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The 2004 slaying of Jerry Palensky has the elements of a good whodunit - except for the ending, where all the loose ends are tied up and the killer is revealed.

Almost three years after his body was found floating in the Jordan River, numerous questions remain:

* Who would want to hit Palensky so hard that his skull fractured?

* Was it a calculated killing or a spur-of-the-moment attack on the hard-drinking ranch hand?

* Why would a blue-collar worker take out a $300,000 insurance policy and name his boss as beneficiary?

* And is his employer, Nevada ranch owner Linda Walker Fields, the prime suspect in Palensky's violent end?

Detectives describe Fields as "a person involved in the case" because of her relationship with the deceased, but allegations that she is a suspect in the death have popped up only in a civil lawsuit over the insurance policy.

Fields, who describes herself as just a friend of Palensky, adamantly denies any involvement in the killing.

"There isn't one shred of evidence that supports this," said her attorney, Glenn Hanni. He said his client was surprised to learn Palensky left the insurance payout to her.

A lawyer for Palensky's siblings, though, points out that Fields herself wrote her name on the beneficiary line of the enrollment form and paid the premiums out of her ranch hand's bank account while he was in prison.

"I do think when the facts come out, they're going to be particularly unsavory," attorney Blake Miller said.

Information has been trickling out in a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, where Fields and CUNA Mutual Insurance Society are tangled up in a dispute over who gets the benefits.

Fields says Palensky wanted the money to go to her and has sued to get it. But CUNA has filed a counterclaim, arguing Fields is barred from collecting because she is a nonrelative who had no financial interest in the event of Palensky's death.

And the plot thickened when Palensky's two brothers and sister in the Czech Republic came forward to say they should be the heirs. The siblings filed their own claim, alleging Fields is not a proper recipient of the money and asking for an order making the proceeds payable to Palensky's estate - which would eventually give them the payout.

In the meantime, Salt Lake County sheriff's detectives continue to investigate the slaying.

Palensky, 61, died in January 2004 from multiple blows to the back of his head. His death occurred about a month after Fields says she last saw him at her Elko-area ranch.

Pity on the immigrant: In an affidavit, Fields related what she knew about him: Jaromir "Jerry" Palensky, originally from Czechoslovakia, came to the United States in the 1960s. He never married nor had children.

He met fellow miner Vern Fields in New Mexico. Fields later moved to Nevada, where he met and married Linda in 1995. That same year, he introduced Palensky to his wife, who once ran a home for sexually abused children in California and was managing an Elko casino.

The couple had a habit of helping out those less fortunate and soon took in Palensky, who recently had been working in Carbon County mines.

Fields said Palensky lived in their basement for two winters in the late 1990s because it was too cold in his small camp trailer, and he stayed on their property other times throughout the rest of his life.

"We gave him a room and provided meals to him, although he never paid us anything," she wrote in her affidavit.

She and her husband also bailed him out of jail and loaned him money, Fields said.

And because his English was shaky, the Fieldses helped him with his business affairs. In early 2002, Palensky gave her power of attorney and signed quit claim deeds on two Utah properties he owned, Linda Fields said.

While Palensky was serving a DUI sentence in a Nevada prison that began in April 2002, Fields sold his lot near Sunnyside, Utah, after the small house on it was condemned and torn down. She used the $4,000 payment to cover the demolition costs and her husband then withdrew $23,730 from his own retirement account to pay some of Palensky's urgent debts, she said.

For reimbursement, she and Vern sold 20 acres that Palensky owned in Emery County for about $25,000, Fields said. Next, she settled Palensky's gambling debts and loans from other people using money from his savings account.

Then, she paid the utility bills on the space where Palensky kept his trailer and moved it to the ranch for storage, according to Fields.

After being released from prison in October 2003, Palensky returned to the ranch, Fields said. She wrote that she had withdrawn $6,970 left in his savings account so it would not be taken by creditors and gave Palensky the cash in a small bag.

In late October or November 2003, "two guys in a pickup truck" visited Palensky, who told her the three were doing a mining deal in Quartzite, Ariz., Fields said.

A month or so later, Palensky disappeared.

On Jan. 14, 2004, a bird watcher spotted Palensky's body in the Jordan River near 4100 and 700 West. Authorities say he had been in the water for more than 24 hours.

Who gets the money? Three weeks later, Fields filled out a claim form for the insurance proceeds and added a sentence that she wanted to give the money to Palensky's relatives in Europe.

Later, she explained the phrase meant only that she intended to send $5,000 to his brother to repay a loan. She also said Palensky had told her that when he died, none of his money or property was to go to family members.

Fields said she repeatedly discouraged Palensky from taking out an accidental death policy - which also covers an insured who is the victim of a homicide - after he first brought it up in 2000. The ranch hand finally filled out an enrollment form, but she left it on her desk at the Elko bar she and her husband owned, hoping he would drop the matter.

But when Palensky began serving his DUI sentence, he became insistent. Fields said he confided that he feared he would be killed behind bars if other inmates found out he had also been convicted of lewdness with a minor in Utah.

After a frantic search failed to turn up the enrollment card, she filled out a duplicate, Fields said.

She filed suit in December after CUNA balked at paying her. Her attorneys are arguing that both Utah and Nevada law allow nonrelatives and people who lack a business relationship with the deceased to collect. They also have produced witnesses to bolster the claim that Palensky wanted Fields to have the money - an occasional worker at her Elko bar who allegedly saw the original insurance enrollment card and an inmate who said he read the insurance papers sent to Palensky in prison.

In addition, Fields is countering the allegations that she is a suspect in the homicide. She has submitted the results of a polygraph test conducted by a private examiner who concludes Fields was truthful when she stated that she and her husband had nothing to do with the murder.

In another court document, Hanni contends that Fields has never been called a suspect in the crime by police and says his client "earnestly requests that these inflamatory allegations" brought up in the insurance dispute cease.

Attorneys for CUNA and the siblings, while alleging in court documents that detectives have described Fields as a suspect, say the suit can be resolved strictly on the question of who has a legal right to the money. The law is clear, they say, that Fields cannot be the beneficiary.

"She has no insurable interest in the life of Jerry Palensky and never had it," Miller argued at a recent court hearing.

Fields responds that she did have an interest, not only as someone who had used some of her own money to take care of his financial needs, but also as a member of Palensky's adopted family in America.

More twists in the story could lie ahead.

U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins on Oct. 5 declined a request by CUNA and the siblings to throw out Fields' suit. The case now is scheduled to go to trial next year.