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On her way to meet a boyfriend three blocks from Temple Square, Carolyn Waite Sarkesians was instead met by her murderer.
She was beaten, raped and strangled. Her body was dumped in a pile of trash outside a nearby halfway house.
For the past 28 years, her family has been consumed with questions about how she ended up there and who perpetrated such a vicious attack.
But three weeks ago, Sarkesians' sister Jackie Benn was contacted by Salt Lake City homicide Detective Mark Knighton.
The murder investigation had been revived by the city's year-old Cold Case squad, and Knighton told Benn that DNA evidence taken from her sister's body in 1976 matched that of a convicted rapist.
Salt Lake City police arrested Gayle G. Benavidez on Thursday.
"This has brought some very much needed closure to our family and our friends," said a grateful and emotional Benn, at a Friday morning news conference. "It means more to us than I can ever express."
Thursday's arrest may also bring some closure to another family. The Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office is reopening the 1976 murder case of Kathy Jones Harmon, who was beaten, raped and strangled three days before Sarkesians was killed. Harmon's semi-nude body was found in East Canyon by a University of Utah student on a hike.
Detectives with Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County have long thought the two murders were connected. Deputies plan to review the Harmon file over the weekend and see if Benavidez may be involved in this case as well, according to Sheriff's spokeswoman Rosie Rivera.
Benavidez, who was 19 in 1976, had been sentenced for raping a 15-year-old girl just three months prior to the murders. But instead of prison, Benavidez was placed in a residential treatment center, and was allowed to travel to work at an outside job. He was living in the center, 175 E. 2100 South, when Sarkesians was murdered.
On March 7, 1976, Sarkesians, 24, was to rendezvous with her boyfriend at the corner of 300 West and North Temple. Either the boyfriend arrived late or the assailant arrived early because when the boyfriend showed up, Sarkesians was gone.
The director of the Salt Lake Probation Halfway House, at 323 W. North Temple, told police he found Sarkesians' body near the facility's trailer at 4:05 p.m. the next day.
Finding no driver license, officers needed three days to identify Sarkesians. Homicide detectives then compiled a short list of suspects - which at the time included Benavidez - but a lack of evidence stalled the case.
In June 1976, Benavidez broke a lock at the residential program and fled. He was later captured. In 1981, he pleaded no contest to another rape while he was in an Ogden halfway house and was eventually sent to prison. Since then, he has had occasional scrapes with police, most stemming from alcohol abuse.
As the months and then years passed, Benn and her family lost hope that the police would solve the case, though her father, now deceased, contacted investigators regularly. Her mother, now 86, always struggled with Sarkesians' death, Benn said.
But with Thursday's arrest, those long-held emotions turned to "extreme relief."
Inside the offices of the Cold Case squad, Sgt. Ron Millard sifts through the unsolved files looking for instances where additional investigation or DNA testing may make the difference. He dropped Sarkesians' case on Knighton's desk in February.
A biological sample sent to the state crime lab on Feb. 19 reopened the case and the subsequent DNA profile generated on March 30 ultimately matched Benavidez, who investigators say had no prior relationship with Sarkesians.
On Thursday, officers picked up Benavidez at his mother's home in Salt Lake City. After interviewing him at the station, Knighton booked Benavidez into the Salt Lake County Jail on suspicion of aggravated murder. Detectives plan to screen the case with the district attorney's office on Monday.
The arrest places Benn and her family at ease and she hopes it spurs investigators to renew efforts in other cases.
Salt Lake City Police Chief Rick Dinse says he expects this case to be a starting point for future success for the six-member Cold Case unit.