Nancy Perry-Baird was born on January 14, 1952 to Kenneth and Elna (nee Stueler) Perry of Provo, Utah. Kenneth ‘Kay’ Stewart Perry was born on October 19, 1917 in Provo, UT, and Nancy’s mother Elna was born September 11, 1924, in Washington, DC, but moved to Phoenix, Arizona at the age of four; when she was nine, her family moved to Provo, Utah. On July 21, 1947, Kenneth and Elna wed and the couple eventually laid down roots in Layton, Utah. They had three daughters together: Nancy, Pat, and Gail. They had a happy marriage, never fought, and were best of friends. They always knew what each other wanted and always had the others needs and wants first priority. Before Nancy’s mother, Mr. Perry was married once before: he got hitched to his first wife Wanda on May 10, 1939, and the couple had two children together, Don and Norma; she sadly passed away on January 1, 1945. Here’s a funny quote about their relationship that I found in Mr. Perry’s obituary in relation to his first marriage: ‘Kay and Wanda Huff met in high school. They were in the same class. Wanda was disappointed when for graduation she was given a watch and not an engagement ring’ Elna was a graduate of Brigham Young University and earned degrees in both accounting and education; she retired from the IRS in Ogden after working there for fifteen years. Nancy had fair skin with long strawberry blonde hair and hazel eyes; she stood 5’2”/5’3″tall and had scars on the inside of both wrists from a failed suicide attempt (interesting factoid: she has type O-positive blood).

At the time of her disappearance Nancy was living at 471 Wasatch Drive in Layton, Utah and was employed at the Triangle Oil Company’s Fina Gas Station at 1378 North Highway 89. I wasn’t able to find a lot about Nancy’s early life or family background, but everything I came across pointed towards her having a relatively normal childhood. She went to Layton High School in Utah and got married to Floyd (Dee) Baird in 1970 after she graduated (they were both eighteen at the time). Floyd was employed as a master electrician, and the couple had a son together in the Winter of 1971; they later got divorced in the spring of 1975.

On July 4, 1975, twenty-three-year-old Nancy was working a 3-11 PM shift (some sources say it was until midnight) as an attendant at the Fina self-service gas station in East Layton, Utah. At the time of her disappearance, she lived close to her POE, her son lived with family, and her ex-husband lived in the state of Wyoming. A little after five o’clock East Layton Police Officer David Anderson stopped and chatted with Nancy a little bit during his shift; he bought a bottle of soda water then left a few minutes later to investigate a potential alcohol violation at the Shamrock gas station on the other side of the highway; he returned to the Fina station around 5:30 PM, and at that time he noticed a green van and a couple of lingering ‘hippie-types,’ and he felt he had to assess the situation.

In his report, Anderson described glancing back towards the Fina between 5:20 and 5:30 PM and he ‘went over to check it out,’ without ever explaining why exactly the van piqued his suspicion. Anderson’s report does not say what became of the van or whether he made contact with its driver: it only says that by the time he got back to the Fina station, Nancy Perry-Baird was no longer there: her purse, keys and car were all there, and Anderson saw no signs of a struggle inside the store. He quickly contacted his chief, who in turn requested the assistance of the Davis County Sheriff’s Office in mounting a search for Nancy Perry-Baird. At the time of Nancy’s disappearance, the East Layton Police Department was made up of four officers: a part-time police chief named Ray Adams, full-time Officer Anderson, and two part-time reserve officers: Gerald Burton and Thomas Jackson; none of those men had received formal police training, and none of them had attended Utah’s police academy. the town disincorporated the department five years later when it was annexed into Layton City in January of 1981.

When Perry-Baird’s manager Bonnie Peck popped in to pick up some soda water at around 5:30, she came into a line of customers and no cashier. Not long after Officer Anderson returned, he encountered Peck and quickly realized that sometime in the past fifteen to twenty minutes Nancy Perry-Baird had somehow vanished off the face of the earth. The only thing out of the ordinary was that there was $10 worth of gas on a pump that hadn’t been paid for (the average cost of a gallon of gas in 1975 was .57 cents, so that was a good amount of fuel). Nancy’s locked car was still in the parking lot, and her handbag that contained her cashed paycheck ($167), car/house keys, headache medications, and other personal belongings were found inside the station. She was last seen wearing a blue halter top with blue shorts, a gold pinky ring inlaid with a ruby in the center that had two smaller rubies on each side of the center stone, and over her street clothes was her work attire: a blue pinstriped smock-type shirt with the Fina Gas Station logo embroidered on it. At the time Nancy was working her son was with relatives.

Immediately after Nancy disappeared the East Layton police immediately requested assistance of the Davis County Sheriff’s Office in searching for Nancy Perry-Baird. By July 7th, law enforcement exhausted their land and air searches and shifted their focus to talking to Nancy’s family, friends, acquaintances, and customers. Police were able to obtain receipts from the gas station for the hours she worked and were able to track down a good number of her customers. One by the name of Denzel G. Williams who was a resident of Kaysville was contacted by law enforcement because a credit card receipt proved that he had purchased gasoline during the time Nancy was there.

