Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised
Mackenzie Lueck was just 23 years old and starting her life while attending the University of Utah in 2019. Then, one day, everything changed when she was reported missing. Police and investigators worked tirelessly to locate Lueck, but when they found her, her body had been burned.
june 20, 2019, a worried father calls the salt lace city police departement from his home in california….
mckenzie lueck a 23 year old college student had just returned to salt salt lake city after spending a week at home for a family funural .
her last text toher mother was simple” landed .love you mama”
there was no hint that it might be her final message.
when her parents dropped her off the airport they expected to see her again when the semester ended…
but mckenzie never made it home after her late night flight and as days passed without contact their worst fears began to unfold.
mckenzie a dedicated student was now missing.the investigation that followed would unravel a chillinh mystery.
CCTV footage, phone records and police interrogations revealing the brutal fate that she met in the early hours of june 17th.
this case take us to salt lake city the capital of Utah with a violent crime rate of 9.79 per 1,000 residents.
salt lake city has a crime rate higher then that of mckenzie’s native los angeles by one in 1,000.
but no one expects that 1 in 1,000 to make a difference and no one expects to be that one
mckenze was in salt lake city to finish her studies at the unversity of Utah just to semesters away from earning her degree.
living with two,her life seemed typical for a college student.
but after a flight back from california where she attended the funural of her grandmother her communication stopped cold.
her parents diuane and greg lueck had grown increasingly anxious after their last message from mckenzie.
diane didn’t see the text until sh woke up the next morning and when she responded she noticed something strange….
her reply wasn’t delivered through iMessage,it had gone through as a regular SMS mckenzie’s phone was offline.
at first lueck brushed it off but it as time stretched on and their calls continued to go straight to voicemail wory crept in.
by june 20th after hearing from none of mckenzie’s friends or roommates her parents decided to act.
police’s first step was to carry out a wellness check at mckenzie’s adress and salt lake city on the assumption that she made it back there from the airport.
they tried to contact the landlord but received no reply.
eventually one of mckenzie’s roommates let them in to the house,he said that mckenzie had asked him to take care of her cat while she was in california and that she’d said she was returning to salt lake city that week.but he didn’t know exatly when.
on a search of the property the police didn’t find the suitcase mckenzie had traveled with…
her car was still in the driveway and there were no signs of foul play.
the implication was clear,she’d never made it home.
there were other concerning ,she hadn’t been seen in class all week and she was due to submit an online midterm exam by midnight that night , june 20th and she hadn’t yet logged into the portal.
alongside school mckenzie worked at a biological testing company and her colleagues there couldn’t confirm that she turned up to work since going to california.
the police also reviewed surveillance footage from the airport at the time her flight was scheduled to land.1:35 in the morning.
she was lsited on the manifest meaning that she had indeed gotten on the flight as planned which aligned with her text to her mom upon landing.
and the police managed to pick her out on CCTV and getting into a lyft car at 2:40 a.m.
meanwhile greg was doing his own investigation into his daughters life,looking for any clues as to her whereabouts.
mckenzie shared her bank accounts with her parents and upon looking into them greg found an unusual transaction dated june 10th in the amount of $ 300 and lately she hadn’t been asking her parents to assist her with tuition payments or rent and she recently bought new furniture.
greg didn’t know where this money came from,if it was just her earnings from the biological testing company job or if it came from somewhere else.
mckenzie’s brother knew that she had been seeing men through the Tinder app and that she might have a boyfriend who lived in park city.
but he didn’t know this possible boyfriend’s name,nonetheless it was a lead.
one of her friends also corroborated that she’d been seeing men through tinder.and said that mckenzie had confessed a desire to become a stripper.
greg contacted AT&T to look into mckenzie’s phone records.
on june 17th betweenn 1:50 and 1 :58 a.m so after mckenzie had landed in salt lake city she had texted one number eight times.
the content of these messages was not available which meant it could be a lead or just a dead end.
maybe this was just mckenzie ordering her ride share.
