Utah Executes The Invisible Serial Killer Who Killed Like A Ghost | Crime, Last Words & Firing Squad

  September 29th, 1951. Utah State Prison. Five men raised their rifles. One man stood waiting. The warden gave the signal. Sheriff Mack Wade’s voice cut through the silence. Ready, aim, fire. Five shots rang out. It was over in seconds. The man who died that morning was Ray Dempsey Gardner, and before he faced those rifles, he spoke his final words to the world.

 He said it calmly, no tears, no regret, just three short sentences, and then silence. But here is what makes this story different from most. Ray Dempsey Gardner did not begin his killing on a dark road or in a stranger’s home. His first known murder happened inside a jail cell, right under the noses of law enforcement.

 Officers looked at the body. They wrote up  their report. They called it natural causes. Gardner walked free. For eight years, nobody knew the truth, and in those eight years, things got much worse. Before this story ends with five bullets, it begins with a phone call and a young girl who simply needed the work. Here is how we got here.

 Welcome back to Red Mark Files. If you are new here, this channel is your home for true crime stories told straight from the records. Returning viewers, thank you.  Hit that like button right now. Every week, we go where the records lead. Now, let’s go back to the beginning. Her name was Shirley Grezinger.

 She was 17 years old. She lived at home with her mother in Ogden, Utah, a quiet working-class city tucked against the mountains of northern Utah. 1949 Ogden was the kind of place where people knew their neighbors, where teenagers walked to jobs after dinner, where a mother standing at the door to wave goodbye felt normal, routine, safe.

 Shirley was not remarkable in the way the world usually notices people. She was just a 17-year-old girl living an ordinary life. She went home after school. She helped out when she could. She was the kind of young woman who said yes when someone needed a favor. That quality, her willingness to step up, is what put her in danger on the evening of July 20th, 1949.

 A friend of hers had been offered a babysitting job. That friend fell sick and could not make it, so she passed the caller’s information along to Shirley. It was a simple handoff between two young women trying to be responsible. Shirley agreed to take the job. Before she left the house that evening, her mother grew uneasy. Court records confirm she was worried.

 She did not know the family her daughter would be sitting for. She did not know who had called. She did not know the name, the address, or the neighborhood. Shirley walked out the front door anyway. She left on foot. It was a summer evening in Ogden, warm, ordinary, unremarkable. She was simply a teenage girl trying to earn a little money.

 Weeks later, another woman, 38 years old, from Butte, Montana, would encounter the same man under different circumstances. Her name comes later in this story, but tonight, it was Shirley. Her mother waited. Shirley never came home. Now, let’s talk about Ray Dempsey Gardner. He was born on October 4th, 1921. From the very beginning, his life was built on instability.

 His father did not die of old age or illness. He died in a shootout with the police. His mother did not raise him. She went to prison. Before Gardner was old enough to understand what a family was supposed to look like, he no longer had one. The state placed him in an orphanage in Columbus, Ohio. That is where his story begins, not as an excuse, as a fact.

What happened next was not the result of one bad decision. Court records show that Gardner built a criminal record spanning over 500 offenses across multiple states. 500. Theft, larceny, interstate violations. The list was long before he ever hurt anyone physically. The system tried, or at least went through the motions.

 Gardner passed through three correctional institutions. First, the Indiana Boys School as a juvenile. Then the Montana State Prison. Then the Wyoming State Penitentiary. Three separate systems. Three separate attempts. Not one of them changed his direction. He was not famous. He was not loud. He did not draw attention to himself in public.

 He moved from state to state picking up farm work, staying just long enough to blend in, then disappearing. By design, nobody remembered him for long. Then came 1941. Gardner was locked in a jail in Jamestown, North Dakota. His cellmate was a man named Frank Shelley. One morning, Shelley was found dead in that cell. Officers reviewed the scene.

 They wrote their report. They concluded he had died of natural causes. Gardner was never charged. He was never seriously questioned. He walked away clean. What the officers in Jamestown didn’t know, what no one would know for eight more years, is that Frank Shelley was the first. By the summer of 1949, Gardner was 27 years old.

 He was working on a fruit farm north of Ogden, Utah. Quiet, invisible, exactly the way he intended to be. Two days before Shirley Gressinger disappeared, Ray Dempsey Gardner was still showing up for work. He had been employed at the Walton Fruit Farm, north of Ogden, Utah, long enough to seem ordinary. He worked. He kept to himself. Nobody raised an alarm.

 That was the point. Then, on July 18th, 1949, he walked up to his employers and told them he was done. He was heading back east, he said, back home. According to court records, that was a lie. He left no forwarding address. He gave no details. He simply disappeared from the farm and from the lives of everyone there who thought they knew him.

