I have been searching for Bundy’s gas receipts for YEARS. I’ve always struggled with insomnia, and last night at around 4 AM found a TB website I never came across before and read through EVERYTHING. Thank you to the ‘Ted Bundy Archives’ WordPress page and Kevin Sullivan for this information.
Rhonda Stapley was born on August 19, 1953 to Rulon and Vivian Stapley in Richfield, Utah. Rulon (who seemed to go by his middle name of Floyd) was born on July 22, 1928 in Joseph, UT and Vivian was born on October 19, 1933 in Austin, UT. The couple were wed on April 11, 1948, in Coconino, Arizona and eventually settled down in the Salt Lake City area. Together they had 4 children: two boys (Rulon Dale and Michael John) and two girls (Rhonda Karol and Bonita Rae). Mr. Stapley worked as an operator of a frozen food company but passed away in a plane crash on October 3, 1967 at the age of 39. Vivian had a variety of jobs in her life, and was employed as a school lunch lady, in fast food and retail stores. She remarried Stanley Redfern in 1978 and passed away at the age of 87 on October 7, 2021. The Stapley family apparently had a small-scale ‘claim to fame’ after developing a couple patents for some potato products. Rhonda graduated from Connell High school in 1971 and went on to attend the University of Utah. After completing her degree in pharmacy, the petite 4’11” brunette married Barry Robert Godding on (either) April 23/24, 1979 in SLC (according to Ancestry). In the acknowledgments portion of her book she mentions she has ‘daughters’ but doesn’t elaborate any further .
On an unusually warm and sunny day in October 1974 Rhonda Stapley was waiting for the bus to pick her up to take her back to her dormitory when a young man in a light colored VW Bug pulled up and asked if she’d like a ride: ‘just as it passed me, it stopped and he put it in reverse and backed up. He rolled down the passenger window and he says, ‘Hey where are you going?’’ When she replied ‘the University of Utah,’ he told her that’s where he was headed as well and asked if she’d like a ride, which she happily accepted. The shy young college student had been at the dentist and her mouth was still sore from the extensive work she had just had done. He introduced himself as Ted and told her he was a first year law student. Stapley immediately noticed his striking blue eyes and told him that she was close to being done with a degree in pharmacy. In an interview for the documentary ‘Ted Bundy: The Survivors,’ she shared that it ‘didn’t feel like hitchhiking, what I did. This felt like a friendly college student helping another college student, and that seemed normal and not out of place.’ But, it didn’t take long before Rhonda realized that the handsome stranger wasn’t taking the normal route back to school. When she asked him about it he politely inquired if it would be okay if he just ran a quick errand up by the zoo, to which she said no, she didn’t. But when the zoo came and went, Rhonda quickly became concerned again, to which the man simply told her that the errand wasn’t AT the zoo but near it. And that’s when things began to get extremely uncomfortable for her: ‘the ride started to become strained, he stopped talking to me altogether, he just had both hands on the steering wheel just driving.’ Desperate to escape, when Stapley reached for the door handle she realized it was missing, and that’s when she REALLY began to panic.
At around 3-3:30 PM, the young man eventually reached Big Cottonwood Canyon and ‘suddenly he pulled over. It seemed like he was looking for a place to park. At this point I did not expect a murder attempt, I was more anticipating an attempt at a romantic parking episode, and I wasn’t afraid of that either, just not interested, and wanting to get out of that potential situation without embarrassing either of us. I still thought he was a nice and somewhat charming guy right up to the moment.’ … ‘He turned a way that wasn’t the normal route to the university. You could get there that way, but it wasn’t the normal route and I questioned him about that. I said, ‘Where are we going?’And that was when the ride started to become strange. He just had both hands firmly on the steering wheel and was just driving.’
After finding a secluded spot off the beaten track, Stapley’s abductor stopped the car and turned to face her directly. The naive young Mormon woman was certain he was going to make a move on her and lean in for a kiss: ‘in my mind, I think he’s looking for a place to pull over and park and make out.’ The thought of such casual intimacy with a complete stranger was something she wasn’t comfortable with, not only because of her devout faith but also her sore mouth. However instead of a smooch he looked at her, his bright blue eyes now black, and said completely without emotion: ‘I am going to kill you.’ … ‘Then he puts his hands ’round my throat and starts squeezing and shaking me, and I’m thinking, ‘Why? Why does he want to kill someone and why is it me?’’ After dragging her out of his VW, Rhonda’s captor proceeded to physically and sexually assault her for hours in the public canyon near a picnic table. During the assault he choked her out, repeatedly taking her to the brink of consciousness then stopping; he even slapped her across the face to wake her up. Stapley also claims that he bit her on the right breast and would yell at her, ‘you should be thanking me that you are even still alive. I can kill you anytime I want.’ She said that: ‘he was angry, more angry than I’ve ever seen anybody. His fists were clenched and his veins were bulging on his forehead and his neck, and his face was bright red. His eyes were almost black.’ Interesting fact about the bite: Rhonda said the marking reappeared roughly forty years later (which immediately made me think of the stigmata markings on Christ during his crucifixion).
When his back was briefly turned and he was ‘distracted by something near his car,’ Stapley was able to escape her captor by jumping into a ‘fast moving mountain river’ and floating to safety: ‘As soon as I jumped up and started to run, I fell into a fast-moving mountain stream, which is probably what saved my life.’ When she got far enough away (I got the impression she was at one point unconscious while in the stream and woke up land), she managed to get herself out of the water then walked the roughly ten miles back to the University of Utah. She traveled mostly through the woods, petrified that her attacker would find her if she walked along the main roadway. She credited her new boots as one of the main reasons she was able to make the long walk back, and on the CrimePiper website, user ‘Fra La’ commented that ‘she has added yet another reason why she was on foot, she had new hiking boots to break in. New details cropping up all the time, lol. Too many details.’ To this, site creator (and good friend of mine) Erin Banks replied: ‘convenient plot twist to explain why she still had her pants on when she walked back home for 6-7 hours. The boots were a brilliant idea, I’ll give her that (when Stapley jumped in the running water she claimed that her pants were still around her ankles).’ After her long journey back to the University of Utah, Rhonda took a long, hot shower then assessed her injuries: she had bruising on her face, a large ‘goose-egg’ over her eye, bruises and markings all over her body (but especially around the neck), and a few broken ribs. Somehow, no one ever questioned her about any of it, including her friends, roommates, and professors, who all saw her routinely after the incident. Despite the headlines she saw that reported other women from the Salt Lake area were vanishing at an alarming rate, Stapley kept the incident to herself and didn’t come forward with her story until 2016.
Because Rhonda left some of her personal belongings (including her drivers license) behind in her abductor’s car, she was afraid that he would somehow eventually track her down. But, thankfully she never updated the DMV with her new mailing address after she moved so he couldn’t locate her through her ID. The identity of her attacker remained a mystery until roughly a year after her assault, when she saw his face in a newspaper in August 1975 when it was reported that a local law student was arrested for the unsuccessful kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. After Bundy (who she referred to as ‘her bad guy’) was finally caught, Stapley said that his arrest brought not only relief but also a ‘wave of guilt. It was another proof that it was him. ‘That’s the guy.’ Maybe I should have done something about it.’ She rationalized her decision of not going to LE because other women had since reported him and she felt that she had nothing else of value to add. She also feared unwanted attention from those who wondered why she didn’t report the incident to police earlier.
Fearing that if her mother found out she had been assaulted she’d make her dropout of school and return home, Stapley blamed herself for accepting a ride from a stranger. Also, at the time of her abduction she was a virgin as well as a devout Mormon, and didn’t want people to think poorly or less of her if they knew she was no longer pure: ‘the teachings in the LDS church at that time was that your virtue and your chastity were the most important thing a young woman could have, and if you come to a point giving up your chastity or your life, you’re better off eternally if you die.’ … ‘I felt ashamed and embarrassed and stupid; stupid for even getting into such a dangerous situation.’ … ‘I imagined people whispering, ‘that’s that girl who was raped.’ I didn’t want attention. I still don’t.’
When enough time passed and Stapley was finally ready to date again, she left little notes all over her (shared) apartment (including underneath garbage cans) sharing where she was and who she was with. She hoped that if she ever went missing again her roommates (or the police) would eventually find them and because of them they would be able to locate her. That I do think is a little weird: were they not friendly? I have friends who are devoutly religious and they still talk openly about dating and men. It’s not forbidden, why all the secrets and weird notes? And what if the garbage can got dirty and they needed to clean it? Ever have a bag of trash leak garbage juice all over the can? It’s not pretty… personally, I would have most likely hosed it off… So what’s to say the note would have even been found?
Could you imagine how many lives Stapley could have saved if she came forward immediately after she was attacked? I stopped commenting on Facebook posts of people talking about how it was her ‘faith that forced her to keep her mouth shut and she was embarrassed and ashamed.’ I’m sorry, I just don’t buy that. Being sexually assaulted was completely out of her control, and if she went to the police right after it happened maybe Bundy would have been caught sooner, which would have prevented some of his Utah and Colorado killings as well as everything in Florida. When asked why she didn’t go to police earlier she told People magazine: ‘I thought that I just needed to put it away and make life like it was before and just pretend it never happened.’
