COTTONWOOD HEIGHTS, Utah (Scripps News Salt Lake City) — The informant who told police that a Cottonwood Heights wife had shot and killed her husband while he slept was someone who was having an affair with the woman, according to new details released by the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office.
Matthew Johnson (Cottonwood Heights Police)
Jennifer Gledhill was formally charged Tuesday with nine felonies, including first-degree murder, in the death of Matthew Johnson.
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Gledhill was arrested on Oct. 2 after an informant told police that Gledhill admitted to killing her husband, who was with the Utah National Guard. Johnson was reported missing on Sept. 23 after he didn’t show up to work at his base.
In the new charging documents, the informant was revealed to be a man with whom Gledhill was having an extramarital affair. The man told authorities that on Sept. 22, Gledhill told him that Johnson had previously “yelled at her because he knew she had been sleeping with someone else.”
Gledhill then told the man that she shot Johnson in the head as he slept in their shared bed. She then claimed to have put Johnson’s body in a rooftop storage container before sliding him down the stairs of the home and loading his body in a minivan.
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While Gledhill said she had dug a hole somewhere “north” of their home and buried Johnson’s body in a shallow grave, the body has yet to be located.
“So while we filed charges today, the work continues. The body has not yet been recovered, but based on the totality of the evidence that we were able to gather, we felt that sufficiently comfortable that we had probable cause to warrant the filing of the charges that we did,” DA Sim Gill said.
When the man with whom Gledhill was romantically involved asked about all the bruises on her body, she said they came from moving Johnson’s body and cleaning their house.
Detectives later found reddish-brown spots on the wall, bed frame, and blinds of the master bedroom where Johnson was allegedly shot, as well as bleach covering the wall behind the bed.
The district attorney’s office said a “circular pattern on the carpet below the bed on the right side near the head of the bed tested positive for human blood.”
A neighbor later told police that they saw Gledhill’s parents cleaning the home on Sept. 24 until late in the evening, although her mother said they had only been there an hour. Gledhill’s mother said she had purchased a mattress from Amazon only at the request of her daughter.
When detectives served a search warrant on Gledhill’s parents’ home, they found a plastic tote that contained a Glock 19x gun box wrapped in a child’s onesie. The district attorney’s office said the gun container matched the gun model Gledhill had shown to the man who informed police.
On the day Gledhill allegedly killed Johnson, GPS data showed she had traveled to where her husband’s truck was later found. She was also caught on camera at a service station in Salt Lake County cleaning her car.
This story was originally written by Jeff Tavss and Mythili Gubbi at Scripps News Salt Lake City, an E.W. Scripps Company.
