On a typical morning in Sanpete County’s peaceful rural Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a walker or jogger can be found retracing their morning steps, making laps along the roads that border and cross the property, with little to no vehicular traffic.
Sitting nondescript in the cemetery’s A plot is a small headstone that simply reads: “Monte R. Merz, 1911-1965.” Next to it is an identical headstone where Mertz’s mother is buried and siblings are nearby. Mertz’s mother died three years after her son. For many years, Monte Mertz’s grandchildren in Utah were told that he had died in a car accident.
But what they’ve recently learned is that buried in the modest plot is a suspected serial killer and child molester.
And Mertz did not die in any accident. Rather, he died after shooting and killing his fifth wife in California in 1965 and then shooting himself moments later, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
The murder-suicide is the latest act of violence in a life of brutal crime, according to the LAPD. In total, police now believe Mertz killed two women, a teenage girl and a fetus in California from 1956 to 1965. And based on his behavioral patterns, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Rachel Evans said she believes those crimes may have just been surface scratches.
In 2017 – 52 years after his death – Mertz was ruled responsible for the stabbing death of a 15-year-old girl in 1960 after a key witness came forward to call police decades later in fear.
And this year, thanks to the work of a detective who was new to the cold case unit and had never worked a homicide case before — a woman who spent many hours traveling to Utah trying to piece together the investigation — police decided that there is ample evidence linking Mertz to the 1956 murder of a pregnant 18-year-old woman in Van Nuys, California.
It was the oldest unsolved homicide in the San Fernando Valley, an area of more than 1.75 million people.
“inside voice”
Evans, who was previously a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff, has been with the LAPD for 13 years and became a detective 4 1/2 years ago.
“I just felt like it was what I had to do,” she said of her decision to become a police officer. “I don’t know, I just felt like this was where I needed to be.”
Los Angeles police detective Rachel Evans, pictured June 2 in Los Angeles, recently solved the valley’s oldest unsolved murder, finding that Utah native Monte Mertz killed Barbara Jepson and her unborn child in 1956 in a brutal stabbing in her home. Mertz died in 1965 in a murder-suicide after killing his then-wife Ina Mertz.
Rick Loomis for the Deseret News
She is currently assigned to the Homicide Unit at the Van Nuys Police Department and works on new — or what police call “fresh” — murders. But in 2019, when she was first asked to join the Robbery/Homicide Unit, she was assigned to the Unsolved Case Unit. Investigating murders, new or old, was not something Evans said she ever thought she would be doing in her career.
“I have a really soft heart. I would have thought I couldn’t handle crime scenes. But when I got into it, I found I was pretty good at it,” she said.
Although Evans admits she was nervous entering the department, which at the time included detectives who had been investigating homicides for two decades and didn’t want to train newcomers, she also went into her new job with a never-say-no attitude.
The rookie was welcomed by the veteran detectives, who handed him a large book that contained the 1956 homicide file.
“One of the guys literally handed me this book and said, ‘Here, good luck with that.’ And it was the oldest case in the valley and it was not resolved. I was sitting at my desk like, ‘What am I going to do with this?'” Evans recalled.
The case was the murder of Barbara Jean Jepson, a young pregnant woman who was raped and stabbed to death in her home on January 31, 1956. By the time the case landed on Evans’ desk in 2019, hundreds of detectives had already been dug through over the past 60 years.
But Evans, who admits to being fiercely competitive, was determined to “prove herself” and show the veteran officers she could solve the case.
“I’m not good at letting things go. I’m competitive. I want to get it. So here I am in this new unit – they didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know who they were. they were testing me to see what I could do. I like the challenge. “I’ll figure that out.”
“But there were times when I was very frustrated with the case because I couldn’t find something and I just kept having this feeling of ‘Keep going. Keep going.” I’m like “What the hell?” I worked on something for seven hours to finally get a name, but this opened up all these things.
“So luckily I listened to that inner voice that was like, ‘Keep going.’ And I did. And I was able to uncover all of that.”
The large evidence file detailing the 1956 murder of Barbara Jepson and her unborn child was filmed on June 2 in Los Angeles. The case remained unsolved until it was turned over to LAPD Detective Rachel Evans on her first day on the job as a case investigator.
Rick Loomis, for the Deseret News
It took her a week to read the entire case file. Then he read it a second time and started taking notes. On her third reading of the file, “I started to see, ‘Hey, this is weird.’ Why didn’t they talk to this person? Who is this person? So I started looking for people. “Okay. Who’s alive that I can still talk to?” So I started turning over rocks, not knowing what my direction would be,” she told KSL.com.
Evans then began to pick out interesting details about the case, “like there was no forced entry and there was no force in the house, it seemed like he knew this guy. And that was my first clue (that) she knew this person .. There was nothing wrong with jamming the door. She let this guy in. He obviously knew him.
“Here’s what I found out when I went to the book: There was no forced entry, no struggle. It was very clean and the radio was blaring to try and drown out the noise. They tested the radio for fingerprints; they didn’t have the DNA back then and they didn’t get anything,” she recalled. “Jewelry was not taken, nothing was out of place, no valuables.
As Evans reviewed the case, it wasn’t long before she began to focus on one man.
“Immediately he was on my radar,” she recalls.
That Utah man was 54-year-old Monte R. Mertz.
Wives and daughters
Mertz was born on May 24, 1911, in Mount Pleasant. In 1931 he married Cleo Ream and the couple had one son and one daughter. They later divorced and Mertz married another woman, Bernice, in the San Fernando Valley. Although it is unclear when Mertz left Utah for California, a wedding announcement was found by Evans in the Ogden Standard-Examiner. That marriage also ended in divorce in 1945, with Bernice Mertz citing “cruelty,” Evans said.
Monte Mertz was “an avid gambler, prolific child prodigal, animal abuser, womanizer (and) rampant alcoholic,” Evans said her research revealed.
By 1948, he had moved in with Fern Spiva in the San Fernando Valley and stayed with her for six years, making her his common-law wife. At the time Mertz and Spiva began living together, Spiva had a 10-year-old daughter, Barbara, from a previous relationship.
“I believe he groomed and abused Barbara along the way because that was kind of his modus operandi.” He’s going to marry these young women who have these young girls and then he’s going to abuse those girls,” Evans said.
LAPD Detective Rachel Evans, pictured June 2 in Los Angeles, recently solved the Valley’s oldest unsolved murder, finding that Monte Mertz killed Barbara Jepson and her unborn child in 1956 in a brutal stabbing at her home. The murders were the first unsolved case Evans was assigned to when she moved to the department. Mertz died in 1965 in a murder-suicide after killing his then-wife Ina Mertz.
Rick Loomis, for the Deseret News
In 1955, Barbara married Joe Jepson. That same year, Mertz married another woman – his fourth wife – who already had two children, including a young daughter.
Then in 1956, Barbara Jepson was murdered in her home. No one was ever arrested for the crime.
In 1960, in the nearby Foothills area, 15-year-old Mary Ann Perdrotta, who had a stable next to Mertz’s and often rode horses with him, was stabbed nine times and…
Add Comment