Rhonda kept the assault to herself until 2011, when a supervisor at her POE using the same type of threatening language as Bundy did put her in an uncomfortable situation, which forced the memories of her assault to immediately come rushing back to her. The nightmares and flashbacks finally forced her to seek help: ‘I couldn’t control my tears, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I thought I was going crazy. But I knew it had to be related to the Bundy stuff, because that’s what my dreams and my nightmares and my panic attacks were about.’ Stapley sought mental health therapy, and like many other Americans turned to the internet for help. After an anonymous online friend shared a run-in with the serial killer she was finally able to gather the strength and tell loved ones what happened to her after almost 37 years: ‘there’s no group of Ted Bundy survivors that I could sign up and join. But there are other people who have experienced trauma. They can understand not wanting to tell, and the shame and embarrassment and all those things that go along with rape. The main thing I wanted to tell people was that they’re not alone. Even though their traumatic experience may be different than my traumatic experience, at least there’s someone who can recognize those feelings and people who can understand.’ Looking into it, Rhonda publicly came forward with her story in the spring of 2016: I see she did an interview with Dr. Phil on April 26, 2016 and published her book ‘I Survived Ted Bundy: The Attack, Escape & PTSD that Changed My Life’ (complete with forward by Bundy bff Ann Rule) on May 5, 2016. She also did an interview with People magazine roughly a week later on May 13, 2016.
Rhonda kept the assault to herself until 2011, when a supervisor using the same type of threatening language that Bundy used put her in an uncomfortable situation, forcing her past to immediately come back to haunt her. The nightmares and flashbacks finally forced Stapley to seek help: ‘I couldn’t control my tears, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I thought I was going crazy. But I knew it had to be related to the Bundy stuff, because that’s what my dreams and my nightmares and my panic attacks were about.’ She sought mental health therapy, and like most other Americans, turned to the internet for help. After an anonymous friend shared a run-in with the serial killer, Stapley was finally able to tell loved ones her story after almost 37 years: ‘there’s no group of Ted Bundy survivors that I could sign up and join. But there are other people who have experienced trauma. They can understand not wanting to tell, and the shame and embarrassment and all those things that go along with rape. The main thing I wanted to tell people was that they’re not alone. Even though their traumatic experience may be different than my traumatic experience, at least there’s someone who can recognize those feelings and people who can understand.’ Looking into it, she publicly came forward with her story in the spring of 2016: I see she did an interview with Dr. Phil on April 26, 2016 and published her book ‘I Survived Ted Bundy: The Attack, Escape & PTSD that Changed My Life’ (complete with forward by Bundy bff Ann Rule) on May 5, 2016. She also did an interview with People magazine roughly a week later on May 13, 2016.
Stapley stated her assault took place in the ‘autumn of 1974,’ which does line up with when Bundy was living in Utah for his second (unsuccessful) attempt at law school (he moved there from Seattle on September 2, 1974). He was living at his first SLC apartment located at 565 1st Avenue North, and from what I understand he made a decent attempt his second time around and made a point of going to most of his classes. He was in between jobs at the time, but previously worked at the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia from May 3, 1974 to August 28, 1974. He remained unemployed until June 1975, when he briefly was employed as the night manager of Bailiff Hall at the University of Utah (he was fired the next month for coming in inebriated). Bundy was still in a long distance relationship with Liz Kloepfer, even though things seemed to be strained and sort of fizzling out at that point.
In my opinion, the most damning piece of evidence against Stapley’s claims is the missing VW handle. Like Sotria Kritsonis, Rhonda claims that the passenger’s side door handle was completely missing from the car, and I’m sorry… that’s never been brought up in any other CONFIRMED Bundy case (Kritsonis does not apply). I personally don’t believe it. As Erin Banks’ points out in her book, ‘Ted Bundy: Examining the Unconfirmed Survivor Stories:’ ‘the 1968 Beetle would not open if the outside door handle was still attached to the door while the inner door handle had been dismounted, Several researchers have credibly demonstrated that in the past. If the inner latch had been discounted, the integral part of the door handle, the cylinder pin latch assembly, and mounting screws holding inside and outside of the door handles together, and only separated by the door/panel itself, would sit loosely in the door. If one now tugged on the outer latch in an attempt to open the door, one would inevitably pull out the entire door handle from the outside.’ I don’t think I need to go on, as this right here proves there really was no way she would have been able to let herself in the vehicle if it had no inside handle. The only other thing I want to touch on regarding this topic is when I was in Seattle I listened to the Phantom Prince on Audible and I remember thinking to myself how often Ted drove around in his Beetle with Liz, Molly, and other friends… if he took the door handle off his vehicle he would have the run the risk of someone in his life seeing it, and no one in his inner circle ever reported seeing it missing. We also have to remember that he was drunk and/or high a good chunk of the time he was out ‘hunting’… he could have very easily forgotten that he took it off, running the risk of getting caught by Liz (or any other woman he was sleeping with). Lets also think back to Carol DaRonch, who had no problem exiting Bundy’s car on her own and never said anything about a missing door handle when she had her own experience with him a month later in early November, 1974.
Another thing about Stapley’s story that jumps out of me is her complete lack of any sort of substantial head wound. Most of Ted’s victims (if not all of them) suffered from some sort of skull injury in order to help incapacitate them, but Rhonda said her attacker didn’t go after her in any such way. He also didn’t use any sort of medium (like a cable or rope) in his strangulation technique aside from his hands, which is unusual for him (for example, with Cheryl Thomas he used a pair of pantyhose to choke her). Also, despite the fact that Stapley said it was an unseasonably warm fall day, the water she floated away in still would have been incredibly cold: according to my research, the waterways in and around SLC in October would have been in the high-50’s to low/ mid-60’s, and experts say that you should consider any water temperature below 70 degrees Fahrenheit with extreme caution. I guess I just find it hard to believe that she would have been able to gather the energy and strength to walk the TEN MILES back to her dormitory after being submerged in freezing cold water… Especially when you throw some (self-diagnosed) broken ribs, a painful dental surgery, and hours upon hours of being brutally sexually assaulted into the equation… I mean, the journey would have taken her hours, and since she traveled through the woods instead of the main roadway the conditions would have been a bit rough and less than ideal. In her book, Banks reports that when you take her height, weight, and normal everyday level of activity into account it would have taken her at least 15-20 minutes per mile of walking (and that was a healthy, uninjured individual). Also, when Stapley woke up after moving down the river she reported it was dark outside (meaning it was after 7 PM), which is the time of sunset in SLC in October. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure her adrenaline was really pumping, especially at first… but her walk back would have taken hours, it would have eventually worn off.
Additionally, Ms. Banks spoke with residents of SLC that lived near the area of Cottonwood Canyon where Stapley said she was assaulted. They reported that the level of water present at that time of year would have been minimal, and the depth of a puddle: ‘just a few short inches high during fall and winter.’ Banks also said there were lots of large boulders in the water which would have further prevented Stapley from ‘floating away from her abductor.’ Something interesting Erin points out in her book is that after the assault Stapley attempted suicide but half-way through had a change of heart. She called a suicide prevention hotline for help, and the man that answered her call (named Dave) immediately dropped the phone and rushed to her address in order to save her life. I mean… I work for a health insurance company, I have a pretty good understanding of HIPAA laws and how important it is to follow them. Even in a time as unregulated as the 1970’s, I never heard of a crisis hotline employee (or ANY other mental health professional) breaking every single rule put in place so they could go and help the person that called in. Stapley and ‘Dave’ somehow ran into each other again years later (he had since earned his doctorate), and after catching up a bit and telling him her story he told her that she was his hero and that he ‘put her on a pedestal right alongside my family members who work as first responders or who have been in military combat.’ I mean, what? Why would anyone say that to her?
Stapley is one of a few women that claimed to have been kidnapped and/or assaulted by Ted Bundy and lived to tell the tale. I know one individual from my Facebook group that said she was a victim of his but requested that I respect her privacy and not pry any further (she is working on a book from what I understand)… I know of a few others that have some pretty obvious mental health issues. Please keep in mind, when I say this I’m not talking about his confirmed victims, like Karen Sparks/Carol DaRonch/Kathy Kleiner/Karen Chandler/Cheryl Thomas. Just like Sotria Kritsonis (whose abduction site was my very last stop when I went to Seattle in April 2022), Rhonda came forward later in life to tell the tale of her run in with Ted. On February 9, 2018, Kritsonis did an interview with KIRO-TV where she discussed her 1972 alleged kidnapping attempt, which was very similar to Stapley’s: it also began at a bus stop on her way to college (just minus the dental surgery) and the car she got into was also missing its passengers side door handle. Just as a side note, one thing that does irritate me is how people say Rhonda isn’t ‘attractive enough to be a Bundy victim,’ which absolutely drives me nuts because first of all, attractiveness is subjective and (in my opinion), she was a pretty girl in her younger years. I mean, I personally think the serial killer was an opportunist that took advantage of whoever he happened to stumble across… Let’s look at his younger victims, like Kimberly Leach, or Lynette Culver. This is probably borderline inappropriate to say but I don’t think Bundy looked at these TWELVE YEAR OLD GIRLS and thought, ‘ they’re attractive and totally my type, they’re going to be my next victim.’ He simply took them because they were there.