 No goodbye. No explanation. Just gone. What Gardner did over the next two days was not random. He did not stumble across his victims. He looked for them. He sought out women who had a reason to trust a stranger’s phone call. A babysitting job passed along through a friend. A newspaper job listing answered deliberately. These were not accidents.

These were doors he opened on purpose. On the evening of July 20th, 1949, Gardner made a phone call. Shirley’s friend had already passed the babysitting referral along. When Shirley picked up, she heard a calm, ordinary voice offering a job. She had no reason to feel alarmed. She told her mother she was going out for the evening.

 She did not know the family. She did not know the address. Her mother did not know either. That detail, confirmed in the records, is one of the most haunting parts of this entire case. A phone call, a job offer, a girl who just wanted to help a friend out. What Gardner did next, what he had planned before he ever dialed that number, is impossible to believe.

 Ray Dempsey Gardner worked alone. There were no partners, no accomplices, no one he confided in, no one who could have stepped forward and warned anybody. He did not need help. He had something that worked better than a partner. He had a method. With Shirley Gretzinger, he did not approach a stranger cold. He found a way in through trust that already existed.

 According to court records, Gardner never used force to get his victims into the vehicle. He didn’t need to. The setup did the work for him. If you are still with me, thank you. This case gets harder from here. Drop a comment below with the word Gardner if this story is already making your skin crawl.

 And if you have not subscribed yet, now is the time. Because what happened next, on the night of July 20th, 1949, started like any other in Ogden, Utah. Gardner arrived. She got in. No alarm was raised. No struggle at the door. No warning. She had been connected to him through someone she trusted. That connection was all he needed.

 He did not drive toward any neighborhood. He did not drive toward any family home. He drove south, away from the city, away from traffic, away from people. He took her to a gulch outside Ogden. Isolated, quiet, far from anyone who could help. Then he made his move. When Shirley refused his sexual advances, Gardner did not stop.

 Court records from State v. Gardner confirm what happened next. He took wadded toilet paper and forced it down her throat. He strangled her with it. He raped her while she was dying. She was 17 years old. Court records confirm he did not leave after that. He mutilated her body. He stole her purse. He took her personal belongings, then he dragged her into a thicket of trees and bushes, a cluster of overgrowth sitting between a road and a sidewalk south of the city, and he left her there.

On the morning of July 21st, 1949, a member of the public found her body. Her clothing had been torn away. Only her sandals remained. Her body showed signs of severe physical violence. Authorities confirmed her cause of death as strangulation. The wadded toilet paper was still in her throat when she was found.

 Gardner was gone, but he wasn’t finished. In Montana, someone else had already answered an ad in the newspaper, and she was waiting for a ride. That same day, July 21st, Gardner returned to the Walton Fruit Farm north of Ogden. Testimony from court records describes his clothing as grass-stained and wrinkled when he walked back in. He said nothing unusual.

 He simply returned. But there was one thing the Walton family noted afterward. That morning, the newspapers carried the first reports of a young woman found dead south of Ogden. Court records document that Gardner took an unusual and notable interest in those reports. He read the coverage carefully. He asked about it.

 He already knew exactly what had happened to her. He had been there. Four days later, on the evening of Sunday, July 24th, the Walton family left for the Pioneer Pageant in Ogden. When they came home, Gardner was gone. He had vanished from the farm while the house was empty. When they checked, a .22 caliber pistol was missing.

 Several items of clothing were gone as well. Nobody reported it immediately. Nobody connected it yet, but Gardner was already moving. He had left Utah behind. He was heading north, and in Butte, Montana, a 38-year-old woman was waiting on a response to a job advertisement she had placed in the newspaper, hoping someone honest would answer. Someone had.

 After July 24th, 1949, Ray Dempsey Gardner was no longer in Utah. He was in Montana. Sue Ella Horn was 38 years old. She lived in Butte, Montana. She was not wealthy. She was not connected to anyone involved in what had happened in Ogden. She simply needed work. So, she did what people did in 1949. She placed a classified advertisement in the local newspaper.

She was looking for a position as a cook on a ranch. She wrote her ad, submitted it, and waited for a genuine response. Gardner answered it. He contacted her in Butte. He had a vehicle. He told her he could drive her to the ranch location. There was nothing about the exchange that would have raised a flag.

 He had a car. He had an answer to her advertisement. He seemed like a reasonable prospect. She got in. Outside the city, away from traffic and witnesses, Gardner tried to take her money by force. Sue Ella Horn did not comply. She refused. She slapped him across the face. Then she jumped out of the vehicle.

 Court records indicate she was attempting to reach law enforcement. Gardner shot her. He took her belongings. He dug a shallow grave outside Butte and buried her body in it. Then he drove away. Nobody reported Sue Ella Horn missing right away. Her absence attracted no immediate attention. No investigation opened. No alerts were raised.

