Embark on a chilling journey into the heart of an unsolved mystery with our true crime podcast episode, delving into the haunting disappearance and death of Elizabeth Salgado. A 26-year-old woman from Mexico, Elizabeth vanished on her way home from school in Provo, Utah, in 2015. The discovery of her remains three years later in a remote canyon area raises more questions than answers. Join us as we unravel the timeline of events, dissect the investigation, explore potential theories, and confront the enigma surrounding Elizabeth's tragic fate. This riveting exploration not only seeks to uncover the truth but serves as a stark reminder to stay vigilant and aware of our surroundings in an unpredictable world. Tune in and become part of the ongoing quest for answers in the compelling case of Elizabeth Salgado.
Embark on a chilling journey into the heart of an unsolved mystery with our true crime podcast episode, delving into the haunting disappearance and death of Elizabeth Salgado. A 26-year-old woman from Mexico, Elizabeth vanished on her way home from school in Provo, Utah, in 2015. The discovery of her remains three years later in a remote canyon area raises more questions than answers. Join us as we unravel the timeline of events, dissect the investigation, explore potential theories, and confront the enigma surrounding Elizabeth's tragic fate. This riveting exploration not only seeks to uncover the truth but serves as a stark reminder to stay vigilant and aware of our surroundings in an unpredictable world. Tune in and become part of the ongoing quest for answers in the compelling case of Elizabeth Salgado.
This is Rocky Mountain cold cases. I'm Rachel and that's Adam. I'm Adam and that is Rachel.
Okay, so there I was scrolling through Instagram reels like the old person I am. I don't really TikTok anymore. I instagram reel it.
Yeah, I'm a YouTube shorts person. Yeah. So there's a guy that pops up on my every once in a while who works at a mortuary, and he tells you things about autopsies, and I enjoy it when he pops up randomly.
Yeah, well, he's the one who told me my fun fact. Apparently, when you die, if you have a pacemaker and you want to be cremated, if they shove you in the oven, your pacemaker, it's going to explode. You don't want to damage their oven.
Those are expensive ovens. Kaboom. So they take the pacemaker out of your body.
Right. Then they shove you in the oven. That pacemaker, this guy's mortuary, he hangs onto it for a year.
He, like, tags it and hangs onto it, I guess in case investigation or something, I don't know. But he hangs onto it for a year. Then he donates your pacemaker to animal hospital and they can put it in your dog.
Well, how much is that surgery? Because. I don't know. I just thought it was cool.
I mean, it's neat, but odd. And it's neat. No, it's super neat.
It's neat. I mean, I grew up in the country, so it was like if the dog wasn't going to make it, you just started digging a hole. This is our most morbid fun fact of my whole life.
I'm so sorry. There are some people that relate to what I just said. Anyway, sorry, can you.
I don't know, to start the cold case. Okay. I can just go straight to the cold case.
I thought it was really cool. Fun fact that you took it to a dark place. It is a cool fun fact.
Maybe I'll lay off hearts for a while. Okay. Do you want to guess what state we're in? This know.
I don't know. I didn't know if you were saying Idaho or. I don't know.
Well, both. I said both of them. Okay, well, you're wrong.
You're wrong. Maybe on more accounts than that, I'd get Penny a pacemaker goals. Okay, well, anyways, we are in Utah.
This is the place. Utah. Beautiful.
Oh, my gosh. That's like a hashtag. Anyway, bye.
So this is the case of Elizabeth Salgado. There is a disappeared episode on this one. Called on a mission.
This person is not on a mission. So I'm not really sure what that title. Anyways, some of my information is from that episode.
It's also one of my favorite shows anyways. Oh, they'rebooting it, too. Oh, my gosh.
Okay. In March of 2015, Elizabeth had recently moved from Mexico to Provo, Utah, to attend not BYU University in Provo. Wait, nomen global language school.
Nomen global language. Even my second guess I was thinking of. What's that other one? Uvu.
Uvu. Yeah. That one's kind of down there.
Yeah. No. So nomen global language school is a school for people to learn, like, a second language.
Mostly English, I believe. It's supposed to be pretty reputable. Wow.
This is, like, recent. You said 2015. 2015.
So Elizabeth had an interest in learning English in the United States, but also wanted to be near people who shared her same faith, which is how she ended up in Provo. So she is a member of the LDS church. Where was she from originally? Mexico.