The reviews for Stapley’s book on Amazon seem to be mostly good: as of December 2023, it had 677 reviews and a rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars. Some are overwhelmingly positive, for example one was written by a private investigator that said it ‘should be mandatory reading at all police academies’ Another that said: ‘the author’s story of survival, and struggle with PTSD is incredible. This is one person’s description of how trauma influenced her decision-making process. From an outsider’s point of view, it was enlightening, terrifying, awe-inspiring and educational. I encourage all law enforcement officers to read and study this book.’ However, others completely write off her story, and say that the entire scenario never happened and was made up for attention. This is just my personal observation, but most of the people that picked up her book and believed her story seem to be true crime novices, and didn’t have a very complete understanding of Bundy’s story, where the ones that were doubtful have a stronger background in true crime and have a deeper understanding of the case.
On June 22, 2016, Rhonda went on KATU’s morning show and told the host that her alleged encounter with Bundy was more serious and relevant than Carol DaRonch’s because she was sexually assaulted but DaRonch wasn’t, saying: ‘she actually escaped as soon as she got into the car so she wasn’t really assaulted.’ It’s absurd to think that because DaRonch wasn’t raped or brutally beaten that she wasn’t ‘really assaulted.’ The woman fought off a crowbar and escaped with a handcuff around her wrist. She clearly suffered horribly at the hands of her attacker. Of course she was assaulted.
I always wondered how Stapley’s family and other loved ones felt about her story, specifically if her husband and daughters believed her. Apparently, Barry Godding didn’t fully support his wife’s decision to publicly come forward after so many years and was even less enthused at the idea of her writing a book. She said that he liked to throw temper tantrums about her ‘quest to tell her truth and often insulted her with insensitive remarks about finally getting over that pesky rape all those years ago.’ I went through Rhonda’s FB page a few times in preparation for this article and interestingly enough, Erin Banks had the same mentality that I did about a heart attack Barry suffered the same year that she came forward about what happened to her, saying: ‘in a 2016 status update on one of her Facebook profiles Stapley speaks of how relieved she is that her husband is finally recovering after his heart attack, for she can now finally get back to promoting her and selling her book. I found this statement to be incredibly tone deaf and revealing as to her own level of empathy: ‘Barry seemed to think that I was dredging up ancient history for some devious purpose. I got the impression he thought that I was competing with him, that I had decided to become upset about a long ago trauma just as he was dealing with his own health crisis.’’
When I write an article, I have a set list of resources I go through, such as Reddit, YouTube, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and so on and so forth. One of my favorites is CrimePiper, which is run by Erin Banks, who is the author of the book I mentioned earlier. When I visited the sites files section something interesting caught my eye: a professor at the University of Utah and Rhonda’s one time mentor through the LDS church named Dr. Victor B. Cline published a paper on May 24, 2009 titled ‘Pornography’s Effects on Adults & Children,’ and on page nine he mentions Bundy. Rhonda said that Dr. Cline was ‘the first man to take a personal interest in her after the attack,’ and he requested to be assigned as her home teacher. Typically this is something the church does with all of the members of a family present, however in Stapley’s case he worked with her alone. The PhD told her he was famous and that people paid good money to receive his counseling services, but because they were meeting through the church he was providing her with those services for free. A great point that Ms. Banks brings up is that when Dr. Cline reached out to Rhonda, he had no idea that she had been assaulted by Bundy, and ‘she believed he, a virtual stranger, just ‘seemed to sense’ that something was wrong with her. To take such an extensive and personal interest in a female student, considering the obvious possible connotations of the nature of his interest, is astounding for someone who has much to lose as Cline did. It’s ‘not recommended’ by the LDS that a man and a woman who are not married or not otherwise related to one another interact without witnesses present or in great frequency. Still, Cline showered young Rhonda with attention. (Banks, 19).’ So, this man that apparently had a big impact on Stapley in her post sexually assaulted years wrote a paper that mentioned Bundy, and suddenly two years later she comes forward claiming that he assaulted her in October 1974? Come on.
Stapley still lives in SLC with her husband, and in a 2016 interview with People magazine she referred to herself as ‘an inventor’ as well as a pharmacist, wife, mother, and grandmother. In January 2003 Rhonda and her sister Bonita Hunt founded SnuggleHose, which is defined on her website as ‘warm, soft, cozy covers for CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machines for patients with sleep apnea) hoses and ventilator machines.’ Stapley came up with the idea after she was diagnosed with sleep apnea in June 2002 and started using a CPAP. She is active on multiple social media platforms and even participates in ‘Ted Bundy trivia’ on the Facebook group ‘TB: All Opinions Matter.’ About her experience of living through being raped by Bundy, she said: ‘I think my experience with Ted Bundy affected every aspect of my life. It changed my level of self-confidence, it changed my trust, even my trust in myself. I became more introverted, less outgoing.’
I want to end this article with a quote from Erin Banks’ book: ‘Mrs. Stapley’s worth as a human being is indisputable. Her story is not.’ Before I wrote this article, a (very small) part of me wondered if *maybe* the young college student was raped (even though I didn’t think it was by Bundy). But, then I remember when I had my wisdom teeth extracted: my mouth was incredibly sore and puffy, plus I was numb from the novocaine. Not to mention I was bloody and stuffed full of gauze. Was Bundy really so hell bent on sexually assaulting a woman that he did it to one in such an off putting situation? Stapley said that he even raped her orally, which surely would have not been ideal for him considering the condition of her mouth (she said he was so rough that he ripped out some of the stitches in her cheek, which would have only made her 10 mile walk home even more hellish). Oddly enough, much like the bite mark on her breast that reappeared forty years after it happened, on one occasion when Stapley was thinking about the assault and how her oral stitches were ripped out her gums began to bleed for no reason. I mean, if I were Rhonda and I had just endured hours upon hours of hell, I would have looked for the first person available for help, not wandered back to campus, probably unsure of where I was going, hoping and praying I’d make it back alive. There’s just so many parts of this story that don’t really make any sense. A small part of me does feel bad for doubting a potential rape victims story, but I can’t help it.
Johanna Tabitha Virginia Strong Leatherbury was born on May 17, 1953 to Jack and Gayle (nee Strong) in Cedar City, UT. Mr. Leatherbury was born on September 16, 1916 in Eureka, UT and her mother was born on July 21, 1920. The couple were wed on May 22, 1939 in Heber City and eventually settled down in Holladay outside of Salt Lake City. Jack was a graduate of Brigham Young University and worked for the Union Pacific railroad for 43 years. The couple had ten children: six boys (Jack, Charles, Paul, Christopher, Marshall, and Greg) and four girls (Roxanne, Johanna, Suzanne and Jacquine, who died the same day she was born on February 22, 1940).
Johanna stood at 5’3″ tall and weighed 135 pounds at the time of her murder. In 1971, she graduated from Olympus High School and was employed at Ballast Hall, a dormitory at the University of Utah. She was also a member of the Holladay Sixth Ward Chapel, a branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The evening of August 20, 1971 was no different than any other: before she left her family home to go hang out with her friends the 17 year-old said goodbye to her parents and siblings. It would be the last time the Leatherbury’s would see her alive. The night turned into morning, and she never came home. This wasn’t like Johanna at all and her family knew right away that something was wrong. Immediately they began to search the area in hopes of finding her.
Described by one of her brothers as ‘thoughtful and kind,’ Johanna was very well liked by her peers and was deeply loved by family and friends. She always made time to visit her grandfather at the VA, who was an injured World War II veteran and loved spending time with her nieces, who said their aunt would often take them out for coffee with her friends and never treated them like children. Like most teenagers on the cusp of adulthood, Leatherbury liked going out with friends and ‘hanging out:’ on the evening of Friday August 20th, she met up with friends at a popular hangout referred to as ‘The Complex,’ which is best described as a vacant field where kids from the areas high schools went to hang out. Leatherbury had just graduated and was moving on to college (most likely the University of Utah where she worked), and it’s important to keep in mind it was the end of August, which is right before school starts up again. Of the spot, Jack Leatherbury said that it was just a normal teenage haunt, and that the areas two schools (Skyline and Olympus High) were just a five minute, 1.7 mile drive apart so many of the students knew each other from growing up in the same area: ‘the kids from Skyline and Olympus High School all hung out at this area. They played games and did what teenagers do.’
I have two different reports as to where Johanna was last seen: in an article published by The Ogden Standard-Examiner on August 24, 1971, it stated that ‘Miss Leatherbury was last seen Friday night when she drove a friend home.’ However the more frequently given account is that she was last seen getting into a car with two unidentified gentlemen containing an unknown number of people by friends near The Complex (which was located at the intersection of State Street and 2100 South Street) at roughly 11:00 PM on August 20, 1971 (I read one source that said it was as late as 11:25 PM and listed the location at 2500 South State Street and West Temple). No one caught the type of car that Johanna got into, however the public was given a description of two different makes and models that were said to be in the area where she was last seen: on August 26th just days after Leatherbury was murdered LE issued an all points bulletin on two cars and their drivers that were reported to be near The Complex. One of them was a 1959/60 black (or dark green) Chevrolet Impala with an engine that ‘sounded like a washing machine’ that was driven by an approximately 24 year-old male with ‘hair down to his ears.’ The second vehicle in question was a 1970/71 Dodge Charger with white racing stripes painted on the sides and a black stripe on the rear that was driven by a person described as ‘young and blonde.’ Unfortunately, it seems that police were unsuccessful in their search efforts.