 Gardner moved on as if nothing had occurred. Back in Ogden, Utah, Shirley Gretzinger’s mother was speaking with investigators. The community was shaken. But after weeks of inquiry, no suspect had been identified in that case, either. Gardner had now killed two women across two states. He had no arrest, no active warrant, no officer looking specifically in his direction.

 And then he did something that is difficult to fully comprehend. He went back to Ogden. On August 14th, 1949, Ray Dempsey Gardner drove back to the Walton Fruit Farm north of Ogden. He was behind the wheel of a brand new green Dodge car with Wyoming license plates. He pulled up toward the property. Then he saw something that changed his plan.

 One of the Walton sons was home. Gardner did not stop. He turned around and drove away. He ran straight through a stop sign on the main highway. He then collided with a trailer, overturning it completely. The front light and fender of the Dodge were visibly damaged. He did not stop for that, either. The Weber County Sheriff’s Office received a call.

 A Deputy Marshal from Clearfield intercepted Gardner in Layton, a town south of Ogden, and brought him back. When members of the Walton family were brought into identify him, they recognized him immediately. Gardner looked them in the eye and told officers he had never seen them before in his life. He was booked on three charges: grand larceny, hit-and-run driving, and driving through a stop sign. Then officers searched the car.

Inside, they found the .22 caliber pistol that had gone missing from the Walton farm on July 24th. They found clothing that also matched items reported missing from the property. Additional items in the vehicle confirmed the green Dodge had been stolen in Wyoming and transported across state lines into Utah.

 Then they found something else entirely: luggage, clothing, items belonging to a woman named Sue Ella Horn, who had not been seen since early August. Investigators noted she was missing. They administered a polygraph examination. The results indicated Gardner had direct knowledge of her whereabouts. Officers then looked back at the full picture: his unexplained departure from the farm on July 18th, the detail about his clothing when he returned on the 21st, his second disappearance on July 24th, the stolen pistol, the stolen car, the missing

woman’s belongings sitting in his back seat. The investigation that had stalled for weeks now had a suspect. The polygraph results gave investigators what they needed to push harder. They confronted Gardner directly with the evidence connected to Sue Ella Horn, her luggage, her clothing, her disappearance. Gardner broke.

 He admitted to killing her. He told officers where the body was. On September 3rd, 1949, Gardner traveled with the Weber County Sheriff and an Ogden City police officer to Butte, Montana. He did not just confirm the location. He walked them through everything. The route he took, what was said, how it ended.

 He showed them the shallow grave. Sue Ella Horn’s body was recovered exactly where he said it would be. He returned to Ogden on September 6th. Two days later, on September 8th, the state of Montana filed murder charges against Gardner. A warrant was issued and forwarded to the Weber County Sheriff.

 That same day, the federal Dyer Act charge, interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle, was dismissed. Gardner was now being held for murder. Then, on September 10th, 1949, something unexpected happened. Gardner asked for the Sheriff. He made the request himself on a Sunday morning. He also asked that a jail trustee be present for the meeting. Both requests were granted.

When the Sheriff arrived, Gardner began asking questions. He wanted to know what evidence investigators had in the Greizinger case. The Sheriff answered him. When the answers were laid out, Gardner stopped asking questions. He picked up a pen and wrote out a full confession to the murder of Shirley Greizinger in his own handwriting.

 He stated clearly within the document that it was made voluntarily, without fear, without threats, without any promises made to him. On September 12th, he went further. He accompanied officers back to the scene of Shirley’s murder. He retraced the exact route from the point where he had picked her up.

 He walked them to the locations where he had hidden items taken from her body, her watch, articles of her clothing. Those items were recovered exactly where he indicated. Then, Gardner tried to walk it back. He claimed an unnamed friend was responsible. He attempted to redirect the blame entirely. The items he had just personally led officers to made that story impossible to believe.

During this same period, Gardner also confessed to the 1941 murder of Frank Shelley, his cellmate in the Jamestown, North Dakota jail. No charge was ever filed in connection with Shelley’s death. The case had already been officially closed as natural causes eight years earlier. The Utah Supreme Court, in later reviewing the admissibility of Gardner’s Grezinger confession, noted the following: He was 27 years old at the time.

 He had met with lawyers on multiple occasions while in custody. He had been informed of his legal rights more than once before the confession was made. There was not a single piece of evidence suggesting coercion, pressure, or mistreatment of any kind. The confession stood. Ray Dempsey Gardner had confessed to three murders across three states.

 He had led officers to two separate crime scenes. He had evidence with his own hands. Only one state put him on trial. Utah moved first. Montana’s murder charges existed on paper, but were never prosecuted. The state of Utah had everything it needed: a written confession, corroborating physical evidence, and a defendant who had personally walked investigators through the crime scene.