By July 7th, law enforcement exhausted their land and air searches and shifted their focus to talking to Nancy’s family, friends, acquaintances, and customers. Police were able to obtain receipts from the gas station for the hours she worked and were able to track down a good number of her customers that day, one of those people being Denzel G. Williams, who was a resident of nearby Kaysville: Davis County sheriff’s detective Kenny Payne interviewed Williams on July 5, 1975, who shared he was there to fill up the family car and a gas can before a trip to Park City the next morning, and was there with his thirteen-year-old son David and nine-year-old daughter, Jana; he estimated they were there between roughly 5:10 and 5:15 PM. Williams himself never entered the service station, but his daughter went in to buy a bottle of raspberry soda (she only had 28 cents on her and the beverage cost 29, but Nancy let the penny slide and gave it to her anyways). The report said Nancy Perry-Baird had not appeared ‘alarmed or nervous’ at the time of her interaction with Jana Williams, who later said in an interview with COLD that she does ‘remember that she was very kind.’ In that same interview David said, ‘I didn’t want to interrupt this conversation they were having. They weren’t in a hurry to leave or anything.’

The young girl also said that two young white men that were in their early twenties’ were chatting with Nancy at the other end of the counter but didn’t appear to be buying anything. The Williams children were able to provide police with descriptions of the men they saw, which allowed them to use a tool called an ‘Identi-Kit’ that helped build composite images. Police labeled the men ‘subject #1’ and ‘subject #2,’ and both were determined to be ‘hippie type individuals’ (why does this term keep coming up?): Subject #1 was described as ‘skinny, had shoulder-length hair, a beard and mustache and wore a denim jacket with frayed edges.’ Subject #2 also had a beard and mustache, however his hair only came to the bottom of his ears and he was wearing a yellow long-sleeved shirt.

Jana Williams-Grow recalled in her interview that she felt scared at the time she gave her initial interview in July 1975, and she had been worried the men she and her brother described to police might try to seek revenge against them: ‘I thought they’d find me.’ The long-forgotten feeling resurfaced when she viewed the composites again, saying: ‘I got a little bit sick to my stomach when I saw him because I do remember him.’

Mr. Williams remembered seeing what he thought was a bright yellow 1973 four-door Ford Maverick with a white stripe along the side and that the recalled seeing a third man outside the gas station, who he described as being between fifty-five to sixty years old and very slender, with a full head of gray hair and overly prominent veins on his arms. He said the gentleman went into the exterior men’s restroom and came out while he was still pumping his gasoline. Williams said that he never went inside the station and after he filled up his gas tank gave his card to his son David, who went inside and paid. He said that it takes about four to five minutes to drive to his house from the Fina station, and he very clearly remembered being home before 5:30, which was exactly when his brother came over for a visit.

Another important eyewitness is Mrs. Henry Heath, who reached out to the police because she had stopped by the gas station around 5:30 PM to buy film and witnessed several people milling around the counter waiting for assistance. She distinctly remembered a Caucasian man in his late 20’s with medium length brown hair styled neatly with a bit of facial stubble buying what appeared to be a ‘canned beverage.’Mrs. Heath further reported that she saw a Mexican man with two small boys that were also standing at the counter waiting to purchase some items. Lastly, there was a visibly irritated tall, thin, white male in his fifties’ who (most likely upset by the lack of customer service) put a six pack of beer down and walked out. It was at this point that the older woman started poking around the store to see exactly what was going on: she checked the women’s restroom and noticed the door was open and there was no one inside. The man with the two boys looked in the office, which had also been unoccupied. Mrs. Heath also reported seeing a yellow pickup truck hauling a shell camper with a young couple inside; they stopped to get gas and when they weren’t serviced right away blew their horn. After she had been waiting around for roughly five to seven minutes the store manager (Bonnie Peck) came in, and as she was in a hurry made a beeline to the counter. A male customer (obviously a regular that recognized her) made a joke asking if she stepped away for a moment to grab a beer, which is when she asked what was going on and where her cashier was. At this point three people in a van pulled up asking for directions to the Sheriff’s Office (they also announced that one of their vehicles had been impounded), and upon discovering the mess, Peck quickly jumped into action and cashed out the waiting customers. Mrs. Heath paid for her film and remembered getting home roughly ten minutes before 6 PM.

What happened in the fifteen to twenty minutes between Mr. Williams leaving the gas station and Mrs. Heath showing up? One of the stranger parts of this case is (to me) how she was abducted in the middle of the day on a holiday during peak business hours. Why risk abducting someone then? Why not wait until 9:00 or 10:00 at night when there’s fewer customers and you’re protected by a cloak of darkness? The FBI briefly got involved in the case because initially it was suspected that maybe Nancy had been kidnapped, but after about six weeks and no leads they eventually left things in the hands of local law enforcement (as they were unable to prove anything and weren’t able to officially take on the investigation if she was abducted). Over the years since she disappeared hundreds of Nancy’s family, friends, and acquaintances were interviewed and polygraphed and everyone passed.

In a joint statement released by former Davis County Sheriff William J. ‘Dub’ Lawrence and Chief Adams, it was reported there were no signs of a struggle or theft from the Fina station (aside from the $10 worth of gas). Thankfully Nancy’s disappearance was taken seriously from the start, but it makes sense it was when comparing this case to the other missing girls in Utah at the time… after all, she had a young son, a stable job, and was a bit older than most of the other victims (even though Caryn Campbell was also twenty-three, Denise Oliverson was twenty-four, and Julie Cunningham was twenty-six). Family and friends told LEO’s there were no signs that Nancy had any intention of leaving or taking off and all of her personal belongings were left behind in her residence and no money was taken, which almost makes me think she was an intended target and the attack was not meant to be a robbery. Additionally, her manager said she was always on time to work and was a good employee, which makes me think she wouldn’t have just walked off the job or just left.

