Logan • Utah State placed the Old Wagon Wheel on the south plaza Saturday, giving fans an opportunity to pose for photos with the trophy and savor another victory over BYU.

Those folks were allowed to live in the past, especially on homecoming weekend. The Aggie players were charged with moving ahead and pursuing a brand-new Mountain West trophy to go with their historic reward for beating the Cougars, and they’re succeeding so far.

Utah State quarterback Jordan Love did pretty much a full day's work in the first half Saturday as the Aggies rolled to a 59-28 victory over UNLV in front of 21,212 fans at Maverik Stadium. Love finished with 322 yards passing and five touchdowns in less than three quarters, after posting 287 yards and four TDs by halftime as the Aggies took a 42-7 lead.

Love’s version of the story is that adjusting to a Mountain West mindset was easy for the Aggies. “Like we said, the [BYU] game doesn’t really mean anything to us,” he said. “We’re focused on the Mountain West Conference. So these are the games that matter.”

USU coach Matt Wells was not about to revise history, knowing his team enjoyed winning in Provo. “I don't think we ever want to get away from celebrating wins,” he said.

There's a lot of that going on in Logan this season. At the halfway point, the Aggies are 5-1 for the first time since 1978. Coincidentally enough, members of USU's championship teams from '78 (Pacific Coast Athletic Association), '93 (Big West) and 2013 (Mountain Division of the MW) were honored during homecoming, giving the current players incentive to become worthy of their own recognition in the future.

They're trending that way. USU is 2-0 in conference play and, beginning with next weekend's trip to Wyoming, is favored in every game until the Nov. 24 regular-season finale at Boise State, according to ESPN's Football Power Index.

Wells appreciated how his players responded to last weekend's success in Provo, reporting at 6:30 a.m. Monday “ready to roll,” he said.

And once the Aggies got going Saturday, they produced their usual flurry of points in variable weather of rain, hail, clouds and sunshine. The worse it got in the first half, the better they played. USU trailed 7-0 after missing a short field goal on its first drive and going three plays and out on the second possession, starting at its 1-yard line after UNLV (2-4, 0-2) downed former Utah kicker Hayes Hicken’s punt.

USU followed with five touchdowns in less than nine minutes, including Baron Gajkowski's 16-yard return of a punt that was blocked by Devin Thompkins. The offense scored touchdowns on five drives in a row.

The Aggies have scored at least 42 points in every game since the season opener, a 38-31 loss at Michigan State. “That’s just what we’re supposed to do,” Love said. “We’ve got to go out and put points up.”

Native American voting rights activists in North Dakota have launched an audacious plan aimed at pushing back against a Supreme Court ruling that threatens the reelection of Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., — and that could decide the fate of the Senate in the process.

The high court decided 6 to 2 Tuesday to leave in place a state law that requires residents to provide an ID displaying a residential address rather than a P.O. box number to vote. Republican lawmakers who pushed for the measure say the rule is designed to combat voter fraud.

But tribal officials and Democrats say it appears aimed at making it harder for thousands of Native Americans to vote, particularly those who live on reservations without conventional street names. The law specifically bans the use of P.O. boxes as an alternative form of address, rendering many tribal ID cards invalid.

Native American activists have responded with plans to create addresses on the spot for those who need them on Election Day.

Tribal officials will stand outside polling stations on Nov. 6 with laptops and access to rural addressing software and a shared database of voter names. North Dakota is the only state that does not require voter registration, meaning eligible voters can generally show up at the polls and cast a ballot so long as they have proper identification.

O.J. Semans, chief executive of Four Directions, a national Native American voting rights group, said the strategy was "legally watertight" and necessary to counter the "devastating" court ruling.

"Even if it doesn't change the overall result, it's about fighting back," Semans said. "We have to fight back."

In one of the country’s least-populous states — and where Heitkamp, one of the Senate’s most endangered Democratic incumbents, eked out a victory of fewer than 3,000 votes in 2012 — the Supreme Court ruling could prove decisive.

Native Americans were widely credited with delivering Heitkamp's last win, which set in motion a six-year legal war of attrition pitting the GOP-run statehouse in Bismarck against tribal leaders and voting rights groups. Census Bureau records show 46,000 Native Americans live in North Dakota, including 20,000 on tribal reserves. According to court filings, at least 5,000 of those on reservations do not have conventional addresses.

North Dakota has become a high priority for Republicans as they seek to retain their slim majority in the Senate. In television interviews this week, President Donald Trump, who won the state by 36 percentage points in 2016, touted polls showing Rep. Kevin Cramer, R, leading Heitkamp by double digits. Republicans have made Heitkamp's vote against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh a centerpiece of their effort as the campaign enters its final straight.

Native American voting right groups described this week's Supreme Court ruling, in which Kavanaugh did not participate, as the latest ploy to depress already-low turnout among tribes.

"It is a partisan and intentional effort at targeting native voters," said Matt Campbell, attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, who represented a group of military veterans as plaintiffs in the case. He cited official figures indicating that in 2012 there were just nine cases of potential voter fraud out of 325,862 votes cast. "Voter fraud is not a problem," he said.

Al Jaeger, North Dakota's secretary of state, did not respond to a request for comment. However, in a reply to Four Directions obtained by The Washington Post, Jaeger warned that the activists' plan could cause confusion among voters. He cited the example of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Tribe, which he said was already bound by an agreement delegating authority for erecting road signs and assigning street addresses to Rolette County.

In a 2017 letter to Trump's now-defunct Commission on Election Integrity, Jaeger also laid out his views on the need for stricter voter ID requirements.

"While some individuals argue that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, there are others who argue the exact opposite," Jaeger wrote. "Regardless, the truth is that under the current forms of election administration, it is not possible to establish whether widespread voter fraud does or does not exist because it is difficult to determine either way when proof is not required of voters when registering or before voting."

In a dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned that the North Dakota ID law presented a "severe" risk of "grand-scale voter confusion." Her opinion noted different ID rules were in place during the state's primary election this spring, meaning some voters might show up at the polls with ID that falls short or simply stay at home in November.

"Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election," Ginsburg wrote.

Cramer has not publicly responded to the Supreme Court ruling, and his campaign did not reply to a request for comment from The Washington Post.

Julia Krieger, communications director for the Heitkamp campaign, declined to comment on the plans by Native American activists but described the voter ID law as a partisan move aimed at lowering turnout among Heitkamp's voters.

"Passed by North Dakota's Republican-majority legislature almost immediately following Heidi's victory in 2012, it's no secret that North Dakota's hyperpartisan voter ID laws target student and Native communities because they prefer Heidi in the U.S. Senate," Krieger said.

While North Dakota has voted Republican in 19 out of the past 20 presidential races, the state was long represented by two Democratic senators, Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad. Heitkamp ran in 2012 after her mentor, Conrad, encouraged her; she has remained popular in part by distancing herself from national Democrats, although the state has been trending to the right in recent years.

The first flash point in the legal battle over voter ID laws came in 2013 in the wake of Heitkamp's election, when the state legislature argued the system in place at the time facilitated voter fraud. Legislators banned alternatives for those without ID, including affidavits signed under penalty of perjury or tribal officials testifying that a voter was a local resident. They then removed college and military cards from the list of acceptable documents and passed another law requiring that a person's ID contain a current residential address.

Jim Silrum, North Dakota's deputy secretary of state, a proponent of the efforts to tighten voter rules, said at the time the measure was drafted after "concerned citizens" and state representatives raised fears about the possibility of voter fraud.

Activists say a succession of laws put in place since 2012 have disenfranchised thousands of tribal voters, especially those who lived on reservations or in wilderness areas. During the 2014 midterms in Rolette County, home to the Turtle Mountain tribal reservation, turnout plunged from 45 percent to 33 percent, while neighboring non-tribal areas saw no comparable decline.

“We’ve been dealing with suppression of our political rights and voice for decades,” said Wizipan Little Elk, who led Barack Obama’s Native American outreach effort during the 2008 presidential election. “This is just one more example.”

After the Dow Jones industrials plunged 832 points on Wednesday, Larry Kudlow, President Trump's chief economic adviser, walked up the White House driveway and proclaimed that there was no cause for concern. Not about the stock market, or turmoil in China's economy, or American casualties of Trump's trade fights, or the president's attempt to bully the Federal Reserve into an easy-money stance.

"Our economy and the people and the workers and entrepreneurs, they're killing it. We're the hottest in the world," Kudlow proclaimed in front of the CNBC camera. "We're crushing it right now, and I think that's going to continue regardless of China."

Kudlow, standing outside the West Wing, offered versions of this happy talk — “I don’t think this is anything resembling a sugar high ... America is on a tear” — to any other reporter who would listen.

