Candace Cooley could make sense of her son walking across the desert back to his camper. What she couldn’t make sense of were the guns being gone. “He always has his guns,” she said. “Always.
”
Nineteen-year-old Dylan Rounds was a farm kid through and through. Born during grain harvest, he spent his earliest months in a combine and his childhood building chicken coops and pig pens while other kids played video games. At seventeen, with help from his grandfather, he bought a patch of land in Lucin, Utah—a remote desert area two hundred miles west of Salt Lake City. It was his happy place.
His comfort zone. The kind of place where you can drive for miles without seeing another soul. Dylan kept a particular pattern of communication with his family. He’d call one person ten times in a day, then move on to the next.
His mother knew his schedule intimately. On the last Saturday in May 2022, Dylan called his grandmother. That was the last anyone heard from him. “I got a phone call from his best friend saying he hadn’t heard from him either,” Candace said.
“We all headed out. We knew something was wrong. ”
A massive search operation launched across the inhospitable terrain. Without food or water, survival out there is measured in days, not weeks.
The Box Elder District Attorney’s Office got involved. Search and rescue teams combed the desert. A search of Dylan’s trailer revealed his guns were missing. All of them.
Investigators spoke to Dylan’s closest neighbor—a man named James Brenner who lived about five miles away, squatting on property and using a grain shed Dylan was known to store things in. Brenner was the last confirmed person to see Dylan alive. “When Dylan backed in, he must have been in a hurry,” Brenner told police. “He knocked my stall.
He backed into it and busted it out. ”
Brenner was open about being upset that Dylan had damaged his things. Then he started talking about the unsavory characters in the area. “I think somebody tried to rob him,” Brenner said.
“Dylan never carries money. He always shoots his mouth off about how much money he’s making. He was a thick-headed kid. ”
The police found it strange—saying those things about someone who was clearly missing.
Near the grain shed, searchers discovered a garbage pile. Two boots sat beside it. They matched what Dylan always wore. And there were red blotches on them.
“Justin and his father were with me, and we both looked at each other,” Candace said. “We just knew. Something bad has happened. His boots said it all.
We knew we probably weren’t going to get our son back. ”
The family returned to Dylan’s trailer and discovered his handgun had mysteriously reappeared. Digital analyst Kelly Gibson volunteered to examine Dylan’s cell phone data. The phone records showed Dylan’s movements on the day he vanished—from the grain shed to Lucin Pond.
That’s where the signal stopped. Search and rescue scuba teams dove into the pond. After two hours, they found the phone. It was badly damaged, a pile of rust after nearly four weeks underwater.
The FBI’s forensic lab in Salt Lake City was the only chance of getting anything off it. “I told the case agent the chances of me rebuilding this are slim to none,” the forensic examiner said. He spent three painstaking days taking the phone apart, cleaning each piece, transferring parts to a donor phone. When he finally plugged it in, the battery light came on immediately.
He found call logs—an incoming call from Grandma—and then three videos. The last video was the final file saved on the phone. “I immediately called the case agent,” he said. “He showed up within minutes.
I had paused the video with a person’s head looking straight down. When he walked in, he said, ‘I know exactly who that is. ‘”
It was James Brenner. The video showed Brenner moving in and out of frame, blood visible on his elbow and wrist.
He was holding a gun, cleaning it frantically. His camo shirt had red stains. “The chances of him turning on the phone, let alone placing it perfectly to capture this video, is truly incredible,” the examiner said. Almost a year after Dylan disappeared, investigators charged James Brenner with his murder in March 2023.
But Brenner refused to reveal where Dylan’s body was buried. Then in 2024, as part of a plea deal for a lighter sentence, he finally led investigators to the grave. “They put Dylan’s bones in a box and shipped them back to Idaho,” Candace said. “When he was recovered, finally, you could take that breath.
We made him a promise, and we followed through. ”
The motive was almost petty. Brenner seemed jealous of the young, ambitious kid with a plot of land and a future, while Brenner, in his sixties, squatted on property with nothing to show for it. Dylan had backed his truck into Brenner’s gate and destroyed his things.
Killers often have breaking points that seem small from the outside. James Brenner was sentenced to up to thirty years in prison. The judge said the punishment didn’t fit the crime and recommended the parole board keep him locked up as long as legally possible. Candace channeled her grief into Dylan’s Legacy, a charity that helps families search for missing loved ones, offering canine assistance, drones, and victim advocacy.
She kept a small portion of Dylan’s remains to help train cadaver dogs. “I grab Dylan out of my freezer and I tell him, ‘Let’s go to work, son,'” she said. “‘We’re going to go help this family. ‘”
There’s no closure, but there’s some peace.
She watches the crops grow, sees the sunflowers lining the road—Dylan loved his sunflowers. “I think what he would have accomplished,” she said. “But then I think what he has accomplished through death. Dylan was going to make a legacy.