the police listed mckenzie as a missing person and sent a text message to her number saying” you are an adult and have the right to not communicate with whomever you want i simply need to verify your safety,we will not communicte your location or anything else unless you give us permission,please give me a call”
in cases like these with a young person reported missing, it wasn’t unusual for them simply for them to have run off, needing some time away from everything.
mckenzie’s family could only hope that this was the case.
on june 21 st the poilice widened the investigation to mckenzie’s known connections,they uncovered an ex boyfriend who dated mckenzie until april 2018.
he told them that a few weeks after the relationship had ended she’d sent him a snapchat video of her having sex with two other people and he blocked her.
one of mckenzie’s friends had something interesting to say that mckenzie had a job interview lined up at exotic kitty.
which was a genlteman’s club the investigators also spoke to one of her male friends who said that he and mckenzie had been casually dating on and off since september 2018 but it never been exlusive and it had plans to meet up when mckenzie got back from california.
this friend said that mckenzie was a regular sugar baby,meaning she connected with men sugar daddies who would give her gifts and money, this was mayve her mystery source of income.
she used the dating app Tinder as well as the site seeking arrangement for this purpose, the site’s homepage reads seeking arrangement delivers a new way for relationships to form and grow.
sugarbabies and sugar daddies or mamas both get what they want when they want it.
mckenzie had last logged into this website on june 16th a few hours before her disappearance.
the friend also told police that she’d connected witha guy on Tinder about 3 weeks ago but didn’t know any details about the mystery man.
a mixed picture of mckenzie was emerging aside to her life that her parents hadn’t known anything about.
born on march 8th 1996 in the beacchside LA suburb of El segundo, she was the second of her parents four children and their only daughter.
at high school she was on the swim and water polo teams and helped to start a club for breast cancer awareness. she continued her feminist thinking at the university of Utah
where she was a positive and supportive sisterly presence in her:
sorority Alpha kai omega
the sorority’s charity work focused on domestic violence awareness and prevention and on facebook mckenzie posted to celebrate the anniversary of women’s suffrage.
she ‘d had adifficult year as accroding to one friend she’d been sexually aussaulted in 2018 and was having a hard time dealing with it,seeing a therapist and taking medication for depression.
mckenzie was raised in the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints and salt lake city is the faith’s headquarters.
mckenzie wasn’t devout however and enjoyed going out to bars with her friends and apparently meeting men on tinder.
she’d alos recently come out to her family as bisexual though her friends and family weren’t aware of any women she was seeing.
she came from a healt care backgroundwith her dead greg working in healh care logistic and administration,mckenzie herself was majoring in pre-nursing and kinesiology.
study of human movement,she hoped to go to nursing or medical school after her graduation planned for may 2020.
but she’d never make it to graduation.
eventually the police managed to track down the details of the lyft ride mckenzie had taken from the airport.
information in her email inbox showed she’d been picked up at 2:40 a.m. on june 17th and then dropped off at 16 east center street north salt lake at 2:59.
this location was a park hatch park with several buildings nearby . there was no obvious reason for mckenzie to be there.
confirmed that this was the location where she was last seen hatch park here in north salt lake investigators now revealing she met someon else after getting dropped off.
detectives has spoken with the lyft driver and learned that mckenzie was met at hatch park by an individual in a vehicle. mckenzie did not appear to be in any type of distress.
on the 25th we learned about a distrubing problems with the cameras at hatch park in norths salt lake which could have filmed mckenzie getting in that car the morning of june 17th..
“hatch park doesn’t have any cameras we have some dummy cameras…..”
meanwhile the police had opened a tip line and it was flooded with information. people reported sightings of mckenzie in the company of various men.
including one on june 21 in a liquor store, the witness claimed to see her buying alcohol with a whit man and describedher as wearing a white shirt with jeans and having a tattoo on her arms above the each elbow.
one with words and the with an arrow.
mckenzie did indeed have tattoos but not these tattoos rather she had a tattoo of a star on her back.
these fals sightings muddied the waters and made it difficult to determine when the last sighting of mckenzie actually was.
had she been wandering around salt lake all week or was that fateful lift ride to the park in north salt lake the last moment before something terrible.
the only one who could meaningfully answer this question was the lyft driver.