But the Pollyanna performance didn't play well on Wall Street. The Dow lost another 546 points Thursday. The index had a partial recovery Friday but finished the week down 4.2 percent, the third straight weekly decline.

Maybe that's because investors had heard Kudlow say such words once before.

Ten months before the crash of 2008: "There's no recession coming."

Seven months before the crash: "The economy will be rebounding sometime this summer, if not sooner."

Six weeks before the crash: "An awful lot of very good new news."

Markets rise and markets fall, and this last week's volatility doesn't necessarily mean the economy will tank. But it does show the limits of Trump's hucksterism.

Though Trump called the stock market a “bubble” during the campaign, he has boasted scores of times about new records it has set during his presidency. On Saturday, he told a crowd: “Your 401(k)s, you all look like a bunch of geniuses — thank you, Donald, very much.” So far, that has worked, because economic growth has continued under Trump, and indeed accelerated after the massive stimulus of a tax cut and spending increase. Republicans would otherwise be facing bigger losses in next month’s midterms.

But now come scattered signs of trouble. The Fed has been raising interest rates — in part because Trump’s massive stimulus during an expansion threatens to set off inflation. China’s economy has been unstable, in part because of Trump’s trade dispute.

And though the trade deficit with China hit a record in September, Trump's tariffs have hurt many U.S. producers; Ford, claiming the tariffs cost it $1 billion, is planning workforce cuts.

No amount of fact-checker Pinocchios will stop his followers from accepting Trump’s word that Robert S. Mueller III is on a witch hunt, global warming is a hoax, North Korea no longer is a nuclear threat and Democrats are a dangerous mob. But they can feel the economy personally. When the downturn comes, huge deficits, which Trump widened, will leave the federal government with little power to cushion the fall. If this happens on his watch, even Trump’s ardent supporters would see it’s not fake news — and that would be the end of him.

Trump needs reassurance — and Kudlow, the former TV business pundit, now plays the carnival barker’s carnival barker.

With cameras in the room for a prescription-drug bill signing Wednesday, Trump introduced "the great Larry Kudlow, whose voice is so beautiful. ... The economy, Larry, how is it doing?"

"Couldn't be better," replied Kudlow.

And Kudlow's message couldn't be otherwise:

Oct. 7: "Right now, the American economy is crushing it."

Sept. 28: "We're crushing it, we're absolutely crushing it."

Sept. 17: "We're crushing it."

Sept. 6: "We're crushing it."

Aug. 28: "America today is just crushing it everywhere."

Aug. 17: "We are crushing it. And people say this is not sustainable, it's a one-quarter blip? It's just nonsense."

In Thursday’s interview, Jim Cramer, Kudlow’s former partner on CNBC, tried to temper Kudlow’s mania. Cramer cautioned about a slowdown in business in key economic sectors, a peak in real estate, slower lending, declining demand for luxury goods — “a pastiche that I’m concerned about.”

Kudlow brushed off the worries. "I'm just saying there's so much good news out there that we shouldn't just try to find a couple of numbers that don't look great, okay?" he said. "This is a heck of a story. Let's embrace it."

Sound familiar? "The Bush boom is alive and well," Kudlow said before the 2008 crash, calling the soon-to-collapse economy "still the greatest story."

Until it wasn't.

Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter, @Milbank.

Washington • If Sen. Ben Sasse is right — he has not recently been wrong about anything important — the nation’s most-discussed political problem is entangled with the least-understood public health problem. The political problem is furious partisanship. The public health problem is loneliness. Sasse’s new book argues that Americans are richer, more informed and “connected” than ever — and unhappier, more isolated and less fulfilled.

In "Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal," Sasse's subject is "the evaporation of social capital" — the satisfactions of work and community. This reflects a perverse phenomenon: What has come to count as connectedness is displacing the real thing. And matters might quickly become dramatically worse.

Loneliness in “epidemic proportions” is producing a “loneliness literature” of sociological and medical findings about the effect of loneliness on individuals' brains and bodies, and on communities. Sasse says “there is a growing consensus” that loneliness — not obesity, cancer or heart disease — is the nation’s “number one health crisis.” “Persistent loneliness” reduces average longevity more than twice as much as does heavy drinking and more than three times as much as obesity, which often is a consequence of loneliness. Research demonstrates that loneliness is as physically dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and contributes to cognitive decline, including more rapid advance of Alzheimer’s disease. Sasse says, “We’re literally dying of despair,” of the failure “to fill the hole millions of Americans feel in their lives.”

Symptoms large and small are everywhere. Time was, Sasse notes, Americans "stocked their imaginations with the same things": In the 1950s, frequently 70 percent of television sets in use tuned in to "I Love Lucy." Today, when 93 percent of Americans have access to more than 500 channels, the most-watched cable news program, "Hannity" has about 1 percent of the U.S. population. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the average number of times Americans entertained at home declined almost 50 percent. Americans are hyperconnected but disconnected, with "fewer non-virtual friends than at any point in decades." With the median American checking (according to a Pew survey) a smartphone every 4.3 minutes, and with nearly 40 percent of those 18 to 29 online almost every waking minute, we are "addicted to distraction" and "parched for genuine community." Social media, those "tendrils of resentment" that Sasse calls accelerants for political anger, create a nuance-free "outrage loop" for "professional rage-peddlers." And for people for whom enemies have the psychic value of giving life coherence.

Work, which Sasse calls “arguably the most fundamental anchor of human identity,” is at the beginning of “a staggering level of cultural disruption” swifter and more radical than even America’s transformation from a rural and agricultural to an urban and industrial nation. At that time, one response to social disruption was alcoholism, which begat Prohibition. Today, one reason the average American life span has declined for three consecutive years is that many more are dying of drug overdoses — one of the “diseases of despair” — annually than died during the entire Vietnam War. People “need to be needed,” but McKinsey & Co. analysts calculate that, globally, 50 percent of paid activities — jobs — could be automated by currently demonstrated technologies. America’s largest job category is “driver” and, with self-driving vehicles coming, two-thirds of such jobs could disappear in a decade.

This future of accelerating flux exhilarates the educated and socially nimble. It frightens those who, their work identities erased and their communities atomized, are tempted not by what Sasse calls "healthy local tribes" but by political tribalism of grievances, or by chemical oblivion, or both. In today's bifurcated nation, 2016 was the 10th consecutive year when 40 percent of American children were born outside of marriage, America has "two almost entirely different cultures," exemplified by this: Under 10 percent of births to college-educated women are outside of marriage compared to almost 70 percent of births to women with high school diplomas or less.

Repairing America’s physical infrastructure, although expensive, is conceptually simple, involving steel and concrete. The crumbling of America’s social infrastructure presents a daunting challenge: We do not know how to develop what Sasse wants, “new habits of mind and heart ... new practices of neighborliness.” We do know that more government, which means more saturation of society with politics, is not a sufficient answer.

Sasse, a fifth-generation Nebraskan who dedicates his book to the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs and other little platoons of Fremont, Nebraska (population 26,000), wants to rekindle the "hometown-gym-on-a-Friday-night feeling." But Americans can't go home again to Fremont.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.

Provo • Struggling and offensively challenged BYU turned to Zach Wilson on Saturday night hoping for a spark of some sort from the quarterback who was busy getting Draper’s Corner Canyon High ready for the state playoffs at this time last season.

Aided by some willing teammates who just seemed to play better with Wilson in the lineup, the seventh true freshman to start at quarterback for BYU engineered an offensive outburst not seen in Provo since 2016.

Replacing senior Tanner Mangum in the starting lineup for the first time this season, Wilson managed the game well, played mostly mistake-free and contributed to the rushing attack with a nifty 23-yard jaunt to the end zone. The Cougars got back in the win column after consecutive lopsided losses to Washington and Utah State with a 49-23 win over Hawaii in front of an announced crowd of 52,354 at LaVell Edwards Stadium.

The Cougars improved to 4-3 while scoring the most points since hanging 52 on UMass two years ago, while Hawaii fell to 6-2 and still has never won in Provo, dropping to 0-10 here.

Wilson was helped by something Mangum didn’t enjoy during the Cougars’ losing streak — a rushing attack. BYU rushed for more than 250 yards and the freshman threw for 194 yards and three touchdowns, with one interception.

“He is confident in his ability to throw, but he can also run it,” BYU coach Kalani Sitake told the BYU radio network before the game. “We will see what he can do, but it is a good time for him to take over, and provide us with a spark.”

That he did.

Seemingly energized by the midseason change and the rare benching of a senior quarterback, BYU played one of its best halves of the season in jumping to a 28-3 lead.

Wilson could not have gotten off to a better start. He led the Cougars on touchdown drives on their first two possessions, and his quarterback rating was through roof. It was the first time since the San Jose State game in 2017 that the Cougars have scored on consecutive possessions.

