A suspect has been identified in the case of a newlywed couple found shot to death at a Utah campsite last summer, said authorities who revealed that he died by suicide shortly after the killings.
Kylen Schulte, 24, and Crystal Beck Turner, 38, were discovered suffering gunshot wounds on Aug. 18, in the La Sal Mountains in Grand County, the sheriff’s office said at the time. They were killed just four months after they got married in April.
The couple, said to be living a bohemian lifestyle in a converted van, told friends about a “creepy guy” who had been lurking around their campsite just days before their deaths.
The Grand County Sheriff’s Office identified Adam Pinkusiewicz as the suspect in their deaths Wednesday.
Authorities learned that Pinkusiewicz was in the La Sal Mountains and Moab, Utah, at the time of the killings but that he “had left the State of Utah shortly after the homicides, and then later committed suicide,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release.
Sheriff Steve White said Pinkusiewicz died Sept. 24, about a month after the killings.
Pinkusiewicz, who worked at a McDonald’s that Turner also worked at in Moab, was initially a person of interest. The sheriff’s office made “numerous attempts” to find and interview him, the release said.
Before his death, he told someone that he had killed two women in Utah and “provided specific details that were known only to investigators,” officials said.
Although he has been identified as the suspect, the investigation continues, and evidence — including Pinkusiewicz's recently seized car — continues to be processed.
Officials ask that anyone with information about Pinkusiewicz or his vehicle, a 2007 Toyota Yaris, to contact the Grand County Sheriff’s Office.
Days before they disappeared, Turner and Schulte met friends at a bar and told them they were worried about someone camping nearby.
“They said they needed to move their campsite because of some creepy guy at their campsite,” Schulte’s aunt, Bridget Calvert, told NBC News earlier. “These are outdoors girls, and they’re independent and confident. And for somebody to make them feel uncomfortable, it had to be a very valid discomfort.”