lyft privacy policies meant that investigators had to get a search warrant to access mckenzie’s account details.
by the time they spoke to the person who had driven her that fateful night it was june 22nd and she had been officially missing for two days.
when they questioned the driver he said he dropped mckenzie as planned at the park in north salt lake where she’d been picked up by a friend in car that looked like a subaru.
none of mckenzie’s friends had come forward to say they’d picked her up that night though her status as missing was widely reported.
her other friends were speaking on the news.
meanwhile time since mckenzie’s disappearance was stretching on, she’d been booked on a flight back to LA. on june 23rd for a family wedding and the police met the plane to determine if she was on it . but she wasn’t.
and when her bank records were produced under subpoena they discovered she hadn’t made any transactions sins the lyft payment in the early hours of june 17th.
so whatever had happened to her had likely happened that very same night.
possibly at hatch park.
the investigators set up a Geo fence for the area of hatch park in the early hours of june 17th… which registered six devices entering that vicinity in the time frame
one device pinged several times in the area a device belonging neither to mckenzie nor the lyft driver…
it belonged instead to a man named Ayoola Ajayi.
Ayoola’s phone had pinged in the same area as mckenzie’s right before 3:00 a.m. when mckenzie’s phone was turned off between 2:58 and 2:59. a.m.
more damningly,phone record showed that mckenzie andAyoola had been having conversations over the text me app.
these was enoug for the police to apply for a search warrant of Ayoola’s residence.
on june 25th the police made contact with him.
Ajayi was an information technology worker meaning he understood the significant of his geolocation and the way they triangulated his proximity to mckenzie on the night she disappeared.
he claimed he wanted to clear up any confusion and he mentioned his alibi right out of the starting gate.
he said his baby mama’s first name was michelle and that he didn’t know her last name she was 8 months pregnant with his child but they weren’t together.
Ajayi seemed to feel guilt however about using the seeking arrangement site.
he couldn’t deny that he’d been using the website, since the investigators had concrete evidence.
he did however deny meeting mckenzie through the site.but why had they texted outside of the site on june 16th only 9 hours before she went missing.
Ajayi claimed that she must have found his phone number on his profile and texted him the question mark to ask if he was interested.
he claimed he didn’t save numbers in his phone and so he didn’t recall if he talked to mckenzie before,when she asked for a photo, he sent her a selfie and she never responded to it.
Ajayi said he downloaded all the online evidence the police wanted.
including the footage from his home security camera.which he claimed placed him at home all the early hours of june 17th.but wasn’t willing to hand it over.
Ajayi excused the coincidences as best he could, he wasn’t under arrest, however at the end of the interview ,police confiscated his cell phones before allowing him to leave.
and on the following day thay executed a search warrant at his house.he was broadly cooperative but he questioned why they confiscated his phone as evidence.
they then proceeded to search the house ,they found another occupant of the house a guest who was staying in Ajayi ‘s spare bedroom through an airbnb booking.
he’d only arrived from the airport that morning and had no idea why the police were suddenly conducting a search on his host’s house .
other than this guest there was no one in the house and there was no sign of mckenzie.
the police told Ajayi he was free to leave. Ajayi left he said to go to the local library.undercover officers followed him and learned that he didn’t go to the library.
he went to a smith’s grocery and the bank inside it.
there he bought a pay as you go cellphone.
a few hours later after having gathered the evidence at the house ,the police came to detain him .
the police confiscated his new cellhpone as evidence.
it was 7 days after mckenzie was reported missing and 10 days after the last sighting of her alive.
so what did the police find at Ajayi ‘s residence that was daming enough for them to detain him…
they found multple knives….
a hammer…
and a gun.
and in his car ,they found dirt and debris.
they also discovered a lot of electronics…
including a router and a Wi-Fi mesh system.
all these electronic items including Ajayi ‘s phones. and computer wouldbe forensically examined.
but the most telling evidence wasn’t technological at all…the investigators found a freshly dug patch of earth in the back of Ajayi’s yard.
and heard from his neigbhors that on june 17th hed’ been burning something there that had given off a foul smell.
a k-9 unit was brought in to search for human remains and the dog detected something.
