Who Killed Anthony Adams?

🌈Anthony "Tony" Adams🌈

He was a quiet warrior and a true freedom fighter.

Tony was born on July 30th, 1953 in Baltimore, Baltimore County, Maryland. He was raised in Salt Lake City and graduated from Judge Memorial High School. While in high school he was active in the science and chess clubs, and the student United Nations. He was on the honor roll, the soccer team and the staff of the school newspaper, The Judgeonian. He was a member of the debate club. He was also a National Merit finalist. Tony possessed an extraordinary drive, thanks in no small part to the example of his mother who attended college in the 1940's, despite the obstacles of discrimination.

As a leader in the Salt Lake Chapter of the Socialist Workers Party, Tony had helped organized the Anita Bryant Protest in 1977. He was also a member of the Salt Lake Coalition for Human Rights and the NAACP. He protested on behalf of gay rights and participated in a campaign to pressure the University of Utah to divest its stock in companies that operated in South Africa during the apartheid years.

At an early age, Tony struggle with being gay and a man of faith. But, ultimately, he learned to accept himself through Metropolitan Community Church, which preached that Christ’s love and homosexuality were not mutually exclusive.

In 1978, 25-year-old Tony was attending the University of Utah and was the campaign manager for the Socialist Workers Party Congressional candidate Bill Hoyle. Tony was also a city bus driver. 

On Friday, November 3rd, Tony went home early from work at the Utah Transit Authority to his Avenues apartment. He’d had a tooth pulled and was hoping to recuperate before a political rally for Hoyle that Sunday. He never made the rally.

At about 8:45 p.m. on November 6th, which was the day before the election, Tony's boyfriend, Bill Woodbury, Rev. Bob Waldrop, and another friend, Clemens Bakwent, went to Tony's apartment at 125 E 1st Avenue. They were concerned because no one had seen or heard from him for several days. After climbing in through a window, Woodbury found Tony in the bedroom, naked and covered with blood, crumpled up against the radiator. He had his mouth open and was not breathing. Tony had been stabbed five times in the chest and twice in the neck. One neck wound extended deep enough to cut into the muscles along his spine.

A butcher knife had been discovered in Tony's bedroom in a pile of clothes. It appear that there was anything taken from the apartment and it was difficult to surmise if there was forced entry. There was damage to Tony's door, but some people that knew him said that it might have been done before the murder.

Investigators believed that Tony was killed on November 3rd, the day he came home from the dentist.

Coincidentally, police detectives were still investigating the death of 16-year-old Sharon Schollmeyer who was found strangled to death in the same apartment building in December 1977. Her case was solved in 2016, DNA evidence came back to a man named Patrick McCabe.

Two detectives originally on Tony's case were reassigned mid-investigation when Ron Millard took over. Despite coming to the crime scene after it already had been cleared by the original detectives, Millard found a knife with what appeared to be a bloodstain on it inside a utensil drawer. He theorized that it could have been a second murder weapon.

Millard also suspected that Tony's murder was a crime of opportunity and passion. That if it was premeditated, the murderer would have brought a weapon with them.

A witness allegedly saw Tony the weekend of his murder at a tavern in the company of another man who was described as white, with long dark hair, a mustache and a short beard.

Tony's case went cold, until 34 years later.

In 2012, Mickey Ann Henson was classified as a person of interest, after her death, based on a fingerprint found in Tony's apartment. The police said that in the late 1970's Henson was a drug user, a prostitute and was suspected of associating with a group known to rob gay people. This had investigators wondering if Henson was working with someone to rob Tony while he was about to get intimate with someone else and that the robbery turned deadly.

Henson’s sister, Cindy, was highly skeptical Henson had anything to do with the murder. Cindy said Henson was a warm and compassionate person, especially when she was younger. Cindy agreed that her sister was a wild child that ran away at age 11 and that she worked occasionally as an escort, but she wasn’t a criminal living on the street.

“She had a family living in Salt Lake; her dad lived up there. She had people that loved her and a good job,” Cindy said. “She was not a street rat.”

Cindy also said that her sister was bisexual and at the time had a girlfriend.

“I don’t remember her or any of her friends hurting gays, because she was one of them,” Cindy said. “She would have stood up for them.”

Henson was involved as a witness for the prosecution against white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin, who gunned down two black men jogging in Liberty Park in 1980. Henson had been solicited for sex by Franklin and later testified against him in state and federal trials though she feared for her life in doing so.

Three weeks after Tony's body was discovered, another gay Salt Lake City man, Doug Coleman, was shot to death a few blocks away. A few months later, Mona Ulibarri, a lesbian, was raped and murdered.

Coleman’s suspected killer was arrested and sent to a mental institution, and eventually died.

Missing from Tony's evidence file, according to police, is the knife believed to be the murder weapon. Unfortunatly, before the knife went missing, it was only tested for blood type, not DNA. (No word on the status of the second knife) 

Long before the police acknowledged that the murder weapon was missing, rumors of it's disappearance made many fear that someone in the department was the killer of both Adams and Coleman. These same people felt that the police were covering it up to avoid a scandal.

What is more interesting is, of all the murders that happened in Salt Lake City, from 1978 to 1984, only those three are missing pieces of evidence. 

No one has ever been charged in any of the three murders.

If you have information about the missing evidence or about a Salt Lake City cold case, call dispatch at 801-799-3000 and ask to speak with the homicide division. You can leave a tip and remain anonymous.