Layton police name new person of interest in Carla Maxwell cold case

Layton police have reopened Carla Maxwell’s 1986 murder with a sharper focus than the case has ever had: a gun tied to multiple killings, and a man already linked by DNA to one of them. Maxwell, a 20-year-old 7-Eleven clerk, was found dead behind the counter after customer Edward Wilkinson called 911 at 3:46 a.m. on April 25, 1986.

Investigators now say Maxwell was killed sometime between 3:15 a.m. and 3:46 a.m., and they believe the weapon was a .38- or .357-caliber revolver that has never been recovered. Ballistic analysis connected that same gun to two other Salt Lake City homicides in the mid-1980s, giving detectives a broader violent thread to pull.

The new person of interest is Rickie Lee Stallworth Sr., who Salt Lake City police identified in May 2025 as the man responsible for the 1985 murder of 18-year-old Christine Gallegos. In that case, Gallegos was beaten, sexually assaulted, stabbed and shot to death. Investigators said they used investigative genetic genealogy, then confirmed Stallworth’s identity with a voluntary DNA sample from a family member.

That breakthrough came after a late-2023 reexamination of evidence, with help from Utah’s Cold Case Review Board, the Utah state crime lab, the State Bureau of Investigation and funding tied to the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grant. Detectives also sent evidence to Othram Labs in The Woodlands, Texas. Stallworth died in 2023 of natural causes at age 65, so he cannot be charged in Maxwell’s death, but his name now sits at the center of a case that police believe may help explain a larger pattern of killings.

For Layton investigators, the value of naming Stallworth now is not about a courtroom arrest. It is about forcing the Maxwell case back into the light, where the gun, the timeline and any surviving witnesses can be matched against the Salt Lake City evidence trail. Police are looking for anyone who may remember Stallworth, the revolver, or activity around the Layton store before dawn that morning.

Utah’s cold case system makes that push more than symbolic. The Utah Cold Case Database, created in 2018, requires agencies to enter unsolved cases older than three years, and it is designed to keep dormant homicides from disappearing into file cabinets. Maxwell’s killing never did.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Layton police at 801-887-3800, because the unanswered question is still the same one that remained after the 911 call at 3:46 a.m.: who pulled the trigger, and who else saw enough to say so now?