so they intrerviewed Ajayi for the second time and this time they stopped being so empathetic. the police pushed him on the limits of coincidence.the locations of his phone and mckenzie’s was an accident he argued or a mistake.
he kept his WiFi open without password protection for the sake his Airbnb guests, this was why there was confusion around his IP adress being used so he said.
he had no answer on this supposed coincidence and he wasn’t convincing. whe the interview ended the police had confirm some things that Ajayi had used the seeking arrangement site and that he talked to mckenzie over text.
but Ajayi hadn’t confessed to anything more incriminating, he insisted he’d been home on the night of the 16th and the morning of 17th and he claimed he’d never met mckenzie in person.
he did confess to having lit a fire in his backyard on the 17th but said he’d put it out as soon as a neighbor told him he wasn’t allowed to be burning things because of pollution restrictions.
and that he needed to call the fire departement ,this same neighbor told the police that the fire had smelled like nothing she’d ever smelled before and that she told him to call the fire departement or she would.
Ajayi said he’d only been burning some trash and maybe some clothes but he insisted the clothes were his own.
he explained the dirt and debris in the floor of his car as a result of recent work on his yard, saying he recently planted 20 or so flowers and the debris was from the fertilizer.
apparemly he was also in the habit of killing goats for food and burning them instead of skinning them.
but he hadn’t done that for a while,this according to Ajayi was the explanation for any blood they might in the bottom of the fridge in his garage.
but it was not goat remains they found in his backyard.
no, instead they found a human bone.
charred muscle tissue.
and part of a human skalp with hear.
there were also a cellphone,Ajayi’s fire had not been a simple exercise in burning trash
it had been disposal of evidence.
Ajayi’s car smelled strongly of gas and they discovered a red gas can that looked identical to the one he’d been seen purchasing at 9: 00 a.m. on june 17th.
the morning after mckenzie’s disapperance.
there were also surveillance evidence of Ajayi’s car in those fateful early hours.
in these footage Ajayi’s Kia can be seen heding towards hatch pakr at 2:48. a.m.
at 2:59 a.m. the white lyft vehicle drives away from the park.
and about 10 seconds later so does Ajayi’s Kia,only now mckenzie was in it.
following the interview ,the police had released Ajayi and he went to stay with a friend but it wouldn’t be for long.
the physical evidence against him was mounting and early on june 28th the samples from his backyard were confirmed to match mckenzie lueck’s DNA. and the police were prepared to detain Ayoola Ajayi on suspecion of murder.
a SWAT team was deployed to thefriends apartment where Ajayi were staying. meanwhile , one of the officers called him to encourage him to surrender.
the SWAT team arrested him without incident.
so , who actually was Ayoola Ajayi and what did he have to do with mckenzie lueck?
born in 1988 Ajayi was raised in nigeria but had lived in Utah since at least 2009 when he started at Uath state university on a student visa.he’d return to the university three separate times but never earned his degree.
he’d also been with the Utah national guard from 2014 t0 2015 when he was discharged with an entry -level separation.he did not complete basic training and didn’t receive any certificates leaving him ineligible to be employed on any tours of duty.
he was discharged for medical reasons , potentially Glaucoma.
however his linkedIn page which has since been taken down,listed that he was an IT specialist for the US army from 2014 to 2016.
and that he had experience working in IT for DELL, Ggoldman sachs, and microsoft.
he had attempted to start a modeling career,describing himself on his model management page as tall buffed funny .
” i am a victim , romantic, violent and character actor “
ajayi self- published a book on amazon in 2018 called forge identity.
it was a fictional story,about a boy witnessing a friend and neighbor be burned alive by a violent mob.
it was suggested that this book was based on a true story.
he was also married to a woman named tanisha ajayi, who lived in dallas texas.they met through a family friend and got married when he was 23 and she was 27.
they d never lived together and she hadn’t spoke to him in years.
according to tanisha ajayi had lost his temper when she refused to come to Utah to live with him and threatened to kill her if she wouldn’t. she said he once tried to tie her up with a phone cord and she had to jump through a window to escape.
