Vietnam veteran was killed while his girlfriend was being raped. Half a century later, police arrested

A. Utah Man charged with murder of 21-year-old teenager more than 50 years later Army the soldier was fatally shot and his lover was kidnapped and raped.

Darrel Eugene Choate, 74, was charged in the 1972 murder of Gregory Dahl Nickell, according to charging documents filed Friday. KSL reported.

Nickell, who was at his home in Vernal, Utah, for Thanksgiving, was ambushed when he went on a date with an 18-year-old woman on November 26, 1972.

They were parked in a scenic area when a man knocked on the window and claimed he had crashed, according to the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office. One of the men wanted to go back into town, and when Nickell agreed to help, he was shot at least three times.

The gunman and another man set fire to Nickell’s car with his body inside. Her 18-year-old lover, whose name was not disclosed, was kidnapped and raped before being released a few hours later.

Nickell’s girlfriend gave her account of the night to the sheriff’s office and recalled that “they” killed her.

But it would take detectives decades to find out who “they” were.

In 2019, the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office resubmitted evidence collected in 1972 to the Utah State Crime Lab, which included DNA evidence collected from Nickell’s hospital appointment at the time of the attack.

Later in 2022, on the 50th anniversary of Nickell’s murder, the sheriff’s office announced that, after extensive DNA testing, Daniel Arthur Bell was one of two men involved in the murder. However, Bell was never arrested in this case. He passed away in 2019 at the age of 88.

However, detectives believed a younger suspect was still there and continued their investigation.

When Bell first came on their radar as a suspect, detectives spoke with his widow and learned that before his death, Bell had been convicted of rape in Oregon in 1987 and that his friend “Gene” had been involved in a rape in Washington. According to the probable cause statement, the last time Bell saw “Gene” was in the 1980s or 1990s.

Authorities responded to Darrel Eugene Choate’s home on an unrelated call and obtained a DNA sample; this sample was compared to the DNA sample of the unknown suspect in Utah.

According to charging documents filed Friday, DNA testing “revealed that Darrel Eugene Choate was a direct match to the DNA of one of the suspects who murdered Greg Nickell and raped (the woman). This direct DNA match revealed that Darrel Eugene Choate was one of the two suspects.” “It’s proof that there is and that one of the suspects is not just a close familial match.”

Detectives learned Choate, who lived in Tooele, Utah, had “an extensive criminal record that includes sexual offenses at Price.” Allegedly, Darrel Eugene Choate also made statements in the recordings that he believed he could read minds.

“I spoke to my brother when he was killed, of course he wasn’t there but I knew he was there in spirit and 52 years ago I told him I would never stop, I would find out who killed him. Ray did this to him,” said Nickell’s sister, Lynnette Nickell. he told Fox13.

“I just want to be able to look at his face and ask why.”