Utah 2010 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocked Community

Utah 2010 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocked Community

November 30, 2010. A quiet bookstore in South Salt Lake, a husband walks in from running errands expecting to find his wife behind the counter like she is every single day. Instead, he finds her body in the back stockroom. The killer left behind his own blood, his fingerprints, a bloody palm print, even a men’s designer belt lying right next to her.

 It was by almost any measure an overwhelming amount of physical evidence and yet for 10 years none of it led anywhere. No name, no face, no arrest, just a case file that grew thicker every year while the man responsible walked free, got married, held down a job, and lived less than a mile from where it happened. What finally cracked this case wasn’t a witness or a confession out of nowhere.

It was a technology nobody in 2010 even knew existed yet and the story of how investigators used it is one of the most quietly remarkable cold case breakthroughs in American forensic history. To understand why this case shook South Salt Lake so deeply, you have to understand who Sherry Black actually was because she was about as far from a random crime victim as you could imagine.

 Sherry Nielsen was born on October 14th, 1946 in Orem, Utah. By 1958, as a young girl, she had already developed a passion for books that would quietly define the rest of her life. She met her husband, Earl Black, at their high school dances and the two married on April 16th, 1965. A year later, their daughter, Heidi, was born. For 10 years, from 1976 to 1986, Sherry worked as a docent at Salt Lake City’s Hogle Zoo, traveling out to elementary schools with live animals to teach kids about conservation.

By the time she became a grandmother in 1986, she had already built a reputation as someone who gave her time freely to her community. Professionally, Sherry and Earl ran B&W Billiards and Books together, a shop at 3466 South 700 East in South Salt Lake, built right next to their own house. Earl handled the billiards side, restoring pool tables in the workshop.

 Sherry ran the books, rare, used, out of print, collectible. She knew the inventory so well, she never bothered writing it down. No computer system, no ledger. It all lived in her head. By 2010, she was 64 years old, a grandmother of six, and through her daughter Heidi’s marriage to Greg Miller, former CEO of the Larry H.

Miller Group and the Utah Jazz, connected to some of the most recognizable names in Utah business. But she never lived like it. She stayed behind the counter of her own small bookstore, tracking down obscure titles for collectors who wandered in off the street. Investigators would later confirm something important.

 Sherry Black had no known enemies, no disputes, no documented conflicts with anyone. She wasn’t targeted because of who she was, and that single fact, that this was a stranger, not someone from her life, is exactly what would make this case so difficult to crack. Because when police have no relationship to trace, no motive to chase, no grudge to investigate, where do you even start? Tuesday, November 30th, 2010, Sherry Black was alone in the store, just like most days.

Earl was out running errands. At approximately 1:43 p.m., Earl returned to the property and walked into the shop. When he searched the building, he found his wife unresponsive on the floor of the rear stockroom. He called emergency services immediately. First responders arrived to find severe trauma.

 She was pronounced dead at the scene. The autopsy conducted the following day by the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner told a brutal story. Sherry Black had been stabbed nine times with a pair of heavy-duty tailor shears found at the scene. She’d also suffered blunt force injuries consistent with a severe beating to her head, neck, and torso.

 Years later, District Attorney Sim Gill would confirm one more disturbing detail that hadn’t been public at the time. The evidence showed she had also been assaulted after her death. Here’s what made the crime scene so strange, though. The violence was concentrated almost entirely in that narrow rear stockroom out front. The customer counter and retail floor were untouched.

 Nothing looked ransacked. Nothing looked staged like a robbery gone wrong. And because Sherry kept the entire inventory in her memory, rather than on paper, investigators couldn’t even determine whether anything specific had actually been stolen. There was no ledger to compare against empty shelves. If a rare book was missing, there was no way to know.

 But whoever did this left something behind that no criminal wants to leave at a murder scene themselves. Pooled and smeared near the body was blood that didn’t belong to Sherry Black. A man’s blood suggesting the attacker had cut his own hand during the struggle. Investigators lifted latent fingerprints from nearby surfaces along with a distinct bloody palm print.

 And lying beside her body was a men’s Armani Exchange belt AX buckle size 36 to 38 in with a small sticker on the back of the buckle bearing the handwritten digits 323. On paper, this should have been an easy case. DNA, fingerprints, a palm print, a traceable clothing item. Investigators had more physical evidence than most cold cases ever dream of.