Law enforcement interviewed Perry-Baird’s family the night she disappeared, but they were unable to offer much help, however they did say that they felt it especially odd that she left behind $167 in cash… but what if Nancy staged an abduction so she could intentionally disappear? Maybe then it might make sense? Law enforcement officer’s spoke with Richard Marinoka from the employment office in Ogden, UT on July 8, who said that Nancy had come in to speak with someone earlier that March because she was apparently unhappy at her job and wanted to find a better one. Was she depressed about her current situation and trying to disappear?

When police searched Nancy’s bedroom, they found a phone number scribbled on a pad of paper near the phone that belonged to a female relative in Lakewood, Colorado, however when they called her, she claimed she hadn’t had any contact with Perry-Baird for about two and a half years. From her residence, law enforcement also collected a hairbrush that had strands of Nancy’s hair tangled in the bristles as well as her birth control pills (which showed that she hadn’t taken any since April 7), her address book, and a photo album. Now…. why does a woman stop taking the pill? Well, there are a few reasons: 1) she was not having any sex at all, 2) she wanted to get pregnant, or 3) she already was; this (in my opinion) throws a wrench in things. It’s also worth mentioning that (according to the police report) there were nine different men that Nancy had some sort of past or current romantic involvement with, so my educated assumption is she had some sort of active sex life.

Sheriff’s detectives compared pictures in Nancy’s photo album to the two composite images of the men that David and Jana Williams had reported seeing inside the Fina station, and in her case file a lieutenant with the sheriff’s department wrote: ‘there was a very similar likeness of one of the Identi-Kit composites to a picture’ that had the name ‘Monty’ written on it. Deputies quickly identified the man in the photo as Monty Torres, and when they showed the photo to Jana Williams, she was able to ‘positively identified Monte (sic) Torres as one of the hippie type individuals that was in the service station.’

Sheriff Lawrence brought fourteen deputies to the general area where Nancy was last seen early on Saturday, July 5, and those LEO’s joined the four East Layton officers in a ground search of the mountains and roads of nearby North Davis County. Lawrence commented that: ‘we’re treating it as if it were the worst, but hoping she’ll come home.’ A SLC Police Department helicopter was also brought in for about three hours to search both sides of the highway, but with no success. The sheriff said that all leads were checked out, but the case quickly ran dry then eventually went cold. About two months after she vanished two residents in Castle Rock, Utah reported that they thought they saw Nancy shopping at a local food store (unfortunately nothing came from that sighting), and it’s worth mentioning that Castle Rock is only a 30 minute drive away from Lakewood, which is where that female relative of Nancy’s lived whose phone number was written down on the pad of paper next to her bed.

Floyd Baird was out of state when his ex-wife disappeared, and he was officially cleared by authorities in late 1975; at the time Nancy disappeared he had been working on an electrical job in Rexburg, Idaho, and spent the fourth of July in Jackson Hole with a friend (Rick Thomas), either river running or kayaking. Interestingly enough, he did share with investigators that despite being separated from Nancy they still went out on the occasional date now and then; additionally, her other boyfriends alibi’s held up as well, and one of them (a man named Dennis Forsgren), told investigators that he had been out of state vacationing with his family at the time (this was later verified).

According to neighbors, Nancy hired Monty Torres to mow her lawn the month before she disappeared, and when Davis County Sheriff’s deputies were finally able to him down, he was in Pocatello, ID and clarified that he had been there on the afternoon of July 4, 1975 as well. LEO’s in Utah asked the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office in Idaho to locate and interview him. When a detective made contact with him, they described him as being ‘quite jittery;’ despite this, Torres reportedly said he’d been at Lava Hot Springs on the afternoon of Nancy Perry–Baird’s disappearance.

Torres was able to provide detectives with multiple alibis (who confirmed they saw him at 1 PM and again at 7 PM), and told investigators the last time he saw Nancy was about a month before she disappeared (his mom volunteered that she hadn’t seen her son in about three months). Additionally, two other male acquaintances of the young divorcee were questioned: Reed Miller and a man whose name was redacted. Deputy Ben Reichel interviewed Miller, (who like Nancy’s ex-husband was also in the Jackson Hole area that holiday weekend), who shared that he knew her since the winter of 1972, and at one point the two were pretty serious, but when he shared that he didn’t have any interest in getting married things cooled down pretty quick. The two saw each other for the last time on June 28th when they went out on a date. Miller, Torres, and Baird were polygraphed and all three men passed.

Not many details are known about Nancy’s mystery man, but one fact that was made public is that law enforcement tried to speak to him on multiple occasions, but he dodged their every attempt. In a report completed by Officer Anderson that was dated July 8,1975, Perry-Baird’s parents provided investigators with two pictures of the mystery boyfriend, and according to reports, he worked in a warehouse setting and his foreman/supervisor shared that he left for Phoenix to see his parents on July 2nd and wasn’t due to be back to work until either July 12/13. After they exhausted all efforts to speak to him, law enforcement tried to locate members of his family, and the closest ones they found were a cousin and an aunt: the cousin shared that he split up with his wife in June 1975 but was supposedly thinking about getting back together with her, and his aunt (Mrs. Frank Olson) stated she didn’t associate with her brother or his side of the family.

At the time Nancy was abducted in the summer of 1975, Sheriff Lawrence said the department was investigating quite a few high-profile cases and for about a month after she vanished they talked to multiple people of interest but were unable to pinpoint a suspect. He commented that: ‘when a police officer does this for years you develop a sixth sense. You feel it. (Bundy) was the worst of the worst criminals and it took its toll on most of us. We had five missing women at one time. Half we found part of the bodies, some of them.’