The day after Johanna was last seen her older brother Jack heard a report on the radio that immediately alarmed him: ‘it was a bulletin on the radio that said there had been a body discovered in the surplus canal out by the Great Salt Lake.’ … ‘Good Lord, I could tell you where we were about every hour from the day to the time they discovered her.’ Per KSL, her younger sister, Roxanne said that ‘when she didn’t show up, we all began to panic.’ The Leatherbury family’s search attempts didn’t yield any answers; however her body was quickly discovered the next day.
On August 21, sometime between 4 – 4:45 PM the naked remains of Johanna Leatherbury were discovered in a marshy area near the Great Salt Lake by David Russell and Neal Draper. The men happened to be fishing in the canal, which was located about a half mile west of the west stock bridge on the Goggin’s Drain by the Great Saltaire, an abandoned entertainment complex that had been destroyed in a fire in November 1970. Goggins Drain is a bypass canal that drains water from a surplus canal and helps transport water from 21st South to the Great Salt Lake. At first the two fishermen thought they found an old department store mannequin, however after they brought it to shore and further inspected it they quickly realized that wasn’t the case at all: it was the corpse of a young woman.
Because it was 1971 and not 2023 the men had no cell phones, so they drove to the closest town of Magna, UT to inform law enforcement about their discovery. Once detectives arrived on the scene and pulled the body out of the water it was obvious to them what happened to the young woman: she had been shot in the chest and head nine times and stabbed in the chest and stomach four times (I did see it reported she was stabbed five times and another that said was shot only three times). She had also been raped and pistol whipped. In the very beginning, responding officers thought the body may have belonged to 17-year-old Sheri Martin, who disappeared from her POE of Winchells Donut House on August 12, 1971. Martin’s body was eventually found by two hikers 15 miles south of Wendover on September 6; she also died from gunshot wounds.
Captain Pete ‘ND’ Haywood of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department told the public that they’re ‘looking into many leads in the killing of Leatherbury, but we have no suspects at this time.’ Strangely enough, a 20 year-old woman named Leeora Looney disappeared the same evening in August 1971 that Johanna was murdered after she was reported missing from her POE at a doughnut shop in Lakewood. According to court documents, her car and purse were also both left behind, completely untouched. Several witnesses reported seeing two men in the shop just before she disappeared that were later identified as serial killers Sherman Ramon McCrary and Carl Taylor. Three days after Looney disappeared her naked remains were found in a remote field; she had been strangled, raped, and shot in the head. It was later determined McCrary and Taylor were responsible for her death as well as Shari Martins. The McCrary family is suspected of at least 24-26 additional murders (I’ve read varying amounts) and all involved young women that were last seen alive at doughnut shops throughout Colorado, Texas, Florida, Kansas City and Utah between 1970 and 1971. In 1988, 62-year-old Sherman Ramon McCrary hung himself in his cell while serving time in prison; he would have been eligible for parole in 1997.
It wasn’t long before police identified the woman as Johanna Leatherberry. After she was found, SLC deputies thoroughly combed the marshes that bordered the Great Salt Lake for clues. Additionally, on August 22-23 two Utah National Guard helicopters helped in the search and they combed through the area where her remains were found; unfortunately, this failed to find anything of value. Detectives speculated that she was killed early in the morning after she disappeared then was transported to Goggins Drain. After arriving, her assailants dragged her body into the water, where it floated for roughly eight hours before it was discovered. Investigators found multiple tire tracks and footprints near where the remains were recovered as well. On August 26, 1971 detectives executed a search warrant to enter an undisclosed Salt Lake residence, where they confiscated a .22 caliber gun as well as a switchblade, which may have been connected with the crime. Ballistics tests were done on the weapon and comparisons were made with slugs taken from the girls remains. A total of three .22 caliber pistols as well as the knife were sent into the FBI crime lab in Washington DC; also sent in were the victim’s fingernail clippings, hair samples, her Chrysler car, and her purse as well as its contents. Captain Haywood told the media that all possible leads were being investigated and any pistol which deputies came across in their routine duties were being run through ballistics.
At first, the investigation was on a fast track and LE were certain an arrest would quickly be made, however all leads were deemed to be a ‘dead ends’ and fizzled out; the case quickly went cold. Weeks turned into months, which turned into years, then decades. Hopes for a quick arrest vanished after multiple persons of interest were questioned and cleared. In an article published on August 27, 1971, it’s reported that at one point five full time detectives were assigned to the Leatherbury case. They conducted interviews with hundreds of Johanna’s family members, friends, school/church mates, acquaintances, and coworkers, but no one could provide them with anything of value. One of Captain Haywood’s ‘hottest leads’ was a phone call from a man that wished to remain anonymous that claimed he had seen a girl abducted near the County Complex the same night Johanna was last seen. Officers asked the man to call them back and Haywood even offered to protect his identity.
Captain Haywood said that one of LE’s biggest handicaps regarding the investigation was that no one that was with the victim at The Complex the night she disappeared ever came forward to offer information. Because of this, investigators had to keep going back to find individuals to check out certain pieces of information, which took up a lot of valuable time and made their job much harder. Haywood speculated there were at least a dozen kids at The Complex the night Leatherbury disappeared (if not more), but nobody wanted to come forward and volunteer anything helpful. It also made him wonder if maybe there was some form of illegal activity going on that night that nobody wanted to get in trouble for.
According to KTSU, today the vacant lot where Leatherbury was last seen is now occupied by The Salt Lake County Clerk’s Office and an assisted living development. One odd fact about this case is that her wallet and checkbook were found on the roof of the World Motor Motel which was located at 1900 South and State Street in SLC. Eventually, two juveniles (one of them was an industrial school escapee) came forward that had items in their possession that belonged to Johanna; they were questioned, cleared, and released. The boys admitted to rifling through her Chrystler early on Saturday, August 21st and stealing her purse, which she left behind on the backseat. The two then went through the bag, throwing its contents on the roof of the motel; they threw the purse itself in some nearby bushes. LE found the belongings thanks to a breeze that blew several of Leatherbury’s papers off the roof of the motel, which alerted them to the location of the items as they combed the area for evidence. Detective Haywood said that Leatherbury’s vehicle was found a couple blocks away from The Complex parked on Westminster Avenue between State Street and 200 East near the Salt Lake County Complex in the early morning just hours after she disappeared.
A night watchman from the Morton Salt Company told LE that he saw a brown International Harvester Scout driving in the area where Johanna’s remains were recovered at around 5 AM on August 21; this is the same time that investigators suspect her remains were dumped. When detectives located the vehicle’s owner and spoke to him, he was cleared as well. Captain Haywood said of the killer, ‘there’s no doubt in the world that this is a crime committed by a local person.’ The SLC Chief of Detectives seemed to back him on his claim, saying that Leatherbury’s body was found in ‘practically an unknown spot’ and that the individual would have had to had to have known the area ‘intimately’ to find his way in and out on the three trails leading to the area. One of those three paths was useless and led directly to a muddy mess.
On September 5, 1971, Haywood announced that he saw links between Johanna’s case and the brutal murders of William Rulon Shaw and a young delivery driver named Mike Bown. Shaw was a 65 year old florist that was killed three days after Johanna on August 24, 1971 after he was shot during a robbery of his shop. Michael Preston ‘Mike’ Bown was a 23 year-old deliveryman in Provo and was shot in the back of the head on September 2, 1971 while dropping off bread at Natter’s Market on South 700 East Street. The bullet struck him in his left cheek and exited through his right eye, killing him instantly. Another employee, 33 year-old Carolyn Kingston was also shot in the head through her right temple but survived. The suspect got away with less than a hundred dollars. There was a second delivery man on the scene and I read conflicting reports that either the suspect’s gun jammed or that he ran out of ammo, but regardless as to what happened that person’s life was spared that day. According to him, the robber was between 18 to 20 years of age, had curly hair, was short and well groomed. Left behind at the crime scene was a gold Timex watch with a dark blue face and a blue and gray striped nylon band. The timepiece used Roman numerals rather than numbers and is strongly believed to have belonged to the suspect. Additionally, there were reports of a 1959 Black Chevrolet Impala four-door sedan at the scene with its engine running, much like the one seen the night Johanna disappeared. Haywood said that he saw similarities in the deaths of Bown, Leatherbury, and Shaw: they all involved a .22 caliber pistol and that the ‘mode of operation’ in the Bowe and Shaw homicides were similar.
At the time Johanna was murdered Bundy was living in Seattle at the Rogers Rooming house on 12th Avenue and was in a long term relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer. He was also an undergraduate psychology student at the University of Washington (although he was in between semesters at the time, as it was the middle of August). At the time he was a delivery driver for Pedline Supply Company, which was a family-owned medical supply company (he was there from June 5, 1970 to December 31, 1971). One of the first things that jumped out at me regarding Johanna being a possible Bundy victim is the fact that she was shot multiple times. None of Ted’s victims were ever shot, and aside from Carol DaRonch’s claim that he pulled out a gun during her attempted kidnapping I never heard of him using such a weapon in any capacity. The only other unconfirmed victim I wrote about that suffered from gunshot wounds is Susan Wickersham. On July 11th, 1973 at 11:30 PM, the 17-year-old dropped the family car off at the restaurant her mother was working at in Bend, Oregon then left to wait across the street for some friends to pick her up. When they never showed up, she decided to walk home instead and was never seen alive again. Wickersham’s skeletal remains were found in the woods by a man collecting firewood on January 20, 1976. Examination of her skull by the state medical examiner’s office determined she had suffered from a gunshot wound to the head. Personally, I don’t think Bundy killed Susan and it seems like her family doesn’t either (I briefly spoke with one of her SIL’s on FB and she agrees with me).
