NEWLY WEDS FOUND DEAD In the Mountain | Disappearance and Murder of Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner

The light in Moab, Utah, has a way of lying to you. At dawn it pours across the desert like molten brass, polishing every red wall and chalking the canyons with a soft, golden hush. It tells you everything is safe out here—under the La Sal Mountains, along the Colorado River, down the washboard roads that disappear into sage and sky. That morning light is gorgeous and deceiving, and in the summer of 2021 it kept shining even after two women vanished into it.

They were the kind of pair this part of the American West seems to invent out of dust and stubbornness. Keelin “Rainbow” Schulte, born 1996 in Vail, Colorado—tie-dye shirts, silver rings, a laugh that could turn a checkout line into a block party. Her friends called her color in human form. Crystal Turner, born 1983 in Hot Springs, Arkansas—steady hands, quiet humor, the sort who built trust by simply showing up. Keelin was watercolor; Crystal was the frame that held it. They found each other in Moab, Utah, USA, a town that looks like a postcard and acts like a frontier: climbers dangling off Cathedral towers, vanlifers boiling coffee on tailgates, rangers waving as they roll past on Main Street. The place breathes “freedom,” and people come to inhale.

They married in the spring of 2021, the kind of ceremony that felt less like paperwork and more like a promise spoken to the wind. They lived light: a silver Kia Soul, a tent, shifts at the Moonflower Community Co-op and McDonald’s, plans for a tiny home some day when tips and paychecks finally aligned. Evenings meant the La Sal Mountains—the high forest above the desert heat, the picnic-table quiet near Warner Lake, a hammock strung between aspens where the night air carried the soft clink of their mugs. To know them was to know Moab: generous, scrappy, a little dusty, always ready to share a map or a meal.

August 2021 felt electrically dry. Tourists, finally free of lockdowns, poured into Arches National Park and up Kane Creek; vans lined the pullouts; campfires popped after sundown. The town pulsed like it had been asleep for a year and woke up starving. With the crowds came the edges: unfamiliar faces drifting, campsites with shadows that lingered a little too long at the tree line. Keelin and Crystal noticed. Days before they disappeared, they told friends about a creepy guy camping near them up in the La Sals—watching, hovering, wrong. They planned to move sites. They said they’d be careful. But the mountain air often talks you out of fear—the way it smells like pine and cold stone, the way it tells you nothing bad can reach you above the desert. They stayed.

Friday night, August 13, they were at Woody’s Tavern, the local bar where pool balls click like metronomes and the jukebox runs hot with old rock. Keelin wore overalls and a bandana; Crystal, beer in hand, leaned and listened and smiled. They laughed, told a friend they’d head back up toward Warner Lake, mentioned the man again—the one who made their skin prickle. In Moab, odd birds come and go. Everyone nodded; everyone forgot. They drove east under a sky that looked painted and pinned up.

Saturday passed without texts. Sunday, August 15, nothing. Friends blamed mountain cell service; up there, bars vanish as fast as daylight. Monday, August 16, Keelin didn’t show at Moonflower. Crystal missed her shift. Phones dumped callers straight into voicemail. It landed like a stone. In Moab, people notice. When you’re late, someone goes looking. By evening, headlights pushed up the switchbacks into the La Sals. Friends took spurs they knew by heart. Campsite—empty. Another—empty. The dark fell hard and starry. The mountains swallowed every name shouted into the trees and gave nothing back.

News moves through Moab faster than wind under a canyon arch. Volunteers organized on Facebook. Shawn Paul Schulte, Keelin’s father, called from Montana and refused to hang up. He rang deputies, ex-coworkers, even local psychics. He couldn’t sit still while the world spun without his kid. People who had no business taking days off simply did. They fuelled ATVs, launched drones, printed flyers. They combed creek beds and logging roads, eyes flicking from tire ruts to broken twigs to shadows that weren’t supposed to be there.

