City of Saints

by Andrew Hunt

  The nationwide media frenzy suddenly reignited in August 1964. Another confessor, William E. Sadler, a partially deaf sixty-one-year-old inmate in the Frio County jail in Pearsall, Texas, insisted he murdered Dorothy Moormeister thirty-four years earlier. The soft-spoken, white-haired Sadler provided the Frio County sheriff with a detailed account of his involvement in the Moormeister homicide. He said it was a “paid job,” and he took a lie detector test that, according to Dewey Fillis, detective chief of the Salt Lake City Police Department, “indicates conclusively that Sadler was telling the truth.” Authorities in Utah were astonished by the detail of Sadler’s confession, right down to the precise position of the body at the murder site. “Where did he get that information if he was not there?” asked District Attorney Jay Banks. Sadler’s tale proved so convincing that he was extradited to Utah to stand trial for the murder of Dorothy Dexter Moormeister.

  Once his case went to court, however, he reversed his story and denied involvement in the murder. He said he confessed to the crime in order to escape the “intolerable and barbaric conditions” in the Frio County jail. In the end, a district court jury of twelve men took less than two hours to deliberate and found Sadler innocent of the murder. Sadler walked out of the courtroom vowing to remain in Salt Lake City “the rest of my days.” He told reporters, “My name will never again be on a police blotter, not even for a traffic ticket.” As soon as he left the courtroom, he disappeared for good.

  Sadler’s confession and subsequent trial turned out to be the Moormeister affair’s last hurrah. By the time of his acquittal, most of the participants in the original investigation were either dead or gone or getting along in years. Like Los Angeles’s gruesome 1947 Black Dahlia case, in which twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short was found mutilated and severed in two, the Moormeister murder was never solved. Yet Dorothy Moormeister would not assume the same mythic and legendary status as Elizabeth Short.

  Finally, I would like to tip my Stetson to the authors whose books helped me re-create the Salt Lake City of 1930 and its inhabitants. These are The Gathering Place: An Illustrated History of Salt Lake City by my friend John McCormick; Salt Lake City Then and Now by Kirk Huffaker; Salt Lake City: 1890–1930 (Images of America) by Gary Topping; Wallace Stegner’s Salt Lake City by Robert C. Steensma; Ogden (Images of America) by my friend John Sillito; Visions of Antelope Island and Great Salt Lake by Marlin Stum; The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner; This Is the Place: Utah by Maurine Whipple; Utah in the Twentieth Century by Bryan Q. Cannon; Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930, by Thomas G. Alexander; and Utah: A People’s History, by my mentor and friend, the late, great Dean L. May.

  Also by Andrew Hunt

  The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War

  David Dellinger: The Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary

  The 1980s (coauthor)

  About the Author

  ANDREW HUNT is a professor of history in Waterloo, Ontario. His areas of study include Post-1945 U.S. History, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the American West. He has written reviews for The Globe and Mail and The National Post, authored two works of nonfiction, The Turning and David Dellinger, and is coauthor of The 1980s. He grew up in Salt Lake City and currently lives in Canada.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  CITY OF SAINTS. Copyright © 2012 by Andrew Hunt. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Hunt, Andrew E., 1968–

  City of saints / Andrew Hunt.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Thomas Dunne Book.”

  ISBN 978-1-250-01579-2 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-01580-8 (e-book)

  1. Socialites—Crimes against—Fiction. 2. Corruption—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Salt Lake City (Utah)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.4.H858C58 2012

  813'.6—dc22

  2012030078

  e-ISBN 9781250015808

  First Edition: November 2012