

Walking into that courthouse this week felt like stepping back into a nightmare I’ve been trying to wake up from for over a year. The media trucks are lined up outside, satellite dishes pointing at the gray sky, broadcasting our tragedy to the world.

Inside, the atmosphere is electric with tension. I saw her again. She’s thinner now, her prison uniform hanging off her frame, but her eyes haven’t changed. They still hold that same defiant, icy stare she gave me the night she told me she was the “Queen of Hearts.” She doesn’t look like a woman who regrets executing the father of her children; she looks like a woman who is angry she hasn’t won yet.

I am scheduled to take the stand. I will have to sit there, in front of the jury, in front of Eric’s grieving parents, and in front of those stoic Green Berets, and recount every detail of our affair. I will have to admit my own shame to help secure her conviction. It is a small price to pay for the truth, but it weighs heavy.

The Ghost in the Mountains

Despite the legal proceedings, there is a gaping hole in this story that no court verdict can fill.

Matthew “Eric” Johnson is still missing.

For over a year, his brothers-in-arms—the men of the 19th Special Forces Group—have refused to give up. They have spent their weekends, their holidays, and their own money searching the rugged terrain of Northern Utah. They have combed through Davis County, Box Elder County, and the freezing waters near the Idaho border.

They found the storage container. They found the blood. They found the evidence of the crime. But they haven’t found the man.

It haunts me. I drive past the mountains now and wonder if he’s there, hidden in a ravine, covered by the winter snow. I wonder if he’s cold. It’s an irrational thought—I know he’s gone—but the human heart struggles to let go without a goodbye.

Vanessa holds the key. She knows exactly where she left him. She knows the GPS coordinates of the shallow grave she dug while her children slept. But she refuses to speak. She is holding his body hostage, a final power play to inflict pain on the people who loved him.

A Broken Legacy

The true victims of this tragedy aren’t in the courtroom. They are somewhere else, shielded from the cameras, trying to grow up in a world that makes no sense.

The three children.

They are a year older now. The 5-year-old is 6. The 11-year-old is 12. They have spent a year without their father and a year visiting their mother through bulletproof glass—or perhaps not visiting her at all.

I often think about the “legacy” Vanessa wanted to leave. She wanted to “ship-shape” the country. She wanted to remove the “sc*m.” Instead, she has left a legacy of absolute destruction. She has orphaned her children. She has incriminated her elderly parents, who are now facing their own legal reckonings for choosing to help cover up a m__rder rather than do the right thing.

She destroyed her own family tree, root and branch, all for… what? A new mattress? A quiet house? A $500,000 insurance check she will never see?

Justice vs. Closure

As the trial moves toward a verdict, I know “Justice” will likely be served. The evidence is overwhelming. The recording I made, the GPS data, the DNA in the storage box—it paints a picture of premeditated, cold-blooded execution.

I believe she will spend the rest of her life in prison.

But Justice is not the same thing as Closure.

Justice is a legal term. It means the state has punished the offender. Closure is a human need. It means bringing Eric home. It means giving his parents a place to mourn. It means giving his children a grave to visit on Father’s Day.

Until Eric is found, there is no real ending to this story. There is only a pause.

A Final Message

I am sharing this story—my side of it—not for fame, and certainly not for sympathy. I am sharing it as a warning and a plea.

The Warning: Be careful who you trust. Evil doesn’t always look like a monster. Sometimes it looks like a beautiful, sad woman in a million-dollar home who tells you she just needs to be “saved.”

The Plea: If you are reading this, and you live in Utah, or you hike, or you hunt in the northern counties… keep your eyes open. Look for the disturbed earth. Look for the unusual.

Somewhere out there, a soldier is waiting to come home.

I am no longer the man who opened the door to Vanessa that night. That part of me died when I heard her confession. Now, I am just a witness waiting for the gavel to fall, hoping that one day, the snow will melt and reveal the truth.

Rest in peace, Eric. We are still looking.