commentary by Patrick H. Moore
You’re asleep and your loved one is sleeping next to you. The house is quiet and it is dark and outside it is night — a night like any other night, or so you supposed when you went to sleep. But you were wrong even though you were right. In the night there is good and there is evil just like during the daytime. On this particular night evil was afoot in human form and it drew near to your house and then it came inside your house and it wanted to take what you had worked for and then, as it was rummaging through your belongings in the basement, it came across a bigger prize – a lovely child, your child, your 5-year-old daughter – and it spoke to her and she spoke back and you awoke. Maybe the voices woke you or maybe it was your protective motherly instinct but you sprang from sleep while fear like no other shot to the core of your being and your loved one awoke and…
When the father rushed outside in his pajama pants and hoodie he saw the terrifying sight of his 5-year-old stepdaughter in the arms of a stranger who was carrying her away across the front lawn. The man had snatched the girl out of her bed in the basement moments earlier after coming in the house through an unlocked door, police said.
What was strange about this was that when the father confronted the child stealer and demanded he give back his daughter, the thief neither protested nor resisted. Instead, he simply handed her to the father and fled.
The mother called 911 in tears and she spoke:
“There was a man in my home and he took my 5-year-old daughter. I happened to wake up and he had my daughter outside. My husband ran out there and got her from him. But he took my daughter.”
The dispatcher asked the mother if she had gotten her child back and she said she had but at the same time she could not overlook the fact the intruder had invaded the sanctity of her home:
“Yeah, but he’s out there somewhere. He came in my home…He took my daughter from my house.”
The police arrived, set up a perimeter, and with the help of K-9s, launched a search of the neighborhood. They found the suspect in another home two blocks away. The man had crawled into the house through a doggy dog in an attempt to hide. The second set of homeowners had dogs of their own who spotted the doggy door invader and yelled for the police who were nearby to come get him.
And get him they did, capturing the man outside the second house after one of the K-9s chomped down on his shoulder.
He was identified as Troy Morley, age 48, a resident of the community of Roy, which was 45 miles to the north of the middle-class neighborhood in Sandy that the man had targeted. Mr. Morley has been charged with child kidnapping, burglary, trespassing and resisting arrest.
Sandy Police Sgt. Dean Carriger believes that the 5-year-old girl was not “targeted” by the kidnapper but was rather randomly selected.
“It obviously was a very scary, traumatic situation,” Carriger said. “The sanctity of our home is huge and for somebody to enter that and grab your child, it’s got to be one of the worst nightmares a parent could face. … If those parents were not awakened to go out and investigate, he could have easily left undetected with the girl.”
Odd that the Sergeant would say “he could have easily left undetected with the girl”, when it seems pretty clear that he “would have”, sentiments with which the victim’s family’s spokesman, Miles Holman, certainly agrees with.
“Thirty seconds later and it would have been all over. He would have been long gone.”
Mr. Holman said that the family is doing well considering the circumstances.
* * * * *
What this brings to mind is the fact that there are two Utahs. There is the family-values-centered Church of Latter Day Saints Utah, with whatever problems and issues it may or may not have, and there is the other Utah, which as we’ve seen countless times here on All Things Crime Blog, is plagued by rampant heroin and meth addiction. This is a Utah where mothers murder their new born children and young children overdose on their parents’ methadone. This is also the Utah that produced the kidnapper of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart who was snatched out of her Salt Lake City bedroom in 2002 and was held captive for nine months before being found. And now this second Utah has produced a second child snatcher who thankfully was apprehended before he got away.
The two Utahs are represented quite clearly in the remarks of various individuals who spoke about the attempted kidnapping:
“Things like that just don’t happen around here,” said Melissa Johnson, 26, a resident of Sandy, a city 90,000 strong, which is predominantly Mormon. Melissa is currently living at her parents’ house which is right next door to where the attempted abduction occurred.
Melissa said her younger sibling heard screams and commotion that morning and came to sleep with her downstairs for safety. Melissa said her family is part of the same ward as the family that was nearly victimized:
“I’ve been thinking that the Heavenly Father had a hand it. He was protecting them. . . I just hope it won’t be traumatizing for the little girl.”
Naturally, the neighbors are traumatized. A mother of three, who lives down the street, said she and her husband are considering an alarm system.
“That is your biggest fear as a parent,” Parry said April Parry. “It can happen anytime, that’s what makes it scary.”
Thus, the second diabolical Utah lurks around the fringes of the first family-values-centered Utah.
To the dismay of a mental health professional named Andrea Shearer, the two Utahs lived in close proximity in her neighborhood in Roy to the north. Troy Morley was her next door neighbor. Ms. Shearer said she and her neighbors “weren’t the least bit surprised to find out the man known as a super creep had been accused of trying to abduct a girl.”
Ms. Shearer explained that her children were not allowed to interact at all with Morley based on a series of bizarre and inappropriate conversations. She further explained that Morley had been caught sneaking into backyards, including hers, which led her to obtain a no trespass order from the police.
Based on what Ms. Shearer said, it appears that Morley had the peculiar but unmistakable “meth head” qualities. She said he said a satanic cult caused his wife to leave him, and that there were “critters crawling through the attic.”
“He scared me. I’m so glad he’s gone,” said Shearer.
It appears there are an awful lot of satanic cults creeping around the fringes of “normal” folks and communities. Either that or the vast majority of them are simply figments of peoples’ imaginations.
Utah should not feel alone in that there are two Utahs. Every state has its own dark double filled with drug addicts, perverts and violent criminals. And sometimes the two sides may exist within the same family or even within the same individual. The mystery of evil and its many manifestations would appear to be the driving force that triggers crime; without which, in our spare time, we would all simply watch games, play on our computers and take the children to the park.