The woman who discovered the bodies of a newlywed couple in Moab, Utah last summer, says police recently told her they were beginning to question her story—until Wednesday night, when authorities publicly identified someone else as a suspect.
Meanwhile, Cindy Sue Hunter lived in constant fear of being accused of something she didn’t do, and became a pariah in her neighborhood, she told The Daily Beast on Thursday.
Hunter, 64, found the remains of Kylen Schulte, 24, and Crystal Beck, 38, in the La Sal Mountains, four days after they disappeared last August. The two, who had previously told friends they were startled by a “creepy” man they encountered while camping in the area, had been shot dead. The shocking double homicide made national headlines and put the 5,200 residents of Moab on edge. It was a particularly unbearable loss for Schulte’s parents, who had already lost a teenage son to gunfire in 2015.
Hunter first met Schulte the following year and had befriended her father, Sean-Paul. After the two went missing, Hunter said she became frustrated with what she perceived to be a lackluster search-and-rescue effort by the police. So she went looking for the women on her own.
Hunter started at the McDonald’s where Beck worked and where she and Schulte parked their RV. As she told The Daily Beast at the time, Hunter wanted to “feel their energy and get a sense of where they were.” She then drove into the mountains, driving around for several hours while “talking aloud to the girls and begging them to sign me.” As she made her way through the wilderness, Hunter described something she couldn’t quite explain.
“When I wanted to turn on Lake Warner, I don’t want to say I had voices in my head, but I was told, ‘Go straight ahead and shoot,'” she said. “It just kept repeating. I head towards Sand Flats Road, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of silver through the trees and saw a campsite along a tricky side road. Very easy to miss. And then I found their car.”
Footage shows the last time a fallen camping couple is seen alive
Hunter then tripped over Schulte’s body and ran back to her car. She locked the doors and called the police. When officers arrived, they found Beck’s remains, according to Hunter.
In the aftermath, Hunter was celebrated by the community as a hero for locating the women and bringing some semblance of closure to their families. But her small artifact store couldn’t weather the pandemic, and Hunter had to close and leave town. Then, a week after she moved to a new place, her life really turned upside down.
“They filed a search warrant for me last month and told me I was a suspect,” Hunter told The Daily Beast. “It scared me so much, I felt like I was going to be charged with this fucking murder.”
Three cartloads of officers from the Grand County Sheriff’s Office came to Hunter’s new home and dropped a bomb on her, she recalled.
“They said my story kept changing, which it didn’t,” said Hunter, who said she took pictures of the crime scene with her phone to formally document her discovery. “They said my phone was pinging there” [near the murder scene], and I said, Of course it happened – I told them I went there for walks several times a week in the summer… They told me it was not common for people to take pictures at a crime scene. So they thought maybe I was hiding something. That’s basically what they told me.”
Hunter, whose phone was seized by the officers, said she was treated “horribly” and that she is considering suing the sheriff’s office over the surreal turn of events.
“All I did was find them, and the way I found them made me a suspect,” Hunter said Thursday. “They don’t believe in [the] supernatural. I found them in a way that didn’t make sense to them, so that made me suspicious.”
Yesterday, authorities in Grand County identified 45-year-old drifter Adam Pinkusiewicz as the alleged killer.
Pinkusiewicz, who died by suicide in September, worked at the same McDonald’s as Beck, according to Grand County Sheriff Steven White. In a statement, White said Pinkusiewicz was “in La Sals and Moab at the time of the murders,” and fled the state shortly after. Before he died, “Pinkusiewicz told another party that he killed two women in Utah and provided specific details known only to investigators,” White said in a statement, adding that the investigation remains open.
Since his daughter’s murder, Sean-Paul Schulte has been in Moab, manning a “clue” to receive any tips. He told a local radio station that he first heard Pinkusiewicz’s name “months and months ago” as “one of many interesting people,” but that detectives had been unable to find him. Pinkusiewicz was finally identified as a suspect on May 11, just days after reality TV star Dog the Bounty Hunter showed up to help investigators†
Investigators continue to process “critical and newly discovered evidence” in the case, including Pinkusiewicz’s 2007 Toyota Yaris, which was recently located and seized by authorities, White said in his statement. But Hunter still feels stabbed by the police, who, according to her, have not yet told her that she has been acquitted. As a result, she finds it hard to feel any sense of closure and is reluctant to take the sheriff’s announcement for granted.
“It’s hard for me because if I hadn’t been picked up as a suspect I think I would be elated and overjoyed,” Hunter told The Daily Beast.
As it is, she said she would “wonder how it was handled”.
“They had no answers for us until Dog came to town,” Hunter continued. “We’ve been waiting for answers for nine months and then Dog comes to town and… [suddenly] do they know who did it? I hope it was him, and he’s dead and we don’t have to deal with that monster anymore. But I struggle with the fact that they knew [it was him]… and let us dangle here.”
The Grand County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
Hunter described the past month as “living hell” and said she desperately hopes she’s doing better now. Her new neighbors, who had greeted her warmly at first, suddenly turned freezing when they saw officers approaching and “surrounding” her house, she said.
“I moved and I was going to start a new life,” explains Hunter. “And [when the police came], have seen all the neighbors, and no one wants to talk to me now. Before that happened, people came to my door, gave me their phone number, and welcomed me into the neighborhood. None of them will answer the phone or call me back. They no longer wave. It certainly hurt me.”
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