 So, why did it take 10 years to get a name? The South Salt Lake Police Department took the lead with Captain Jack Carruth, Sergeant Gary Keller, and Lieutenant Dwayne Ruth overseeing the scene. Officers secured the building, canvassed the neighborhood, and pulled search warrants to comb through the shop, the workshop, and the surrounding property.

Earl Black and the rest of the family cooperated fully, submitted to elimination interviews, and were quickly cleared. This wasn’t a domestic case. This was someone from outside the family, outside Sherry’s world entirely. In December 2010, police went public with photos of the Armani Exchange belt, hoping the odd 323 sticker might jog someone’s memory.

 A thrift store clerk, a pawn shop worker, anyone who might recognize where that tag came from. The Black and Miller families put up a $50,000 reward for information. Detectives had already executed search warrants on the retail space, the workshop, and the surrounding grounds, methodically recovering every trace of physical evidence they could find.

Then, in February 2011, the Utah Bureau of Forensic Services extracted a clean full male DNA profile from the blood at the scene. This was the moment that should have solved everything. The profile went straight into CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database, the same system that has cracked thousands of cases by matching crime scene evidence against the DNA of known offenders.

 It came back with nothing, no match. In May 2011, the sample was sent to Sorenson Forensics for deeper analysis. What came back was intriguing, but limited. The perpetrator’s DNA showed 59% West Sub-Saharan African biogeographical ancestry. It was a clue about who he might be, but it wasn’t a name. And in 2011, there was no scientific pathway yet to turn ancestry percentages into an actual identity.

Detectives interviewed dozens of people. They chased hundreds of tips. They collected voluntary DNA samples from persons of interest. None of it connected. And underneath all of it sat one detail nobody in the department knew yet. A detail that would later explain the entire 10-year delay, and it had nothing to do with detective work at all.

Here’s the part of this story that should genuinely frustrate you because the reason this case sat unsolved for a decade wasn’t bad police work. It was a gap in the law itself. Six weeks before Sherry Black’s murder on September 16th, 2010, a 19-year-old named Adam Antonio Spencer Durbarow was arrested for shoplifting in West Valley City.

 He pleaded guilty on October 27th, 2010, and received probation along with a suspended 60-day jail sentence. Under Utah law at the time, DNA collection was mandatory for felony convictions and class A misdemeanors. Durbarow’s shoplifting charge was a class B misdemeanor, a category that fell just below the legal threshold requiring a DNA sample.

 So, even though his blood was sitting in an evidence locker in South Salt Lake, and even though he’d been arrested just 6 weeks before the murder, his genetic profile was never entered into CODIS. There was nothing for the system to match against. Then, on January 15th, 2011, 6 weeks after the murder, Durbarow was arrested again, this time for theft.

 He pleaded guilty on February 1st, sentenced to 180 days in jail. But, he was released early due to jail overcrowding, and again, no DNA collection followed. Twice this man was in police custody within weeks of the murder. Twice the system had a legal chance to capture his DNA. Twice it didn’t happen because of a statutory line drawn between misdemeanor classes.

Add to that the absence of any personal connection between Sherry Black and her killer, no relationship, no grudge, nothing for detectives to trace through phone records or financial statements, and you start to see the full picture. This wasn’t a case that was solvable through traditional detective work. Interviews, canvasses, financial digging, none of it works when the killer is a total stranger who’s never crossed paths with the victim before.

There was a third obstacle working against detectives, too. One that had nothing to do with DNA at all. Because Sherry kept her entire book inventory in her memory instead of on paper, there was no way to generate a list of what, if anything, might have gone missing from the shop. That closed off an entire avenue of investigation.

 Tracking stolen merchandise through pawn shops, online auctions, or antique dealers simply wasn’t possible when nobody could say for certain what, if anything, had been taken. Even the Armani Exchange belt, the single most publicized piece of evidence in the case, hit a dead end of its own. The 323 sticker on the buckle never traced back to a specific retail transaction or point of sale.

 It was a distinctive object with no paper trail attached to it, visible, photographed, publicized for years, and still functionally silent. The case went formally cold in 2013. The Unified Police Department’s Cold Case Unit joined the investigation alongside South Salt Lake Police. But for years the file sat there, full of evidence, empty of answers.

