Body found 40 years ago in national park ID’d as missing teen — but mystery remains
A body found in a Utah national park over 40 years ago has finally been identified — but it’s still a mystery how the victim died, officials said.
Provo Police Department shared the “long story” of 17-year-old Robby Peay’s disappearance and death to Facebook on March 19, adding that despite it spanning over four decades, the department felt it was worth sharing.
Peay ran away from a youth treatment center in October 1982 and didn’t return, officials said. He was listed nationally as a missing person.
Then a few months later in February 1983, a body was found in the Three Gossips area of Arches National Park, officials said. The body had a gunshot wound to the head and similar physical characteristics to Peay, but was too decomposed for investigators to identify it.
Months after the body was found, “Peay’s truck was found abandoned 350 miles away in Lake Powell,” officials said.
“There were no other leads at that time, and eventually the case went cold,” officials said.
Peay’s family filed to have him declared legally dead and set up a gravestone in Provo Cemetery, the department said.
Detectives stayed on the case over the years comparing his characteristics with current ‘John Doe’ (unidentified body) reports, and in 2018, a detective added his information to what became the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) and another national crime database, the department said.
A forensic dentist then caught an error in Peay’s cold case information: his X-ray data had been entered in the wrong order, officials said. The information was corrected and yielded a high percentage match with the unidentified body found in Arches National Park.
Despite the match, the Office of the Medical Examiner still needed DNA to confirm it, officials said.
Around the same time, Provo detectives learned Peay had been adopted at birth, the department said.
It took some time to unseal court adoption documents that revealed “there were no surviving direct-biological family members” — until “further genealogical research unveiled a maternal uncle, who was able to provide the much needed DNA sample for comparison testing.”
Detectives requested to exhume the remains found in Arches National Park, but before the request was granted detectives discovered the body’s DNA on file in NamUs that another local agency had entered years earlier, officials said.
“The samples were compared and declared a match, confirming the remains in (Arches) were indeed Provo’s missing person, Robby Lynn Peay,” the department said.
The Office of the Medical Examiner confirmed the match, and the unidentified person case was “finally solved.” However, the DNA match didn’t provide answers about how Peay’s body ended up in the national park or how he died.
The department forwarded its case file to Grand County detectives, where Peay’s body was found in Arches National Park, officials said. The department has jurisdiction to investigate the homicide.
The department included a statement from Detective Sergeant Patterson in the post.
“Peay had been missing for over 40 years when the breakthrough finally came through dental records and DNA testing,” Patterson said in the statement. “With this crucial evidence, we were able to identify an unknown individual, bringing long-awaited answers to a family that had spent decades in uncertainty. Moments like these are among the most rewarding aspects of the job.”
Several people said that while they were glad Peay’s remains were identified, they feel sympathy for his family for not having answers about what happened to him.
“Happy this mystery is finally solved, or at least we know that it was Robby,” someone said in the comments on the post. “We will probably never know what happened to him. I’m sure there are hearts still broken.”
This story was originally published March 21, 2025 at 1:07 PM with the headline "Body found 40 years ago in national park ID’d as missing teen — but mystery remains."