The 14 points doubled their first-quarter output for the entire season, and the opening touchdown drive was the first time they’ve scored on their first possession in 2018.

Lopini Katoa galloped 12 yards for the first touchdown after Sitake gambled on 4th-and-1, and Wilson ran for his first career TD on a third-and-15 situation, making a UH defender miss at about the 15 and jetting to the end zone.

But just when BYU fans were about to proclaim the 19-year-old should have been playing the entire season, he made a freshman mistake. Two, actually.

Hawaii linebacker Solomon Matautia dropped a sure interception when Wilson underthrew a receiver. But in what looked like a replay of that miscue the very next play, UH’s Rojesterman Farris hauled in a pick.

Wilson recovered nicely. On the next possession, he fired a beautiful strike to Talon Shumway for 16 yards and the Cougars did the rest of the work on the ground. Former linebacker Matt Hadley’s first career touchdown run went for 21 yards and gave the Cougars a 21-0 lead with 7:24 remaining in the second quarter.

Hawaii quarterback Cole McDonald, the nation’s second-leading passer, finally found a rhythm midway through the second quarter. His 42-yard pass to Cedric Byrd got the Warriors deep into BYU territory. However, BYU’s defense forced three straight incompletions from its 15, and UH settled for a 33-yard field goal from Ryan Meskell.

McDonald still got his yards — he was 21 of 35 for 247 yards and two touchdowns with seven minutes remaining — but the bulk came after halftime.

Austin Lee’s first career interception, which he returned 36 yards to the Hawaii 13, set up BYU’s fourth touchdown of the first half. Freshman tight end Dallin Holker caught a 13-yard TD pass from Wilson, the first TD catch of Holker’s career and the first TD pass of Wilson’s career.

The 28 points were the most in a first half against an FBS opponent in Sitake’s four-year tenure.

Riley Burt ran 4 yards for a touchdown and Wilson threw 24- and 26-yard touchdown passes to Aleva Hifo and Gunner Romney in the second half.

Eugene, Ore. • Mario Cristobal sprinted down the sideline beginning for a timeout. If Oregon was going to announce it was back among the elite of the Pac-12 Conference after a couple of down years, the coach wasn’t about to risk a pass when it was obvious for the Ducks to do just that.

The Ducks were going to run. And they were going to give it to their young star running back seeking a bit of redemption for the mistake he made the last time Oregon was in a big game.

“It was a matter if C.J. could run through an arm tackle and beat the safety,” Cristobal said.

C.J. Verdell did exactly as Cristobal hoped, scoring on a 6-yard run in overtime, and No. 17 Oregon knocked off No. 7 Washington 30-27 on Saturday.

The Ducks potentially ended the Pac-12’s hopes of landing a team in the College Football Playoff by getting the best of their rivals to the north after two straight years of receiving beatings by the Huskies.

And it was Oregon running it right through the middle of the Washington defense for the final winning score. Verdell finished with 111 yards but none were sweeter for the Ducks than the final 6, when he sprinted nearly untouched on third-and-goal and set off a wild celebration in the east end zone of Autzen Stadium.

Oregon originally lined up for the third-down play and appeared ready to pass. Cristobal didn’t like the call and instead decided to see if the Ducks could catch Washington off guard and looking for a pass.

“It was the perfect play against what we were doing,” Washington linebacker Ben Burr-Kirven said. “It’s just unfortunate ... Just tough luck on the call.”

For Verdell it was a far different feeling than last month against Stanford when his fumble late in regulation led to the tying field goal for the Cardinal and a game the Ducks eventually lost in overtime.

“I’m glad the coaches put the trust in me to run the ball. ... That hole was big. It parted like the Red Sea,” Verdell said.

Two years ago, the Huskies snapped a 12-game losing streak to the Ducks with a 70-21 thumping of Oregon at Autzen. Last year it was a 38-3 rout in Seattle, two straight seasons of the Ducks being humbled by their neighbors to the north after a decade of dominance by Oregon.

The Ducks (5-1, 2-1 Pac-12) were fortunate to reach overtime after Washington kicker Peyton Henry missed a 37-yard field-goal attempt on the final play of regulation. Henry’s kick was wide right.

“I feel bad for Peyton. That’s a lot of pressure for anyone, let alone a young guy,” Washington coach Chris Petersen said. “I wish they didn’t have that many timeouts. But Peyton’s a hard-working guy and he’s made a lot of field goals for us in his short career, and he will be back and he will be better.”

Washington (5-2, 3-1) took possession first in overtime but had to settle for Henry’s 22-yard kick after stalling inside the 10. The Huskies had a chance to force a long field goal as Oregon faced third-and-11 after a holding call. But Justin Herbert threw a strike to Dillon Mitchell for 17 yards and the Ducks had first-and-goal. Three plays later, Verdell sprinted into the end zone and soon after the field was a sea of green and yellow celebrating.

Herbert didn’t have his best day, playing in front of a large gathering of NFL scouts and executives that included Denver Broncos GM John Elway. Herbert was 18 of 32 for 202 yards and two touchdowns of 12 yards to Mitchell and a key 9-yard strike to Jaylon Redd late in the first half that pulled the Ducks even at 17-all at halftime.

Washington quarterback Jake Browning threw for 243 yards and threw a 43-yard touchdown to Ty Jones in the third quarter. The Huskies played parts of the second half without their top two running backs after Myles Gaskin and Salvon Ahmed both left with injuries and played sparingly in the closing minutes.

“I thought he played well. That kid’s a tough kid. He’s not going to back down ever,” Petersen said. “He threw some tough, pin-point balls in there and he stood up in the second half.”

Henry had missed three of his last four kicks entering Saturday, but hit from 41 yards earlier in the game. Oregon spent two timeouts trying to ice Henry for his final kick in regulation. He kicked both times after the timeouts were called, missing one and making one. But when it counted, Henry pulled his kick slightly and Oregon was given another chance in overtime.

“It worked out well for us. The game went into overtime and this time we finished the job,” Cristobal said.

UCLA 37, California 7 • In Berkeley, Calif., Joshua Kelley ran for 157 yards and three touchdowns to give coach Chip Kelly his first win at UCLA.

“It feels amazing,” Kelley said. “This is why you play football. This is why you grind during training camp, winter, spring and fall.”

The Bruins (1-5, 1-2 Pac-12) entered the day one of four winless teams in the FBS as part of their worst start since 1943. But UCLA dominated the trenches against the Golden Bears (3-3, 0-3) to give Kelly his first win as a college coach since leaving Oregon for the NFL following the 2012 season.

Kelley scored on a 5-yard run to cap a 59-yard drive set up by a fumble by Patrick Laird in the first quarter. Then, after Cal finally got on the board with Laird’s 1-yard run on the opening drive of the second half, Kelley and the Bruins answered with two straight scoring drives capped by Kelley’s 1-yard runs that made it 27-7.

He has been a bright spot in a down season for UCLA, becoming the first Bruins player with three straight 100-yard games since Jordon James in 2013.

Keisean Lucier-South put the capper on the rout with a 38-yard fumble return for a score after one of Cal’s five turnovers.

“We’re starting to figure it out,” safety Adarius Pickett said. “We’re starting to figure it out in all phases. ... It’s an amazing feeling. The team is excited.”

The Bears dropped their third straight conference game after starting the season 3-0 and getting into the AP rankings for the first time since 2015. The offense struggled for any consistency outside of the 75-yard drive to open the third quarter. Cal was stopped twice on fourth-and-short in the second half, dooming any hopes of a comeback.

Brandon McIlwain completed 22 of 40 passes for 168 yards but was held to minus-2 yards rushing, lost two fumbles and threw two interceptions.

“Total team loss,” coach Justin Wilcox said. “We didn’t anything well enough to win the game and we need everybody, we need everybody to perform better, the entire program.”

Provo • Zach Wilson stood on the field in the aftermath of BYU’s 49-23 win over Hawaii, sweating and beaming, as his teammates walked by, patting him on the head, acknowledging his first start, his first victory as a college quarterback.

Off in the distance, Tanner Mangum, the senior quarterback Wilson replaced, sighed, took it all in, accepted some salutations, and walked into the BYU locker room. He was happy for the Cougars’ win, happy for Wilson, but, personally, deep within, was hurting, at least a bit. He allowed no outward hint of that.

“There’s going to be highs and lows,” he said. “One thing I’ve learned is, you can’t define yourself by what happens on the football field.”

What happened on Saturday night is, Wilson completed 16 passes for 194 yards, running for a touchdown, throwing for three, chucking one pick. Mangum watched.

It’s remarkable the amount of effort college athletes pour into their pursuit of football, the way they immerse themselves in it. In the case of Mangum, he went through the whole cycle, and more.