Enter Ted Bundy… in the summer of 1975, Ted was enrolled in classes at the University of Utah School of Law and was living at 565 1st Avenue in SLC (he was there from September of 1974 to September of 1975); according to the FBI Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992, his activity is unaccounted for on July 4, 1975. From June to July 1975, he was briefly employed as the night manager in charge of Bailiff Hall at the University of Utah (he was fired for showing up drunk), and from July to August 1975 he was a PT security guard for the school (his position was terminated due to budget cuts).

It’s obvious by her physical description that Nancy fit Bundy’s typical victim profile, however it is worth noting that the scene is outside of a school setting, and I never heard of Ted going after anyone at a store/gas station before. Before Perry-Baird’s disappearance, his last confirmed victim was Susan Curtis on June 28, 1975 out of Provo, Utah: the 12 year old child vanished from Brigham Young University and Ted later told law enforcement he buried her roughly seventy-five miles away… but, if you’re considering the unconfirmed victims, on June 29, 1975, Shelley K. Robertson disappeared out of Golden, CO, and her body was found in a mine shaft near Georgetown seven weeks later. Ted’s reign of terror didn’t last much longer after Nancy disappeared, and early in the morning on August 16th, 1975 Utah State Trooper Sergeant Bob Hayward arrested him in Granger after leading him on a mile and a half long car chase.

Bundy residing in the area is really the only thing police have linking him to Perry-Baird’s disappearance: no one at the Fina station reported seeing a VW nearby (let’s face it, a Bug is a fairly memorable vehicle) or a man that fit his physical description, and unlike Nancy Wilcox (for example), there was never any mention of a mysterious law student in her life (it’s been speculated Ted went into the cafe where Wilcox worked and flirted with her). When asked about Nancy Perry-Baird’s disappearance during his death row interviews, Ted denied any responsibility: during his interview with Ted, Dennis Couch asked him, ‘do you recall what type of place it was (Perry-Baird) was working at or where it was located?,’ to which he replied: ‘no, I didn’t have anything to do with that.’ Later in the interview, the detective showed Bundy a picture of Nancy, and to this, he said, ‘Nancy Baird, who’s that?’

After Ted was arrested in SLC, Sheriff Lawrence’s team of detectives started looking into his background in relation to Nancy’s abduction, saying ‘we had him in Rock Springs, Wyoming which put him on Interstate-80 coming back from Colorado.’ From Rock Springs, Lawrence said Bundy headed west into Utah and chose to return to Salt Lake using Interstate-84: ‘we don’t have any gas receipts that he stopped in the area.’ The Sheriff theorized that at one point Ted headed south on Highway-89, the same roadway where the Fina gas station Nancy worked at was located, saying ‘there’s no women missing (along I-80). There was no abduction on 80-coming in.’ The sheriff strongly believes that the serial killer murdered Perry-Baird then disposed of her remains in Lambs Canyon, saying ‘Ted Bundy was tired, he had driven all day. I believe he went to somewhere that was close. It was handy, it was safe, it was secure.’

Sheriff Lawrence also said that Bundy was familiar with that particular area in Utah and that the body of Melissa Smith was found just about ten miles away in Parleys Canyon: ‘it’s what we call the law of probability. It’s not provable but if you work back by process of elimination you come up with the most logical scenario.’ In the pictures section below, I included a WebSleuth’s comment saying that East Layton law enforcement claimed Bundy fueled up at Nancy’s POE at least once in 1975, and according to Investigative Sergeant Ryan Kirkman with the Davis County Sheriff’s Office in Utah: ‘I wouldn’t say that we’re heavily looking at Ted Bundy. He is a name in the case file that certainly hasn’t been 100% ruled out, but it’s nobody that we’re focusing on at this time.’

The Davis County Sheriff’s Office provided a sample of Nancy Perry-Baird’s hair (that was collected from her hairbrush) to the FBI to compare to the unidentified hairs collected from Bundy’s car, and it was eventually determined that federal agents did not find a match to the samples that were taken from Ted Bundy’s 1968 VW Bug. Despite this, some investigators continue operating on a belief Bundy was somehow involved in whatever had happened to Perry–Baird.

Sadly, at the end of the day Ted’s involvement with the disappearance of Nancy Perry-Baird is just a theory with nothing but weak, circumstantial evidence and at the end of the day there just wasn’t enough for prosecutors to bring him up on charges. Despite Ted denying any involvement with Perry–Baird’s death, Sheriff Lawrence doesn’t believe him: ‘he admitted that he had some of the heads of his victims in Utah at his apartment. He mentioned Lamb’s Canyon.’ Additionally, Perry-Baird’s in-laws don’t believe Bundy either and also felt he was responsible for her murder: her FIL Wally Baird felt Ted’s denial could have possibly been a cover-up: ‘he may have been that way because he didn’t know at the time that she had kids, a child and had been married. That was something that was contrary to his MO.’

According to Killer in the Archives creator Tiffany Jean, records from the Carol DaRonch kidnapping case show that during the summer of 1975 Bundy briefly dated a SLC schoolteacher named Leslie Knudson: Jean said that Knudson was able to provide law enforcement with an alibi for her beau on that fourth of July weekend in 1975 and the pair had attended a family reunion at her family’s ranch. Her maternal grandfather was a sheep rancher and owned property in Fruitland, UT, which is more than one-hundred miles from the gas station where Nancy Perry-Baird disappeared from. According to Jean, ‘it would be pretty difficult for (Bundy) to have done both things on that day because it would have been quite a drive, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else has ever put those together, that (Bundy) was with (Knudson) on the day that this crime occurred.’

