26-05-2025
Psychic correctly predicted a missing student's body lay in hills just six miles from his dorm for 50 YEARS before a chance discovery
The mystery of a student who disappeared from his university dorm without a trace has been solved more than 51 years later.
Douglas Brick, 23, walked out of his dorm at the University of Utah on October 12, 1973, and was mysteriously never seen again.
Police searched the vast expanse near the university, but with little information about where he went, he was never found and the case went cold.
In the absence of evidence, speculation spawned wild theories over the next five decades, the most basic being he disappeared in the foothills behind the campus.
Others claimed Brick dropped out of school and hitched a ride to Ogden to start a new life, or that he had fled the country.
He was depressed, and possibly suicidal at the time.
The whole time, his body was lying in the hills just six miles from the dorm building, overlooking the campus.
Brick graduated from Pocatello High School as a top student in 1968 and was studying physics when he went missing.
He was a National Merit Letter commendation winner and a member of the Boys Council, Key Club and German Club.
With the case cold, life moved on for Brick's family and friends.
His father, a pharmacist and naval World War II veteran, died in 1964 from congenital kidney disease, and his mother, Donna, never remarried.
The last time his Donna saw her son was in September 1971, when he packed up his car and headed off to start his fourth year at Utah University.
She described him as sweet and kind in her journal, but her writings also revealed one of the several bizarre coincidences in the case.
In 1990, when his family held a memorial for him, she wrote of a chance encounter with a store clear at a department store in Salt Lake City.
The clerk claimed to be a psychic, and Donna asked her, 'Maybe you can tell me what happened to my son.'
They described details eerily similar to where Brick's body was eventually found, near the summit of Black Mountain above the university.
Brick, the clerk claimed, went into the foothills to take his own life, but instead slipped in the dark and fell to his death.
'He really wants you to find him, they said.
University of Utah Police detective Jon Dial said the details 'stuck out' to him.
'The terrain I was traversing as part of the search, it is extremely steep and loose on both sides, and I was having a hard time in the daylight keeping my footing under me and figuring out where I was going,' he said.
Donna died in May 2010, and her son wasn't mention in her obituary - they didn't know whether to say he was alive or dead.
Another coincidence occurred when the case was reopened in 2022, after the university's crime data analyst, Nikol Mitchell, uncovered the forgotten case.
Major Heather Sturzenegger agreed to reopen it, but discovered the files had been lost over the years and they had very little to go on.
All they knew was he lived in Austin Hall, which by then had been demolished, but not who he knew, who his roommate was, who reported him missing, or where police searched at the time.
Sturzenegger and Dial located Brick's sister and took DNA, which produced no database matches, and an old girlfriend, but were still nowhere.
Then in December 2022, Sturzenegger was making small talk with her daughter's new doctor, Steven Warren, about what she was working on.
'That's strange, when I was a student at Utah University in 1973, my roommate went missing,' Warren said.
Warren, it turned out, was the one who reported Brick missing, called his family, found his abandoned car - and knew where police searched for him.
'I can still picture him in his glasses, going to class with his hard-cased briefcase,' Warren said after his long-lost roommate's body was found.
'I can still see all of his belongings in the back seat of his car - I never forgot one thing about it.'
Then, last October, hunters stumbled upon two weathered and worn fragments of a human skull in the hills, which made the local news.
Sturzenegger wondered, could this be Brick? Five months after the bones were sent for testing, their DNA matched Brick' sister.
'When I got the report, I lost my breath. My heart was pounding. I was shaking. I was thinking, am I reading this right? Is this him?' she said.
She and Dial flew to California, where Brick's remaining family lived, to break the news.
'We never stopped hoping for answers about Doug's disappearance,' the family said in a statement.
'Many years ago, we pushed for the cold case to be reopened with the addition of DNA evidence. We are relieved to finally have some answers. After 52 years, this result, while sad, is nothing short of a miracle.
'We thank the hunter who found him six months ago and reported it immediately, Detective Jon Dial and Major Heather Sturzenegger, search and rescue volunteers, and all the individuals and agencies that were involved in this case.'
Though his body has finally been found, many of the details of his last moments may never be known, but the university plans to keep searching the hills for clues.
'I felt a very personal connection to Douglas throughout this investigation,' Dial said.
'In a way, it's hard to explain. There was a push and a connection that I felt was from Douglas to this case specifically, in moving it along and being persistent.
'I have felt very strongly that I will always have Douglas in the back of my mind, and his family.'
