VERNAL, Utah — A felony charge has been filed against a 74-year-old Tooele man in the 1972 shooting death of the Vernal Army veteran.

The Eighth Circuit 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 returned, the man shot him several times with a handgun.

He and his accomplice burned the car on a back road with Nickell’s body inside.

The woman was held with them until sunrise, eventually being released 60 miles from where the incident began.

Lynnette Nickell Ray, Greg’s sister, realized something was wrong the next morning when Greg didn’t show up for work. Finally, she says that Sheriff Arden Stewart came home with the meeting with Greg.

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

Finding out who “They” are took decades.

In 2019, evidence from the 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,

“Which turns out he was deceased at the time, but that was a start,” Ray said.

In September 2020, Bell, who died in 2019 in Yakima Washington, emerged as a match for the DNA that was collected.

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

He moved from Utah after 1972, was convicted of rape in Oregon in 1988 and paroled in 1999, after which he 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 took place in Washington. Bell’s wife went on to say that 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 his home on an unrelated call.

That sample was compared to the unknown suspect’s DNA sample. The probable cause statement went on to say that Choate is a direct DNA match for one of the suspects who killed Nickell.

“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 -a. this for him,” Ray said.

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

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

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

FOX 13 News has made calls to the Uintah County Prosecutor’s Office and the Uintah County Sheriff’s Office, as well as the Tooele Police Department to see if we can get any answers as to why he is not in custody. I haven’t heard at this point.