According to Leslie, ‘I know he was in Colorado that summer, for sure, I just don’t know the weekend. And the 4th of July is when we would’ve gone to the family ranch. So I was definitely seeing him the 4th of July.‘ … ‘I took him to a family reunion so all of my relatives got to meet him. He was appealing, for sure. My parents were very proud of me.’ Leslie did not disclose the whereabouts of her family ranch in her phone call with Chris, but COLD used genealogical records to pinpoint the ranch’s location as Deep Creek, located between Strawberry Reservoir and the town of Fruitland in the Uinta Basin (which is a prominent physiographic and geologic structural basin located primarily in northeastern Utah but extends slightly into northwestern Colorado).

If Bundy had left the Deep Creek ranch, driven to East Layton to abduct Perry-Baird, then returned to the ranch, the round trip would have required roughly four hours (and that isn’t including the time spent abducting Nancy, killing her; then disposing of her body): If Bundy instead departed the Deep Creek ranch and headed for his home in SLC, his most likely route would not have taken him through East Layton, and to pass by the Fina station while on his way home from the ranch, he would have needed to make a lengthy and indirect detour north on Interstate-84 to Weber Canyon, then south along US Highway-89 (which runs along the Wasatch foothills on the eastern edge of Layton, positioned just east of the main city center and Hill Air Force Base).

Additionally, at the time of Perry-Baird’s disappearance investigators commented that they found no evidence that made them think her case had anything to do with the then nine-month-old disappearance of Debbie Kent, who was abducted from the parking lot of Viewmont High School on November 8,1974 in Bountiful (for reference, the school was about a forty-five-minute drive away from the gas station); as of March 2023, only Kent’s patella has been recovered. Here’s an interesting factoid: according to a 1975 article published by the Davis County Clipper, Deb’s father was employed with the Triangle Oil Company, which owned the Fina gas station that Perry–Baird was employed at.

Recently a new theory on Perry-Baird’s strange disappearance has emerged: The Utah Cold Case Coalition noticed that the investigation pretty much stopped after Bundy was arrested and came into the picture, and one of their co-founders Karra Porter commented that ‘a lot of the investigation stopped there. So, we talked to quite a few people that were never interviewed’ (some of them including former LEO’s that worked the case when Nancy first disappeared). The coalition has recently come across two possible persons of interest, one of them being a young man that was trying to date Perry–Baird at the time she disappeared (the feeling wasn’t mutual), and one of the names we’ve been given by former law enforcement does have a subsequent history of sex offenses and a criminal record and so that at least adds to the red flag (he even had a history that landed him in prison)’ … ‘What we’ve learned so far is that one of the two suspects would be consistent with potentially having a pickup like that.’ Porter elaborated that new eyewitnesses that were never before interviewed said they remember seeing a pickup truck leaving the area at roughly the time Nancy was abducted, (which jumps out at me a bit because when Bundy relocated from Seattle to SLC he did have an old pickup truck to help with the move); she also said that of the two potential suspects one stands out a touch more than the other.

It’s speculated that Nancy’s case may somehow be related to the disappearance of another young woman named Cheryl Scherer. Nineteen-year-old Scherer vanished out of thin air from Rhoades Pump-Ur-Own self-service station in Scott City, Missouri sometime between 11:40 and 11:50 AM on April 17, 1979. The two women shared many similar characteristics (such as age, body type, and hairstyle) and disappeared under incredibly similar circumstances. Two hours before her shift ended, Cheryl called her mother who later told police nothing about the conversation was out of the ordinary and that her daughter seemed to be in a good mood. A coworker eventually came in to find the station deserted and ransacked. Just like Perry-Baird, Scherer’s car was left in the parking lot (with the keys inside) and her purse and checkbook were left inside her POE (however in this situation $480 was missing from the cash register). Police speculated the young girl was abducted after a robbery but there were no witnesses. The depraved serial killers Otis Toole and Henry Lee Lucas admitted to an abduction during that time and it’s strongly suspected they are responsible for Scherer’s disappearance. Both men denied any involvement in either girls disappearance.

Ralph Leroy Menzies: one name that I came across while researching Nancy Perry-Baird’s case was Ralph Menzies, a convicted serial killer that spent thirty-seven years on death row in Utah. On February 23, 1986, Menzies abducted twenty-six-year-old mother Maurine Hunsaker from her job at a gas station in Kearns, Utah; her body was discovered two days later tied to a tree in Big Cottonwood Canyon. She had been strangled and her throat was slashed. Investigators linked Menzies to the crime after finding his ID cards in a jail booking area following an arrest for an unrelated offense, and a subsequent search of his apartment uncovered Hunsaker’s purse. In March 1988, he was found guilty of capital murder and aggravated kidnapping, and he was given a death sentence.

Menzies’ case drew significant national attention during his final years due to his rapidly deteriorating health: during the nearly four decades he spent at the Utah State Correctional Facility, he developed severe vascular dementia, and his lawyers argued that he required a wheelchair and supplemental oxygen and no longer understood why he was there or why he was being punished. He was scheduled to be executed on September 5, 2025, but in August 2025, the Utah Supreme Court issued a stay of execution, ruling that his progressive cognitive decline raised serious constitutional questions regarding his competence to be executed.

Just days before his death (which was supposed to be by firing squad), an evaluation by the Utah Department of Health and Human Services concluded that Menzies was mentally incompetent for execution and that his condition was untreatable. He died at a local hospital before the state could formally challenge the medical report or hold its scheduled December competency hearing. According to media reports from the Associated Press, his death brought a sense of relief and closure to the family of Maurine Hunsaker after thirty-seven years of legal uncertainty. Menzies passed away at age sixty-seven from natural causes on November 26, 2025, just weeks before a critical legal hearing regarding his mental competency.

