MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories
The Turquoise Necklace (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
02 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What happened on the evening of March 11, 1974, in Salt Lake City?
One evening in March of 1974, an investigator in Salt Lake City, Utah sat across an interrogation table from a man who claimed he had psychic powers. Now, the investigator had naturally been quite skeptical of this man and his powers, but the man began giving him a bunch of very specific visions about the case the investigator was trying to solve.
And in fact, some of the information he was revealing was enough to make the investigator wonder, could this man actually be a psychic? Or was he the killer? But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do.
So if that's of interest to you, please go on an unbelievable, amazing vacation with the follow button and volunteer to take pictures for them. But every time you take a picture of them, secretly turn the camera around and just take selfies of yourself. Okay, let's get into today's story.
On March 11th, 1974, 22-year-old Barbara Rockey sat at a desk in her bedroom in Provo, Utah, writing furiously. As she was writing, eventually she paused for a minute to reread what she had written, but she wasn't quite happy yet, so she added a few more lines. The letter she was writing was for her roommates, and she knew it had to be perfect, because Barbara was saying goodbye.
So Barbara was a junior at Brigham Young University, or BYU, which was a very religious school where most students were practicing Mormons, but not Barbara. She had chosen to go to BYU because of religion, but really just because she was fascinated by it and thought going to a school structured around faith would be very interesting.
But when she actually got there, she immediately felt out of place because her classmates went to church every week for hours at a time, and they all followed a pretty strict set of behavioral rules and values, which wasn't really Barbara's thing. Barbara was from California and considered herself more of a free spirit who liked exploring new ideas and trying new things.
So over the last three years, Barbara had felt both frustrated and also alienated by the other students' very rigid lifestyles. She'd been hoping that that would change with her new living situation. She'd just moved in with seven other girls in January. But now, just two months into that, it was already very obvious that those girls did not like her.
They were just as religious as the rest of the kids at BYU, and they seemed to think Barbara was weird for doing things like dating around and experimenting with different religions. It just didn't make sense to them. So Barbara had decided that instead of trying to change her roommate's minds, She would just lean in to this kind of weird behavior, as they called it.
Barbara basically started making them uncomfortable on purpose, like by saying she prayed to the devil, which totally shocked them. And after a while, Barbara had really got the sense that these girls, they weren't just weirded out by her. They were now actively scared of her, which really alienated Barbara a whole lot more. And so all of that was why Barbara was now writing this letter.
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Chapter 2: Who was Barbara Rockey and what was her background?
And when he looked inside, he saw there was a note. And so he just opened up her car because he found it was unlocked and he grabbed the note and he began to read it. And as he did, he felt his heart rate start to pick up. An hour later, Jerry ran into the campus police station with Barbara's roommates following right behind him.
After finding the note inside of Barbara's car, Jerry had gone back to Barbara's house to show it to her roommates and ask if they had seen her, because now he was worried that this note was some kind of suicide note. The note was a goodbye letter that Barbara apparently had written. And it said that she was leaving to be with her people. And the tone of it was just kind of alarming.
Now, Jerry could tell her roommates thought that he was overreacting to this note. But they had ultimately agreed to come with him to the police to just make sure everything was okay. And so as soon as the officer on duty came out, Jerry explained to him that he had had plans with Barbara that day and she had not shown up, which was very uncharacteristic.
And then he explained how he found her car and then also this letter and his concerns about this letter. And the officer on duty said, okay, you know, we'll look into it. And so over the next few hours, the campus police did look into it. They reached out to some other kids on campus and also to Barbara's family. but nobody had seen or heard from Barbara since that morning.
And so the police continued to look into this, realizing this could be a missing persons case, but technically not enough time had passed to officially call it that. So in this first day, it was all just kind of preliminary.
The next day, almost 50 miles north of the BYU campus, a worker for a Utah utility company hiked up a trail in Big Cottonwood Canyon, a hilly nature preserve on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Officially, he was there to check on some water lines. But he was also, you know, taking his time and enjoying himself. I mean, this area was beautiful.
It was high up in the mountains and very remote and peaceful. So this guy was genuinely shocked when he reached the top of the trail and saw he was not alone. There was a woman up there. But at first, the way his brain processed what he was seeing is he saw this woman who was lying on the ground and she appeared to be nude or partially nude. And he thought, oh, she's sunbathing.
Like, that's what she's doing up here. But then he's like, it's March. It's cold. And she's face down and she's definitely totally naked. And then he took a few more steps forward and his brain kind of processed what he was seeing, at which point he just gasped, turned around and ran back to his car to go alert the police.
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Chapter 3: How did Barbara's relationship with her roommates affect her life?