Wednesday morning, August 18, Cindy Sue Hunter, a family friend, eased her vehicle along a rough forest track in the South Mesa area, Shawn Paul on the phone in her ear like a compass. She promised him she wouldn’t stop. A glint of silver flashed through the timber: the Kia Soul tucked off the road. Doors locked. Keys inside. Camping gear still, like a stage right after the curtain drops. Cindy called their names and stepped into the brush. A stream ran thin and cold nearby. In the tall grass she saw what no one should ever see. The mountains carried her scream across the pines and down the valleys until the whole place heard.

Back in town, Main Street froze. People stared at their phones, at each other, at the red cliffs. Candles appeared at Swanny Park by nightfall. The Moonflower Co-op taped a sign to the door: “Closed this morning. Love each other fiercely.” The Grand County Sheriff’s Office, the Utah State Bureau of Investigation, and federal partners ringed the site with tape and set up lights that hummed like bees. Investigators moved careful as surgeons. Shell casings from a 9mm. No sign of robbery. No assault. No struggle that made sense. Whoever came into that clearing came on purpose and left fast. The medical examiner’s language stayed clinical; reporters kept their adjectives in check; the community didn’t. “They were targeted.” The words knocked the air out of the room.

Rumors bloom in a vacuum. This was late August 2021; the country was fixated on another story with Utah in its margins—the disappearance of Gabby Petito, whose police body-cam video from Moab had already gone viral. Internet sleuths drew lines on maps and turned timelines into conspiracy webs. The sheriff stood in front of red rock and said the only thing that mattered: there was no link. Different victims. Different circumstances. The mountain of speculation did what mountains do—stood there and cast a shadow. But the investigation kept to the trail.

Detectives tore down the long, slow list of the obvious. Ballistics. Vehicle tracks. Every campsite within miles. Dashcams, trail cams, door cams pointed at nothing but trees. Employees at Woody’s remembered the women leaving laughing around 9 p.m. on the 13th. Co-op workers remembered Keelin’s last shift. Coworkers at McDonald’s remembered Crystal’s patience and her habit of waiting for Keelin outside, leaning into the sunset. Everyone remembered the man—that vague outline: white, middle build, a pickup maybe. In Moab, that could be a census.

The lab confirmed the same 9mm fired all rounds. No usable prints. No foreign DNA. The killer had been careful. Or lucky. Or both. Deputies and analysts worked twelve-hour shifts and then some, cross-checking registered 9mm owners, pawn records, recent hires at seasonal jobs. Lists grew, then shrank. Tips flooded in—dozens, then hundreds—most smoke, some heat.

The grief didn’t wait for answers. It built ritual. Someone started a memorial garden behind Moonflower: windchimes, desert wildflowers, two benches pointed at the orange hush of evening. Keelin’s photo watched from the wall beside a note she’d once taped up: “Find something small to love every day.” People touched the photo with two fingers before the shop closed, a quiet salute. At Swanny Park, candles gathered like a second sky. A guitarist played the kind of songs that let you cry without making a scene. Someone whispered, “Love wins,” and it stuck—on bracelets, on posters, on the town’s collective tongue.

The sheriff’s office did the math no one wanted to do. The killer probably wasn’t a tourist passing through. If he were, he left fingerprints on nothing but air. More likely he blended in—someone seasonal, someone known by first name only, someone who could haul stakes by sunrise and vanish into the interstate. They sketched lists: new faces at trailheads, at diners, at the co-op and fast-food counters. One name started surfacing the way oil does—slow, rainbow-slick, undeniable. Adam Pinkusiewicz (spelled a dozen ways in rumors), forty-five, a mechanic who’d worked briefly at McDonald’s, where Crystal Turner had also worked. He’d quit abruptly and left Moab days after the murders. At first, it looked like nothing. In Moab, people leave like weather changes. But the more they tugged, the more the thread gave.

They traced him to Grantsville, Utah, and then to Colorado. Every time they arrived with questions, he had already moved, or worse. Winter put a lid of white over the La Sals. The case didn’t go cold; it went stubborn. Shawn Paul Schulte refused to let it sink. He turned his van into a moving command post, launched The Seekers online, went live from gravel pullouts with his voice breaking and his will unbroken. He knocked on the door of every rumor. He drove roads the women had driven and then roads no one would. He learned the mountains by their scars.

