For South Jersey woman, a faraway death hits home

When she heard that Teresa Rose Greaves' remains had been recovered from a makeshift grave on a Utah hillside, Debbie Veevers cried for a classmate she remembered but barely knew.

"I just felt so much compassion for this poor soul who had no one," says Veevers, an Oaklyn resident who graduated from Collingswood High School with Greaves in 1977 - and has raised $1,400 at Gofundme.com to have her brought back for interment in South Jersey.

Greaves went missing in Utah in 1983; the Davis County Sheriff's Office is now investigating her death as a homicide.

"The thought that there's nobody to grieve for her bothered me more than anything," Veevers, 56, says. "We have to have a memorial service. We have to do something for her."

Greaves appears to have been raised mostly by a grandmother, Mary Greaves, and other relatives in Woodlynne, Camden County. They are deceased, as is her mother; her birth certificate did not include the name of her father.

But on Wednesday, Salt Lake City radio personality Scott Fisher, who hosts a nationally syndicated genealogy show, said he had located family members, including an uncle, in Florida.

"I'm just so ecstatic," says Veevers, who has been working with Fisher to track down relatives. "I hope this brings closure for the family, even though we may never know what happened to her."

The day she disappeared, Greaves was 23 and had been living with a friend from Voorhees for only two months in a mobile-home park in Woods Cross, Utah.

Greaves apparently took a bus about a dozen miles south to Salt Lake City for what she said would be a job interview. She called her housemate, Betty Jo "Bo" Colozzi - who died in 2013 - to say she had arrived in the city.

But she never came home. It was Aug. 5, 1983.

On Feb. 5 of this year, a man walking a dog on Mountain Road in Fruit Heights, Utah - an unincorporated area about 10 miles north of Woods Cross - called police after spotting what turned out to be a human skull near the bottom of a hill not far from Highway 89.

Investigators later recovered additional remains, as well as pieces of clothing, farther up the hill. Dental records Mary Greaves had provided in 1983 enabled identification of the victim.

"It's sad," Davis County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman DeeAnn Servey tells me. "We find these remains, but all of our tracking [of relatives] just led to death certificates of the immediate family."

"We know that she was a very active member of the Oak Ridge Boys fan club in the early 1980s," says Woods Cross Police Sgt. Adam Osoro, who reopened the investigation into Greaves' disappearance - the department's sole cold case - in 2012.

"She didn't drink, smoke, or party," Osoro says. "She was an all-around good American girl as far as we can tell. But we don't know all that much."

That's where Veevers, a fourth-generation Oaklyn resident with a lively personality, comes in.

When I meet her Tuesday at Common Grounds Coffeehouse on Clinton Avenue, she brings along her 1977 yearbook, as well as notes from her own attempts to find Greaves' South Jersey family, friends, and neighbors.

"Teresa's address was in the yearbook, so I went to the house where she lived in Woodlynne, and then to the borough offices, where I got some family names off the deed," Veevers says.

A longtime office manager with a 14-year-old son, Veevers began her search after receiving an e-mail three weeks ago from fellow Collingswood alum Ronald Woods, asking members of their class to share information about Greaves.

"I'm the administrator of our [Class of '77] Facebook site, and I got a call [from Fisher] a few weeks ago, wanting to find out more information about Teresa," says Woods, 56. He lives in Haddon Township and is a real estate broker in Haddonfield.

"Debbie called me back and was very upset."

Woods put Veevers in touch with Fisher, whose show is called Extreme Genes. Working with Veevers, he has been developing and providing information about Greaves' family history to investigators.

"Debbie jumped in feet first, and we've kind of been working as a tag team," Fisher says. "She's been fantastic."

Neither Woods nor Veevers knew Greaves well.

"She was quiet and very nice," he says.

"We had different circles of friends," says Veevers.

In the yearbook, the notation next to Greaves' graduation photo describes her as a "quiet comedienne" who "values honesty, trust, and kindness."

Greaves "plans on getting a car and going to college, in that order," the notation concluded.

Veevers says she feels a kinship with Greaves because she, too, went out West after graduation, heading for California in a Volkswagen bus with her boyfriend.

And whatever the outcome of the investigation, she says the search for answers has "made me grateful" for her own life.

"I'm rich, compared to poor Teresa, in a grave on the side of a road for 32 years," Veevers says. "I want to bring her home."

Anyone with information about Teresa Rose Greaves should call the Davis County, Utah, Sheriff's Office at 801-451-4150.