Officials in charge of Leatherbury’s murder said that most of the files related to the case were damaged by flooding at the police station years ago. Despite going cold, her case is still considered ‘active’ and officials exhumed her body in 2017; the results of this examination have not been shared with the public or even her family, which deeply upsets them. Johanna’s niece Sandy said that they ‘weren’t privy to hardly anything. We appealed for the file, and we were denied.’ … ‘She deserved more. She deserved to have whoever did this to be caught.’ … ‘We just didn’t have any follow-through. There was no follow-through. It was just put up on the shelf and left.’ … ‘I am so angry and frustrated because there was a door being slammed in our face all of the time.’ However, a spokeswoman for the Unified Police Department named Melody Gray disagreed with that statement, explaining that the case is still active and that they ‘have a full-time cold case investigator and he has actively been working this case including right now.’
A newsletter for the police society VIDOCQ dated December 15, 2015 mentions a presentation the organization put on regarding the case of Johanna Leatherbury (looking through their website I couldn’t find any additional information on her). In the article, Deputy Police Commissioner Bill Gill reported that Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Todd Grey was able to secure a sample of Leatherbury’s DNA as well as her mandible for further testing. The same article mentioned that the group was going to speak with a serial killer named ‘Robert Lee Sales,’ who was serving time at the Utah State Prison for murders similar in nature to Leatherbury’s. Incarcerated since 1973, Sells raped and murdered multiple young woman around Johanna’s age in the early 1970’s. He was convicted of the murder of JoAnn Poulsen from Corinne, UT, who was recovered from the PineView Reservoir on September 26, 1971. Oddly enough she disappeared on August 21, 1971, which is the same day that the remains of Leatherbury’s were recovered.
About her sister, Roxanne Leatherby-Brough said that Johanna ‘was a good kid. She tried hard to please other people, help us all. I don’t know. I miss her a lot.’ The remaining members of the Leatherbury family haven’t gotten much information related to Johanna’s case over the years, and unfortunately both of her parents died before seeing their daughter’s killer brought to justice: Gayle passed away at the age of 64 on November 6, 1984 and Mr. Leatherbuty died at the age of 73 on May 6, 1990. Their son Jack said he watched as the gruesome details and gnawing unknown tore his parents apart, and because of the death of their daughter they both went to their graves completely changed people. A few of Johanna’s siblings have passed away as well: her brother Paul died at the age of 55 on November 23, 1997 in Murray, UT (which is coincidentally where the Fashion Place Mall is located, which is where Carol DaRonch’s attempted abduction took place). According to his obituary, he was a past President of the Utah Arabian Horse Association and he loved his horses, fishing, and traveling. He had a great zest for life and was known to those who loved him as ‘the world’s greatest salesman.’ On July 5, 2012 Greg Leatherbury died of complications from diabetes at the age of 61. He was known to loved ones as ‘the great organizer’ because he excelled at planning events and activities, including an annual Father’s Day Open Golf Tournament. Charles Leatherbury died at the age of 73 on December 27, 2018; he was in the US Army and fought in the Vietnam War.
Because of their extreme dissatisfaction with the way law enforcement handled the investigation, the Leatherbury family recently joined forces with the Utah Cold Case Coalition to help get answers in Johanna’s case. The coalition is a Utah based organization that helps to bridge the gap between police and the families of cold case murder victims. Two of Johanna’s nieces, sisters Sandy and Cindy, said they were told that information related to their aunt’s case could not be shared because it is still an open and active investigation. Cindy Leatherbury-Grange commented that: ‘we really have felt the case was solvable, but now it’s so many years past.’… ‘We’re wondering if these people are dead, what has happened. Thirty years ago, we might have had a chance.’ The coalition’s co-founder Jason Jensen is certain Johanna’s killer is local to Salt Lake City. In a post on their FB page about the Leatherbury case, the ‘Cold Case Coalition’ commented that: ‘it’s been exactly 48 years since Johanna Leatherbury was found dead in a drainage ditch near Saltair in Salt Lake County. She had been raped, shot, and stabbed. 48 YEARS. Yet Unified P.D. won’t release any records because it’s ‘still an open case’s This is the same response we get from Unified in every case. If you haven’t solved the case in nearly half a century, can someone else have a try?’
In an article published by ABC4, Johanna’s family got an email from a Salt Lake detective in mid-February 2022 with news they’ve been waiting many, many years to receive: ‘They have identified new DNA from the crime scene and he was securing funds to send it to their lab for testing and hopefully he’ll be able to use genetic genealogy.’ Jensen commented that this new evidence could be a variety of things: ‘if it was an article of clothing or something that was handled by an investigator 30 or 40 years ago chances are great that it’s an incidental from an investigator. But if it’s something concrete like semen, then it’s going to be the bad guy.’ This technique is quickly becoming very common with law enforcement and helps to identify familial DNA, and from there authorities are able to narrow down the search in hopes of finding a possible suspect. The article said it would be months before LE got the results of the DNA analysis and considering it’s now the end of 2023, I’m leaning towards them not finding anything of value from the sample. As a side note, in early 2023 Rita Curran’s killer was found in the same manner, and it was determined that her neighbor William DeRoos killed the pretty young teacher in her bed on July 19, 1971 in Burlington, VT.
On November 8th, 1974, 27 year old Ted Bundy left his apartment on 1st Avenue North in Salt Lake City and drove to the Fashion Place Mall on South State Street in Murray. From there, he attempted to kidnap 18 year-old phone operator Carol DaRonch, who was there doing some shopping after parking her maroon 1974 Camaro on the southern side of the mall’s parking lot. At the time, the storefront was occupied by Sears but today is a Dillard’s.
That evening at around 7 PM, DaRonch was standing outside a WaldenBooks when a man approached her. He identified himself as ‘Officer Roseland’ and asked if she parked by the Sears entrance of the mall. She said the man was polite and sounded well-educated. After Carol confirmed that she did, the ‘policeman’ told her that he witnessed someone attempting to break into her vehicle and requested that she go with him to assess the damage and see if anything was taken. DaRonch agreed, thinking Bundy was a real officer of the law, but once they arrived immediately realized her car was untouched and nothing at all was missing.
Despite assuring ‘Officer Roselund’ that everything was fine, Bundy was able to convince Carol to go with him back inside the mall and file an official complaint. Once inside, he began poking around the hallways, almost as if he were searching for someone. He then told Carol that ‘they’ must have taken the suspect to the nearby ‘police substation,’ then proceeded to walk her across the street to a closed laundromat on East St. South. The building was in a small, nondescript retail space and once there Ted tried to open its side door, which was conveniently locked (as the laundromat was closed). It was at that moment that DaRonch became suspicious of the ‘officer,’ and asked him for some identification. Almost as if he was waiting for the request, Ted pulled out his wallet and quickly flashed her a silver police badge. Carol immediately felt reassured and agreed to go with him to the main police station. Bundy then walked her back across the street to his waiting VW, and despite thinking it was an odd choice of vehicle for a police officer, she wondered that maybe he was working undercover and just went with it.
Once in Bundy’s Bug, the ‘officer’ immediately began heading in the opposite direction of the station. About driving for about a half-mile, he abruptly pulled the car over and onto a curb in front of McMillan Elementary School. Quickly realizing that something was wrong, Carol began panicking and demanded to know where they were going. Her captor seemed completely removed from the situation and just stared at her, not saying a word. While she tried to open the door to escape, Ted suddenly sprang to life, grabbed her left arm and slapped a handcuff on her wrist. During the struggle, DaRonch clawed and hit Bundy with such force that it prevented him from being able to get the handcuff on her other wrist.
In an effort to scare Carol, Bundy pulled out a small black pistol and threatened her with it. But instead of submitting, she continued to scream and fight against him until she was finally able to escape out of the passengers side door. Ted also got out of the car and pursued her with a crowbar, but thankfully Carol was able to flag down a passing motorist and get away.
Bundy took advantage of a hysterical and preoccupied DaRonch to quickly flee, and jumped back into his Beetle and drove off, furious that he had just let a potential victim get away. He then drove twenty-one miles away to Bountiful, where Debra Jean Kent and her parents were attending a play at Viewmont High School. When the performance went longer than expected, Debra volunteered to take the family car and pick up her two younger brothers at a local skating rink. It was only three miles away, and if traffic was light it should have been only a twenty minute round trip. Eventually an hour passed and Deb never returned to the auditorium. As more and more time went by, Mr. and Mrs. Kent grew anxious and decided to go outside and find a payphone.
After exiting the school, they were met with a sight that filled them with pure terror: in the parking lot was the family car. The Kent’s quickly realized that not only was their daughter missing, but their sons were still at the roller rink. Later that same evening, a search of the schools grounds took place, and classrooms were opened to make sure that Deb hadn’t accidentally been locked inside somehow. The Kent family and friends also searched some of the hills and canyons around Bountiful, but unfortunately they found no trace of the missing teenager.