May 2022 brought the turn no one wanted and everyone needed. Detectives learned Pinkusiewicz had died by suicide in Colorado earlier that year. In the wreckage he left behind, witnesses remembered remarks he had made: that he’d been up in the La Sals that weekend; that he knew Crystal from work; that he “messed up bad in Utah.” Some statements were secondhand, but they lined up like fenceposts. Forensics couldn’t stitch him to the bullets—the weapon was gone. But time, place, work history, movements, and words braided into something that held. On May 11, 2022, Grand County Sheriff Steven White said what Moab had spent nine months waiting to hear: they believed Adam Pinkusiewicz acted alone and was responsible for the deaths of Keelin Schulte and Crystal Turner.

Relief didn’t jump; it exhaled. There wouldn’t be a trial, a cross-examination, a verdict narrated live on cable. No moment when a prosecutor pointed at a living man and called him killer. Closure in America is often a ceremony; this one was a statement with a date stamp. Families got the call first. Reporters got the sentence. The community got a night of deep, steady breathing. At Swanny Park, candles burned in peace this time instead of in protest.

Pieces trickled out after. Pinkusiewicz had been transient, living out of a vehicle, battling the kind of mental storms that drive people to the edges of towns and maps. He’d known Crystal casually and, according to some, disliked her. He’d talked about leaving Moab and never going back. His final writings hinted at guilt and offered no explanation. The crime lab kept the shell casings in their labeled nest. The file stayed open for formalities and the long, careful archiving that comes with violent death. But in every practical way the circle had closed.

The town stitched itself slowly. The mural near Main Street went up—two women side by side, the La Sals said softly behind them, the words Love Wins Always in looping script. The paint faded and got touched up, as things worth keeping do. At the co-op, customers still pointed at a photo and told newcomers who she’d been and how she’d treated every morning like a small holiday. At the bar, someone still mentioned how Crystal watched over Keelin with eyes that could be called home. The mountain trails filled; the van pullouts brimmed. Moab remained Moab, but a part of it changed in a way you can’t see on a map. People locked car doors. They scanned tree lines. They learned the difference between paradise and safety.

The case traveled farther than the canyon walls. In law enforcement seminars, instructors used it to talk about transient economies and seasonal suspects—how, in tourist towns across the United States, killers can drift faster than evidence dries. Journalism classes paired it with the Petito glare to talk about visibility, about how one story can flood a landscape and drown another if you’re not careful where you put your camera. Those are clean lessons; the lived ones aren’t. In living rooms in Moab, people learned how grief moves: from shock to ritual, ritual to fatigue, fatigue to a quieter place where love keeps sending up green shoots through bad soil.

Shawn Paul kept visiting the co-op. He brought wildflowers sometimes, set them by his daughter’s photo, spoke to her like fathers do when there’s too much in the room and nowhere to put it. “Hi, baby. We’re okay down here.” He meant it and didn’t. He said on camera that forgiveness wasn’t a light switch. He said he forgave the man, because the alternative would rot him from the inside. He said forgiveness is a kind of freedom you buy for the living, not the dead.

The desert has a memory longer than any headline. Stand on South Mesa after the wind lays down and you can hear everything—the rattle of aspen leaves, the pulse of far-off tires, the kind of quiet that feels like pressure. People say that’s where friends scattered part of the women, beneath trees that whisper whenever the weather changes. If the evening is still enough, laughter seems possible. Not the sound itself—just the idea of it, the promise it leaves behind the way perfume hangs in a doorway long after someone has gone.

It would be easier if evil announced itself with horns and smoke. Here it wore a normal face and a name no one remembered until later. It leaned at a counter. It clocked in, clocked out, bought bad coffee, rolled through the drive-thru, stared too long at strangers. That’s the hardest part to teach: in a country of long roads and friendly towns, danger often looks like nothing. The lesson isn’t to stop trusting. The lesson is to let your instincts speak and to listen before the mountain wind talks you out of them.

