VERNAL, Utah — Murder charges have been filed against a 74-year-old Tooele man who shot and killed a Vernal Army veteran in 1972.

The Eighth District Court charged Darrel Eugene Choate with murder, a first-degree felony.

On November 26, 1972, 21-year-old Army veteran Gregory Nickell took his 18-year-old date to a scenic overlook near Vernal.

A man approached the car and knocked on the window, saying there had been an accident and he needed help. When Nickell turned around, the man shot him multiple times with the gun.

He and his accomplice burned the car with Nickell’s body in the back road.

The woman was kept with them until sunrise and was eventually released 60 miles from where the incident began.

Greg’s sister, Lynnette Nickell Ray, noticed something was wrong the next morning when Greg didn’t show up for work. Eventually, she says, Sheriff Arden Stewart showed up at their house with Greg’s date.

“Where’s Greg? He said they killed him,” Ray said.

It took decades to find out who “they” were.

In 2019, evidence in this case was sent to the Utah State Crime Lab for DNA processing. This led to the identification of one of the suspects, Daniel Arthur Bell.

“It turned out he was dead at the time, but that was a start,” Ray said.

In September 2020, Bell, who died in Yakima Washington in 2019, was revealed as a match with the DNA collected.

With the help of surviving family members and criminal records, authorities learned that Bell was living in the Uintah Basin in 1972 and was familiar with the area’s back roads.

He moved away from Utah after 1972, was convicted of rape in Oregon in 1988 and was paroled in 1999, then moved to Washington and remarried.

According to a probable cause statement, interviews with Bell’s wife in Washington revealed that her husband told her that his friend “Gene” was involved in a rape that occurred in Washington. Bell’s wife said Bell and “Gene” had not seen each other since the 1980s or 1990s.

A DNA sample was eventually collected from Darrel Eugene Choate by law enforcement officers who responded to an unrelated call to his residence.

This sample was compared with the DNA sample of the unknown suspect. The probable cause statement stated that Choate had a direct DNA match to one of the suspects who killed Nickell.

“I talked to my brother when he was killed, of course he wasn’t there but I knew he was there spiritually and I told him 52 years ago that I would never stop, I would find whoever did this to him,” Ray said.

Now Ray has just one question he hopes will be answered.

“I just want to be able to look at his face and ask why,” Ray said.

According to the probable cause statement, Choate lives in Tooele but is not currently in custody.

FOX 13 News called the Uintah County Prosecutor’s Office and the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office, as well as the Tooele City Police Department, to see if we could get answers as to why he was not in custody. We have not received any response yet.