The police initially told Belva Kent that 24 hours needed to pass before they were able to organize a search for the missing girl. In the beginning of the investigation law enforcement strongly speculated that the seventeen year old was just another runaway, but they were soon pressured into taking action. The next day, police and forensic experts combed Viewmont High School’s parking lot, and despite not finding any signs of a struggle they did find a discarded handcuff key outside of the auditorium on the western part of the school grounds. It didn’t take long for experts to determine it was a perfect fit to the handcuffs that had been used during the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch earlier that same day. It was now glaringly obvious that after DaRonch’s kidnapper fled the scene he quickly made the drive north to Bountiful, where he successfully abducted Debra Kent.
A man matching Bundy’s description was seen that evening lurking around the school, asking young women to help him ID a car in the parking lot. Raelynn Shepherd was a drama teacher at Viewmont High School who Ted repeatedly tried to lure outside. Shepherd said that he had a ‘nervousness’ about him that made her feel uncomfortable and didn’t care for the way he was looking at her. Because of that, she told him that she was too busy to help; when she saw him again at around 10:45 PM his hair was messed up and he was breathing heavily. This was about 20–30 minutes after Kent had left the school to pick up her brothers, which means Bundy returned to Viewmont after abducting her. His motivations for doing this are unclear: he may have been trying to establish an alibi by appearing in public immediately after the abduction. Or, perhaps he was looking for a second victim. We’ll never know. Additional eyewitnesses reported hearing a woman screaming in the parking lot at roughly the same time that Kent left the auditorium. Another individual came forward and reported that they saw a VW Beetle driving away from the high school.
Bundy became the prime suspect behind Deb’s disappearance after he was arrested for the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. However, law enforcement didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with the abduction. As the years passed by, it seemed less and less likely that Kents’ remains would ever be recovered. The family lived at 23 East 3500 Street South in Bountiful, and after she disappeared her mother left their porch light on for years in hopes that it would somehow bring her home. Right before he was put to death in January 1989, Bundy finally confessed to killing Deb Kent. He said that he brought her back to his apartment and after ‘keeping her for a while’ murdered her. He then put her body in his car and drove 105 miles away to Fairview Canyon, where he buried her remains about 3 feet deep, under some heavy rocks. After searching the Canyon, law enforcement found a patella (kneecap), and it is likely that her other bones were scavenged and spread around by wildlife over time. Although the ME’s office determined that the bone was human, they weren’t able to test it beyond that until 2015, when a cold-case detective stumbled across Kent’s DNA that had never been entered into the NamUs database. At that point, he reached out to Mrs. Kent, who held onto the only piece of her daughter she had left and asked if he could take the bone for genetic testing.
Although she gave the detective the patella, Mrs. Kent told him that she didn’t want to know the results. In her mind, it belonged to Debra and didn’t want to be told otherwise. Thankfully her fears were put to rest five months later, when the results came back that the bone belonged to Debra. Mrs. Kent said that her daughters murder destroyed her family: her younger son, Bill blamed himself for his sister’s death and died in an alcohol-related car accident on February 3rd, 1985. Shortly after Deb’s disappearance, Dean Kent quit his job as an oil executive, began drinking, walked out on his marriage, and fathered a child. He died from cancer at the age of 78 on January 2nd, 2016. In a 1989 interview, Belva Kent said that Ted Bundy was a ‘cancer’ that tore her family apart. She passed away on June 22, 2023.
I am constantly updating my articles when I stumble across new information and boy did I find a great new source. Needless to say, I’m reading through this now and will be updating Sandra’s article shortly.
I listed the addresses in order of how they were on the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992’; for obvious reasons I left the Palo Alto address out, as there wasn’t anything to it (despite how much I looked into it).
* Some places where Bundy lived in his earlier days were left out of the report. I added the following:
A treasure trove of Bundy related information including documents related to his escape in Colorado then again in Florida as well as the strange case of Janla Carr.
Documents thanks to https://vault.fbi.gov/Ted%20Bundy%20/Ted%20Bundy%20Part%2001%20of%2003/view
My Salt Lake City trip was a bit of a disaster right from the start: my Mom passed away in July 2022 after a six year battle with Multiple Myeloma… then we got pregnant less than a month later after trying for over 2.5 years! Then as quickly as that happened, suddenly we weren’t anymore… despite not being in the best mindset mental health-wise, by Fall I was ready to get away. So, I planned a 4 day long trip to Salt Lake City in November 2022. Unfortunately I not only missed my flight there but I missed it home as well. I guess I just wasn’t at my best and it showed. I probably should have pushed the trip off but I did get through all the places I wanted to see.
We all know that Ted left Seattle and moved to Salt Lake City to attend the University of Utah Law School in early September 1974. He resided in a few different apartments while in SLC: he lived at 565 1st Ave N from September 1974 to September 1975 then moved to 364 Douglas Street on September 26th, 1975. His 1st Ave address is roughly 15 minutes away from the cellar where Douglas Street is just 10 minutes away. In 1976 he briefly lived at 413 B Street while on trial for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch.
This site in Emigration Canyon is supposedly where Bundy killed up to 12 girls, although there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever proving he ever stepped foot in the area. Ted never mentioned taking his victims to a cave or cellar in any capacity. No longer a cave, it’s now just a weird old shack sitting right in between Donner Way and a condominium complex. In my opinion, it sounds like it’s all just a local urban legend. Watching videos about this place before I went to Salt Lake, it looks like it’s in a super sketchy area in the middle of the woods but it was right by the Donner Pass and strangely enough, the condominium nearby was built in 1966 (meaning it was there when Bundy was active in Utah). I put this off until last because I was pretty sure Ted never killed anyone here (meaning if I missed it I wouldn’t have been too upset). I’m shocked at how out in the open this place is. Once I knew where I was going it was easily accessible, with well worn pathways that have been used frequently.
Edit, November 2023: One thing I routinely try to do is go through my resources and update my articles when I find more information. When I was in Florida this past May I came across a 59 page document from the Trempealeau County Sheriff’s Department in Wisconsin regarding the case of Sandra Jean Weaver. At first, I thought about putting the new information in a simple addendum, but there’s so much that I’m just going to rewrite the entire piece. The report is broken down into four parts: the first is a write up (almost like a report) that Detective Daryl L. McBride had with Weaver’s friend, Joan Elkins at the LaCrosse Police station on January 11, 1975. The second is a verbatim interview between Glade Gamble and the Toole County Sheriff’s Department, Detective Jerry Thompson from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s department, and Officer Milo Vig from the Mesa Co. Sheriff’s Department on January 22. The third is an interview between Ken Jones and the same members of LE as the Gamble interview that took place on January 22, 1975, and the last portion is an interview with the same officers and Phillip Quintana on January 21, 1975.
Sandra ‘Sandy’ Jean Weaver was born on August 5, 1955 to Bruno and Marlene of Arcadia, Wisconsin. She had two brothers (Randy and Billy) and two sisters (Nancy and Julie); the Weavers also had a son named Joseph who sadly passed away two days after he was born in 1961. Sandy had blue eyes, was 5’7” and weighed 120 pounds; she wore her brown hair long and parted down the middle. She attended Arcadia High School, and during her time there was on the drill team, participated in the Future Homemakers of America, Girls Athletic Association, worked PT as a librarian and was the junior editor of the newspaper. After graduating in 1973, she studied commercial art at Western Wisconsin Technical Institute in La Crosse, WI.
Sandra left home in the summer of 1974 and moved to Salt Lake City, hitchhiking the entire way there with her two friends, Joan Elkins and Jeffrey L. Skarboszewski. According to an investigator for the Mesa County Sheriff’s office, after arriving in Utah the friends went to Toole, where they stayed in a canyon for a few days. It was there they met a guy named Ken Jones, who invited them to come stay in his trailer near Toole. Jeff got a job part time working with Jones father and both girls found employment full time for the Manpower program. Looking into it, Manpower appears to be sort of on the job training program based out of SLC. For their first week the girls took inventory of motion picture products, and the second week they were sent to the Wycoff warehouse (which was a trucking company); Weaver had been on the job for a little over a week when she was murdered. The position was roughly forty miles away from Jones’ trailer, and the friends hitchhiked back and forth everyday. In a conversation with her mother in June 1974, Sandra said she was planning on going home for her sister Nancy’s wedding on July 27th, but didn’t specify an exact date she planned on being back. It’s known that Weaver was a frequent, heavy drug user and had a tendency to ‘sleep around’ (oh good Lord, weren’t we all young once?). The guy she was with the night before her disappearance (a young man named Glade Gamble) said that they engaged in intercourse the night before she vanished (but more on him later)…
On Friday, June 28 Sandra and Joan bought some groceries in SLC then hitchhiked back to Jones’ trailer, arriving around 7 PM. At around 11:00 that evening a friend from their new job named Phillip Quintana (aka Phillip Martinez) showed up with the intention of spending the weekend with them (he arrived with a random friend). In addition, Jones had a friend that was staying with him that was between 18 to 20 years old and was an ‘athletic freak.’ That night, Sandra slept with Ken and Joan slept with Phill (his friend spent the night in a chair). The following day, Weaver left the residence and went to a friend named Jeanine’s trailer in Toole. There, Weaver met Glade Gamble and the two took a drive through the canyon in Jeanine’s blue VW Beetle.