Within the hour, Captain Pete Hayward, with the Salt Lake City Sheriff's Office, drove his cruiser along a remote access road that led to Big Cottonwood Canyon. So Hayward normally loved being in nature. All he really did in his spare time was hunt and fish.
But right now, the scenery and remote location were actually kind of an inconvenience, because he needed to get to his destination quickly, and that was just very hard to do out here. Hayward had just gotten a call about a woman who'd been found dead in the canyon by a worker for a utility company.
And while a few responders were actually already there securing the scene, Hayward knew they wouldn't be able to really do anything until he got there. Because when he worked a murder case, every single detail had to go through him. A few minutes later, Hayward saw some police cars up ahead on the side of the road, and also a deputy waiting by a trailhead.
And so he pulled over, got out, and then followed the deputy up a steep trail for about 300 yards. And he was pretty out of breath by the time he saw a few other crime scene techs and officers gathered around a bush, where underneath the bush there was a body of a naked woman lying face down on the ground.
Hayward walked over and crouched down to examine the body, and right away he could see at least three bullet wounds in the woman's back. But other than that, he didn't see any other injuries, and there were no clear signs of decomposition. His best guess was that this woman had been there for maybe a day or so, which was actually sort of a miracle when he thought about it.
I mean, this time of year, nobody came out to this area, and if it hadn't been for that utility worker, I mean, she might not have been found for months. Hayward looked next to the body, and he saw the woman's clothes and shoes were right nearby, and each item was actually folded very neatly, which struck him as a little bit strange.
Hayward pulled on a glove and began examining the clothing, and he could see that there was really nothing ripped or damaged. And also, as Hayward kind of walked around the immediate area, he noticed the whole scene was just as neat as the clothes. There was no gun anywhere, and no marks in the dirt or signs of a struggle or a fight,
and there was no indication that the body had been dragged around, and so Hayward felt pretty confident that this woman was likely shot and killed in the exact spot she was found in. Hayward stood in the middle of the trail and considered everything he was seeing.
The neatly folded clothes could have been removed during consensual sex, and then maybe things turned violent, or that could mean the woman was maybe forced to undress at gunpoint. Either way, Hayward's gut told him that this woman's killer was someone she knew. Because the thing was, getting up here from the road was not easy. I mean, Hayward was pushing 50 and knew he was not in the best shape.
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Chapter 4: What led Barbara to write a goodbye letter to her roommates?
He wasn't ready to eliminate anybody as a suspect just yet, but so far, Jerry seemed pretty unlikely. He had an alibi, and he was also the one who reported Barbara missing. And considering it was complete luck that her body was even found at all in the area that it was, you know, it really would have been in the killer's best interest to keep quiet and hope her body was never found.
So why would Jerry go to police at all if he was the killer? So Hayward headed out the door to wrangle some officers. They needed to go to Provo and have another word with Barbara's roommates. The next afternoon, just two days after Barbara was found in the canyon, Hayward pulled up to a pawn shop on the outskirts of Salt Lake City.
If he thought he was tired yesterday, well, he was absolutely exhausted now because a lot had happened in the last 24 hours. They'd gotten in touch with Barbara's family, who were obviously shocked and devastated, but they didn't have any useful information for the investigation.
They didn't know much about Barbara's friends or life at school, so they couldn't say if anybody would have wanted to hurt her. And they'd had no idea if she had been planning to leave campus for any reason. But apparently, she was. Because the handwriting expert had come back and confirmed the note was authentic, and Barbara did write it.
So her plans to leave appeared to be genuine, which is what the note basically was about, if you read it literally. But for Hayward, after speaking to Jerry, who talked about the tension between Barbara and her roommates and how she didn't fit in, and also after Hayward literally spoke to all seven of Barbara's roommates and they all actually admitted they did not like Barbara...
It made Hayward think that the letter from Barbara should be interpreted literally, that she was just trying to flee campus and get away. In particular, from her roommates. But the roommates all had solid alibis for the day Barbara went missing. So for now, you know, Hayward basically had to rule out the roommates.
But Hayward was not that upset about this because the roommates had actually given him another lead. According to one of the roommates, right before Barbara had disappeared, she had mentioned that she planned to pawn a turquoise necklace that she owned in Salt Lake City.
So Hayward and some other officers had spent the whole day canvassing pawn shops in that area to see if maybe she had actually gone through with it. Now, so far, Hayward had not found the necklace or, you know, found the pawn shop that maybe Barbara went to, but he was very hopeful, maybe too hopeful in some ways.
Because, you know, aside from this necklace lead, the investigation really was kind of losing steam. They had searched and fingerprinted Barbara's car, but had not found anything significant. They'd also gotten the autopsy back, and it was mostly unhelpful.
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