SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, May 20, 2025 (Gephardt Daily) -- Fifty-one years after the disappearance of University of Utah student Douglas Brick, the cold case has been solved.
The student was last seen on Oct. 12, 1973, but no one, including his roommate, knew where he had gone.
Last week, weathered skull fragments found last year in the foothills above the U were confirmed to be a 99.9% genetic match for a living relative of the missing man. The case was solved after 51 years, six months and 19 days.
"We never stopped hoping for answers about Doug’s disappearance," Brick’s family said in an issued statement. "Many years ago, we pushed for the cold case to be reopened with the addition of DNA evidence. We are relieved to finally have some answers. After 52 years, this result, while sad, is nothing short of a miracle."
Though Brick’s case was unknown to many until recently, the details surrounding its discovery and subsequent resolution have had an impact that reaches across generations, linking friends, strangers and family.
Steps forward
In 2022, University Police hired a crime data analyst, Nikol Mitchell, who, in her work with Utah’s Statewide Information and Analysis Center (SIAC) discovered that the U had a cold case that had been lost for at least 20 years, a U of U news release says.
Heather Sturzenegger was the investigations lieutenant at the time, and she immediately agreed to open a new case. Although cold cases are rare, and solving them are even less common in the lifetime of a police officer, Sturzenegger made a goal to find Brick.
"For me, I just wanted to try to bring closure to the family and solve the case so they can have some peace," Sturzenegger said. "I have always had a really strong feeling that we would be able to solve this case."
Initially, Sturzenegger and Detective Jon Dial, who was assigned to work on the disappearance when Sturzenegger was promoted, had very little information to build on.
There were claims Brick had dropped out of school and hitched a ride to Ogden to start a new life, or that he had fled the country, or that he had disappeared in the foothills behind the U, the news release says.
They had no records of those who knew him. They knew he lived in Austin Hall—which has since been demolished—but they didn’t know who was his roommate, who reported him missing, or where police searched for him.
Then came the first lucky break. They discovered that Brick’s sister had called university dispatch in 2018 to ask about her brother’s case, which couldn’t be found. Using information from that call, Dial flew to California to meet Brick’s sister and retrieve her DNA through a cheek swab. If Brick was a John Doe in the national system, they would know as soon as they added that sample.
But the submitted DNA didn’t get any hits.
In December 2022, Sturzenegger happened to go with her daughter to a doctor’s appointment in the office of Steven Warren, whom she had never met. They began chatting about what kind of work Sturzenegger did, and where, when Warren offhandedly said, “That’s strange, when I was a student at the U in 1973, my roommate went missing.”
Sturzenegger said she was stunned. It turned out that Warren was the one who reported Brick’s disappearance, and called his family, and found his abandoned car.
Warren confirmed what Dial and Sturzenegger needed to know: the search area where he and police officers had hiked over and over, looking for Brick. It was a huge breakthrough, found by pure coincidence.
Last October, almost to the day Brick had first gone missing in 1973, hunters found two fragments of a human skull about six miles above the white block U on the hill. A medical examiner and an anthropologist at the U confirmed the age of the bone, which was weathered and worn.
University police received permission to send the bone to a specialized lab, and after 5 months of waiting, Sturzenegger received the news. The bone fragments were from Brick.
“When I got the report, I lost my breath,” Sturzenegger said. “My heart was pounding."
Sturzenegger and Dial flew to California days later to let the family know.
Learning about Brick
Public information about Brick is hard to find, aside from a few facts peppered across a handful of cold case discussion groups on Facebook, and two faded stories printed in the Daily Utah Chronicle.
He graduated from Pocatello High School as a top student in 1968, officials learned. He studied physics at the U. He was a National Merit Letter commendation winner, a member of the Boys Council, Key Club and German Club.
In her journals, his mother described him as sweet and kind, the news release says. He was only 23 when he went missing. The last time his mother saw him was in September, when he packed up his car and headed off to start his fourth year at the U.
Those who knew him said he was depressed when he went missing, and possibly suicidal.
That year, Donna wrote an entry in her journal that, of all of the details he discovered from this case, Dial says he will never forget. While she was at a department store in Salt Lake City, Donna had a chance encounter with a store clerk who said she was a psychic.
Intrigued by the surprisingly accurate assessment the clerk had already made about her, Donna said, “Maybe you can tell me what happened to my son.” The psychic then told her details no one would have known — that he had gone to the foothills above the U, contemplating ending his life, the release says.
"He became afraid, and because it was dark, and he slipped and fell. He really wants you to find him," the psychic reportedly said.
“These details stuck out to me,” Dial said. “Where the skull was located, the terrain I was traversing as part of the search, it is extremely steep and loose on both sides, and I was having a hard time in the daylight keeping my footing under me and figuring out where I was going.”
Brick’s skull was found near the summit of Black Mountain.
Lasting impact
Although Brick’s case was cold for decades, he was never forgotten.
"I can still picture him in his glasses, going to class with his hard-cased briefcase," Warren said in the release. "I can still see all of his belongings in the back seat of his car — I never forgot one thing about it.”
When Warren learned that Brick had withdrawn from all of his classes one week before the end of the semester, every year he attended the U, Warren worked to influence university policy that now triggers an alert if a student withdraws from any class two semesters in a row.
Many of the original police officers who worked on the case, including Sergeant Gil Farnsworth, who was mentioned in The Daily Utah Chronicle as following up on the case a year later, are no longer alive. But Farnsworth’s son, Corey, still remembers joining his dad on a search for a missing student, crawling into a tiny cave, and finding nothing.
Dial says that even though they found one answer, he still has other questions that will never be resolved. University Police plan to go and search the area again, now that the snow has melted and the weather has cleared.
Brick’s family expressed their gratitude for the University Police in a statement on May 7.
“We thank the hunter who found him six months ago and reported it immediately, Detective Jon Dial and Major Heather Sturzenegger, search and rescue volunteers, and all the individuals and agencies that were involved in this case.”