Sometimes Keelin’s friends post old photos: her in oversized sunglasses, her on a rock ledge, her with a dog that looks like it chose her. Crystal shows up in the backgrounds like a lighthouse—stationary, steady, shining. The comments read love wins like a vow the town keeps remaking. If slogans are shallow, this one isn’t. It was built out of casseroles and search parties, garden benches and gas money, long nights and longer drives, men and women who held flashlights in the trees until their hands went numb. That’s what love wins means here: love keeps working when justice is a memo and mercy is a language you have to learn in middle age.

By late summer, tourists had returned to taking pictures of Delicate Arch at sunset the way the internet taught them to, and the light went through its daily costume change: orange to crimson to purple to that washed-out blue that means the day is over and the temperature will dive. Somewhere, a camp stove hissed. Somewhere, a ranger locked a gate. Somewhere, on a wall that faces the sun, two women looked out over Moab, Utah, USA, as if the whole town were an audience that needed reminding how to sit together in the dark and wait for the light to come back up.

You can stand in that light—the same Keelin loved to photograph, the same Crystal called home—and feel the story not end but settle. Not a bow. Not a line under it. Just the steady weight of what happened and the steadier truth of what didn’t: the town didn’t break, the families didn’t fold, the love didn’t go anywhere. It stays, like color baked into stone. It stays, like a trail you can still follow long after the footprints are gone. It stays, even here, especially here, where morning light crosses the desert and tells you the oldest lie in America: that nothing bad happens under a sky this beautiful.

The light in Moab, Utah, doesn’t just rise—it erupts. At dawn it spills across the desert like molten gold, crawling over red cliffs and seeping into canyons carved by a thousand years of wind and silence. It burns soft and holy, the kind of beauty that convinces you nothing bad could ever happen here. But beauty lies. That same light would one day illuminate a horror so unthinkable it shattered everything this small American town believed about safety, love, and trust.

In that corner of the Southwest where the La Sal Mountains crown the horizon and the Colorado River cuts a glittering scar through stone, two women built a life that felt free, wild, and completely their own. They lived on their own terms—laughing too loudly, loving too openly, and chasing every sunset the way others chase paychecks. To understand them is to understand Moab itself: a town of wanderers and dreamers, climbers and artists, drifters and believers. A place where time stretches, where people trade ambition for air that smells like dust and pine, where freedom feels infinite.

Keelin “Rainbow” Schulte was born for this kind of life. Sharp-eyed, wild-hearted, a mosaic of tie-dye and turquoise jewelry, she looked like she’d been carved out of sunlight and rebellion. Born in Vail, Colorado, in 1996, she grew up between mountains and motion, raised by her father Shawn Paul Schulte, who taught her that adventure mattered more than convention. She played guitar, collected people like souvenirs, and never stayed anywhere that asked her to dim her light. Her laugh could fill a room. Her spirit could fill a town.

And then there was Crystal Turner—older, steadier, but just as untamed in her own quiet way. Born in 1983 in Hot Springs, Arkansas, she’d spent years chasing work and meaning across the country: waitress, mechanic, traveler, survivor. Where Keelin was color and chaos, Crystal was the calm—the anchor who understood that love wasn’t about possession but partnership. She could fix a car, pitch a tent, or make silence feel like safety. When she smiled, people stayed. When she met Keelin, people swore they saw lightning in slow motion.

Their worlds collided in Moab—a meeting that felt less like chance and more like gravity. They married in spring 2021, barefoot in the desert, vowing love under an open sky instead of stained glass. To them, it wasn’t about signatures or ceremonies. It was about choosing each other, every day, every dawn. They called each other “wife” with the giddy insistence of teenagers who finally found what the world told them they couldn’t have.

They lived simply. They worked seasonal jobs—Keelin at the Moonflower Community Co-op, Crystal at McDonald’s—saving money, sharing everything, dreaming of one day building a tiny home on their own patch of desert. They lived in their silver Kia Soul, or sometimes in a tent up in the La Sal Mountains, camping near Warner Lake beneath aspen trees that whispered like old friends. It wasn’t luxury, but it was theirs. It was freedom.

