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

Darrel Eugene Choate, 74, has been charged in connection with the 1972 slaying of Gregory Dahl Nickell, according to charging documents filed Friday. KSL reported.

Nickell, who was home in Vernal, Utah for Thanksgiving, was on a date with an 18-year-old girl 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 an accident, 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 fire to Nickell’s car, with his body still inside. His date, an 18-year-old woman who has not been named, was kidnapped and raped before being released hours later.

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

But to figure out who “they” are would take the detectives decades.

In 2019, the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office resubmitted evidence collected in 1972 to the Utah State Crime Lab, which included DNA samples 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 the radar as a suspect, detectives spoke to his widow and learned that prior to his death, Bell had been convicted of rape in Oregon in 1987 and that his friend “Gene” had been involved in a rape in Washington. The last time Bell saw “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 to the DNA sample of the unknown suspect in the Utah cold case.

According to charging documents filed Friday, DNA tests showed that “Darrel Eugene Choate is a direct DNA match for one of the suspects who killed Greg Nickell and raped (the woman). This direct DNA match is proof that Darrel Eugene Choate is one of the two suspects and not just a close family match to one of the suspects.”

Detectives learned that Choate, who lives in Tooele, Utah, has an “extensive criminal record that included sex offenses in Price. Darrel Eugene Choate also made statements on the tape that he believed he was able to read minds,” according to the charges.

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

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