This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2005, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Over the years, a lot of people have examined the murder of Kennecott Copper security guard Bryan Patrick Ruff.
Police, lawyers, a judge and television shows. Some of them came to different conclusions, but nothing ever led to an arrest.
Ultimately, it was another homicide - the still unsolved stabbing death of Wellington resident Crystal Bradley - that helped police in Ruff's murder.
Prosecutors on Tuesday charged Crystal Bradley's husband, Dale B. Bradley, with first-degree felony murder.
The charges allege Dale Bradley, 37, killed Ruff in 1991.
"It's about time," said Craig Ruff, Bryan Ruff's brother, who has waited nearly 14 years for justice.
Bradley, through family members speaking on his behalf, has previously denied killing Ruff. A family spokesperson had not returned The Salt Lake Tribune's messages by late Tuesday.
Ruff, 22, disappeared about 7 p.m. on Dec. 10, 1991, from his post in the guard shack at Kennecott smelter, leaving his hat, radio and a half-eaten lunch. A camper found his body July 10, 1993, protruding from a shallow grave in Five Mile Pass, about 25 miles south of Kennecott. He was still wearing his Kennecott uniform. An autopsy determined Ruff was shot to death.
Bradley worked as a guard with Ruff. In a statement of probable cause filed with the murder charges Tuesday, a Salt Lake County sheriff's detective said Bradley suspected that his then-wife and Ruff were having an affair.
Bradley's wife "told police that earlier in the day . . . Bradley cleaned out the trunk of his car," according to the charges. She "told police she thought this was unusual since he had owned the car since high school an had never before cleaned out his trunk."
The statement says phone records, witnesses and Bradley's comments to police place Bradley at the guard shack at the time Ruff disappeared. Bradley, the detective says, admitted going to the guard shack, even though it was his day off.
In 1991, Bradley also made conflicting statements about his whereabouts that night and about how his car door was damaged the night Ruff disappeared, according to the charges. Police say those statements later proved untrue.
When Ruff's body was found in 1993, the detective claims, Bradley accurately told his wife that Ruff had been shot five times in the chest with a .22-caliber gun.
"Neither the details of where Bryan Ruff was shot, nor the caliber of the weapon, have ever been released to the public," the statement says.
The detective also says Bradley gave conflicting statements to his wife, telling her that when she was in Texas a few days after Ruff's disappearance that police had solved and arrested someone in the case.
Then in 2005, Bradley allegedly told his now-ex-wife that Ruff was dead prior to her trip to Texas.
Bradley has not been the only person suspected in the Ruff case. In 1994, an administrative law judge, ruling in a workers' compensation case, said Ruff probably was killed because he was trying to stop a theft ring at the smelter.
"We were led to believe that it was someone else for a long time," said Craig Ruff on Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home in Pine Ridge, S.C.
The judge's ruling and other suspicions cast on the theft ring could become elements of Bradley's courtroom defense.
Bradley and the Ruff case received new attention earlier this year. On April 30, Bradley's new wife, 27-year-old Crystal Bradley, was found stabbed to death outside the couple's trailer in Wellington, south of Price. Carbon County sheriff's detectives identified Dale Bradley as a "person of interest" and said they were working with their counterparts in Salt Lake County on the Ruff case.
Todd Park, a Salt Lake County sheriff's detective, said he began reviewing the evidence in the case, including one of Ruff's boots. He noticed it had paint similar to that of Dale Bradley's car. A crime laboratory analysis, Park said, matched the paint.
Park said Tuesday that there isn't any one piece of evidence that convinces him that Dale Bradley is the killer. Rather, it is a combination of evidence.
"You couple it together, and that's how you work these cases," Park said.
Meanwhile, in Carbon County, Dale Bradley has denied killing his wife, and that case remains unsolved. Carbon sheriff's detectives did not return Tribune calls on Tuesday.