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KEY TAKEAWAYS
- A jury trial for Jennifer Gledhill, charged with killing her husband, was scheduled Friday for mid-December.
- Gledhill has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges, including murder, obstruction of justice, and desecration of a body.
SALT LAKE CITY — In a hearing on Friday, attorneys set a jury trial for a Cottonwood Heights woman charged with killing her estranged husband.
Jennifer Gledhill, 42, is suspected of killing Matthew Johnson, 51, a member of a Special Operations Unit in the U.S. military, from whom she had filed for divorce in July 2024. Johnson’s body has never been found.
A man the woman was having an affair with contacted police after Gledhill told him she had shot and killed her husband in his sleep, charging documents state.
She is charged with murder, a first-degree felony; five counts of obstruction of justice and drug possession with intent to distribute, second-degree felonies; plus abuse or desecration of a dead body and witness tampering, third-degree felonies.
Gledhill pleaded not guilty to the charges in February and was ordered to stand trial for the alleged crimes. The trial will last eight days, beginning on Dec. 8 and going through Dec. 17.
Third District Judge Adam Mow set a deadline for any pretrial motions to be filed at the beginning of August and set a pretrial conference for Nov. 6, saying that hearing would be a final opportunity for Gledhill to change her plea.
Gledhill’s attorney, Jeremy Deus, said she had been extended a plea offer, but he did not say whether Gledhill was considering it.
The Utah National Guard first contacted police on Sept. 25, 2024, to report Johnson had not returned to work. Three days later, Gledhill reported him missing. While serving a warrant, detectives found areas in the marital home that had recently been cleaned with bleach and some reddish-brown spots on the walls, bed frame and blinds.
In a recent hearing where Mow denied Gledhill’s request to be released on bail, new evidence was introduced — including blood found in the couple’s bedroom and in a car rooftop storage container, later located in Davis County, testing positive for Johnson’s DNA.
Deputy Salt Lake County attorney Emily Paulos said prosecutors believe the storage container was moved during a storm from where it had been concealed.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.