Mexico. Okay. When she arrived in Utah, she spoke very little English.
Before leaving Mexico for Utah, she had graduated from a university in Mexico with a degree in industrial engineering. She had plans that once she was fluent in English, that she would return to Mexico and get her master's degree in engineering. So she's pretty smart.
Oh, yeah. She was 26. Okay.
She had been attending the school in provo for three weeks when, on the afternoon of April 16 of 2015, she left class to walk the 2 miles home and never made it in Provo. We hire you in provo. She had literally been in the country for three weeks and disappeared.
Congratulations, Utah. Way to mess it up. Okay.
Back it up, back it up. So she went to the. I'm confused where you're confused.
Well, I just don't have any what ifs for this other. Because it's the first paragraph. Okay.
All right. But my thinking is she came from Mexico. Okay.
So sometimes there's situations where they might have some ties with the cartel back in Mexico. Not that she has ties with the cartel, but. I don't know what I'm trying to say.
People might want to try and, I don't know, do bad things to people. Like, the cartel wants to do bad things to people. This is the weirdest episode.
So my point being is they're like, oh, the cartel knows that. Maybe her family has money. I'm going to go ahead and tell you right now, it has nothing to do with the cartel.
Okay. All right. I tried to.
What if it, before I knew anything yeah. You can't just. What if when you just find out somebody came here and disappeared immediately.
Okay. On the disappeared episode, one of Elizabeth'sisters said on the day of Elizabeth's disappearance, she had text her asking her what she was doing and Elizabeth replied she had just left school. In the episode, the sister states that the message seemed unusual, that it was very short and to the point which Elizabeth didn't normally do.
And she would usually try to continue the conversation with her sister, but she didn't text her sister back at all after that. Her uncle also. So she has two uncles who live in the country.
One of them does live in the Provo area. So that uncle went to Elizabeth's apartment around five to take Elizabeth grocery shopping, but he got no answer at the apartment. So after having the uncle check her school, work and apartment the next day to see if she turned up, they then alerted police to Elizabeth's disappearance.
On the third day of her disappearance, police found out that her phone had been turned off so they couldn't ping it. And there was no activity in her bank account. That's suspicious.
That's very weird. So that means she wasn't robbed for her money because nobody's using her money, but also that she likely didn't just take off because she's not using her money. Yeah.
In the wake of her disappearance, police checked for security cameras at businesses on Elizabeth's route home. They sent flyers out and posted them around town. And there were posts on social media and billboards put up.
There were several searches as well, lasting for two and a half months. Elizabeth's own uncles were suspected of having been involved in her disappearance. But I couldn't find any information as to specifically why they were suspects, other than it was just like, we look at family first all the time and you're the only family in the country with her.
And then in some of the articles, it seemed more like other people were speculating more than police were with the uncles. So I read that the people that suspected them were mostly volunteers and they would say things like the uncle's stories were inconsistent or that they just had a bad feeling and that they just felt like the uncles knew more than they were saying. That's interesting.
It's so hard to say, though, because with not a whole lot of information, like with what you just said and maybe like someone that she met or whatever that no one knows about, but she maybe met this person at a bus stop or whatever, something small and short. But I'm just thinking about that show that we watched where that girl went missing in New York. New York or east coast somewhere kind of by, I don't know, it doesn't matter.
But where? It was basically, like, they believed that she was trafficked and then later found out that the person that the police questioned told the police that she was dead or no longer around. And no one told the mom. But it was just.
I mean, I don't know. The trafficking thing is such a huge thing, and so, I don't know, people just vanish. And I honestly think that's what happened.
Thank you so much for being here, for being a listener and allowing us to take up a little portion of your day to share some of these true crime and cold case histories with you. It takes a lot of work to put in and find these cold cases. If you guys have liked this episode and some of the others that we've done that are like, please subscribe if you have not already, as well as we would surely appreciate it if you gave us a rating on Apple podcasts.
Without further ado, let's get back to the episode. Thank you guys so much. I don't know.
People just vanish, and I honestly think that's what happens. Yeah. In the disappeared episode, they did interview one of the officers on the case, and the trafficking part did come up, like, as part of the suspicions.