Hot-shot recruit, Elite-11 co-MVP with Jameis Winston, quarterback-in-waiting at BYU, freshman star after his church mission, and then, the benching in favor of a rebuilt Taysom Hill, temporarily facing bouts of anxiety and depression, seeking clinical help, suffering through the junior year from hell, when he struggled as the starter and blew out his Achilles tendon, the temptation to give up, the pain of a lonely rehab, the battle to get himself physically back together, the fight for the starting position with a talented freshman, and then another benching.

That’s an extraordinary journey.

“I’ve experienced a little bit of everything,” he said. “And it’s taught me things I can carry with me for the rest of my life.”

You want to run through a wall of fear, try informing coaches that you are dealing with mental-health issues in a football world, an environment of what Mangum described as “hyper-masculinity,” a place where any kind of condition of the mind is seen by some as weakness.

To those neanderthals, Mangum simply said, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. It’s my story.”

He’s handled it. It’s up to others to understand it, too.

Mangum went ahead this season to direct a conservative BYU attack to wins over Arizona, Wisconsin and McNeese State, and losses to Cal, Washington and Utah State.

Now, he’ll watch and encourage the young kid, hurting for the loss of his spot, but hoping that Wilson soars even higher than he did Saturday night.

That’s the perspective of a 25-year-old QB who, as he said it, has seen and felt all things an athlete can see and feel. He won huge games as a freshman, was big man on campus, getting full of himself, and then getting knocked to the turf in a way that makes a man either bitter or wise. A couple of years back, he might have felt sorry for himself and quietly complained.

Not now.

Now, he gets it. And by it, I mean life.

Wilson will go on and do what he will. He has his promising football future.

Mangum will go on with a firm grasp on his reality, on what’s most important, with a hope that BYU will win, that Wilson will succeed, and that he himself also will play well, if he’s called on again.

“I’ve been on both sides,” he said, “as a starter and as a backup. Either way, I want to be me. I want to be the best teammate I can. I want to help Zach. I know what he’s facing. But I’m a competitor. I want to play. I think I can help this team win. I won’t give up. I’ll help Zach, and I’ll use this as a growing experience.”

Upon Mangum’s demotion, a former teammate told him: “When you look back, you’ll judge yourself favorably on not giving up, not on how good you were.”

Truth.

“I’ve learned,” Mangum said, “to keep a positive mindset, to look forward and keep my head up. If hard times come, they won’t last. You fight through them. There’s more to life than just football.”

Turns out, being BMOC has a whole different connotation with Tanner Mangum. He knows being a big man entails much more than throwing touchdown passes. It’s about absorbing life’s blows and powering on, and, with any luck, helping others do the same.

GORDON MONSON hosts “The Big Show” with Jake Scott weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone.

Responding to the Oct. 8 headlines "Nicknames 'offend' Jesus" and "Male, female … X," I recommend that we all consider a fine point of writing to say "people who" rather than "people that."

In that front-page story, Christopher Wharton, attorney and Salt Lake City councilman, is quoted as saying, "Mel wasn't the first person that had come to me about [the vagueness of the portion of Utah law that seems to allow for gender marker changes].”

In this time of gut-wrenching division among people — women and men, members of the Utah Church (my shorthand to avoid offending Jesus with my usual references to dear friends as Mormons), Republicans and Democrats, and other labels — I want us to take care in recognizing humans in all of our manifestations. We are people who deserve respect, not merely entities that express opinions.

Flora Shrode, North Logan

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As I have listened to KUER and read The Salt Lake Tribune the past two weeks, it reminded me what a disturbing and dysfunctional world and American culture we currently live in.

It isn’t about learning what is “true” or how I can better serve my fellow men/women in my life. It is about having to be “right,” no matter what the price and no matter how dishonest I must be in order to obtain that. We live in a disgusting time when the only thing that matters is for me to “win” and to make sure that you “lose,” no matter what the context is.

Where have honesty and integrity gone? What has happened to man’s desire to live with honor and moral values? Sadly, it doesn’t seem to matter which side of the fence we are on — we must win and you must lose. Even in our religious culture it doesn’t matter because “I am right,” so you must be wrong. After all, I am part of “the only true and living church on the face of the Earth,” so, of course, you are wrong.

What would it take for all of us to “love our neighbor as ourselves” and to respect our differences so we could develop ways to live together with integrity and respect?

Robert B. Johnson, Salt Lake City

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Said President Donald Trump to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh “On behalf of our nation, I want to apologize to Brett, etc. etc.”

Do not add me to that apology. I am a citizen of the United States and no way do I want to be included in that apology.

Trump has done a great disservice to all women in America by saying those words. Especially to the women (and men) who have been sexually abused in one way or another.

I truly believe that Kavanaugh was so intoxicated at the time that he blacked out all those events. An alcoholic can drink enough to cause blackouts and not remember what they did.

I am under the opinion that the investigation was not thorough enough and was rushed through because of Trump’s insistence. After watching Kavanaugh’s performance at his testimony, he acted like a spoiled rich child whose parents always came to his defense.

Wake up, America, and vote your conscience in November. I know I will.

Luana Chapman, Holladay

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I am a Democrat voting a straight ticket this year — 100 percent female.

Now, that is not entirely true because there are four races on my ballot where all the candidates are male. That is precisely the situation I am looking to change.

This year, if there is a woman in the race, I’m with her! This means that in the Salt Lake County Council At Large 3 seat, I’m voting for Republican Sophia DiCaro over “Democratic permanent” Jim Bradley.

DiCaro works tirelessly to reach multiethnic communities in West Valley City and throughout the state. She also sits on the advisory board of the Women’s Leadership Institute, which elevates women’s voices in Utah. Everyone who is walking in women’s marches and demanding that women be heard, regardless of party, should not ignore the opportunity to allow candidates like DiCaro to change the character of Utah politics.

The future is female, but it can only be so if we move past the partisan divide and make conscious, concerted efforts to increase the diversity of voices in both parties.

Kelsey Garner, Salt Lake City

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Where has the Republican party gone? The party that claimed to be one of family values has disappeared into a dark and perverted place where leaders of the party defend many on a long list of “accused” sex offenders.

Those who once spoke the truth about Trump before his election, as Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz did, now want his approval. Even some women ignore multiple sexual misconduct claims and laugh it off as “locker room talk” or “boys will be boys” and trivialize or attack the victims. They label those who protest or call for investigations as “paid protesters” or a “mob” and use the false claims to incite rally attendees who resemble a shark feeding frenzy.

Sen. Orrin Hatch and the rest of the Utah congressional bunch are leading the charge or skulking in the shadows with no condemnation or comment on the Judiciary Committee’s unprecedented actions.

Those who belong to the party and claim they believe in “seeking that which is virtuous and of good report or praiseworthy” should take a close look at that which they intend to vote for. The Grand Old Party has descended into a Gang Of Predators with no moral sanity in sight.

Dale Laursen, Brigham City

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To say that “false” allegations could ruin Brett Kavanaugh’s life or career is ludicrous. The worst that would have happened to him is that he wouldn’t get promoted.

Jessica Jakupcak, West Valley City

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The following is the first in a two-part series written and researched by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.

“Who Killed Anthony Adams?”

The question spray-painted as graffiti across Salt Lake City 40 years ago still begs an answer.

Adams’ body was discovered nude, soaked in blood and crumpled against the radiator in his Avenues apartment on Nov. 6, 1978. The 25-year-old city bus driver had been stabbed five times in the neck and twice in the chest. One neck wound extended deep enough to cut into the muscles along his spine.

Cold for these many decades, the case still stirs speculation about whether the murder could have been a hate crime, a political assassination — or maybe a crime of passion?

Bob Waldrop doesn’t claim to know the answer. What he is certain of is that the young man he once knew as a parishioner made a rich target.

“Tony had three strikes against him. He was black, gay and he was a Socialist, so just how hard was anyone in the officialdom going to care about his murder?”

Waldrop, former reverend of the Metropolitan Community Church in Salt Lake City, remains convinced — along with other friends and acquaintances of Adams — that the murder was never adequately investigated. They also know that the snuffing out of this bright life cast a dark shadow on Salt Lake City’s robust LGBTQ community in the late ’70s.

Adams was prominent in activist circles. Beyond working for the Socialist Workers Party, he was also a member of the NAACP, 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.

Ron Millard was the detective who spent the most time on the Adams murder case. Now retired, he shakes his head at claims police didn’t properly investigate.

He acknowledges the case was a challenge because the two detectives originally on it were reassigned midinvestigation when he took over. He never knew why.

“It was total confusion,” he recalls.

Also, he says people don’t appreciate that homicide detectives of his day were carrying something like 400 “crimes against persons” cases each year — everything from rape to simple assault.

The Adams case was particularly frustrating, Millard says, because the victim’s life seemed so compartmentalized. He was active in many different groups but showed only select aspects of himself to each one. Even people who were close to him had no idea about his other interests. Millard can’t help but feel this was all a product of the closed nature of the gay community.