 The trial opened in December of 1949 in Ogden, Utah. Gardner’s defense did not claim the confession was forced. They did not argue that he had been mistreated. Their challenge was procedural. They argued that because Gardner had been held in custody before being brought before a magistrate, his confession should be excluded under section 105-12-14 of the Utah Code Annotated, 1943.

 The delay in arraignment, they argued, made the confession improper, regardless of whether it was voluntary. The Utah Supreme Court, in State v. Gardner, disagreed. The court affirmed that the confession was admissible. Its reasoning was straightforward. The confession had been made voluntarily.

 Gardner himself had stated as much in his own handwriting. It had been corroborated by the physical evidence he personally produced. He had consulted with lawyers multiple times before making it. His rights had been explained to him on more than one occasion. The procedural argument could not override those documented facts.

 The jury heard the case on December 13th, 1949. They returned their verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree. The jury had deliberated for 58 minutes. They did not recommend mercy. Under Utah law at the time, a jury’s recommendation of mercy was the only way to avoid a mandatory death sentence. Without that recommendation, the outcome was automatic.

 Ray Dempsey Gardner was sentenced to death. Appeals were filed. Every one of them was denied. Between December of 1949 and September of 1951, Ray Dempsey Gardner filed appeal after appeal from his cell on death row at Utah State Prison. Every one of them was denied. In his final bid, Gardner did not ask for a full pardon.

 He did not claim innocence. He appeared before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole with a different kind of request. He wanted to donate his living body to medical research, to serve, in his own words, as a guinea pig for science. He was asking to trade his execution for a life spent in laboratories, useful, he argued, in a way his life had never otherwise been.

The board rejected the request. In their response, prosecutors described Ray Dempsey Gardner in four words, a dangerous sadist. The board agreed with the assessment. The execution date held. During his time on death row, Gardner had almost no contact with family. His nearest living relative was his grandmother in Ohio.

 She had not known where he was or what he had become for eight full years, not until she read about his crimes in the newspaper. Under Utah law, Gardner was offered a choice of how he would die, hanging or firing squad. He chose the firing squad. On September 29th, 1951, Ray Dempsey Gardner was walked to his execution at Utah State Prison.

 Five shooters, five rifles. Sheriff Mack Wade stood before him. Before the command was given, Gardner spoke, “I’m ready to go. No one will miss me. My life has been worthless.” Then Sheriff Mack Wade gave the order, “Ready, aim, fire.” Five rifles discharged simultaneously. Ray Dempsey Gardner was pronounced dead. He was 29 years old.

 Five days later would have been his 30th birthday. Following the execution, the prison warden wrote to Gardner’s grandmother in Columbus, Ohio, his nearest documented living relative, regarding the disposition of his remains. Her response is preserved in the record. She wrote, “In referring to your letter in regard to Ray Gardner’s body being shipped to Ohio, I am not able to have him sent here.

 His mother is dead. We knew nothing about him for 8 years until we read of him committing the crime. I have no further responsibility of care. Use the body as the law directs for medical science.” His remains were surrendered to medical science. It was the one thing he had asked for in exchange for his life. Three lives, three states, three deaths across a decade.

 Shirley Gretsinger was 17 years old. She left her mother’s house on a summer evening to cover a babysitting job for a sick friend. She was doing something kind, something responsible. Her mother stood at the door with a feeling she could not name, a worry she could not explain, and watched her daughter walk away. That instinct was right.

 She never got an answer she could hold. Suella Horn was 38 years old. She placed a classified advertisement in a newspaper because she needed honest work. When Gardner turned on her, she did not freeze. She refused him. She slapped him across the face. She jumped out of that vehicle and tried to run.

 That resistance, court records suggest, sealed her fate. She fought harder than most. Her name is rarely mentioned in the accounts of this case. So, let’s say it clearly. Suella Horn. Frank Shelley died in a jail cell in Jamestown, North Dakota in 1941. His death was recorded as natural causes. It was not. He was strangled by the man sleeping beside him.

 His case was closed without a proper investigation. His family received nothing that resembled justice. And then there is the irony that closes this entire story. Gardner stood before the Board of Pardons and asked to give his body to medical science instead of dying. The board said no. His grandmother, after the firing squad, gave his body to medical science anyway.

He got exactly what he asked for, just not the way he intended. A grandmother who had not heard from him in 8 years wrote four words that said everything. I have no further responsibility of care. Three lives, one man, and a decade of damage that began in a jail cell and ended with five rifles in a Utah prison yard.

 Which moment in this case hit you hardest? Was it Shirley’s mother’s instinct that no one could act on? The 58-minute verdict? Or those final three sentences Gardner spoke before the command was given? Tell me in the comments. I read every single one. If this story moved you, hit the like button. Subscribe if you haven’t already, and turn on the notification bell so you never miss a case.