Locals adored them. At the co-op, people remembered Keelin’s grin and the way she’d chat about coffee, road trips, and Crystal’s cooking. Crystal would pick her up after work, leaning against the car with that soft half-smile—always waiting, always protective. To everyone around them, they were the embodiment of joy: two women who’d managed to build something real in a world that too often felt temporary.

But beneath that summer’s easy rhythm, something began to shift. By August 2021, Moab was bursting with energy again after the long pandemic stillness. Arches National Park overflowed with travelers. Campgrounds brimmed with vans and tents. Locals noticed more strangers than usual—seasonal workers, road wanderers, loners who came and went with the heat. It wasn’t unusual for Moab. But that August, something in the air felt wrong. People whispered about petty thefts, strange encounters, unfamiliar faces lingering too long. The desert, normally patient, felt restless.

Keelin and Crystal noticed it too. Days before everything went dark, they told friends something that would echo through the town like prophecy. “There’s a creepy guy camping near us. He’s freaking us out.” They talked about moving to another site, about being cautious. But Moab had always felt safe. The mountains were their sanctuary—how could danger exist in a place that beautiful?

Their last weekend alive began like any other. On Friday night, August 13, 2021, they met friends at Woody’s Tavern—a local dive where laughter spills out the door and neon signs buzz like lazy bees. Keelin wore her favorite overalls and a red bandana; Crystal sipped a beer, eyes soft with quiet contentment. They played pool, swapped jokes, and talked about heading back up to camp that night. Before leaving, they mentioned the “creepy guy” again—the stranger who’d been hanging around their campsite, watching. No one thought much of it. Moab was full of odd characters. It was part of the charm, or so people told themselves.

They left Woody’s around 9 p.m., the jukebox still playing, the town wrapped in summer warmth. Their Kia Soul rolled out of the parking lot, heading toward the La Sals, music up, windows down. It was the last time anyone saw them alive.

The next day, text messages to Keelin went unanswered. Friends assumed bad reception. Up there, phones drop signal like stones. But when Monday, August 16, came and neither woman showed up for work, the unease spread fast. Keelin’s co-workers at Moonflower called. Crystal’s manager checked in. Calls went straight to voicemail. By evening, worry had turned to fear.

In Moab, word travels faster than dust. Friends started driving up mountain roads, retracing routes they’d driven a hundred times before. They checked every familiar campsite, calling out names that vanished into wind. By the time the sun sank behind the cliffs, searchers knew something was wrong. The desert doesn’t stay silent unless it’s hiding something.

That night, as stars ignited over the La Sals, the town began to move. Volunteers printed flyers. Locals shared photos online. Keelin’s father, Shawn Paul Schulte, coordinated from Montana—calling everyone he could think of, refusing to sleep, repeating the same words: “Something’s wrong. They’re out there. Find them.”

For three days, the mountains swallowed every echo of their names. ATVs roared through canyons. Drones buzzed overhead. Deputies from Grand County Sheriff’s Office scoured roads and riverbeds, combing through dirt and memory. Nothing. The wilderness gave back no sound, no sign, no trace.

Then came August 18, 2021—the morning everything changed. A family friend named Cindy Sue Hunter, guided by Keelin’s father over the phone, drove through the dense forest roads of the South Mesa area, determined not to stop until she found them. The sun was already high when something caught her eye: a flash of silver in the trees. The Kia Soul. Parked off a rough dirt road.

She pulled over, heart hammering. “Keelin? Crystal?” she called out. No answer. She stepped out, walked toward the car. The air was too still. The forest, too quiet. A few yards away, near a narrow stream, she saw what the searchers had been praying not to find.

Two bodies. Close together. Still.

The scream that tore from her throat carried all the way down the mountain. It split the silence of Utah’s morning in half.

By sunset, the news had reached every corner of Moab. The Moab girls, as the community called them, were gone. Two women who had lived freely, who had embodied the soul of the desert, had been found dead in the mountains they loved most.

The town that had always felt invincible suddenly realized it wasn’t.

The desert, beautiful and endless, had kept its secret for just long enough.

