A Vietnam veteran was murdered as his date was raped. Half-century later, cops have made an arrest

Darrel Eugene Choate, 74, was charged with murder in connection to death of 21-year-old Gregory Dahl Nickell who was killed in 1972

Gregory Dahl Nickell, pictured with his mother 1970, was an Army soldier home for Thanksgiving weekend in 1972 when he was shot and killed. Now, 50 years, police have made an arrest in the case (Family photo/KSL)

A Utah man has been charged with murder more than 50 years after a 21-year-old Army soldier was fatally gunned down and his date was kidnapped and raped.

Darrel Eugene Choate, 74, was charged in connection to the 1972 murder of Gregory Dahl Nickell, according to charging documents filed Friday, KSL reported.

Nickell, who was home in Vernal, Utah, for Thanksgiving, was out on a date with an 18-year-old woman on November 26, 1972, when they were ambushed.

They were parked at a scenic overlook when a man knocked on the window and claimed he had been in a crash, according to the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office. One of the men asked for a ride back into town and when Nickell agreed to help, he was shot at least three times.

The gunman and another man set Nickell’s car on fire with his body still inside. His date, an 18-year-old woman who was not named, was kidnapped and raped before being released several hours later.

Nickell’s date told the sheriff’s office her account of the night, recalling that “they” had killed him.

But figuring out who “they” were would take detectives decades.

Gregory Dahl Nickell, 21, was shot and killed while on a date in 1972. New DNA testing led police to a suspect in the case (Uintah County Sheriff's Office)

In 2019, the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office resubmitted evidence collected in 1972 to the Utah State Crime Lab, which included DNA evidence collected from Nickell’s date at the hospital at the time of the attack.

Then in 2022, on the 50th anniversary of Nickell’s murder, the sheriff’s office announced that through extensive DNA testing, Daniel Arthur Bell, was one of the two men involved in the murder. But Bell was never arrested in the case. He died in 2019 at the age of 88.

However, detectives believed a second, younger suspect was still out there and continued to pursue their investigation.

When Bell was first on their radar as a suspect, detectives spoke to his widow and learned that before his death, Bell was convicted of rape in Oregon in 1987 and that his friend “Gene” was involved in a rape in Washington. The last time Bell had seen “Gene” was in the 1980s or ‘90s, according to the probable cause statement.

Authorities responded to the residence of Darrel Eugene Choate on an unrelated call and obtained a DNA sample, which was compared with the DNA sample of the unknown suspect in the Utah cold-case murder.

According to the charging documents filed on Friday, DNA testing revealed that “Darrel Eugene Choate is a direct DNA match for one of the suspects who had murdered Greg Nickell and raped (the woman). This direct DNA match is proof that Darrel Eugene Choate is one of the two suspects and is not just a close familial match to one of the suspects.”

Detectives learned that Choate, who lives in Tooele, Utah, has an “extensive criminal record which did include sexual offenses in Price. Darrel Eugene Choate has also made statements in records that he believes he is able to read minds,” according to the charges.

“When my brother was killed, I talked to him, of course he wasn’t there, but I knew he was there in spirit, and I told him 52 years ago that I was never going to stop, I was going to find who did this to him,” Nickell’s sister Lynnette Nickell Ray told Fox13.

“I just want to be able to look him in the face and ask him why.”