 What it needed wasn’t more manpower, it needed technology that simply didn’t exist yet. Between 2011 and 2017, the case moved forward in small, almost experimental steps, each one a piece of a puzzle nobody could fully assemble yet. In February 2012, the Vidocq Society, a group of forensic experts known for tackling stubborn cold cases spent a week reviewing the file, producing behavioral profiles, and recommending detectives revisit the biological evidence using newer testing methods.

 They came back for a second review in May 2015, this time pushing for probabilistic genotyping and next-generation sequencing, both relatively new forensic techniques at the time. Then came November 30th, 2017, the 7th anniversary of Sherri Black’s murder. On that date, police unveiled something the public had never seen in this case before, composite images generated by Parabon NanoLabs using a system called Snapshot built on DNA phenotyping.

 Here’s what that actually means. Scientists can now analyze single nucleotide polymorphisms, tiny variations in DNA, to predict physical traits with real statistical confidence. In this case, the analysis produced a 97.8% probability of light brown skin, a 99.6% probability of black hair, and a 55.2% probability of brown or black eyes.

 From there, Parabon generated composite sketches showing what their suspect might look like at three different ages, 25, 38, and 52. It was an unsettling thing to watch unfold publicly, an unknown man’s face reconstructed entirely from blood left at a murder scene 7 years earlier. But a composite sketch still isn’t a name, it’s a description, not an identity.

The real turning point was still coming, and it would arrive through a tool most people had never even heard of. In 2018, the case was formally reassigned to Unified Police Department cold case detective Ben Pender, who took over as lead investigator. Pender partnered with Parabon NanoLabs to pursue something called investigative genetic genealogy, IGG for short.

 The concept behind I G G is different from a standard CODIS search. Instead of looking for a direct match to a known criminal offender, investigators upload a crime scene DNA profile to public genealogy databases, the same kind of databases people use to build family trees or find long-lost relatives. Even if the actual suspect has never submitted their own DNA anywhere, a distant cousin, aunt, or grandparent might have.

From there, genealogists work backward, building out family trees until the branches converge on a single living person who fits the age, location, and biological profile of the suspect. On September 18th, 2020, that’s exactly what happened. The SNP profile from the Sherri Black crime scene, uploaded to GEDmatch, returned matches to distant relatives.

 None of those matches were close enough to be a parent or a sibling. They were the kind of distant, third or fourth cousin matches that, on their own, mean almost nothing. But genetic genealogy isn’t about finding one perfect match. It’s about slowly building outward from dozens of small, imperfect ones until multiple branches of a family tree start pointing toward the same intersection.

 Detective Pender began tracing exactly that, branch by branch, and it eventually led him to a single man in California. Pender flew out, obtained a reference DNA swab directly from this man, and confirmed something enormous, paternity. This was the biological father of the person investigators had been hunting for a decade, and the father gave Pender something that no amount of forensic science alone could have provided, human memory.

 He shared the name of the child’s biological mother, a photograph of the child at 3 months old, and the name given to the baby at birth, Antonio. 10 years of silence, and suddenly, for the first time, investigators had a first name. But a first name from a birth record decades old still isn’t an arrest. Somewhere between that infant photograph and the present day, Antonio had grown into a completely different identity.

One that would take one more piece of old-fashioned records work to finally uncover. In early October 2020, detectives cross-referenced the biological mother’s family line with public records, and an obituary for the child’s maternal grandmother became the piece that closed the loop.

 It connected the birth name Antonio to the man now living under a different name entirely, Adam Antonio Spencer Durboraw. Durboraw was 19 years old at the time of the murder and 29 at the time of his identification. He was living and working in Orem, Utah. And here’s where the case takes on a chilling layer of proximity that nobody had uncovered in 10 years of investigation.

In November 2010, Durboraw’s biological mother lived within 1 mile of B&W Billiards and Books. His adoptive father, Joseph Durboraw, ran a commercial photography business called Joseph Paul Photography, and had previously lived on the corner of 500 East and Penny Avenue in South Salt Lake, literally around the corner from Sherry Black’s home.

This wasn’t a stranger who wandered in from across the city. This was someone with roots planted just steps away from the crime scene the entire time. There’s another detail buried in the record that deserves its own moment because it’s genuinely disturbing in hindsight. Joseph Durboraw, the adoptive father, was arrested in 2002 as part of a federal investigation called Operation Hamlet and convicted of producing and distributing child exploitation material, serving 10 years in federal prison. And then there’s this. On

November 30th, 2012, exactly 2 years to the day after he murdered Sherry Black, Adam Derboro posted an image on social media. It showed a cartoon character holding a blood-stained saw captioned, “Don’t upset me. I’m running out of places to hide the bodies.” For 8 more years, that post sat online. Nobody connected it to anything.

