Posts Tagged ‘theft’

Sherry Black, Pickers, and the Salt Lake City Meth Underworld

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

As far as I can tell, there are no new leads in the murder of bookseller Sherry Black. Or at least none that the police are sharing with the media.

However, that blog update did link to this fascinating piece from 2008 talking about a ring of meth addicts stealing Mormon collectables and selling them to antique dealers, and the (mostly unsuccessful) quest of Randy Holladay to get back his possessions. I am very far indeed from the Salk Lake City antique business, but the story paints them (and the “pickers” that sell to them) in a most unflattering light:

Holladay made one fatal mistake, he says, in his homespun investigation. He gave out his list of stolen property to antique dealers in the first week of March. That’s something the Utah Antique Dealers Association advocates, according to its vice president, Nate Bischoff. One day to the next, though, Holladay says, the trail went cold. He suspects the list was circulated to dealers across the Salt Lake Valley, who then hid from view whatever they had bought of his possessions.

The story it paints of the Salt Lake City police is also less-than-flattering, noting that “In 2007, nine burglary detectives handled 1,300 cases each.” The story also notes:

A month ago, Holladay learned that 10 pages of e-mails he had sent to law enforcement at the beginning of the investigation were being circulated among neighbors and what he calls “various shady people” throughout the city. In those e-mails, Holladay poured out his anger, his fear, his suspicions—accurate or not—of neighbors and others. The district attorney’s office shared the e-mails with defense attorneys in the discovery process. Lloyd says his house was broken into several weeks ago. The only thing taken was the discovery file containing Holladay’s e-mails relating to this case.

Then again, hosility to police is pretty much a given for an “alternative weekly,” so their reporting in that arena may need to be taken with a grain of salt…