“Today," the ex-detective says, “you don’t have the same secrecy and stigma gay people had to deal with back then.”

Motives

Millard never suspected the Adams slaying was a hate crime or one driven by politics. More likely, he believes, it was a bar pickup-turned-bloody. For one thing, the police report listed a witness who saw Adams the weekend of his murder at a tavern in the company of another man — white, with long dark hair, a mustache and a short beard.

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. This could have been a second murder weapon, along with a knife recovered from the bedroom, and Millard theorized it indicated a spontaneous crime of passion.

“If it would have been premeditated," he says, “they would have brought their own weapon.”

It was fairly common in those years, Millard says, for domestic disputes between gay men to turn violent — a point echoed by J. Wallace Graham, the state medical examiner of that era.

This view clashed with that of the activist community at the time. About five weeks after Adams’ murder, a delegation of civil libertarians and gay-rights leaders met with then-Salt Lake City Police Chief Bud Willoughby. They described a climate of “violence in the community,” including increasing threats and the murders of at least two gay men. They asked for greater police protection.

Waldrop, a member of the group, was quoted by The Salt Lake Tribune as saying the LGBTQ community feared “there might be an L.A.-type slasher out there.”

At the same time, Syd Stapleton, a Socialist Workers Party official out of New York City, urged police to treat the Adams killing — just days before an election in which he was actively campaigning for the party’s 2nd Congressional District candidate — as a political “assassination.”

Willoughby made no promises, except to assure that his department would work just as hard to investigate murders in the gay community as any other.

About a week later, a Socialist Workers Party attorney received a visit from officers who showed him a composite drawing and a photo of a suspect in another homicide. The man didn’t recognize the subject, but officers asked the attorney to provide “a complete membership list of the persons associated with the Socialist Workers Party so that each could be interviewed and shown the pictures.”

The officers repeatedly pressed for the membership list. When the party representative asked instead to get copies of the composite drawing and photo to circulate, police refused.

“It was a threat,” says Clemens Bak, an Adams friend and fellow Socialist.

Bak feared officers armed with a party membership list would show up at people’s workplaces for interviews and get them fired. To this day, he harbors no doubt about the police’s intent.

“They were just trying to figure out how to get us to shut up,” Bak says, noting the community outcry over Adams’ murder.

A few months after the slaying, Adams’ brother Keith recalls driving to the Police Department to try to get an update. The clerk announced him to another officer: “That dead f-----'s [anti-gay slur] brother is here.”

Keith left with no new information.

Months dragged on without a break. No suspect was ever identified, and the file settled into a box on a shelf.

The murder of a moment

Decades before electing its first gay mayor and elevating the Pride Parade to its second biggest parade, Utah’s capital was home to five gay bars, along with all-night bathhouses and even a nudist strip along the Great Salt Lake dubbed “Bare Ass Beach.” The gayest part of town was where the Vivint Smart Home Arena and KSL now sit. The original Sun Tavern, a prominent gay bar, stood there and pulled in national headliners like Gloria Gaynor, who belted out “I Will Survive” to throngs of gay people trying to sing along loud enough to be heard at LDS Temple Square.

Whatever the motive for the murder, the stifling effect on this rising community was clear, says LGBTQ historian Ben Williams. He sees parallels in the way society reacted to the rallying voices of political trailblazers like elected San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, who was slain the same month as Adams.

“Tony Adams and Milk were both victims of that backlash,” Williams says.

For years after the unsolved Adams murder, activism in the Salt Lake community was muted. In the early ‘80s, Michael Aaron, then with the Gay Student Union, recalled trying to enlist older gay residents to get involved in conferences and events only to be told not to “rock the boat.”

“They were saying, ‘We’re getting killed and the cops don’t care,' ” Aaron says. That pervasive sense of fear and frustration was motivation for Aaron to help document hate crimes against gay people — attacks and harassment that were never reported to police — and start pushing for legislation in the ’90s. A bill eventually was passed in the Utah Legislature, but it was largely toothless, and lawmakers have repeatedly rejected efforts — continuing even now — to toughen the hate crimes law.

The cold-case squad of the Salt Lake City Police Department in recent years has reopened Adams’ homicide investigation — one of about 100 they are looking into with the help of a federal grant.

Former Detective Cordon Parks, who until his recent retirement led the cold-case squad, says this kind of forensic investigation is mostly retracing the original detectives’ steps; it isn’t about reinventing the wheel.

“The old homicide detectives were very sharp people in their day,” Parks says. “They didn’t have all the scientific tools we have today, but it’s rare to find something they overlooked.”

It’s no comfort to the murder victim’s family and friends that investigators are sticking to the 1978 theories that disregard politics or hate as a possible motive.

Adams “wasn’t running for political office,” Parks says. “He wasn’t even that well connected in the political community or the gay community for that matter.”

Parks believes it was a crime of opportunity likely perpetrated by a person or group who targeted gay individuals as vulnerable targets for robbery — “street kids making money.”

Police agreed to release publicly for the first time a lead they think may be relevant to solving the case. They gave The Utah Investigative Journalism Project the name of a person of interest: Mickey Ann Henson.

Wild child

Henson was first classified as a person of interest in 2012, after her death, based on a fingerprint found in Adams’ apartment.

Police know little about her except that in the late 1970s she was a drug user, a prostitute and was suspected of associating with a group known to rob gay people.

But what was a female prostitute doing in the home of a gay man?

For a time Parks wondered if Adams was actually gay, given Henson’s presence in his apartment, especially considering what happened right before the murder.

The Police Department fought requests to release certain portions of the report about Adams’ body and the crime scene. However, an autopsy file obtained by the journalism project revealed information the department had kept secret.

In consultation with police and The Tribune, the project has decided not to risk jeopardizing the case by disclosing these details, except to say that they suggest Adams may have been about to become intimate just before he was stabbed to death. Still, swabs taken from the body did not find the presence of semen.

Parks wonders if Adams wasn’t lured into a situation where he became naked and vulnerable only to have Henson and an accomplice, or someone else, attempt a robbery that went brutally wrong.

One police report shed some light on why investigators liked this theory. It notes that Henson’s sister, during a visit from out of town, recalled hearing Henson and her friends state, “Let’s go roll a f-- [anti-gay slur]."

Henson’s sister, Cindy, who asked her last name be withheld to protect her privacy, is highly skeptical Henson had anything to do with the murder.

Cindy says Henson was a warm and compassionate person, especially when she was younger. Yes, she was a wild child, who ran away at age 11. And it was true she worked occasionally as an escort, but her sister says 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 says. “She was not a street rat.”

She says the police theory that Henson would be involved in targeting gay men doesn’t make sense. She was bisexual and, at the time of Adams’ killing, had a girlfriend.

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

Among several police reports about her sister was one containing the story about Cindy recalling Henson plotting with friends to “roll a f--."

But Cindy says the report distorted her memory. She says it wasn’t something said to a group of friends. Instead, she says, she was alone with Henson, and they had walked past a strange man outside a gay-friendly bar who asked a question of that nature to her sister, who didn’t respond.

Henson was involved in another high-profile murder case of the period — 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, it turns out, 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.

Sting?

In support of their gay-targeted robbery theory, police suspect Adams may have intersected with a criminal element perhaps because he had been arrested for prostitution.

Adams left his phone number in bathroom stalls at bars, undercover vice officers asserted, and they called him to set up a meeting at a downtown hotel, where he was busted on May 31, 1978.

Adams pleaded not guilty and was ready to stand trial Oct. 31, 1978, but the case was dismissed at the last minute — less than a week before his murder.

To this day, Maurianne Webster, Adams’ sister-in-law bristles at the idea that he was a prostitute or would solicit one. She got to know him well when he lived with her and her husband before he moved into his Avenues apartment, and describes a person who was responsible and always busy with school, his job, his activism and, sometimes, baby-sitting her kids.

“Anthony wasn’t just my brother-in-law, he was also my best friend,” she says.

After Adams’ death, articles in The Militant, a newsletter produced by the Socialist Workers Party of Utah, alleged the case was a frame-up by vice officers attempting to coerce Adams into becoming a confidential informant who could spy on the activist groups of which he was a part.

The Militant further theorized that police covered up details of the murder and that the authorities may even have been involved. The Socialist Workers candidate for mayor of Salt Lake City in 1979, Pam Burchett, campaigned on demanding a thorough investigation into the police cover-up or worse.

‘A quiet warrior’

To hear longtime members of the gay community describe it, life in Salt Lake City in the ’70s was a heady mix of joy and terror.

Williams, the local LGBTQ historian, recalls the optimism.