 Nobody was looking at him at all. Now, in October 2020, investigators finally had a name, a face, and an address. The only thing left to do was confirm it and make sure he couldn’t run. On October 7th, 2020, detectives began surveilling Derboro directly. In public, they surreptitiously collected an item containing his discarded biological material, the kind of abandoned DNA sampling that doesn’t require a warrant because once something is thrown away, it’s no longer legally private.

 That sample went straight to the Utah Bureau of Forensic Services for expedited testing. On October 8th, the results came back. A match to the male blood recovered from the stockroom floor a decade earlier. Fingerprint and palm print comparisons quickly confirmed the same thing. Every major piece of physical evidence from November 30th, 2010 now pointed to one specific living, breathing person.

 On the morning of Saturday, October 10th, 2020, officers from the Unified Police Department and South Salt Lake Police Department conducted a traffic stop near Derboro’s Orem home as he was on his way to work. He was taken into custody without incident. At the station, after being read his Miranda rights, Derboro waived his right to an attorney and gave a full confession detailing his role in Sherry Black’s murder.

 He was booked into Salt Lake County Jail on felony charges of aggravated murder and aggravated burglary. 10 years, 10 months, and 10 days after Sherry Black’s body was found, the man responsible was finally in handcuffs, but an arrest and a confession still had to survive the courtroom. On October 26th, 2020, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill formally filed first-degree felony charges of aggravated murder and aggravated burglary against Derberow.

Nearly a year later, on October 4th, 2021, Derberow appeared before Third District Judge Randall Skanchy and entered a guilty plea to aggravated murder. DA Gill was clear with the public that no deals or sentencing concessions had been offered in exchange for that plea. This wasn’t a negotiated reduction.

 It was a full admission. On February 23rd, 2022, Judge Skanchy sentenced Adam Derberow to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole at the Utah State Prison. Afterward, [clears throat] DA Sim Gill spoke to reporters and put the entire 12-year journey into a single sentence. “Today, a measure of justice was found.

It is imperfect, but the best our system can do.” It wasn’t a triumphant statement. It was an honest one, an acknowledgement that no sentence, however severe, could actually undo what happened inside that stockroom in 2010. It could only close the file. The guilty plea also meant something else.

 It spared the Black family from having to sit through a public trial where the most painful details of the crime, including the postmortem assault, would have been discussed in open court. Throughout the court proceedings, members of the Black and Miller families were present at every hearing. And by the time sentencing arrived, they publicly stood behind the life without parole outcome as the right resolution for a case that had taken a decade to even reach a courtroom.

No appeals or petitions for post-conviction relief have been filed since. Legally, the case was finished. But for the people closest to Sherry Black, closing the case file was never going to be the same thing as closing the chapter entirely. While detectives worked the case behind closed doors, South Salt Lake experienced this murder very publicly.

 And for years, the community response never really faded. In the initial years after 2010, the neighborhood held annual candlelight vigils in Sherry Black’s memory. Regional outlets like KSL-TV, Deseret News, and the Salt Lake Tribune covered the case extensively from the very beginning. And their early reporting centered almost entirely on that one strange piece of physical evidence, the Armani Exchange belt.

 That belt became something of an obsession for amateur investigators. Online crime forums spent years picking apart the 323 sticker on the back of the buckle, debating whether it was a thrift store price tag, some kind of inventory code, or a marker tied to a specific retail location. It’s a strange thing to watch happen in real time, a piece of clothing turning into the internet’s best guess at solving a murder.

Years before anyone had heard the name Adam Durboraw, interest surged again in 2017 when police released the Parabon phenotyping composites on the seventh anniversary of the murder. Suddenly, there was a face, or at least a scientifically generated approximation of one, and local news coverage spiked right alongside it.

 Then, after the 2020 arrest and the 2022 guilty plea, the story went national. True crime broadcasts, forensic trade publications like Forensic Magazine, and podcasts including The Deck produced deep retrospectives on the case, using it as a case study in exactly how far DNA science had come in a single decade. And once the details of the investigation became public, so did a specific kind of frustration.