(Part 2 continues…)

The morning after their bodies were found, Moab felt like it had lost its pulse. The town that had once hummed with laughter and trail dust now moved in slow motion, stunned and hollow. By sunrise, the entrance to the La Sal Mountains was lined with patrol cars, yellow tape, and flashing red-blue lights that cut through the trees like sirens of disbelief.

Investigators from the Grand County Sheriff’s Office, the Utah State Bureau of Investigation, and federal partners stood in the clearing where Cindy Sue Hunter had made the discovery. The air smelled like pine, rain, and something gone terribly wrong. The silver Kia Soul sat quietly near a narrow dirt road, doors locked, keys inside, belongings untouched. It looked almost peaceful, as if waiting for its owners to return. But the earth around it told a story too cruel to ignore.

The women were found near each other, not far from their camp. They hadn’t run. They hadn’t fought long. Whoever came into that clearing came with intention—swift, precise, merciless. The shell casings scattered near their bodies would later tell investigators the weapon: a 9mm handgun. No robbery. No assault. No motive that made sense. Only silence and loss.

At a press briefing that afternoon, Sheriff Steven White stood in front of a wall of red rock and cameras. His voice cracked slightly when he said, “This was a targeted act of violence. We have two good people who are no longer with us. We will do everything possible to find who’s responsible.” His words echoed off the canyon walls, heavy as stone.

Back in town, fear spread faster than the heat. At Moonflower Co-op, where Keelin had worked, a handwritten sign appeared on the door: Closed for the morning. Love each other fiercely. Locals gathered outside, crying, hugging, lighting candles. By nightfall, Swanny Park was filled with hundreds of people holding vigil. They played Keelin’s favorite folk songs, shared stories about Crystal’s kindness, whispered prayers into the desert air.

In a place where everyone knew everyone, the question hung in every conversation: Who could do this?

Detectives began piecing together the timeline. The women had last been seen Friday night, August 13, leaving Woody’s Tavern around 9 p.m. Witnesses said they were happy, relaxed, heading back to their campsite near Warner Lake. From that point on, they disappeared from public view. Their phones went silent. Their world ended somewhere between the laughter of the bar and the whisper of the mountain wind.

Officers canvassed every campsite in the area, talking to hikers, campers, and locals who had been in the mountains that weekend. A few mentioned something unsettling: a man camping alone, erratic, aggressive, watching other campers too closely. Keelin and Crystal had spoken about him to friends just days before. “There’s a creepy guy near our site,” they’d said. That statement became the first real lead—the man in the woods.

Descriptions varied: white, middle-aged, medium build, possibly driving a pickup truck. In a town like Moab, that description fit half the population. Still, detectives put out a public call for information. They asked for dashcam footage, trail cameras, photos, anything that might show movement near South Mesa between August 13 and 15. Tips poured in—hundreds of them. Each one logged, cross-checked, filtered for clues.

Forensics combed the site inch by inch. They collected casings, soil, fibers, even rainwater samples. Everything went to the Utah State Crime Lab. When the results came back, the answer was maddening: all bullets fired from the same gun, no fingerprints, no foreign DNA. Whoever did this was careful—or lucky—or had done something like it before.

As days turned to weeks, the desert held tight to its secrets. The investigation expanded to every corner of the county. Detectives visited the co-op, the McDonald’s where Crystal worked, nearby gas stations, and every bar along Main Street. They interviewed coworkers, friends, and strangers who might’ve seen the couple—or the man—before that weekend. The picture stayed blurry.

And then came the rumors.

Only days after the murders, another tragedy began unfolding across the country—the disappearance of Gabby Petito, who had been in Moab with her fiancé Brian Laundrie just before Keelin and Crystal vanished. When bodycam footage surfaced showing police stopping the couple in Moab on August 12, internet sleuths connected dots that didn’t exist. The timelines overlapped. The proximity was eerie. Online forums exploded with theories that the two cases were linked.

For detectives, it was chaos. National reporters descended on Moab, shoving microphones into the sheriff’s face, asking if Gabby and Brian could be involved. Sheriff White’s answer was clear but weary: “We have no evidence connecting these two cases. Please let us do our job.” But the noise was unstoppable. The murders of Keelin and Crystal became the shadow case, overshadowed by the media storm of Gabby Petito’s disappearance.