“Anything was possible,” Williams says. “Women’s liberation, gay rights, the war ended, and the protests worked. The Village People were on the radio and disco — our gay art form — had taken over America.”

Waldrop remembers that feeling, too, but also an underlying sense of danger. Now a resident of Oklahoma, the former minister recounts distributing flyers for his gay-friendly church outside the Sun Tavern one time when a car full of men pulled up.

He approached them with his usual greeting, “Jesus loves you! Here’s a flyer about our church.” But when he got close, he could see the baseball bats clutched in their hands. Waldrop believes his clergy garb caught the men off guard and they sped away.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the time offered little in the way of understanding toward homosexuality. Apostle Boyd K. Packer said during the priesthood session of General Conference in 1976 that members must “resist” temptation from gay men. He jokingly told a story of how he personally thanked a young man who confessed that he had punched his missionary companion for making a romantic pass.

“I am not recommending that course to you," Packer said, “but I am not omitting it."

In this tumultuous environment, Adams was busy creating a name for himself in all kinds of controversial causes — from gay rights to racial justice.

Leon Brown worked with Adams on the University of Utah anti-apartheid divestment campaign and recalled Adams as passionate but not in-your-face aggressive.

“When he expressed his views, he did so in a nonstrident and confident but almost conversational manner,” Brown says. “He was a quiet warrior.”

Adams was not born into a tradition of radical politics. His family had moved from Baltimore to Salt Lake City and were devout Catholics. Anthony attended Judge Memorial High School and was involved in student life — 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 also was a member of the debate club.

A fuzzy picture from his junior yearbook shows Adams in his neatly buttoned Judge blazer, crest and tie pounding a podium midspeech. The caption applauds his “dynamic displays.”

He and his brother were both National Merit finalists in high school, and they possessed extraordinary drive, thanks in no small part to the example of their mother who attended college in the 1940s — despite the obstacles of discrimination.

From an early age, Adams grappled with being gay and a man of faith. But, ultimately, he learned to accept himself through Waldrop’s Metropolitan Community Church, which preached that Christ’s love and homosexuality were not mutually exclusive. The church was also active in social justice issues.

Adams met Waldrop at a meeting of the Salt Lake City Coalition for Human Rights, a group championing various progressive causes. Through this organization, Adams took part in various high-profile confrontations, from suing the state for refusing to allow gay residents to host a formal dance in the Capitol Rotunda to picketing the performance of singer and anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant at the Utah State Fair in 1978.

The coalition’s protests were peaceful, even though the same couldn’t always be said of the reaction from the public. The activists held a candlelight vigil for murdered gay men before the Bryant protest, only to have someone toss a tear gas canister into the crowd.

In the fall of 1978, Adams was campaigning for Socialist congressional hopeful William Hoyle, who was running against Republican Dan Marriott and Democrat Ed Firmage.

The first weekend of November, he 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.

Adams never made the rally.

Monday — the day before the election — his party colleague, Bak, went to check on him.

“It was deathly still in there,” recalls Bak. Finding the apartment door ajar, he entered and was confronted with the discordant image of Adams, lying nude, soaked in blood, collapsed against a radiator, his mouth open, unbreathing.

Questions, conflicts

Forty years later, answers about what transpired in that apartment remain elusive even as questions multiply.

The possibility of two knives used in the murder present the possibility of two assailants. That could suggest a hate crime, which police continue to discount, or a robbery gone bad, as investigators believe.

There are also some troubling discrepancies.

Missing from the evidence file, according to police, is the knife believed to be the murder weapon. (Police have openly acknowledged one knife missing from evidence but would not comment on the status of the second knife referenced by ex-detective Millard).

One of the first officers on the scene reported what seemed to be recent damage to the door — possibly during a forced entry — and that the attacker apparently left a stack of records inside the entrance to keep the front door from swinging all the way open. Millard, who arrived later in the day, thought the damage to the door was old and predated the murder.

Police were unaware until it was recently brought to their attention by the journalism project that older gay community members had been told by Adams’ late boyfriend Bill Woodbury that he had discovered the body, not Bak, as police reports say.

At his funeral, Adams was eulogized by friend and University of Utah professor Ricardo Sanchez as a pioneer of sorts; a man “who in having lived, dared to go beyond fear and resignation, in so doing you created much that we now realize.”

But this rallying moment was soon followed by other acts of violence.

Three weeks after Adams’ 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.

While police said Coleman’s suspected killer was arrested and sent to a mental institution, and eventually died, no one was ever charged in either homicide.

—

Online now and coming soon in print: Part 2 examines the mystery of the missing evidence in the Adams, Coleman and Ulibarri cases. Read it here.

Eric S. Peterson is the founder and a director of the Utah Investigative Journalism Project, a nonprofit based in Salt Lake City.

The following is the second in a two-part series that was written and researched by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Read Part 1 here.

Anthony Adams, a gay, black Socialist activist was found brutally stabbed to death in his Salt lake City Avenues apartment on Nov. 6, 1978. Forty years later his murder is still one of Utah’s most perplexing cold cases.

Not only has it remained unsolved but the investigation itself has been subject to another mystery — what happened to evidence that allegedly went missing from his file? And his case is not the only murder in the late 1970s that remains an active investigation and has evidence problems.

Last January, Salt Lake City Police went to the media asking the public for help locating evidence lost in as many as 20 cold cases — including the knife used to kill Adams.

The department had previously told The Utah Investigative Journalism Project that the evidence was lost by a lab at the University of Utah, known as the Center for Human Toxicology, which processed police evidence in the late ‘70s before the state crime lab opened.

After investigating the Adams case for 18 months, including filing numerous public records requests, the project learned from police last month that the previous claim of 20 compromised cases doesn’t hold up. The department now concedes it has no idea if the lab at the U. lost any evidence. Further, the department now says it has no clear picture of what evidence is still intact from its homicide cold case files.

“We have never done a complete inventory of cold case files,” said police spokesman and Detective Greg Wilking, who added that the department has always lacked the resources to do so — even today. While previous cold-case detectives looked at evidence from a handful of cases for items that could be DNA tested, nothing systematic has been done and the department has no overview of what evidence has been lost, tested or possibly filed incorrectly from more than 100 cases.

As for the 20 cases police previously told the news media were missing evidence because of the university lab, Wilking now says that number could be 20 or “it could be zero.”

“We just don’t know," he said. “There’s just not the manpower and staffing to do it.”

In response to a records request, police did review cases that occurred around the time of the Adams killing and generated a report showing the status of evidence from murders from 1978 to 1984. Of those 17 cases, only three are noted as missing select pieces of evidence:

• The Adams killing from November 1978
• The slaying of Doug Coleman, a gay man shot to death the same month as Adams
• The rape and murder of Mona Ulibarri, a lesbian, in April 1979

The report also says that the evidence from two separate cases — one each in 1978 and a 1979 — were “disposed of” while a 1981 case is listed as having no evidence.

The missing knife

In the Adams case, the police had previously insisted the missing evidence — the knife used to kill Adams — was lost by the Center for Human Toxicology (CHT).

This claim is disputed by numerous sources knowledgeable about the procedures of the time.

Bryan Finkle was director of the center during the Adams investigation and said his lab never took possession of physical evidence.

“No, no we wouldn’t do anything with physical evidence,” said Bryan Finkle, now retired. “We [dealt] strictly with toxicology.”

Finkle says the lab’s role in death investigations primarily dealt with testing organs for signs of poisons, or drugs and alcohol. In the ‘70s, before the state crime lab opened, Finkle said police held onto evidence at a lab they had on the westside of Salt Lake City.

J. Wallace Graham started as Utah’s chief medical examiner in 1978, just coming into the job at the time of the Adams murder. Now retired, Graham confirmed the center didn’t take physical evidence like a knife. He said at that time only the FBI would occasionally accept such items for testing.

Marissa Cote, spokeswoman for the state crime lab, also confirmed through its director Jay Henry that the lab did not inherit any evidence from the center or elsewhere when it opened in 1983.

Retired Detective Ron Millard, who worked the Adams’ case, does not recall delivering physical evidence from that investigation in particular to the center, nor does he ever remember that lab, or later the state crime lab, holding onto evidence.

The police report in Adams case, nevertheless, said “the reporting officer transported all the items of evidence placed in evidence room” and other evidence to the center.

Yet the autopsy report provided to Adams’ family and shared with the project references swabs sent to the U. lab but makes no reference to a knife.

While there are no clear answers regarding the whereabouts of the missing evidence, among the possibilities is that it still remains in police custody. Misfiling evidence is not unheard of and, in fact, in 2010 a detective looking into the Adams case noted in his report that upon perusing evidence from that file in the property room, he found items that “appeared to belong to another case and I booked them under the case number that was written on the package.”

Missing DNA?

Two other cold cases missing key pieces of evidence also involve gay community members killed within months of Adams’ homicide.