At roughly 7 PM on June 29th, Weaver returned to Jones’ trailer and picked up Joan, Phillip, and his friend. From there, the group got dinner then went to a party at Jeanine’s trailer. At the gathering, Weaver introduced Elkins to a guy named Bruce Bolinder, who she had met that afternoon while driving around with Gamble. According to Weaver, Bolinder was supplying Gamble with THC. It is speculated Sandy snorted some THC and used some phenobarbital (and possibly Nembutal) at some point in the evening. There were roughly 25 people at the gathering and most of them were imbibing in some form of drug use. At some point early in the evening Phillip fell asleep on the floor of the trailer, and after a while Joan woke him up to go sleep outside in Gambles VW van. Around midnight she woke Phillip up for a second time to let him know they could catch a ride back to Jones’ trailer with Bolinder. Weaver stayed behind at Jeanine’s trailer. At some point in the conversation with law enforcement Elkins mentioned that when she left her friends trailer with Phillip, there were four vehicles in the driveway: Bruce Bolinders gold Cadillac, Glades red and white VW Bus, Jeanine’s VW Bug, and a fourth vehicle (she wasn’t sure of the make and model or its owner).
At some point during the day, Weaver purchased $15 worth of phenobarbital from Bolinder. Joan said Sandy used some the night of the party as well as on June 30 and July 1, and during this time she stayed at Jeanine’s trailer. At some point on Sunday, June 30 Elkins called Jeanine’s trailer and talked to Gamble, asking to speak to Sandy. He told her she was sleeping but that he would take them to work the next morning. On Monday, July 1, 1974 Sandra returned to Ken’s trailer to change her clothes and wake up Joan for work. Elkins told her she wasn’t feeling well and wasn’t going in that day. Weaver asked to borrow some cash, and she gave her $5 from her purse (which at some point during the day Elkins noticed was missing). Joan said Sandy was wearing blue corduroy shorts and a halter top, and this was the last time she saw her friend. The next day on July 2, she received a call from the secretary at Manpower asking why either of them hadn’t come into work. Joan told her that she was sick, to which the secretary replied, ‘yes I know, Sandy told me.’ She went on to tell her that Weaver had worked until 11:30 in the morning the day before then left and never returned.
The body of Sandra Weaver was discovered the next day on July 2, 1974 around 4:00 PM by tourists hiking in the area near DeBeque, CO by the Colorado River about sixteen to eighteen miles east of Grand Junction. Her naked body was beaten and strangled, found off a service road in the Palisades Canyon (some sources say it was DeBeque Canyon) in Colorado; the only item found on her body was ‘a tiny wooden cross on a gold chain around her neck’ (which she was most likely wearing when she was last seen). I know I’m jumping the gun a bit here but something odd is jumping out at me: two other Utah victims (Laura Ann Aime and Melissa Smith) were also both found the same way: naked only wearing a ‘small necklace.’ Additionally, both girls were strangled in the same fashion as Weaver. Sheriff Haywood has ‘no doubt’ that the killer of Aime and Smith killed Sandra as well. Additionally, Salt Lake City Detective Jerry Thompson said that the facts in the Weaver case ‘are very similar’ to the ones surrounding those of the Smith and Aime murders. She had been sexually assaulted and died by suffocation due to strangulation; her fingernails were also freshly manicured shortly before her death. Because there were no footprints or drag marks found anywhere near Weaver’s remains it’s speculated she was killed somewhere else then dumped off at the top of the canyon, and she just sort of rolled down it. Unfortunately her body wasn’t identified until January 1975: according to an article titled ‘Services Pending for Murder Victim, Weaver was identified through a nationwide check of persons reported missing. Law enforcement also found a very particular type of contact lens on the victim, and using optometric tests forensic experts were able to determine that it belonged to Weaver; dental records were also used.
In a conversation with detectives on January 11, 1975, Elkins said that Sandra was ‘pretty doped up’ when she returned to Jones’ trailer on the morning of July 1, 1974. She suspects this may have been the reason that she showed up to work without shoes on. Later in the day on July 2nd, Bolinder came to Jones’ home and visited a bit with Joan. He came to see her a few more times in the next few days and eventually invited her to move in with him, which she did a little over two weeks later in the latter part of July 1974 (bringing Glade Gamble with her). Joan finally reported Weaver as missing to the SLC police around the 5th or 6th of July; they advised her to call the Toole County Sheriff’s as well. She also shared the news with Sandra’s mother in Wisconsin. She told LE that she asked Bolinder to help her locate Weaver, but he just pushed her request off. Elkins stayed with him for about three weeks then moved in with another friend named Danny Quinn. She eventually left SLC and returned home to LaCosse on August 15, 1974. She brought all of Sandra’s belongings back with her, returning them to her parents.
Seventeen year old Dick Pehrson was a former employee of the Wycoff warehouse and a friend of the girls. He told Joan that Phillip Quintana got dropped off with Sandra the morning she disappeared but he didn’t know who was driving. He also told her that Quintana told a secretary at Manpower that Weaver had been talking to a truck driver the morning she disappeared. Additionally, the same secretary told Marlene Weaver that Quintana told her that her daughter had been seen on a bus headed for Idaho.
Bruno Weaver traveled from Arcadia to Salt Lake and Toole in November 1974 and got in touch with a number of his daughter’s friends/acquaintances; he also spoke with Quintana on the phone around the same time. During that conversation, Phillip denied going to Jeanine’s party the night of July 29 but said that his friend ‘Martinez’ was there. Mr. Weaver also spoke with Bruce Bolinder, who shared with him that a friend named Steve Symonds gave Sandra and Phillip a ride to Salt Lake City the morning of July 1st. The police report stated that ‘all of the men seemed uncooperative and hesitant to talk to Mr. Weaver.’ Jones did tell Mr. Weaver that he had a pair of Sandra’s shoes at his trailer despite both Joan and Jeff telling him she only brought two pairs with her (which were already accounted for). Skarboszeski told LE that to the best of his memory he never saw Sandra go to work without shoes on and didn’t think she would ever go to her POE barefoot.
Elkins admitted to using some of the phenobarbital Weaver bought on June 30 and July 1, but couldn’t explain how the drugs got back to Jones residence because her friend hadn’t been back to his trailer at that point (she briefly came back the morning of July 1 to borrow money and change her clothes before leaving right away for work). Strangely enough, the blue corduroy shorts that Joan claims she last saw Sandy wearing were found amongst her belongings that were returned to the Weavers.
In the second portion of the document from the Trempealeau County Sheriff’s Department, Glade Gamble sat down with members of law enforcement (specifically, the Toole County Sheriff’s Department, Jerry Thompson, and Milo Vig). The interview began at 1:35 in the afternoon on January 22, 1975 and lasted for 45 minutes. In the beginning, Gamble is shown a picture of Weaver and was asked if it resembled the individual he spent time with in June of the previous year. He said yes it did and that she was ‘a good looking girl.’ I mean, most of the ‘interview’ is traditional back and forth between suspect and police, however one particularly interesting portion jumped out at me: investigators questioned, ‘within hours of leaving you, she was murdered brutally, and I am not kidding you when I say brutally. I probably shouldn’t do this but there is a little difference isn’t there? As you can see, I don’t think many human lives deserve that kind of treatment. So if you can help me for God’s sake, give me some information. I don’t care if any drugs were involved, cause we’re not here or have no interest at all in petty crimes or drugs at this time, I am interested in that.’ In response to that, Glade said that he told them everything he knew the first time they spoke except for dates, which he didn’t elaborate on so I don’t know if he meant he forgot them or was purposely withholding information. He said the only phone number Sandra probably had was Ken Jones’ at his trailer.
Some of the key points I took away from this interview are as follows: Mr. Weaver met with Gamble at his house sometime in November 1974. He said the majority of the time he saw the two friends they were wearing shorts, although he thinks he remembers Sandy wearing pants the last time he saw her (since she was on her way to work). He made it clear to the detectives that he didn’t remember if she was wearing shoes or not the last time he saw her and had to be told by a friend that she showed up at work barefoot later that morning. Gamble was able to tell LE that he remembered she normally wore a pair of slip-on clogs but she left them behind at Jeannine’s (if she’s anything like me she probably figured she’d be back there soon enough and it was no big deal). He also speculated that Elkins may have picked the clogs up with the rest of Sandra’s belongings before she returned home to WI. He left Jeanine’s trailer at around 6 AM and speculated that Weaver was stopping back at Jones’ residence before going into work and that she would just pick up another pair of shoes there. He did share that he remembers someone saying that Joan’s purse got stolen, and wondered if it happened at the party the Saturday before Sandy disappeared. He also said that he took off the Tuesday after she disappeared but couldn’t remember the reason why.
When LE asked Gamble how Elkins felt about Bruce Bolinder he replied that she may have been a bit afraid of him in the sense that she worried he might kick her out and send her home. Apparently, he had a bit of a reputation as a ‘ladies man’ and speculated that Joan was probably aware of this and was nervous that he might get sick of her and move on; he didn’t remember the two ever arguing or fighting in any way. Also on the topic of Bruce being a ladies man, Gamble said that he thought that girls in general seemed to like him but didn’t get close with him. He also said that he thought Sandra and Joan met him on June 29th (which was the night of the party) and that he asked Sandy out a time or two but nothing ever came of it. When asked if Bollinder had a violent temper, Gamble replied that he ‘heard of him fighting but had never been there.’ He also allegedly had deep contacts in the local drug world that neither girl was aware of. When Glade was questioned on whether or not he knew of anyone that would have a reason to kill Weaver, he said he had no idea why anyone would want to ‘brutally murder a girl like this.’ and that ‘nobody really argued with her that he knew about.’ He speculated that Joan probably left them to go back to Kenny’s trailer with Phillip because she most likely ‘just got tired of Bruce.’