And he more or less says he doesn't believe that's what happened. And his only explanation on the episode was just that human trafficking is not very common in Provo. He's like, it's here, but it's not very uncommon.
Oh, and he said, too, that her being 26 kind of puts her out of the ideal age range for trafficking. They want younger. They want younger.
But if she looks younger, if she looks like she's in the younger range, that's all that matters to people. They don't care actually what their age is. Yeah, you don't want to believe that it's that.
I'm not saying I want to believe that that's that. But also, at the same time, I don't know, the elephant in the room kind of thing. Is that it? You know what I'm saying? It's just kind of like, I don't know.
If it was a guy and it'd be a different story. I wouldn't be saying trafficking, but, like, a woman that doesn't know the language really well, doesn't know the area very well. She looks probably like she's lost.
Maybe when she's looking at stuff, she's still trying to find out her way, and probably, too. This is going to sound sad, but being maybe naive to the fact that you're in Utah and you're like, oh, yeah, everyone here is safe and kind and nice and whatever. So your guard is down a little.
Not. You don't have your guard ups, and you're maybe being too trusting with people that you don't know anything about. So I guess that's where my thinking is.
It's like she could have found herself in a really vulnerable spot and not realized it until it was too late. Yeah, I really. What if that.
But, yeah, you did. That's my job. So police did look into the uncles, but they cleared them of having anything to do with it.
Like, they pulled their phone records and they legit looked into it. There was also a report from one of her uncles saying that there was a guy who was a regular at the restaurant that Elizabeth worked at that wouldn't stop asking her out and to go on a date even after she had said no. So police found that guy, and they followed up on it, and that individual had a solid alibi for the day she went missing.
Of course he did. Of course. So all this time, a lot of this is going through her uncles because her family is still in Mexico.
So it took 13 days for them to get a visa approved to come into the United States, and that's when they began helping with the searches and speaking to the media. Now, her skeletal remains were found in Hobble Creek Canyon in Utah county in June of 2018. So three years later.
Oh, wow. Her remains were found approximately 30 yards from a dirt road by a man who had stopped to relieve himself. I would also just like to side note a startling number of bodies are found by people pulling over to pee.
That is not an uncommon way to find someone that I've heard, I listen to and watch a lot of crime shows, and a lot of times I had a pee, I pulled over, and there it was. Makes sense. Yeah.
I mean, just keep that in mind next time you pull over. Like, when we were down in southern Utah and I had to pull over to peen, there was nothing out there. I could have found something, maybe.
Anyways, and then here was the tricky thing. And as far as I could find, police have not released the cause of death. I don't know if it's that they couldn't tell because it was just skeletal remains and it was just been in the elements too long or if there was evidence that said what it was.
And they're holding that close to the chest so that when they narrow in on someone, they have that knowledge that isn't public to kind of get them. Yeah, no, that makes sense. It'd be hard, though, to have a whole lot of evidence with that one because three years later and we have coyotes, we've got mountain lions, we've got ravens and stuff that are going to eat off a corpse.
Yeah. Wow. I'm just so morbid today.
You really are. Yeah. I just thought it was unusual that I couldn't find anything because usually they'll give some stuff away, like they were bound or we did find skull fractures or.
You know what I mean? And I couldn't find anything other than just kind of random bits that didn't match any other articles. So I didn't know whether or not to trust them because I only found them in one. Um.
The family had been given most of the remains for burial, but investigators in Utah county have a few pieces as well for continued testing. So when they find more evidence, they can compare it to her stuff. According to an ABC foreign article, the family does want a different DNA laboratory to look at her remains for any more information on that same article, it states that the sheriff's office said that one of the bone pieces they still have was tested for DNA and only showed Elizabeth's DNA, which is not surprising because it's been out in the elements.
Like the other DNA could have been washed away. Yeah, it was a bone. Not likely is the bone that had flesh on it whenever this encounter happened, it's going to have that person's DNA on it.
Well, and it didn't say if there was, like, clothing found with her or not. But even then, I'd be surprised if the clothing had any other DNA on it because, again, it's exposed to the elements and getting rained on and snowed on. I would think it would wash it away.
Yeah. Despite Elizabeth's family's wishes, the sheriff's office has said that they do not plan on sending any of the evidence to any other place other than their own lab. Wait.
