Utah Mom Accused of Killing Husband amid Bitter Divorce Allegedly Made a Chilling Confession to Her Lover: Police By Johnny Dodd and Christine Pelisek 39

Just before midnight on Sept. 22, 2024, authorities say, mother of three Jennifer Gledhill showed up at the home of the man with whom she was having an affair — and made a frightening confession. Two days earlier, she said, her husband, Utah National Guardsman Matthew Johnson, had angrily confronted her after learning that she was cheating on him.

Gledhill described to her lover how, later that night after Johnson fell asleep in the couple’s bed, she shot her husband in the head with his 9-mm handgun, packed his body inside a vehicle rooftop storage container, loaded it into her minivan and then buried him in a shallow grave north of their home in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, according to prosecutors. 

When her lover later told her in a phone call that he was frightened by Gledhill’s confession, her response — which he recorded — was chilling: “Wow, if you think I could even hurt a fly,” she said. “Like he just, he is, he’s not a person. He wasn’t a person anymore. He wasn’t Matt.”

Not surprisingly, Gledhill’s lover couldn’t shake the horror of what she told him.

On Oct. 2, after the man gave police screenshots of texts and audio recordings of their phone calls, Gledhill, 42, was arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder of the death of her husband, 51, in the midst of their bitter divorce. His body has yet to be recovered.

“Matthew Johnson is not missing,” Salt Lake County Deputy District Attorney Emily Paulos said during a Feb. 28, 2025, court hearing. “Matthew Johnson was murdered by the defendant.”

Gledhill has pleaded not guilty. She is being held without bail in the Salt Lake County Jail, awaiting a murder trial set to begin in December 2025.

Exactly what led to the couple’s confrontation is a question with which friends of the couple — who shared three children, now all under the age of 13 — are still grappling.

“I thought she was nice, kind of a homebody,” says Johnson’s friend John Hash, who served with him in the Utah Guard’s 19th Special Forces Group. But Gledhill and Johnson’s relationship became “rocky” in recent years, according to another friend of Johnson’s. 

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Gledhill made numerous attempts — including one just weeks before Johnson’s death — to obtain protective orders against her husband, who served in the U.S. Marines before joining the National Guard, but was unsuccessful. On one occasion, the court determined she was the “instigator” of the couple’s troubles, according to a probable cause affidavit.

The stress took its toll on the devoted dad, says Johnson’s friend, who describes how Gledhill’s erratic behavior so unnerved Johnson that he spent much of the past few weeks of his life sleeping at a National Guard facility out of “concerns about his safety.”

In one of his last conversations with his longtime friend, retired Utah National Guardsman Kevin Thompson, Johnson “had really come to the conclusion that [a divorce] needs to happen, and it is time to move on.”

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Johnson never had a chance to move on. After Gledhill’s paramour alerted police to the possibility of a killing at the couple’s home, authorities claimed they found Johnson’s blood on the carpet under the couple’s bed and evidence that a wall had been cleaned with bleach.

Police also arrested Gledhill’s parents, Thomas, 71, and Rosalie, 68, on suspicion of obstruction of justice for allegedly helping her clean up the scene. 

Meanwhile, more than 100 of Johnson’s fellow soldiers have joined the search for his remains in an area where GPS data reportedly placed Gledhill after the alleged murder. Says Thompson: “We’re all combat veterans. We’ve seen a lot. But we don’t want to leave a friend behind, so it’s on your mind all the time.”