He still has one. ”
In January 2018, in one of the safest communities in Minnesota, a mother reported her daughter missing. Christina Prodan’s mom spoke to her every day, and she hadn’t heard from her in several days. Patrol officers checked Christina’s condo in Edina.
Everything was neat and tidy. The master bedroom, though, was in disarray—bags of clothing strewn about. Could have been a burglary. Could have been someone leaving in a hurry.
Christina was a lovely person, the kind who wore her heart on her sleeve and thought about everyone else before herself. She hadn’t been in the best mental health place when she met Joseph Porter online in 2017. They talked all the time, all night. There were lots of I love yous, even though they barely knew each other.
“You could tell she was fighting with the feelings of being infatuated with this new man who’d given her all this attention,” a friend said. “But also with the reality of knowing there was some danger to it. ”
In her diary, Christina wrote: “Dear the love of my life, I love you so much. You’re everything I’ve always wanted.
You’re so loving sometimes. I wonder if I deserve it. I love you more than my brain can comprehend. ”
Someone giving that much obsessive attention to a person with low self-esteem and few friends can be seductive.
But it’s also a red flag. Joseph moved in with Christina in October 2017. Just three months later, they were both missing. Police began looking into Joseph’s background.
What they found was deeply disturbing. He’d been in and out of institutions since age ten, with violent tendencies starting young. His psychological exams described him burying ten-week-old kittens up to their necks and running them over with a push mower. He killed his own mother’s dog.
Joseph’s mother told police he was a very bad person who should be locked up for the rest of his life. While living with Christina, police responded to seven domestic violence incidents in just three months. Christina reported that Joseph had raped her. A forensic team used luminol in the master bedroom.
Under the special light, a bloody handprint illuminated on the carpet. DNA confirmed it was Christina’s blood. Her phone was off and untraceable. Police set up an alert to notify them if it ever came back on.
Investigators tracked Joseph’s vehicle. The day before Christina went missing, six hundred miles south in Missouri, a state trooper pulled him over. The encounter was captured on dashcam. “Any weapons on you?
” the trooper asked. “No, nothing at all,” Joseph said calmly. He was polite. Relaxed.
He joked with the trooper. When asked about the pickaxe and shovel in his car, he said they were for work. Duct tape was also visible. Six hours later, Joseph was found sleeping in his car two hundred miles away in Arkansas.
Then the case took a turn. Four days into the investigation, Christina’s phone turned back on, pinging from a Walmart in Arkansas. Surveillance footage showed an unknown middle-aged male pawning the phone. As he left the store, he was joined by Joseph Porter.
Investigators identified the man. Joseph was married to a fifty-year-old man named Richard. FBI agents arrested both of them at a trailer park in Arkansas. Joseph’s appearance was alarming—he had fresh burns on his hands and face.
“Where is Christina now? ” police asked. “She’s in Minnesota,” Joseph said. “She’s not there.
You were the last one that had contact with her. ”
“I’m not the last one that had contact with her,” he snapped. “Besides the police that were there that night when you said you left. ”
The Joseph in the interrogation room was a different person from the relaxed, joking man in the dashcam video.
He was defensive, aggressive, angry. Richard was more forthcoming. Police could see he was scared. “He told me that she was dead,” Richard said.
“Before she left? ”
“Yes. ”
Police recovered the vehicle from the Walmart surveillance footage. It was registered to a tow yard in New Orleans.
While Joseph was in custody, police received news that a body had been discovered in New Orleans, right next to that same tow yard. The body was burning in a shipping container full of tires. The medical examiner confirmed through DNA and dental records that it was Christina. In a second interview, Joseph couldn’t back out.
There was too much evidence. “I grabbed her by her nightgown by the front of it,” he confessed. “I threw her onto the bed. I was screaming at her that we’re done.
She kept hitting me. I started punching her. Punched her in the ribs. Knocked the wind out of her.
Can’t breathe, can’t fight. Punched her in the face. I wrapped my arm around her throat. All I wanted her to do was render her unconscious.
Put her to sleep. Felt her body go limp. ”
“I could have protected her from everybody,” he said. “But not from myself.
”
In January 2019, Joseph Porter pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He was sentenced to twenty years and ten months in prison. “I felt guilty that I wasn’t there for her,” her friend said. “Heartbroken that she couldn’t extend her light anymore to the world.
That more people wouldn’t be able to experience Christina and the big heart she had and the laughter she had. ”
The World Health Organization estimates that roughly thirty percent of women will experience violence within a relationship. Knowing the signs of a coercive, controlling, abusive relationship can save lives. Christina’s friend wished she’d known.
“If I could speak to her again,” she said, “I would tell her how sorry I am that I wasn’t there for her. She was such a beautiful soul. I wish she was still here.
“