Inside the investigation, though, the focus never wavered. The crime scene told them what gossip could not: this wasn’t random. It was personal. Someone had targeted them deliberately.

By early September, detectives began to narrow their field of interest. They noticed one name repeating through multiple interviews—a former coworker of Crystal’s at McDonald’s. His name was Adam Pinkusiewicz. He was 45, a mechanic who’d worked briefly in Moab that summer. He’d quit abruptly days after the murders and vanished. No forwarding address, no goodbye, no explanation.

At first, his name was just a note in a file. People came and went in Moab all the time; transient workers were as common as dust storms. But small details began to add up. He’d been known to camp alone in the La Sal Mountains. He’d owned a 9mm handgun. And he’d told someone—just before leaving—that he was “done with this place” and “never coming back.”

Detectives tried to reach him. He was already gone.

Meanwhile, the town was breaking under the weight of grief and fear. Locals avoided the trails they once loved. Hikers looked over their shoulders. People locked car doors for the first time. At Moonflower, coworkers hung Keelin’s photo on the wall above a note she’d written months earlier: Find something small to love every day. Customers touched it before leaving, as if it were a charm.

The weeks stretched into months. Autumn 2021 arrived, painting the desert gold and copper. The La Sals grew colder, their peaks dusted with snow. Investigators kept digging. Forensics ran more tests. The FBI’s evidence response team reexamined digital devices—phones, laptops, online accounts. No sign of enemies. No sign of threats. Just two lives filled with laughter, kindness, and wanderlust.

When the trail started to cool, Shawn Paul Schulte refused to let it die. He became a force of nature—the father who turned grief into motion. He created an online search network called The Seekers, mobilizing volunteers across Utah and beyond. Every week he went live from his van, voice cracking but steady, updating viewers, thanking helpers, and reminding the world his daughter’s story wasn’t over. “Someone out there knows,” he’d say. “And one day, they’ll slip up.”

For a time, that hope was all Moab had.

By winter, the headlines had moved on, but the pain hadn’t. The women’s faces hung on flyers across gas stations and grocery stores. Beneath their photos were three words that had become a mantra: Justice for the Moab Girls.

Then, in spring 2022, the call finally came.

Detectives received word from Colorado: a man named Adam Pinkusiewicz had died by suicide earlier that year. He’d been living out of his vehicle, drifting between states. When investigators retraced his final months, they found something chilling. He had allegedly made comments to acquaintances about being in the La Sal Mountains the weekend of the murders—about knowing the women—and even about “doing something bad.”

The statements were secondhand but consistent. They were enough to reopen every file, recheck every note. When detectives lined his timeline up against Keelin and Crystal’s, it matched almost perfectly. He’d left Moab within days of the killings. He’d taken his gun with him. His movements aligned with the window of time the women had died.

They couldn’t recover his weapon. They couldn’t cross-examine a dead man. But every thread of evidence wove the same conclusion.

On May 11, 2022, nearly nine months after the murders, Sheriff White stood once again before cameras and the endless red cliffs of Utah. This time, his tone was different—measured, tired, final. “Based on all available evidence,” he said, “we believe Adam Pinkusiewicz acted alone and is responsible for the deaths of Keelin Schulte and Crystal Turner.”

There would be no trial. No confession. No courtroom reckoning. But after months of silence, Moab finally had a name.

Relief rippled through the community, though it was muted, complicated. The man accused was gone. There would be no justice in the legal sense—no cross-examination, no verdict, no apology. Yet there was something close to closure. The town could breathe again.

That night, Swanny Park filled once more. Hundreds gathered under the lavender sky. Candles glowed like a constellation on earth. Friends spoke, not of death, but of love—a love that had outlasted the darkness.

Shawn Paul stood before them, his face weathered but his voice strong. He held up a candle, its flame flickering in the wind. “You took two lights from us,” he said, “but love still wins. It always will.”

And as the sun sank behind the desert cliffs, the crowd whispered those words back to him, over and over, until they sounded less like mourning and more like a promise.

Love wins. Always.

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