A report provided to the project shows cigarette butts were found missing from the case file of Doug Coleman, found shot to death in an empty railroad car on the westside of Salt Lake City on Nov. 30, 1978.

Unlike in the Adams investigation, police quickly zeroed in on a suspect: A man who lived in the same building as the victim and owned firearms that he pawned soon after the murder. Ballistics would later match one of the pawned guns to the one used to kill Coleman, though another part of the file seemed to question the validity of the test.

Police also identified another suspect they theorized may have stolen the guns from the initial suspect and who suspiciously left town soon after the shooting.

This suspect returned to Salt Lake City several weeks later and proved evasive in questioning by police, though he did tell them he followed the word of God in the things that he did. He threatened officers that if he was incarcerated it would cause “the greatest drought in history” and the officers “would never see snow or rain again.”

While the man was arrested and institutionalized in the University Medical Center’s psychiatric ward, he was never charged. Nor did prosecutors ever charge the man who owned, then pawned the weapons. Cold case detectives reviewing the file in the early 2000s appear to have decided that the evidence resolved this case, though no action was taken as both suspects were dead by that time.

Mona Ulibarri’s case raises even more questions.

Ulibarri’s body had been discovered in the Jordan River in April 1979 and her vehicle abandoned nearby had been set on fire.

Notes about the evidence provided in the Ulibarri case indicate only fingernails collected from the scene are now missing. But the original police report said that semen was recovered from Ulibarri’s body, suggesting that if there was still a sample in evidence it could potentially be tested against offender databases or samples from the numerous witnesses who were seen drinking with Ulibarri the night she was killed.

Asked about this, Salt Lake City police denied that such evidence was even possible to recover in 1979 from a drowned body. When shown the section of the report stating that the Medical Examiner’s Office in 1979 had in fact tested and confirmed the semen sample, before returning it to police, spokesman Wilking said a detective, newly assigned to the file, would have to look into it.

When asked if Mayor Jackie Biskupski felt this evidence issue was a matter worth attention, spokesman Paul Murphy said the mayor “does support making sure cold cases are investigated and justice is served.” However, Murphy said his understanding was that there was no funding problem affecting cold-case investigations.

Karra Porter with the Utah Cold Case Coalition says these kinds of problems are exactly why her organization was formed. The group is pushing to get more funding and attention into cold case investigations and in the 2018 legislative session successfully pushed a bill to create a centralized cold case database for the state. The organization also offers $3,000 for tips that help solve cold cases and provide grants to law enforcement.

Nationwide, Porter said, “a lot of evidence [exists] from the, ‘70s, ’80s and even the ’90s — a lot of that’s never been run through any kind of database.”

While police may prioritize the cases from last week or last year, Porter says these old unsolved cases often result in new victims. She points to the murder of Sharon Schollmeyer, killed a year before Adams in the same Avenues apartment complex. Schollmeyer’s murderer was caught and convicted in 2016 thanks in part to DNA testing. The killer, Patrick McCabe, had molested underage children in the years after he raped and murdered Schollmeyer, Porter said.

“Not only did the family not get any closure for 40 years, this man was out there and able to commit other horrible crimes in the meantime,” Porter said. According to the Schollmeyer case file, the DNA evidence was gathered in 2013 but not entered into a national database until 2016.

No matter how old, a crime of violence still haunts surviving loved ones — and for that matter, police officers who worked the cases. Porter says her coalition can bring resources to bear, whether it’s paying for DNA testing or having an expert do ballistics on old shell casings.

“If [police] don’t have resources, at least reach out to us,” Porter said. “If you need $1,000 for a photographer to take photos of a bullet casing for the day, email me and you’ll have it in 24 hours.”

Porter says the coalition doesn’t aim to second-guess law enforcement, rather to be an aid in their investigations.

But the indication that police don’t know what evidence they have troubles her.

“If someone is not aware of what evidence is in their cold-case files, that would suggest they are not actively working that case,” she said.

—

Part one of this two-part series can be read here.

Eric S. Peterson is the founder and a director of the Utah Investigative Journalism Project, a nonprofit based in Salt Lake City.

I’ve been in a relationship that’s lasted through 12 rolls of single-ply toilet paper.

That may not seem like a huge landmark, and it is clearly not a typical milestone one would judge a relationship by. But it sums up my relationship perfectly.

Because like single-ply toilet paper, when I first got together with Jack, I thought this would probably disintegrate soon. It was my first-ever Tinder date. He’s never been married. He has no children. He is as single as they come. I have two ex-husbands, two teenagers, two jobs and two-ply toilet paper. I wasn’t sure he was ready for all the twos in my life.

We hit it off quickly. We have similar senses of humor. We come from similar backgrounds. Most important, we’re both fans of the Oxford comma.

But like single-ply toilet paper rolling endlessly down the freeway, we hit a few road bumps, the largest of which was that he actually bought single-ply toilet paper.

Unless you’re supplying all the bathrooms on a college campus, you should never, ever buy single-ply.

He claims, to this day, that it was a mistake, but he also doesn’t like to waste things, so with the stubbornness of an ass (no pun intended), he announced his intention to use it all up.

I thought, well, how long could that take?

It turns out that one roll of single-ply is ridiculously long. Every time I used it, I felt like a rhythmic gymnast with trails of ribbon swirling all around me. I’d smush it into a ball, and it would end up the size of a gumdrop.

Meanwhile, my Tinder date went from a fling to a full-fledged relationship. He gave me a key to his apartment. It doesn’t work. I know this because one time while he was at work, I tried to break in to steal the single-ply monstrosity with the intention of burning it in the world’s biggest, and probably shortest, bonfire.

But the key didn’t work.

I asked him about it. He said, “Wait, did you want a key to both locks?” (I still have the “key,” but I don’t mention it without using air quotes. But I guess it’s the thought of a key that counts?) In response, I told him I would think about giving him a “key” to my house. That was three months ago.

By this time, the rolls seemed to make like rabbits and procreate. The pile actually looked larger.

At one point, we put full rolls outside his apartment on the stair rails, hoping someone would find free toilet paper useful. But there were no takers. So we brought them back inside shocked, because who would pass up free toilet paper out of its original packaging, balancing precariously on a stair rail?

We made the joke that our relationship would be a success if we could last longer than the toilet paper. We stopped making that joke when it seemed like too much of a commitment.

Still, our relationship continued to progress. He accompanied me when I had to go to the doctor with a wrist sprain, because, he said, that’s what boyfriends do. The front office quoted me a flat fee of $119 for the visit. I asked if that included the X-ray. They said it did. Little did I know that the X-ray was included, but getting a doctor to read it was extra.

Anyway, enough about the general state of our health care system.

To sum it all up, two days ago, we finished the last roll. We burned the final square in ceremony. I’m pretty sure in some cultures, that means we’re married.

All said, it took five months. Now we are at a loss as to how we’re going to measure our future success. Maybe it will be when I get that second key.

An overlooked factor in the debate over Proposition 3 is the impact that an expansion of Utah’s Medicaid program would have on the state’s diabetes epidemic.

Over 10 percent of adult Utahans have diabetes, which can lead to kidney disease, heart disease, blindness and death. Additionally, about one-third have prediabetes, which means they have higher than normal blood glucose levels and higher risk for developing diabetes unless they alter their diet or lifestyle or address this risk using medication.

How would expanding access to Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor, make a difference? Based on research my colleagues and I conducted, many more people who need medications would be able to access them for little or no cost.

In a study recently published in Health Affairs, we looked at what happened in the 30 states that accepted federal funds and expanded their Medicaid programs in 2014 and 2015, compared with the states that did not expand access. In expansion states, the annual Medicaid prescriptions for insulin and metformin - the two most common types of diabetes medications - increased by 40 percent after Medicaid eligibility expansions kicked in.

Importantly, this came at a time when insulin prices were soaring. Nationwide, insulin spending per patient tripled to $736 between 2002 and 2013. From 2014 onward, low-income adults in states that expanded Medicaid were protected from these costs. It is likely that many people with diabetes in Utah skip medications due to affordability issues, since diabetes is more prevalent among people with low income, and the threat of high out of pocket spending can keep diabetes patients from taking their medications.

Newer diabetes medications have significant health benefits and lower risk of side effects, but they are also almost twice as expensive as older formulas. Insurance plays an important role in accessing the new medicines as well as old formulas. We found that where Medicaid was expanded, the use of diabetes medications purchased with Medicaid insurance steadily increased over time, up 33 percent by the end of 2014 and up 49 percent by the end of 2015.

Under Proposition 3, up to 150,000 Utahans might gain coverage. Cost is an issue, but for the most part it is paid for by the federal government. States that expand Medicaid receive at least 90 percent federal funding. To pay Utah’s share of the expansion, which has been estimated as $90 million a year, Proposition 3 would increase the state sales tax on non-food items to 4.85 percent from the current 4.7 percent.