Despite the wishes of. Sorry, say, the wishes of Elizabeth's family, they want to get this stuff tested somewhere else. Sheriff's office said no.
Really? Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess I can see why the family would want to have things, you know, because they're trying to reach a resolution. But so is the.
What did you say? The sheriff. The Sheriff's office? Yeah, the sheriff's office. Because if you keep sending this evidence out and around and more and more people touch it, the more and more it's been tampered with, the more the evidence becomes not evidence.
If there's anything there, the more it's tampered with, the more it's not going to be able to be used. Yeah, no, for sure. I understand why they would want somebody else to look into it just because there's been no answers for so long.
Right. But I don't know what else they would find just on pieces of bone. Had they had the whole skeleton still, maybe having somebody else look at it to see if anything was missed.
As far as what could have caused her death, I don't know what evidence they would find for it. I feel for them, but I also just kind of like, I don't let you find anything different. Yeah.
This is sad, too, in the sense of the fact that she came here with all these hopes and dreams and aspirations to accomplish something way bigger down the road, and then her family is in a completely different other country and something happens to her and then they don't know and they have no answers. No one's giving any answers. And then they're finally able to make it over here.
But at this point it's like, well, now what? It's kind of maybe too late. Yeah. And so they, they don't have anything now, really.
A lot of the articles are fairly recent, but they're not saying anything different, anything new, I don't know. And I lean towards, it's probably somebody that she knew and I don't think she knew. Just in three weeks, you can't know anybody very well.
Right. So you don't really know who to trust and whatnot. I don't know.
So I kind of feel like it is someone that she knew. But at the same time, if she's walking every day the same route. Oh, yeah, somebody could have noticed that and taken advantage of it.
I don't think she was so naive that she would have been like some stranger stopped to give her a ride and she would get in, but I think she would be naive enough to trust someone she's met a couple of times, like on campus or at church or something, not realizing they were not an awesome person. Right. Well, and then, too, I don't think that person would take advantage of them.
Not just me personally, but also, how am I trying to put this, people in general. Yeah, it might have been someone that she knew, but I don't think it would have been in their typical meeting place. It would have been them going, oh, I know, she's doing this walk every day, and now they've watched her do the walk or make this walk two or three times.
They're like, oh, she always stops in at the chevron and gets soda. Because human beings are. Yeah, we love our routines.
We love our routines. We have a habit. We like to stop at the same gas station and use the same pump.
We use the same bathroom, get the morning coffee thing. And I think it's so interesting that people. And then two.
It was 2015, right? I think I've kind of said this in one of this earlier episodes, but so many people just have their head into their phone, and they're not looking or watching where they're going or watching what's around them, and just being aware of having situational awareness of your surroundings, of different things, of someone being a little bit off or acting a little bit different than normal. Well, if you remember back the day she went missing, the sister text her, and she was like, that text back didn't feel quite like her. So, I mean, you could look at that, like, two different ways, that it was her and she was maybe walking with somebody, and then that person took advantage right then and there because she didn't text back ever after that one message.
Or you could look at it as she was walking back and somebody had already taken her. And then when the sister text. Oh, yeah.
I don't know why you would reply the one message and then call it good, as opposed to just not replying at all because the phone is off. There's really no way to know at what point in her walk that was or if that was really even her messaging or not. The sister just feels like it wasn't her, but who knows? Yeah.
There's so many different things. I guess the reason that I kind of said what I said is people that are listening right now just try and be more with it. Aware of your surroundings.
Yeah. When you're doing certain stuff, especially, like, at a gas station or something or on a walk or you're sitting at a bus stop. Yeah.
It's nice to get into your phone and do other tasks and stuff, but that can wait till you're sitting on the bus, maybe. Yeah. Or till you're home.
I don't. Yeah. Yeah.
So that's the case of Elizabeth Salgado. That's crazy. Yeah.
I actually remember seeing her stuff on the news. Oh, really? Yeah. Like, when I was looking into this, I was like, I remember seeing her face on the news, so I was living in Alaska when this all happened, so, yeah, I was still in the army up there.
Take it away, brother. If you guys would please give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and please, like and subscribe or whatever you can do with this, share it with somebody that you know would find it fascinating or be interested in my what ifs. You're speculating wildly.
Yeah. So anyways, thanks again for listening, guys. We'll catch you guys in the next one.
Bye.