Residents of rural community admit to some apprehension

CLARK — His name was Juan Antonio Guerra Torres.

Guerra Torres wasn’t well-known in Clark, but some people knew him in this rural community near the Wyoming-Montana border. They didn’t talk much about him before, but they do now, since it was revealed last week he was the man found murdered in the Little Sand Coulee on Jan. 9.

Guerra Torres’ headless, mutilated body was publicly identified on Thursday by the Park County Sheriff’s Office. The news was a shock to the people in Clark.

“He was here sometimes and then gone to California,” said Britney Dodge, who has lived in Clark “all my life.”

Dodge and other locals were distributing food during the bi-monthly Bountiful Baskets program at the Clark Pioneer Recreation Center Saturday afternoon. She said she knows Guerra Torres’ significant other, Sandra, and their five children.

While she referred to Sandra as his wife, others termed her his girlfriend.

Dodge said she thinks Guerra Torres, 30, wasn’t missed because he often disappeared for months at a time. No one she knows of thought he was the victim when the decapitated body was found in January, she said.

Another Bountiful Baskets volunteer, Roxann Lovell, who has lived in the area for four years, said a couple she knows lives in rural Powell had spent time with Guerra Torres. The couple asked not to be identified when contacted for this story, expressing fear of retribution.

“Well, we saw him and talked with him a little,” the woman said Monday. “I don’t remember if it was at work or playing soccer.”

She said he worked manual labor jobs in the area, working in bean fields and in other places.

“He was a hard worker,” she said.

The woman’s husband is from the same state as Guerra Torres — Guanajuato, Mexico — and has an identical belt buckle to the one that was found on Guerra Torres’ body when authorities were trying to identify it.

The body was discovered by a 40-year-old Cody resident who was hunting ducks in the area with his son. It was located on Little Sand Coulee Road approximately 1.5 miles west of Highway 294 east of Clark.

He had been shot multiple times and had been dead for about two days, according to investigators. The body also was decapitated and severely mutilated after death, missing the left arm at the shoulder.

The road, informally known as Little Sand Coulee Road, begins not far from the base of the Badger Basin hill and accesses federal and state lands on the west of Wyo. 294. It’s a little more than 10 miles northwest of Powell and a couple miles north of the Heart Mountain area.

Park County Sheriff Scott Steward called the identification of Guerra Torres “a big turning point, obviously, in the case,” allowing investigators to start looking through records and finding people who knew him.

The sheriff would not say how investigators learned Guerra Torres’ identity.

“If I release that, it could hamper the investigation,” he said.

Steward said the discovery came about two weeks before he made the information public. The time in between was spent doing “some major investigation” that involved the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, the Cody and Powell police departments, the Wyoming Highway Patrol and the Bureau of Land Management.

“It was critical,” Steward said. “We were certainly not trying to hide anything in this major investigation, but the integrity of this investigation has to come first and foremost.”

Guerra Torres had spent time in Park County for more than a decade, according to sheriff’s department records.

“We do know that he kind of traveled back and forth,” Steward said. He said investigators will conduct some interviews outside the state in the near future.

Steward said his department had only minor contact with Guerra Torres over the years, with the most serious being a 2005 arrest for driving with a suspended driver’s license, interference with police and no auto insurance.

There has been a great deal of conjecture that the murder has ties to drugs, and that was certainly the opinion of everyone contacted in the Clark area Saturday.

“To me, it was drug-related,” said “Swede” Swedberg. “Has to be. Nobody goes like that.”

Steward said that’s only speculation.

“At this point in time, obviously we’re following up on all leads, but we can’t confirm either way that this was involved in any kind of drug activity,” he said. “We’re definitely covering all angles of the investigation to include that, but at this point we can’t confirm or rule out — either way — whether it was.”

Larry Denney is one of the owners of a dairy farm located near the state border. Guerra Torres and his family lived in a trailer on land the Denneys own across a gravel road from the dairy.

“I never talked to him much,” Denney said. “He asked us for a job last summer, but we didn’t hire him.”

He said Guerra Torres could not prove he had a legal right to be in the country, and Sheriff Steward said it is believed Guerra Torres was in the U.S. illegally.

Denney said while he had no idea what Guerra Torres was up to, he once noticed a car pulling into their driveway at 2:30 a.m. That seemed highly questionable, he said.

But he said Guerra Torres’ girlfriend/wife’s parents are good people he has known for years. The father is very ill, he said, but the mother works in Cody.

When the Tribune stopped by their trailer Saturday, no one answered the door.

The murder of Guerra Torres is the second high-profile homicide case in Clark in just over a year.

Stephen Hammer, 18, and Tanner Vanpelt, 19, killed Ildiko Freitas, 40, and her parents, Janos Volgyesi, 69, and Hildegard Volgyesi, 70, on March 2,  2013. Hammer and Vanpelt were convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Lovell said she was more frightened then than she is now.

Nancy Woolard, who lives in the Clark community with her husband Brant, admitted she is a little on edge. Woolard, a rural mail carrier, said she knew of Guerra Torres and has seen his family around the area.

“People are scared,” she said. “I’m nervous myself.”

Chris Davis said she is keeping a closer eye on things now, noticing strange vehicles and writing down license plate numbers.

“It makes us more alert,” Davis said. “We kind of become little detectives.”

But, others at the Bountiful Baskets meeting said they feel relatively safe, since the murder seemed to be a personal matter. In addition, virtually everyone in this remote corner of Wyoming has one or more guns.

“We’re all armed,” said Christina Denney. “We take care of each other.”

The Edelweiss bar is a town hub. The folks there sipped beers, ordered burgers and watched “Longmire” Saturday afternoon. While the adventures of a fictional Wyoming lawman captured people’s attention, the very real murder remains a focus of intense investigation.

The Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, Park County Sheriff’s Office and Cody and Powell police departments are all working on the case. The investigation is a main focus for the sheriff’s office, which has assembled a task force that includes officers from all four agencies.

“We’re making progress daily,” Steward said. “But with a case like this, a lot of times you’ll make progress daily, and then you’ll have a couple days where you kind of lose progress or you lose that momentum, and then you’ll get more tips, things come in, and then you pick up momentum again.”

Steward hopes the naming of Guerra Torres as the deceased will generate more information from the public. Tips can be directed either to Sheriff’s Office Investigator Joe Torczon at 307-527-8700 or to DCI Special Agent Juliet Vibe at 307-777-7545.

— Staff writer CJ Baker contributed to this report.

Juan Antonio Guerra Torres