 People wanted to know how a man with two separate arrests within weeks of the murder had managed to stay completely off the radar for 10 years. The answer, as you now know, traced back to a single administrative line in Utah’s DNA collection statute. That frustration didn’t just fade away. It turned into something the family was already positioned to act on.

For Sherry Black’s family, justice wasn’t the end of the story. It became the beginning of a new mission entirely. Heidi Miller, Sherry’s daughter, had actually been fighting for stronger DNA collection laws since long before her mother’s killer was identified. Back in 2014, she advocated at the Utah Capitol for the passage of HB 212, legislation aimed at expanding when law enforcement could collect DNA samples.

Then, after her mother’s case was finally solved using genetic genealogy, she pushed further. On March 3rd, 2023, the Utah legislature passed what’s now known as the Sherry Black Bill, establishing formal state regulations governing how law enforcement can use genetic genealogy in investigations, a direct legislative legacy of the exact technology that cracked her mother’s case.

 The family also founded the Sherry Black Foundation, which funds cold case training symposiums for law enforcement across Utah, giving investigators access to the same advanced DNA methodologies that finally identified Der Barr Eau. Law enforcement recognized the work, too. On March 21st, 2022, 2022, the US Department of Justice awarded Detective Ben Pender the Attorney General’s Award for distinguished service in policing, honoring the investigative genetic genealogy work that had spent years quietly, methodically chasing down a name that started as nothing more than a

percentage on an ancestry report. Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera later pointed to the case as proof that cold files are never truly closed, only waiting for the right combination of science and persistence. And she specifically credited the collaboration between the Unified Police Department, South Salt Lake Police, the District Attorney’s Office, and Parabon NanoLabs as the reason the case finally moved.

SSLPD Chief Jack Carrouth, who had responded to the scene himself back in 2010 as a captain, spoke about the years of frustration his department carried, watching detective after detective inherit a file full of evidence and no name to attach it to long before genetic genealogy finally gave them an answer. Zoom out from this one case and the numbers get even more staggering.

 Data analyzed by the Murder Accountability Project shows that roughly 340,000 homicides in the United States remained unsolved between 1965 and 2021. A huge number of those cases share the exact same obstacle that kept Sherry Black’s file frozen for a decade. An offender whose DNA simply was never in the system because they’d never been convicted of anything that legally required a sample.

Investigative genetic genealogy, the same tool that identified Adam Derboro, has only existed in meaningful use since around 2018. It doesn’t need the killer’s DNA to already be on file. It only needs a distant relatives and that single shift has started to change what unsolvable even means for cases like this one.

 Within Utah specifically, the Sherry Black case is now treated as a regional blueprint, a working example of how combining genetic genealogy with old-fashioned surveillance and abandoned DNA collection can resolve exactly the kind of stranger-on-stranger homicide that traditional detective work was never built to handle.

 It’s the reason the case still gets referenced in forensic training circles years after Derboro’s sentencing, long after most true crime coverage has moved on to the next headline. Sherry Black spent her life surrounded by books she knew by heart in a shop she ran without ever needing to write anything down.

 Her death, for 10 years, was defined by the opposite of that, a case with plenty of evidence and absolutely no way to read it. What finally broke it wasn’t a lucky tip or a deathbed confession. It was a decade of forensic science slowly catching up to a crime scene that had been waiting patiently the entire time. A blood sample, a percentage of ancestry, a composite sketch, a distant cousin on a genealogy website, a father in California who still remembered a name he gave his son decades earlier.

10 years is a long time to wait for justice. Long enough for a suspended shoplifting sentence to be forgotten. Long enough for a two-year anniversary joke to disappear into a scroll of old social media posts. Long enough for a man to build an entire ordinary life a few miles from where he left his own blood on a stockroom floor.

But for Sherry Black’s family, justice eventually came and in the process it changed how cold cases get solved across the entire state of Utah, and arguably across the country. A 10-year-old blood sample sitting quietly in an evidence locker turned out to be more patient than the man who left it there. If this case showed you anything, it’s that the real breakthrough here wasn’t detective work in the traditional sense.

It was genetic genealogy itself, the same method now being used to crack decades-old cold cases all over the US. If you want to understand exactly how investigators build a family tree out of nothing but a blood sample, and how that same method has already unmasked killers hiding in plain sight for 30, 40, even 50 years, that’s exactly what we break down next.

Click the video on your screen and go inside the science that’s rewriting what cold case even means.