Sitting unassumingly in the cemetery’s A plot is a small headstone that reads simply: “Monte R. Merz, 1911-1965.” Next to it is an identical tombstone where Merz’s mother is buried and a sibling is nearby. Merz’s mother died three years after her son. For many years, Monte Mertz’s grandchildren in Utah said he died in a car accident. But what they recently learned is that buried in the modest plot is a suspected serial killer and pedophile. And Merz was not lost in any crash. Instead, 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 was the latest act of violence in a lifetime of brutal crime, according to the LAPD. In all, police now believe Merz killed two women, a teenage girl and a fetus in California from 1956 to 1965. And based on his pattern of behavior, Los Angeles Police Detective Rachel Evans said she believes those crimes may just scratch the surface. In 2017 — 52 years after his death — Merz was determined to be responsible for the 1960 stabbing death of a 15-year-old girl after a key witness came forward to call police after living in fear for decades. And this year, thanks to the work of a detective who was new to the cold case unit and had never worked a homicide before — a woman who spent hours traveling to Utah trying to piece together the investigation — police decided they had enough evidence to link Merz to the 1956 murder of a pregnant 18-year-old in Van Nuys, California; It was the oldest unsolved murder in the San Fernando Valley, an area of ​​more than 1.75 million people.

An “inner voice”

Evans, who previously was a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, was with the LAPD for 13 years and became a detective 4½ years ago. “I just felt like this was what I was supposed to do,” she said of her decision to become a police officer. “I don’t know, I just felt like this is where I was supposed to be.” Los Angeles Police Detective Rachel Evans, pictured June 2, in Los Angeles, recently solved the Valley’s oldest murder, finding that Monte Merz of Utah killed Barbara Jepson and her unborn child in 1956 in a brutal stabbing in her home. Merz died in 1965 in a murder-suicide after killing his then-wife Ina Merz. Rick Loomis for the Deseret News He is currently assigned to the homicide unit at the Van Nuys Police Department and works on new — or what police call “fresh” — homicides. But in 2019, when she was first asked to join the robbery/homicide division, she was assigned to the cold case unit. Investigating murders, new or old, was not something Evans said she thought she would ever do in her career. “I have a really soft heart. I would have thought I couldn’t handle crime scenes. But as I got into it, I found I was pretty good at it,” she said. Although Evans admits she was nervous going into the unit, which at the time included detectives who had been investigating homicides for two decades and didn’t want to train a newcomer, she also went into her new job with a “never say no” attitude. . The rookie greeted the veteran detectives by handing over a large book containing the case file for a 1956 murder. “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 hadn’t been solved. I sat at my desk like, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’” Evans recalled. The case was the murder of Barbara Jean Jepson, a young pregnant woman who had been raped and stabbed to death in her home on January 31, 1956. By the time the case reached Evans’ office in 2019, hundreds of detectives had already combed through this last 60 years. But Evans, who admits to being highly 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 own it. So here I was in this new unit — they didn’t know who I was, I didn’t know who they were. So they were kind of testing me to see what I could do. . I like the challenge. ‘I’ll figure it out.’ “But there were times when I was really frustrated with the case because I couldn’t find anything and I kept getting that feeling of, ‘Go on. Go on.’ 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 heard that inner voice that was like, ‘Keep going.’ And I did. And I managed to reveal everything.” The large file of evidence detailing the 1956 murder of Barbara Jepson and her unborn child is pictured June 2, in Los Angeles. The case remained unsolved until it was handed to LAPD Detective Rachel Evans on her first day on the job as a cold 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? What’s that?” So I started looking for people. “Okay. Who’s alive that I can still talk to?’ So I started turning stones, not really knowing what my direction would be,” he told KSL.com. That’s when Evans started picking out interesting details about the case, “like there was no forced entry and there was no power in the house, like he seemed to know this person. And that was my first clue (that) he knows this person guy There was nothing wrong with blocking the door. He let that person in. He obviously knew him. “Here’s what I realized when I went to the book: There was no forced entry, no struggle. It was very clean and the radio was blasting to try to drown out the noise. They checked the radio for fingerprints, got no DNA back after that, and got nothing.” , he recalls. “No jewelry was taken, nothing was out of place, no valuables.” As Evans investigated the case, she soon began to focus on one man. “Immediately it was on my radar,” he recalls. That Utah man was 54-year-old Monte R. Merz.

Women and daughters

Mertz was born on May 24, 1911 in Mount Pleasant. In 1931 he married Cleo Ream and the couple had a son and a daughter. They later divorced and Merz married another woman, Bernice, in the San Fernando Valley. Although it is unclear when Merz left Utah for California, a marriage announcement was found by Evans in the Ogden Standard-Examiner. That marriage also ended in divorce in 1945, with Bernice Merz citing “cruelty,” Evans said. Monte Mertz was “a voracious gambler, prolific pedophile, animal abuser, womanizer (and) raging 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, becoming his common-law wife. At the time Merz and Spiva began living together, Spiva had a 10-year-old daughter, Barbara, from a previous relationship. “I think he groomed and abused Barbara along the way because that was his (modus operandi). He would marry these young women who had these young girls and then abuse those girls,” Evans said. Los Angeles Police Detective Rachel Evans, pictured June 2, in Los Angeles, recently solved the Valley’s oldest murder case, finding that Monte Merz killed Barbara Jepson and her unborn child in 1956 in a brutal stabbing in her house. The murders were the first cold case Evans was assigned to when she was transferred to the department. Merz died in 1965 in a murder-suicide after killing his then-wife Ina Merz. Rick Loomis, for the Deseret News In 1955, Barbara married Joe Jepson. In the same year, Merz married another woman – his fourth wife – who already had two children, including a young daughter. Then, in 1956, Barbara Jepson was killed 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 owned a horse stable next to Merz’s and who often rode horses with him, was stabbed nine times and killed. Then, sometime between 1962 and 1963, Merz married his fifth wife, Ina. He had two sons and a daughter from a previous marriage. In 1964, Monte Merz was arrested and charged with molesting a 14-year-old girl. Information on that case was difficult for Evans to gather because the case file has since been destroyed. Although Merz is suspected of sexually abusing several girls, this was the only victim he was arrested for. He died before his case could be heard. That same year Merz showed up at a hospital with a gunshot wound. He claimed he was wounded in an accidental shooting, but others believed he was shot intentionally by someone else, according to Evans. But who shot Mertz and why was never established. By 1965, Evans said all of Mertz’s crimes were coming to an end. After his arrest for child sexual abuse, Merz was given a polygraph test by police who questioned him about both the murders of Barbara Jepson and Mary Ann Perdrotta. At first, he denied even knowing Jepson. “When first asked about Barbara Jepson, she said, ‘I don’t . . .