Thomas Richard Jackson: at the time Nancy vanished in July of 1975, a young reserve officer named Thomas Jackson was the newest member of the East Layton police force, and her case file shows he didn’t play a huge role in her investigation… but he did share with COLD that he didn’t feel Ted Bundy was responsible for Perry-Baird’s disappearance, and instead speculated it was his colleague, officer Dave Anderson that caused the young mothers demise (in his opinion, ‘Anderson spent too much time looking at women’). At the time of her disappearance in July 1975, he had only been a police officer for about ten months, and a few former law enforcement-related sources familiar with East Layton police operations in the 1970’s shared with the podcast that most of Anderson’s time was spent patrolling US Highway-89, which is the same stretch of road that Nancy’s place of employment was located on; he left his position with the East Layton PD almost right after she vanished, and case records do not show that he was ever investigated or challenged in any way regarding his account of her disappearance.

Conclusion: after she disappeared, Perry-Baird’s son was told that his mother was ‘vacationing’ and he was sent to live with relatives. Newer technology at a Texas University helped forensic experts create a DNA profile for her based on genetic samples provided by her family. Nancy Perry-Baird would be 74 years old as of October 2026, and despite her remains never being recovered, she has a memorial stone in Provo City Cemetery; her date of death is listed as July 4, 1975.

Nancy’s Father Kenneth Stewart Perry. passed away of heart failure at the age of sixty-two on December 2, 1979; he was buried in Provo City Cemetery. According to his obituary, after he graduated from high school, he joined the ‘Civilian Conservation Corps,’ a federal work relief program established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 as part of the New Deal. Upon completion of the program he hitch-hiked around Yellowstone National Park, Cook City, and Red Lodge, Montana for two years.

During WWII, Kay worked at Boeing in Seattle, and his HAM radio hobby became his job at Hill Air Force base after the Ironton Steel Plant in Springville was shut down. After he was laid off the day World War II ended, he eventually went back to work at HAFB in electronic calibration and repair. His hobbies included gardening, deer hunting and traveling. He was also very active in his church and served in the Sunday School presidency and held various church positions (at the time of his death, he was a High Priest).

Nancy’s mother Elna Lorraine Stueler-Perry of South Ogden passed away at the age of eighty-five on May 28, 2010. According to her obituary, the Perry family were devoted members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (where she was the organist and visiting teacher for many years), and in 1948 her and Kenneth were sealed in the Salt Lake Temple. She enjoyed embroidery, crochet, gardening, rock collecting, all animals, and the desert; her greatest love was driving, and she would take daily trips to ‘get lost,’ have lunch, and visit friends and family. She was loved for her spunk and ‘tell it like it is’ attitude.

Floyd Dee Baird passed away peacefully at the age of sixty-six on March 17, 2018 in his home in Salt Lake City after years of battling Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis; Dee is survived by his wife Colleen Dahl Reber-Baird, three sons, two grandchildren, and his faithful four-legged companion named Kolt. According to his Legacy page, he was an extraordinary man who lived life to the fullest while making a positive impact on all those he came across that loved with all his heart, and in return was loved by so many. If Dee couldn’t fix it, then it couldn’t be fixed. Some of Dee’s greatest memories include ‘The Hook Willey,’ an annual guy’s only fishing trip down The Green River during Mother’s Day weekend. He was an avid fly fisherman and loved waking up early to catch the first fish of the day. Other great memories include Lake Powell, Starvation Reservoir, going on long mountain drives with a truck full of family and friends, sitting around the campfire telling stories, and raising too many dogs to name. Dee was an avid U of U sports fan (‘GO UTES!), and in his younger days he loved bowling, and was in a few different leagues; he also loved snow skiing at Snowbasin with his family.

Nancy’s sister Pat Perry-Lindeman died at the age of seventy-seven on January 25, 2026 in Aurora, Colorado. According to her obituary, Pat was born on July 17, 1948, and she had a special way of making people smile or brightening their day; she was always non-judgmental and kind. She will be greatly missed.

*** Update, August 2023: I’m always updating my articles as I come across new information, and recently I found the initial police report (thanks to the COLD Podcast) as well as a newly published article by ksltv.com. After initially being denied a request for Nancy’s case file by Davis County Sheriff’s Office, the podcast filed an appeal, and the original determination was overturned and the request was granted (with portions redacted). 

Perry-Baird’s name came to the attention of the podcast’s co-collaborators Dave Cawley and Keira Fairmont while conducting research on the Sheree Warren case, a twenty-five-year-old Utah woman who mysteriously disappeared on October 2, 1985 after she left her temporary workplace at the Utah Employees Credit Union in SLC; though her vehicle was recovered weeks later in Las Vegas, her body has never been recovered. Apparently, an informant named William Babbel began communicating with the FBI in February of 1989 while incarcerated at Florida State Prison, who shared that he was at one point incarcerated with Warren’s ex-boyfriend Cary Hartmann, who at the time was serving a prison sentence of fifteen-years-to-life for an aggravated sexual assault in Ogden. Although Fairmont vanished years after Nancy in 1985, their cases had some eerie similarities: both women were recently divorced from (or were in the process of the act) and their spouses and were primary caregivers for their young sons. Additionally, they were about the same age at the time of their disappearances, and both women were last seen at their places of employment.