The cost should be weighed against the health benefits that flow from keeping diabetes in check. Reducing the costs people pay out-of-pocket for diabetes medications can reduce diabetes-related health care costs in the long-run due to fewer hospitalizations. In addition to health care costs, uncontrolled diabetes can take a toll on the economy. The American Diabetes Association estimates that the total economic costs of diabetes in 2017 in the U.S. included $90 billion in reduced productivity at work and at home.

The war against diabetes is fought on many fronts. Utah has a chance to strike a major blow on behalf of its population. Prop 3 would provide Utah with additional resources to fight one of the most widespread diseases of our time.

Rebecca Myerson is assistant professor of pharmaceutical and health economics at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy and a researcher at USC’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics.

Here's what gets me about progressives.

They never seem to realize that they are the majority. Yet on issue after issue, the polling consistently shows that they are.

Abortion? Sixty-four percent of Americans support Roe v. Wade.

Guns? Sixty-seven percent want stricter laws.

Taxes? Sixty-one percent say the rich need to pay more.

Health care? Fifty-six percent want government to ensure coverage to all Americans.

But it's not just opinion polls. It's also presidential polls. Republicans have won the popular vote only once since 1992.

So liberals could have the world they say they want — with sensible gun laws, immigration reform, universal health care, reproductive rights, healing of the planet — if they only had the wit, the will and the courage of their convictions.

Instead, we have a world of weekly mass shootings, children in cages, the Affordable Care Act barely escaping repeal, Roe v. Wade endangered and a dire new United Nations report forecasting planetary catastrophe. Also: Brett Kavanaugh was just confirmed to the Supreme Court.

He is a man credibly accused of attempted rape and blackout drunkenness, a man who, under pressure, demonstrates the temperamental restraint of a sugar-addled toddler two hours past naptime. Yet he sits now on the highest court in the land.

That didn't just happen. Rather, it was the capstone of a long-term scheme to reshape the judiciary as a right-wing rubber stamp. Maybe you remember how Republicans stole a seat on the high court by refusing to give a hearing to President Obama's nominee. Now, with the mostly party-line vote that shoved Kavanaugh through, the court suddenly seems less a disinterested referee of democracy than a partisan tool, its legitimacy sacrificed on an altar of political expedience.

But what’s going on here is bigger, even, than the court. Consider the Census Bureau projection that, within about 25 years, America will no longer be a majority white nation, but rather, a nation in which no racial group is numerically superior. Consider the visceral terror of many in the white majority as “Others” — blacks, Muslims, LGBTQ, Hispanics — rise and demand voices. Consider the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the corresponding rise of voter suppression, the use of gerrymandering to neuter black ballots, mass incarceration and rising hostility toward immigrants from the south.

Consider all those factors and the true shape of things becomes clear. Like Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa, conservatives seek to enshrine minority rule, to ensure that, even as they decline as a percentage of the population, the forces of white patriarchy, of racial, religious and cultural homogeneity maintain their stranglehold on power.

And with apologies to Malcolm X, they are willing to do so by any means necessary. The question is: What are the rest of us willing to do in response?

Are we willing to play the long game as conservatives have?

Are we willing to play with the ruthlessness and calculation they've shown?

Are we willing to organize, to meet at the intersection of our manifold causes, concerns and lives?

November 6 will give us the beginnings of an answer. Until then, one can only hope.

Progressives are the larger of the two main ideologies in American politics. Yet they were just forced to watch in impotence as conservatives reshaped the top court by an act of sheer political thuggery. The lesson should be clear. It's great to have size on your side.

But it's how you use it that counts.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald. lpitts@miamiherald.com.

As Salt Lake City leaders focus on the health and well-being of residents, we believe access to quality, affordable health care is a human right. As such, we support Proposition 3, Utah Decides, which will implement the Medicaid expansion provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in Utah. We encourage Utah voters to join us in voting yes for Proposition 3.

Health care as a human right has been a point of ethical, philosophical and moral debate in our country dating back as far as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Second Bill of Rights,” the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, continuing through President Reagan’s EMTALA legislation and the recent debate surrounding the ACA. We realize the argument for or against that position is not going to be resolved here. Instead, we want to persuade Utahns that a yes vote on Proposition 3 reflects who we are.

Because this is an issue of repatriating Utah tax dollars already collected rather than adding huge costs to Utah taxpayers, we have the luxury of making this decision based primarily on the moral question of who we want to be as a society. Historically, in the U.S. the foundation of community health services was charitable. Hospitals were developed by religious communities, cities, counties and states because it was the moral and compassionate thing to do. The societal commitment was to improve lives, treat the sick and be a community resource. A secondary motivation was that society benefits by providing everyone with health care by eliminating one of the biggest stresses to a person and their family. Readily available quality health care improves productivity and reduces costs to individuals and the community.

Healthy residents are better able to work and contribute to society. They are also better able to pay taxes and do their part to support thriving communities. The direction we were moving in as a country (as has been done by other industrialized countries) was to make healthcare a universal right instead of a privilege. Unfortunately, healthcare has recently begun to be treated as a commodity with profit prioritized over people. Consequently, access to quality healthcare has become rationed and limited through price rather than need.

But is that really who we are in Utah? Is that who we want to be? Do we want the literal life and death decisions impacting Utahns to be determined first and foremost by socio-economic status? Utah has a proud tradition of charitable giving and volunteerism. Residents already recognize that helping those in need benefits everyone.

Proposition 3 helps an estimated 150,000 low-income Utahns who are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid under the current rules but who cannot afford private insurance. They are mostly the working poor, usually one medical emergency away from unemployment and potential homelessness.

This Election Day, we can decide if Utah is a society that will help give our low-income citizens a hand up before a medical crisis ensues, or if we want to wait and pay for increased systemic costs only after the most vulnerable are subjected to suffering, hardship, and ruin. Together, we believe Utah is a place where compassion and charity are core values. Therefore, we respectfully ask the residents of Utah to vote yes on Proposition 3 simply because it is the right thing to do.

Submitted by Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskuspski and members of the Salt Lake City Human Rights Commission, Angela Tuiaki, Jason Wessel, Rebecca Chavez-Houck, Wisam Khudhair, Nichole Salazar-Hall, Kimberlyn Mains, Shauna Doumbia and Lua Banuri.

Proposition 4 is a citizen ballot initiative designed to strengthen our representative democracy by curtailing the practice of gerrymandering. Proposition 4 will bring impartiality and transparency to the creation of electoral maps.

For too long, politicians in this country and in Utah have been allowed to draw their own legislative districts, essentially choosing their own constituents and insulating themselves from election challenges. Known as gerrymandering, this practice allows incumbents to choose their voters instead of allowing voters to choose their representatives. This system promotes a lack of accountability. It allows office-holders to ignore the views of constituents in districts where they are sure of winning whatever their policy and political choices. Proposition 4 will give voters the right to have their voices heard by placing reasonable limits on politicians’ power to tailor election maps by gerrymandering.

Proposition 4 addresses the problem of gerrymandering in two ways. First, it creates an independent seven-member redistricting commission, appointed by the governor and legislative leadership. The commissioners will be persons who do not have any personal interest in the outcome of election maps. For example, a commissioner may not be an elected official, a lobbyist, a political party leader or someone who otherwise holds a position that would present a conflict of interest. This citizen commission will recommend election maps to the Legislature, which can then enact or reject the recommendation. If the Legislature rejects the recommendation it must publicly explain why.

Proposition 4 also imposes reasonable standards that the commission must follow when drawing electoral maps, and the Legislature when reviewing its recommendations. These standards are common-sense rules, such as preserving communities of interest and not drawing legislative boundaries to benefit any candidate or political party.

Some have suggested that parts of Proposition 4 may raise concerns under the Utah Constitution. I disagree. Of course, no one can predict with certainty how a court will rule on a legal issue. But my reading of the relevant constitutional language convinces me that Proposition 4 is constitutional. First, the Constitution provides that “all political power is inherent in the people.” The Utah Supreme Court has described the people’s power to legislate by initiative as “coequal, coextensive” and of “equal dignity” with that of the Legislature. A vote for Proposition 4 is an exercise of that power.

Second, anyone challenging the constitutionality of a duly-enacted law faces an uphill battle in light of the presumption of constitutionality afforded all legislation. Finally, there is nothing in the text of the Utah Constitution or any judicial decision that suggests that the people may not enact procedures to ensure that electoral maps are drawn in a fair and transparent way.

Proposition 4 will create a process for drawing legislative and congressional districts in Utah that serves voters, not legislators. I urge all Utahns to vote Yes on Proposition 4.

Christine M. Durham is a former chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court.