A Secret She Thought No One Would Ever Discover | True Crime Documentary That Unravels a Web of Lies

Hello everyone and welcome back to True Crime Stories. I know many of you use these episodes to fall asleep. So before you drift off, I'd love it if you could leave a comment letting me know where you're listening from around the world. Also don't forget to like and subscribe if you're enjoying the episodes. A green beret survives years of special forces training. He survives everything he may have witnessed overseas. He returns to a quiet suburb outside Salt Lake City, to a life with his wife, his three children, and a house that was already his before the marriage even began. But then one night in September while he is in his own bed, inside his own bedroom, he simply ceases to exist. There is no body and no funeral, only a mattress that is replaced two days later. A rug that turns up in a wetland, and a phone call in which his wife allegedly asks another man not to see her as a monster. This is the story of Jennifer Gledhill and Matthew Johnson, and it begins long before that night in the bedroom. Jennifer Gledhill was born on February 4, 1983. She was the daughter of Thomas Ray Gledhill and Rosalie Christensen Gledhill. Almost nothing about her childhood is publicly known. There is no confirmation of her hometown, no school records are available, and there is no public record indicating whether she had siblings. What is known is that she maintained a close relationship with her parents well into adulthood. So close that decades later, they would still come to her home to help her during a crisis. Matthew Johnson's early years are even harder to pin down. Public records indicate that he was probably born on July 3, 1973, which means he was approximately 10 years older than Jennifer. Before he even met her, he had already lived through an entire chapter of his adult life. He served in the United States Marine Corps. Sometime afterward, he married a woman named Crystal Peterson. That marriage lasted from 2002 until 2007, and then entered for reasons that were never made public. After the Marines, Johnson found a new calling in the Utah Army National Guard's 19th Special Forces Group, the Green Berets. He would remain there for roughly 12 years and form close friendships with a small group of men who would later become enormously important in this story. One of them was John Hash, another Green Beret who served alongside him for more than a decade. Another was Kevin Thompson, who not only served with Johnson, but also lived with him. Before Johnson married Jennifer, Thompson was his roommate in a house in Cottonwood Heights, a quiet affluent suburb southeast of Salt Lake City. That detail matters because the same house Thompson had once shared with him would years later become the center of a homicide investigation. Thompson remembered Johnson as the man everyone turned to when they needed a real answer, the smartest person in the room, but also someone who could make you laugh until you were out of breath. He was not a hardened, closed-off soldier, but a private, dependable, and at times extremely funny man who had built his identity around being useful to the people he cared about. Crystal Peterson, his first wife, was later interviewed about the man she had known in the early 2000s, although the full details of her statements were never widely released. What is clear is that Matthew Johnson had already completed an entire stage of adult life. As a marine, a husband and a divorced man rebuilding his life, long before Jennifer Gletthill entered the picture. At some point after Thompson moved out, Jennifer Gletthill moved into the house, exact date when she and Matthew married has never been publicly disclosed. It is known that the marriage eventually produced three children. Photographs from those years show an ordinary and at least on the surface, stable suburban family. Two parents, three children, a large house, a Chrysler Pacifica minivan, a rooftop cargo carrier for road trips, a couple of dogs and grandparents who live close enough to help care for the children when necessary. For years that appears to have been the family's public image. According to all available information, Jennifer either worked privately or took care of the home. No employer, profession, or employment profile for her has ever appeared publicly. Matthew meanwhile continued to organize his life around the National Guard, his special forces brothers, and above all his children. His attorney would later describe him as a man whose greatest desire was to continue having a close relationship with them. Friends of Matthew have said that at some point, he appeared to ever tired from active service in the guard. However, he continued to report regularly to a National Guard facility, suggesting that he remained connected to it in some civilian or support capacity, close to the community that had defined much of his adult life. Whatever the arrangement was, it kept him tied to the same people, the same base, and the same sense of purpose he had built over more than a decade. But beneath that outward appearance, the marriage, was falling apart. By early 2024, friends were already describing the relationship as turbulent. According to Johnson's divorce attorney, Jennifer left the cottonwood Heights House around March 2024. On July 3rd of that year, the very