Babbel reportedly claimed that Hartmann had been ‘openly talking about Warren’s disappearance’ and the FBI clarified that he told one of their agents he ‘questioned why Ted Bundy was blamed for the disappearance of Nancy Perry-Baird.’ … ‘on one occasion, Hartmann was looking at a newspaper article depicting Ted Bundy along with photos of many of his victims. Hartmann placed an ‘X’ by the photos of five of Bundy’s alleged victims.’ FBI Special Agent Gregory Hall later commented that Babbel ‘learned that Cary Hartmann was an acquaintance of Nancy Baird. Baird’s disappearance allegedly occurred while Hartmann was experiencing a divorce.’ At the time Nancy disappeared in July 1975, Hartmann had been between his two marriages, so Babbel’s information seemed to have at least a glimmer of credibility, however the agency later dropped the inmate as an informant, claiming he was unreliable. In addition to Perry-Baird and Warren, he also attempted to tell the FBI about information related to the disappearance of Joyce Yost, a thirty-nine-year-old woman from Utah who was murdered in August 1985 by Douglas Anderson Lovell. She was killed to prevent her from testifying against him in an upcoming rape trial and her body has never been recovered.

One new piece of information I gathered from Nancy’s case file that I didn’t know beforehand was an account from a friend of hers named Deloris Drake, who lived in nearby Ogden. She told a detective that on the evening of July 2, 1975 they went to a few bars together along Ogden’s Washington Boulevard, including Rigos and the Iron Horse. When they were finished with their night out Drake drove them back to her house at around 2:30 AM on July 3, 1975 and from there Nancy left for her own residence in East Layton. About thirty minutes after leaving, she returned to her friend’s home, saying she ‘appeared to be quite shaken and frightened because a man named Tom in a yellow Volkswagen van had followed her home.’ Tom had apparently pursued Perry-Baird and followed her back to Drakes and was making threatening comments towards her as she entered the residence; Deloris later told law enforcement that she had seen a second man with ‘Tom’ that was on a motorcycle.

*** Update, October 2026: on September 23, 2026, the COLD Podcast premiered a new episode of its acclaimed investigative series titled, ‘Who Took Nancy Baird?,’ where the host Dave Cawley went over Perry-Baird’s original case file, exposing how the now-defunct East Layton Police Department heavily fumbled the initial investigation. In that episode, Nancy’s son Brant (who had only been four years old at the time his mother vanished) came forward and spoke publicly for the first time about his mom since she disappeared in July 1975.

Brant Baird: Nancy Perry-Baird’s parents, ex-husband, her son Brant, and the rest of her family stayed out of the intrusive public eye brought on by the ‘Bundy hype,’ and coped with their grief in quiet anonymity. For decades, Brant avoided talking about it with almost anyone, and ‘growing up, it was really painful. Any kind of question about my parents, I’d always just say my mother died when I was young.’ About the recent interest in his mom’s disappearance amongst true crime fans, Brant said ‘she’s been on multiple podcasts and many articles and blogs. There’s been a bunch of stuff, but I’ve never really gone down those rabbit holes.’

A relative of Brants who had listened to COLD told him that he ought to make an exception, because the podcast had obtained his mother’s case file and uncovered a great deal of newly released information that included the fact that Ted Bundy had an alibi for the day she disappeared: ‘my cousin’s wife called me and was like, ‘Hey, you may want to listen to this,’ so I listened to it over and over.’

Thomas Richard Jackson: in recent years there has been a rejuvenated investigative effort by the Davis County Sheriff’s Office that pivoted almost entirely toward former East Layton police officer Thomas Richard Jackson (who as of October 2026 is seventy-years old). Jackson served as an officer with the department from April 1975 to July 1976 and was one of the initial individuals handling the disappearance of Nancy. In recent years investigators revealed that he was subjected to a polygraph test in 2023 regarding the disappearance, which he failed after giving inconsistent timeline statements.

In 1986, Jackson was arrested and convicted in Utah on felony charges of sexual abuse of a child (which involved his biological daughters), and for this conviction, he received probation, community service, and ordered counseling; his wife (the children’s mother) immediately divorced him after what he did came to light. Sometime upon the termination of his probation, Jackson relocated to Idaho, and where the exact date of the move is not publicly known, records indicate he made the move sometime in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s (where he quickly remarried). In 1995, he was arrested in Jerome County, Idaho, on two counts of lewd conduct with a minor under the age of sixteen when he was charged with the sexual abuse of his stepdaughters; he entered a plea agreement and pled guilty to one count and the district court initially handed down a fixed life sentence, which the Idaho Supreme Court later modified to an indeterminate life sentence with a fifteen-year fixed term; he was released to parole supervision on June 16, 2011.

Acting on tips that he may have been involved in the disappearance of Nancy Perry-Baird, on May 8, 2025 detectives secretly used cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar to excavate Jackson’s former 1975 backyard on Gilman Drive. According to Sergeant Kirkman: ‘we were working off a hunch, initially, to be quite honest,’ and that ‘hunch’ was that Perry–Baird’s remains might be buried in the back of Jackson’s one time property. In a search warrant affidavit, Sergeant Kirkman wrote the dog handlers observed ‘alert behavior’ in one spot in the yard. From there, Davis County brought in a private contractor to perform a ground-penetrating radar survey of the yard, which identified a subsurface ‘void’ in the same general area where the dogs had shown their alert behavior. Sergeant Kirkman presented those circumstances to a judge and requested a search warrant, which would allow detectives to excavate the ‘void,’ but ultimately that specific dig (which has not been previously reported on until later that September 2026) yielded no human remains.

