Investigators say blood and hair in a truck helped move the case from a disappearance to a murder charge.

MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — A 42-year-old man has been charged with second-degree murder in the death of 37-year-old Krista Hunt after deputies searching the Skagit River found her remains weeks after she was reported missing from the Concrete area, authorities and local news outlets said.

The case matters now because it marks the shift from a missing-person search to a homicide prosecution in a county where public details had been scarce for weeks. Prosecutors say Juan Manuel Delgado Jr. was charged March 20, one day after investigators submitted the case for filing. The immediate stakes are whether detectives can turn a partly public, partly sealed record into a full courtroom account of what happened to Hunt between her last confirmed sighting in January and the recovery of her body in March.

Hunt was reported missing Feb. 1 after relatives said they had not heard from her for several days. Family members told local television that she had last been seen around Jan. 25 in Concrete, a small town along State Route 20 in northern Washington. Her mother said Hunt had been with Delgado near a restaurant when the two ran out of gas and Hunt got out and walked away. For weeks, the case remained a search effort with only fragments of public information. That changed March 12, when sheriff’s detectives conducting a boat search found human remains near the Skagit River east of Concrete. By March 18, the county coroner had identified the remains as Hunt’s. “She was last seen with Delgado in Concrete at the end of January,” KING reported as investigators tightened their timeline and prepared a criminal case.

Investigators then began laying out the evidence they believed tied Delgado to Hunt’s death. Law&Crime, citing the sheriff’s office and court records aired by KING, reported that detectives found Hunt’s blood and clumps of her hair in Delgado’s truck. According to the same reporting, a deputy who spoke with Delgado on Feb. 1 was told that he had not heard from Hunt in five days but wanted to return her two dogs. Delgado also reportedly said the relationship had problems in the past but that he believed they were on good terms. Local reporting later said Delgado had told friends Hunt had been hit by a car, though investigators had not publicly supported that account. Those details gave the case a different shape: no longer only a missing-person inquiry, but an evidence-based allegation that the person last seen with Hunt had offered explanations detectives could test against physical findings.

As the case drew wider attention, Hunt’s family described what they said had been a history of violence before she disappeared. Her mother, Pamela Hunt, told KING that her daughter had previously suffered a broken leg and other injuries that she blamed on Delgado. She said Hunt told her he had once “set a timer” and threatened to hit her every 15 minutes. Those statements were not presented by authorities as the basis for the murder charge, but they added a grim picture of the relationship described by family members. Law&Crime also reported that a medical examination documented injuries including a broken neck, jaw and ribs. Even so, the county coroner’s public notice says the case remains under active investigation and that the official cause and manner of death have not yet been determined. That gap between what relatives say, what media reports describe and what the coroner has formally released is likely to matter as the prosecution moves forward.

The procedural record is already unusual. Cascadia Daily News reported that Delgado was arrested March 19 in Mount Vernon and was already being held in the Skagit County Jail on earlier charges tied to possession of an explosive device. In that separate case, court records said Delgado’s mother called deputies after he shot himself in the face at a Concrete bar two days after Hunt was reported missing. During a later search of his residence, detectives found suspected pipe bombs, and a bomb squad determined the items were explosive devices, according to the newspaper. Delgado appeared in Skagit County Superior Court on March 20, when a judge set bail at $1 million. At that point, a full probable cause statement in the murder case was not yet publicly available, leaving key questions unanswered about the prosecution’s theory of how Hunt died and where investigators believe the killing happened.

The loss has rippled through Hunt’s family as the legal case begins. In remarks carried by KING, Hunt’s brother said the death had robbed his family of decades they expected to have with her. The words were blunt and personal, cutting through the formal language of charging documents and sheriff’s updates. In Concrete and nearby parts of Skagit County, the case has also landed with the force that small-town disappearance cases often do: neighbors know the roads, the river bends and the long stretches where news travels slowly until it suddenly does not. Hunt’s name first moved through the community on a missing-person flyer. By late March, it was attached to a murder charge, a bail hearing and a growing public account of fear, injury and a family’s insistence that warning signs had been there long before the river search ended.

As of now, Delgado faces a second-degree murder charge and remains jailed on $1 million bail. The next milestone is the release of fuller court records or future hearings that explain the prosecution’s theory and whether additional findings from the coroner change the public picture of how Hunt died.

Author note: Last updated April 14, 2026.