day Matthew turned 51, she filed for divorce. The filing ushered in a summer of increasingly intense conflict. The two argued over who actually owned the house. Johnson's side maintained that the property had belonged to him since before the marriage began. A claim Jennifer's attorney disputed by pointing out that no court had legally decided the issue. They also fought over custody, and according to messages Johnson's attorney would later review, their arguments followed a pattern in which Jennifer often provoked the confrontations while Matthew frequently asked her to leave him alone. On August 21st, 2024, Jennifer took a serious step. She requested and obtained a temporary protective order against Matthew, alleging domestic abuse. For several weeks, that order provided her with a legal basis to remain in the home and kept Matthew away. Meanwhile outside the divorce filing, Jennifer had begun a relationship with another man, who would eventually become the most important witness in the entire case. Public reports have never identified him by name. They refer to him only as the "informant." Whatever the nature of that relationship, it was serious enough that Jennifer ultimately confided in him about matters she revealed to no one else. On that same time, according to court orders and investigators would later unseal, Jennifer sent her father a message asking him for $13,000 before that Friday. The following day, she contacted him again and requested his credit card information. No public record has clarified what she needed the money for. On September 16th, 2024, a court commissioner reviewed the protective order request and declined to make it permanent. He did not find that the abuse had never occurred. He concluded that the evidence before him that day did not meet the necessary legal threshold. However, he went further, describing both Jennifer and Matthew as "confrontational people" and saying that he suspected the protective order had become part of the broader divorce strategy. Jennifer's own attorney would later say that she strongly disagreed with that characterization. Five days after that decision, Matthew Johnson would be dead. According to the man with whom she was having the relationship, Jennifer showed him a loaded tan-glock handgun on September 19th, 2024. Prosecutors would later argue that the weapon was consistent with Matthew's own Glock 19 X. During the night of September 20th and to September 21st, 2024, Matthew Johnson was at the Cottonwood Heights House. According to the account Jennifer would later give police, the two-drink whiskey, had sex, and then began a heated argument when Matthew confronted her about the affair. She would later claim that he became physically aggressive and that she had bruises to prove it. Prosecutors presented a completely different version of that same night. According to the confidential informant, Jennifer confessed that she shot Matthew in the head with his own Glock while he was asleep in their bed. She said she destroyed his cell phone. She also claimed that she drove Matthew's truck away from the house to make it appear that he had left on his own. According to her account, she put the body inside the cargo carrier the family mounted on the roof, dragged the carrier down the stairs, and loaded it into the Chrysler Pacific of Minivan. A doorbell camera allegedly shows Matthew's truck being parked approximately one-third of a mile from the home at 615 that same morning September 21st with his phone inside the vehicle. The following day, September 22nd, 2024, is the day investigators would later reconstruct almost minute by minute through cell phone records. At around 6 o'clock in the morning, Jennifer's phone was near the place where the truck had been abandoned. At 1.44 in the afternoon, it began traveling north out of Salt Lake County. Two minutes later, Jennifer called her father and spoke with him for about four minutes. At 2.37 pm somewhere in Davis County, the phone stopped generating activity. It was either turned off or lost its signal. It would remain that way for approximately two and a half hours. At 5.07 pm, the device reconnected. One minute later, Jennifer called her father again. At around 5.25 pm, surveillance cameras reportedly captured her Minivan in the center Villaria. According to the informant, this was the interval during which Jennifer drove North. Buried Matthew in a shallow grave, and then discarded several items from the bedroom at another location in Davis County. A mattress pillows on a rug. Investigators would eventually recover those exact items that a location connected to Jennifer's phone data. They also linked the rug to a 2023 photograph extracted from her own phone in which Matthew was standing next to that same piece. That night at 10.37 pm, security cameras recorded Jennifer's minivan arriving at a car wash. Over the next 30 minutes, she thoroughly cleaned the vehicle. She vacuumed it and opened every door. She then left the car wash and arrived at the informant's residence at 11.47 pm. According to him, Jennifer arrived deeply distressed and was carrying some printed materials that she wanted to give him because she thought he would find them interesting. Then according to his testimony, she told him everything. The shooting, the truck, the carrier, the drive north, the burial, and the cleaning. The man said Jennifer seemed