About the dig, according to Sergeant Kirkman, ‘we were working off a hunch, initially, to be quite honest,’ and that ‘hunch’ was that Perry-Baird’s remains might be buried in the back of Jackson’s one time property. Detectives had already searched the yard with the assistance of human remains detection canines, otherwise known as cadaver dogs. In a search warrant affidavit, Kirkman wrote the dog handlers observed ‘alert behavior’ in one spot in the yard. From there, Davis County brought in a private contractor to perform a ground-penetrating radar survey of the yard, who was able to identify a subsurface ‘void’ in the same general area where the dogs had shown their alert behavior. Sergeant Kirkman presented those circumstances to a judge and requested a search warrant, which would allow detectives to excavate the ‘void.’

According to an interview Sergeant Kirkman had with Cold: ‘we ended up ultimately getting a search warrant and digging quite a large hole. Nothing came of that’, and detectives did not locate any trace of human remains and the ‘void’ turned out to be a false positive. About the dig, Kirkman said that Jackson ‘didn’t really care either way that we were back there. We’ve since ruled out the possibility that his former residence could be involved. Investigators also confirmed that as of late 2026 the Davis County Sheriff’s Office is actively investigating two additional potential burial sites tied to Jackson.

In an interview with the COLD podcasters in April of 2023 about his role investigating the Nancy Perry-Baird case, Jackson said he’d first learned she had gone missing when he’d driven by the FINA gas station where she worked and saw Chief Ray Adams and fellow officer David Ray Anderson looking for her. He also shared that he’d informed Adams and Anderson he couldn’t join the search right at that exact moment, as he was on his way to the county sheriff’s office, but according to him, ‘I says, ‘I got to go into County,’ and ‘I’m just going there and coming right back,’ I don’t remember why I was going into the sheriff’s office.’ Based on a timeline of events from an official report authored by officer Anderson, Jackson’s arrival at the scene of Perry-Baird’s disappearance would’ve occurred at approximately 7:30 PM, after she had been missing for about two hours, and it is highly likely that the county offices were closed at this time, as it was after business hours on a federal holiday.

Later in Jackson’s interview with COLD, he made a contradictory statement implying he was on the scene five minutes prior to when Nancy was presumably abducted from her workplace, saying: ‘I wished I would’ve had some kind of an inclination to stick around five minutes, I would’ve loved to have caught somebody doing that.’ The podcast published portions of Jackson’s interview in a podcast episode titled ‘The Convenient Alternative’ in May of 2023,’ and several weeks after its release, detectives from the Davis County Sheriff’s Office and the Layton Police Department visited him at his residence in Idaho; it was at this time consented to speak with investigators and to submit to a polygraph examination about Perry-Baird’s disappearance.

A partial recording of that interrogation obtained by COLD through an open records request showed Jackson denied any involvement in Perry-Baird’s disappearance and he expects to learn the truth of what’d happened to her in the afterlife: ’I’m looking forward to seeing Nancy, I didn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t do murder-type things.’ During a polygraph examination that was administered to him on June 15, 2025, Jackson repeatedly answered ‘no’ when asked if he’d physically caused Perry-Baird’s disappearance, if she was dead or dying the last time he’d seen her, or if he could take investigators to Perry-Baird’s body; detectives also questioned him about confirmed instances of the child sex crimes he committed that were unrelated to the Perry-Baird case. A detective later told him that he did not believe he was fully honest in his answers.

During a polygraph examination he was administered on June 15, 2025, Jackson repeatedly answered ‘no’ when asked if he’d physically caused Perry-Baird’s disappearance, if she was dead or dying the last time he’d seen her, or if he could take investigators to Perry-Baird’s body, and detectives also questioned him about confirmed instances of the child sex crimes he committed that were unrelated to the Perry-Baird case. A detective subsequently told Jackson he did not believe Jackson was fully honest in his answers.

As of October 2026, the seventy-eight-year-old Jackson is considered a person of interest in Nancy Perry-Baird’s disappearance, but he is not the only one: investigators have also speculated about the possible involvement of other members of the former East Layton Police Department, including Jackson’s former colleague, David Anderson. Per Sergeant Kirkman, ‘we have various theories about what we think may have happened. We’re working off those. This case is still very active.’

John Sparks: another name that came up in the COLD Podcast is John Sparks, an ex-boyfriend of Nancy’s that she dated before she met her husband. A longtime suspect in the case, former East Layton police officer Thomas Richard Jackson, explicitly redirected attention toward Sparks in interviews, and it’s also worth mentioning that his brother is Kelly Sparks, who later served as the Sheriff of Davis County. Because of this familial connection, the COLD Podcast raised questions regarding whether John Sparks’ status as an ex-boyfriend created a potential conflict of interest within local law enforcement’s handling or review of the file. As of October 2026 nothing officially links him to Nancy’s disappearance.

The disappearance of Nancy Perry-Baird remains unsolved as of October 2026; the Davis County Sheriff’s Office recently assigned an investigator to review the cold case, in cooperation with the Layton City Police Department.

Works Cited:
Cawley, Dave. ‘Son of woman claimed to have been abducted by serial killer Ted Bundy breaks silence.’ (September 24, 2026). Taken from ksl.com on October 3, 2026.
Cawley, Dave. ‘Davis County deputies excavate back yard of former police officer in search of cold case victim.’ (October 1, 2026). Taken October 3, 2026 from ksl.com
McFall, Michael. ‘Detectives take Another look at Woman’s 4th of July Disappearance.’ (July 5, 2014). Taken March 13, 2023 from archive.sltrib.com