Ajayi refused to sign divorce papers and as a result they remained married.
this wasn’t the only violent blip in Ajayi’s past,though he had no conviction on his record he’d been investigated for a sex offense in 2014 and again in march 2018.
just over a year befor mckenzie’s disappearance when he was accused of sexually assaulting a women he met on a dating app.
Ajayi ‘s history only heightened suspicion and further searches of his property uncovered daming evidence.
police found clothing with bleach and blood stains on it
as well as bloodied shower curtain.
Ajayi was already under arrest for her murder,but they still had to find her body and once again it would be Ajayi ‘s phone records that proved to the key
placing him at logan canyon on june 25th, a scenic location,popular with hikers ,climbers and skiers ,it was an hour and 20 minutes drive from salt lake city and remote enough that it registered as a likely place for Ajayi to have disposed of mckenzie’s remains….
on july 2nd the investigators began a search of this area,it was on july 3rd just after midday that they made a breakthrough.
the horrifying discovery of human remains,it was mckenie’s body ,just as they’d feared she was burried in a shallow grave covered with som brush.
her hands had been zip tied behind her back and her body was partially burned and her killer had made an attempt to bury her body but not well enough.
finally on july 10th Ayoola Ajayi was formally charged with:
aggravated murder,aggravated kidnapping,obstructing justice and desecration of a human body.
what he done to mckenzie lueck was both awful and awfully simple.
he’d arranged to meet with her after connecting on the seeking arrangement site back in 2018, they’d agreed to meet up after mckenzie got back from california and she had her lyft driver drop her of at hatch park.
she even acknowledged the strangeness ofthis to he lyft driver,making small talk thay commented on something being strange and she said:”not as strange as where you are dropping me off in the middle of a park so late at night.”
but this was according to her plan with Ajayi, who would pick her up there and take her to his house.
and that’s what he did but she couldn’t have known what he really planned. he tied her hands behind her back with wip ties and started to choke her with his hands. when this wasn’t enough to kill her…
he used a belt and hit her on the side of the head.
according to the autopsy, it was this blow that ultimately killed her.
on june 17th, he attempted to burn her body in his backyard. but was prevented by his neighbor who questioned the smell.
instead he buried mckenzie there and threw some of her belonings into the jordan river they were later recovered on the bank of the river, these included her student ID for the university of Utah and some items of her clothing.
such as her bra which hadburn marks on it.
the police visited him for the first time on june 24th on the next day june 25th he dug her body up and moved it to logan canyon in the hope it wouldn’t be found there .
but even this IT worker had underestimated the digital traces he would leave.
and he had indeed been trying to cover his tracks even from the beginning,because this wasn’t a sexual encounter turned suddenly sour …
this was premeditated.
Ajayi’ home was full of security cameras,but he turned them off before leaving to meet mckenzie, he wasn’t shy about recording his sexual encounters.
no he turned them off because he had a far darker purpose in mind.
he did the same when he moved mckenzie’s body,turning his home security cameras off for the duration of the time his cell phone was triangulated heading to logan canyon and back on june 25th.
between 2:30 and 4:30. p.m.
he also tried to give away a matress on a resale website.presumably the mattress on which he’d murdered mckenzie.
eventually giving it to a women who later recognized Ajayi on the news as the man who’d given it to her . his digital footprint had caught up with him and he’d have to face consequences.
during the search of his electronic devices the police had allegedly discovered pornographic imagery.
salt lake county district attorney sim gill says 31 year old Ayoola Ajayi sexually assaulted another woman in march of 2018.
a court document states Ajayi invited the women over for dinner , after while watchingt the TV the woman alleges Ajayi sexually assaulted her causing significant pain.
he was charged with 19 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor,but these charges were later dropped.
on october 7th 2020Ayoola Ajayi pleaded guilty to first- degree aggravated murder and third -degree desecration of a human body.
in exhange the prosecutors took the death penalty off the table,he was instead sentens to life in prison without possibility of parole.
he was also charged with the 20,2018 kidnapping and assault of the women he’d met on Tinder who’d come forward when his name was released in the news in cconnection with mckenzie’s death.
he was sentenced to a further 1 to 15 years in prison.