terrified of being discovered and talked about killing herself or running away. He did not go to the police immediately. He would later explain that he genuinely did not know whether to believe her. In the days that followed, Jennifer allegedly sent him messages saying that she had washed and vacuumed the relevant areas of the house and assuring him that the problem was no longer an issue. She deleted parts of their WhatsApp conversation, but the informant had already taken screenshots. Eventually, he also began secretly recording their phone calls. On September 24, 2024, Jennifer's parents, Thomas and Rosalie Gledhill, went to the Cottonwood Heights residence. According to reports, neighbors placed them there from approximately 5 pm until 11 pm. That same day, Rosalie purchased a replacement mattress on Amazon. Thomas later told investigators that he had gone there only because of a leak in the garage and using a phrase that would later draw prosecutors' attention, said that he had not entered the place where the incident occurred. On September 25, 2024, the Utah National Guard contacted police. Matthew had failed to report for duty, and that absence alone was unusual enough to raise alarm because it departed completely from his normal behavior. His friends noted that Matthew's children had already stopped hearing from him several days earlier, around September 21. Jennifer did not personally report him missing until September 28, 2024. Three full days after the National Guard had already sounded the alarm. She told the officer who came to the residence that she and Matthew had argued on September 20, that he had left afterward, and that he had warned her he might be gone for about a week and did not want anyone to contact him. The police officer, who spoke with Jennifer, described her as distracted and nervous. Investigators later noted that she did not try to call Matthew even once after September 21, despite telling police that she did not know where he was. On October 2, 2024, Cottonwood Heights Police arrested Jennifer Gledhill. By then, investigators had already searched the house and discovered what appeared to be an elaborate attempt to erase every trace of what had happened in the primary bedroom. A completely new mattress, cleaned walls, reddish brown stains on the blinds and bed frame, the smell of bleach in the basement, bleach discoloration on the stairs, and a carpet cleaning machine inside the home. A preliminary test performed on the carpet directly beneath where the headboard would have been returned a positive result for human male blood. Inside the family minivan, police also found something unrelated to the alleged homicide. A black container holding powdered plant material and a fanny pack containing six separately packaged bags that apparently held psilocybin mushrooms along with approximately $206 in cash. It was enough for prosecutors to add a distribution charge to all the others. During the days following her arrest, the court also completely prohibited Jennifer from having contact with her three children and replaced the previous protective order with a restraining and no contact order. The children who were approximately 11, 7, and 5 years old were placed in the custody of Utah's child welfare system and were eventually placed with relatives. Over the following months, Jennifer's defense team would try, largely without success, to have even limited contact with them restored. 13 days later on October 15, 2024, prosecutors formally filed nine felony charges against Jennifer. Domestic violence murder classified as a first degree felony. Five separate counts of obstruction of justice related to deleting messages, disposing of the mattress, cleaning the home, making the firearm disappear, and moving the truck. Possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute, abuse or desecration of a dead body, and witness tampering. On October 24, 2024, Jennifer's parents, Thomas and Rosalie, were arrested on suspicion of helping conceal evidence. At their home, investigators had also found the box for a Glock 19 X handgun wrapped inside a 1-Z belonging to one of their grandchildren. The gun was never found. In the months that followed, the case only continued to take on new dimensions. By February 2025, prosecutors revealed a fact that had not appeared in the original charges. The missing rooftop cargo carrier had turned up in a Davis County wetland, apparently after a storm brought it to the surface. According to reports, testing confirmed that Matthew's blood was inside it. At around the same time, laboratory results confirmed that the blood found beneath the bed in Cottonwood Heights directly matched Matthew Johnson's blood. At that same detention hearing held on February 28, 2025, prosecutors played excerpts from the recorded phone calls between Jennifer and the informant. According to what was disclosed, Jennifer begged him not to think of her as a monster, told him it broke her heart that he was afraid of her, and referred to Matthew in the past tense when she said that he was no longer angry. At one particularly strange moment, prosecutors say Jennifer compared herself to the Queen of Hearts, and spoke in general terms about her belief that certain bad people deserve to be removed from society. The prosecution also mentioned a separate video that has never been publicly described in full and that