A Provo teen, missing for more than 4 decades, is matched to a body found at Arches National Park

In October 1982, Robby Peay fled from a youth treatment center in Salt Lake City.

Hailing from Provo, he was 17 years old at the time and became a nationally listed missing person, according to a news release issued Wednesday by Provo Police Department. His youth dental records were included in his case information.

For four decades, no one was sure what happened to Peay.

Then, in recent years, detectives had a breakthrough after a forensic dentist realized his dental records x-ray images had been erroneously entered and effectively reversed in a national database. This led investigators to connect a body to Peay that had previously been discounted. This week, Provo police confirmed the connection.

In February 1983, only months after Peay had disappeared, the body had been found in Arches National Park’s Three Gossips area in Grand County, with a gunshot wound to the head.

Though Provo police say it appeared to resemble Peay, decomposition prevented investigators from confirming it was him.

Peay’s dental records were compared with those of the body and did not match, though Provo police say they were similar.

The remains, the news release says, were buried in an unmarked grave in Moab.

Months later, the news release says Peay’s truck was found 350 miles away in Lake Powell.

Leads ran cold, and in 1990, Peay’s family decided to declare him legally dead.

Peay’s older sister, Chris Skowron, said she didn’t think her mother ever would have sought the declaration, if it was not necessary to sell property tied to his name. Skowron said her mother held onto his share of the money until he had been gone for decades, hoping he would come back. Eventually, she split the money among the rest of her children.

The family put up a gravestone for Peay in the Provo City Cemetery.

Their mother died in September 2020. About a month later, Skowron said she first learned about the possible connection to the body found at Arches.

“I figured that it was my mom,” she said. “She finally knew what happened to her son and she was letting the rest of the family know.”

In 2018, a forensic dentist realized Peay’s x-ray data had been entered with numbers out of order, an error “similar to reversing an image,” Provo police say.

Once the error was fixed, Provo police learned Peay’s dental records and those of the body found in Grand County were more than a 90% match.

But, the news release says, the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner determined that because the x-ray images were from Peay’s youth, they couldn’t be used to compare.

To confirm that the body was Peay, police sought a DNA test. In 2022, a judge approved the release of Peay’s adoption records, and detectives found his maternal uncle to obtain DNA swabs.

They began the steps to request exhumation, but, according to the news release, learned that the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System had compared the uncle’s DNA to that to a DNA sample of the body found in Grand County. The DNA from the body was on file from a case Summit County detectives investigated years earlier — something Provo detectives didn’t know.

The Utah Office of the Medical Examiner certified that the remains belonged to Peay. In the news release, Provo police say they shared case file information with Grand County detectives “who have jurisdiction for the investigation of the homicide of Robby Peay.”

“Working cold cases as a detective is both challenging and time-consuming. Sifting through old files and photos, trying to reconstruct the past, can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack,” Det. Sgt. Nick Patterson said in the news release. “But the moment you uncover that long-awaited lead — the one that has eluded investigators for years — makes all the effort worthwhile. … Moments like these are among the most rewarding aspects of the job.”

Skowron said she learned Wednesday through news coverage, not from the police, that her brother’s body finally had been identified.

She said she was “fairly close” with her brother when they were young, but added she was married when he started skipping school and experimenting with drugs.

“But he wasn’t really in trouble,” she said. “Mom was just trying to find someone who could help him be better, you know, where he wasn’t angry.”

She said Peay struggled with their parents' divorce. Then, some time later, he had to deal with the death of their father, who was hit by a train while traveling to the family’s farm in Springville. Her younger brother was “losing his way,” she said.

“That’s why he was taken up there” to the treatment center in Salt Lake City, Skowron said.

She said he had run away before as a teenager, but had always called his mom after a few days.

She said she plans to speak with other members of her family before determining if they want to move Peay’s remains from Moab to Provo.

“None of us are really well off,” she said. “It would probably be nice to put him there by Mom and Dad.”