reportedly shows Jennifer and Matthew arguing at some point before his disappearance. Judge Adam Mao denied Jennifer's release, and she has remained in custody ever since. Jennifer had already waved her right to a preliminary hearing on February 6, 2025, and pleaded not guilty to all nine charges. She has maintained that plea ever since. In January 2026, she sent a personal letter to the judge presiding over the case, something improper when done outside the presence of both legal teams. In the letter she apologized for taking up his time and said that she was trying to figure out how to handle everything in the best possible way. The judge entered the letter into the record and shared it with both sides. It was not a confession. The trial originally scheduled for December 2025 has already been postponed twice. It was first moved to June 2026, and then postponed again because another murder case before the same judge and handled by the same prosecutor received priority on the calendar. As of today, jury selection is scheduled for December 7, 2026, and the trial dates will continue through December 16. Legally, this is what is known as a "no body homicide" case. Although it is entirely possible to secure a conviction in a case of this nature, such cases require the prosecution to build its entire case through circumstantial and testimonial evidence rather than relying on an autopsy. At this point, the strongest pillar of the state's case is the convergence between independent evidence and the informants' account. Matthew's blood appeared beneath the bed, and months later, inside the recovered cargo carrier. That is a detail the informant had described before the discovery of the carrier became public, precisely the kind of corroboration prosecutors value especially highly. When the abandoned trunk, the two-and-a-half-hour gap in cell service, the late-night visit to the car wash and the replaced mattress are added to that. They form a chain of circumstantial evidence that, even when each element is considered individually, is difficult to explain innocently. However, the defense has real opportunities. There is still no body, murder weapon, bullet or autopsy establishing the cause or time of death. Consequently, there is no direct medical proof that Matthew is even dead, only an overwhelming body of circumstantial evidence indicating that he is. There is also a genuine inconsistency in the timeline. The affidavit places the abandonment of the truck at 6.15 in the morning on September 21st, but it also describes Jennifer's phone traveling toward that same location at around 6 o'clock in the morning on September 22nd, a full day later. Separately, a neighbor reported hearing the couple arguing during the night of September 21st into September 22nd, something that does not clearly fit either version. Defense Attorney Jeremy Deuce has also pointed out that, in theory, Matthew's special forces training gave him skills that an ordinary missing person would not have. Nevertheless, that argument must contend with the blood evidence and the complete permanent silence of a devoted friend. father, who never again contacted his children, his unit, or anyone else in his life. There is also a gap between what has been confirmed and what is assumed regarding their discarded household items. Prosecutors recovered a mattress, pillows, and a rug at a location in Davis County connected to Jennifer's phone, and linked the rug to a photograph stored on her device. But during the February 2025 hearing the defense specifically pointed out that no blood or DNA results from those particular objects had yet been presented. That is an important distinction. Linking an object to a photograph proves that it came from the house. By itself, it does not prove that the object was used to conceal a body. There is no diagnosis here, nor should there be one. No psychologist has publicly evaluated Jennifer Gletthill, and it would be irresponsible to label her based on the transcript of a hearing. However, it is worth pausing to observe the pattern of her alleged behavior after September 21st. If the informants account is accurate, what emerges is not a person who is coldly indifferent, but someone who allegedly swung rapidly between control and collapse. Methodically cleaning a vehicle for 30 straight minutes at a car wash at 11 o'clock at night is calculated behavior. Arriving at a lover's home sobbing only minutes later, confessing everything without being asked and talking about taking her own life represents the exact opposite. Asking someone not to see you as a monster is not the language of a person who feels nothing. It is the way someone speaks when desperately trying to control how others perceive her, something that is consistent with the personal letter she later sent the judge apologizing for causing him an inconvenience. Whether that reflects genuine remorse, pure self-preservation, or a confused mixture of both is precisely one of the questions this jury will have to consider, and it is also exactly the kind of question that no one outside the case can answer from the outside. Jennifer Gladhill remains in custody and is still presumed innocent under the law. With jury selection now scheduled for December 7th, 2026, Matthew Johnson remains missing. If the case is resolved before then, we will be the first to tell you. Follow us so you do not miss it.