The detective repeated the question: why would anyone want to brutally murder a girl like Sandra, asking: ‘you certainly couldn’t say it was a sexual act because she certainly would have given in (gross).’ Gamble told them that the only thing about Weaver that upset him was that she was kind of ‘slow mentally’ and wasn’t very quick to react to things, but that he would never act on his frustrations and didn’t know how anyone could do that. When questioned about when he became aware that Sandy may have either been abducted or murdered, he said that he quickly grew suspicions after no one heard from her and that both him and Joan almost immediately wondered if she was dead after she stopped coming around: ‘I didn’t know why anyone would kill her or how or anything else but I figured she would have gotten ahold of somebody sooner or later.’ He also told detectives that he was aware that Joan had some minor drug charges but nothing major and he had some minor charges as well as a drunk driving arrest. He told them that he had no contact with Elkins in any capacity after Sandy disappeared.
Per Gamble, Sandy had taken two downers he gave her on Friday night, and that he wasn’t sure if Joan ever reported her friend as missing as he never witnessed her make a call to Toole LE. He also said he wasn’t sure if he was there when she talked to Sandy’s parents on the phone but that he was there when she made some calls to Wisconsin regarding her friend. The last time he claimed to have sex with Weaver was sometime after midnight on Sunday night/early Monday morning, but wasn’t sure what the exact time was. When asked if they engaged in anal intercourse Gamble didn’t respond to the question. To the best of his knowledge he said that he wasn’t sure if Sandy had slept with anyone else in that Friday/Saturday/Sunday time frame other than him, and that he ‘wasn’t with her all the time,’ but did clarify that he spent two nights with her. The last time he saw her she was getting into a car with Steve Simons and Scott Williams to go to SLC for work around 6 AM on Monday, July 1. He said that he learned of Weaver’s death after seeing it on the news but didn’t know when she died. By the time of the interview in early 1975 Gamble sold his VW bus and purchased a 1972 Grand Prix. He shared that even though he didn’t know her very well he knew that Joan wasn’t overly fond of cops and wasn’t sure if she would hold anything back for that reason. The interview ended with Gamble agreeing to take a voluntary polygraph examination.
The third interview took place with the same members of law enforcement and Kenneth H. Jones on January 22, 1975. He told the detectives that he met all three friends when they were ‘up hitchhiking up in Settlement Canyon’ around June 10/11, 1974 and that somehow turned into them coming and staying with him. He further shared that Glade Gamble met the girls at his trailer and that he didn’t know Bruce Bolinder very well. In the beginning of the conversation LE told him that the reason they are speaking to him for a second time is because it was determined that Sandra had been murdered shortly after leaving his trailer. There’s a lot of back and forth between the officers and the suspect, with LE saying they ‘needed to get some answers if we can. I realize this was six months ago and it is hard to remember, and I don’t expect you to remember everything. We have had a chance to go over this and some other things that have come up that need to be answered, and I was hoping that you could help me or hide me to the right person. Now correct me if I’m wrong. I understand that Sandy left the trailer on Monday morning, July 1st to go to work with a Mexican kid by the name of Phillip Quintana, who had stayed at the trailer that night with Joan. Is that correct?’ To this, Jones simply answered, ‘ah huh.’ He said that he didn’t attend the party at Jeanine’s trailer the Saturday before Sandy disappeared and wasn’t home when Joan and Phillip got back early Sunday morning. He also shared that he wasn’t sure who was left behind at the trailer when Sandy and Quintana departed for Salt Lake around 7/7:30 AM the Monday morning she disappeared. He did say that when he came home from work around 4 PM Elkins was still there and ‘it wasn’t right away but she couldn’t figure out why she didn’t come back. You know she figured maybe she would come back later, and she never did. She was worried about her.’ … ‘Well right at first, you now she thought she might have had a pretty good excuse and then after she didn’t show up for a day or so, well then she was getting worried.’ When detectives inquired, ‘I don’t know how much attention you paid, but this is a really critical point in the line of clothing, I understand both these girls had very little clothing when they lived here, is that correct?’ .. ‘ As far as you seen, give me an idea, five or six changes, one of two? Can you give me an idea? Did they wear shorts much of the time, a lot?’ He replied, ‘yeah, they wore shorts,’ but did specify that Elkins had a home made dress made out of Levi’s jean material.
Like with the other interviews, the investigators were very focused on the girl’s footwear and asked Jones if Weaver had a lot of shoes, to which he replied she had a pair of sandals and some clogs and that Elkins took them with her when she went home to Colorado. About a week after Sandy disappeared Elkins left Ken’s trailer and moved in with a guy named Danny Quinn; she didn’t give an explanation as to why she left but it was on her own accord and he didn’t ask her to leave. Jones told LE that he was aware that the girls mainly hitch hiked to get around and frequently caught rides with both friends and strangers. He also shared that at no point after her friend disappeared did Elkins ever mention that she was going to go look for her, but that she ‘contacted Sandra’s parents and they decided to put it in the paper, her picture, and I think she turned it in, she said she turned it in.’ Jones said that when Joan finally got around to notifying the Toole County Sheriff’s department about Weaver’s disappearance they told her to also get in touch with SLC LE as well. When asked if he thought Sandy and Elkins were ‘close’ he replied, ‘yes, they were real close.’ He also commented that she seemed to be almost smitten with Bruce Bolinder and talked about him a lot. He said the weekend before Sandra disappeared she wasn’t at his trailer at all but that she most likely came back early Monday morning to get Joan and get ready to go to work. When asked if he knew of anyone that had ‘heard if Sandy came back into town that Monday morning after she left and went back to work that morning,’ Jones simply said ‘no.’
According to Ken, Sandy’s father came to see him about a month and a half before the interview (so November/December 1974). When asked what he thought happened to Weaver he replied that if she made it to work that day then it must have been someone from her POE that she ‘decided to go with.’ Ken said he felt it ‘must have been somebody she didn’t know or she just met that day or somebody she just went with. Maybe they told her they would give her a ride home or take her out somewhere else overnight or something.’ He also shared that Joan had no idea what happened to her friend and she thought that maybe she left with somebody from work or ‘something like that.’ When Ken was confronted with ‘well like I said, we realize the drug traffic. We are not here to bother anyone, that we are not trying to make a case. Did she know anything about any major drug deals and somebody thought she knew too much that you know of?;’ he again replied with a simple, ‘no.’ When the detectives inquired, ‘you wouldn’t have to kill her to rape her, correct?,’ Jones answered ‘uh huh’ and that she would probably just go along with it.
Ken said that when he returned home from work at 4:30 around that Monday, Joan was there (she was sick and didn’t go into work) and the last time he saw Sandy was on Friday the night before she left for the party. When the investigators commented that they understood he told Mr. Weaver that he had a pair of his daughter’s shoes, he clarified ‘after she had left and it was either that night or the next day she didn’t show up Joan said something about ‘that is the only pair of shoes or something.’ And she left them and she ain’t got no shoes or something. She couldn’t figure out why she would leave without shoes.’ There was a lot of back and forth about the missing footwear, with the investigators trying to make Jones admit that he had them (which he vehemently denied). When they asked if Weaver’s last paycheck ever got mailed to his trailer or if Joan ever mentioned what happened to it he said that Elkins had it but he wasn’t certain if she cashed it or not (but he strongly suspects that she did). Jeff Skarboszewski left SLC about a week before Sandra disappeared and went to Phoenix. About the trios mystery friend, Jones said that Jeff seemed to treat both girls real good and always wanted to do what was best for them. At the end of the interview he agreed to a voluntary polygraph examination.
In between the third and fourth parts is a photocopy of Bruce Bolinder’s drivers license.
The fourth part of the document is an interview between investigators and Phillip Quintana that took place on January 25, 1975 (this is where things get interesting). The conversation starts out strong right from the get go, with LE asking if he remembers telling a friend named Dirk that Sandra had gone to Idaho or someplace out of state, and where he got that information from. To this, Phillip said it was one of two hitchhiking incidents that took place in the second half of 1974 in which Weaver’s name came up: ‘this guy that picked her up hitchhiking, but I can’t remember his name. He said he saw her and she was supposed to be living with this guy that she was living with in Memory Grove she was supposed to leave with him to Idaho.’ … ‘I was just asking if he knew Joan and Sandy from Toole and he said yeah, that Sandy was supposed to be living in Memory Grove with some guy.’ Quintana said the man was driving a newer model white Ford and was around 21/22 years of age, between 6’2″/6’3” tall, and had shaggy brown hair. One of the detectives told him it was a man named Danny Brumfield that picked him up that day and the event took place sometime around August/September of 1974.
The second hitchhiking incident took place around Halloween 1974 and involved a 23/24 year old man driving an older model light red/dark orange GMC pickup truck. When asked by this mysterious stranger if he wanted to go to a party that both Joan and Sandy would be at, Phillip told him that he had just been to one and had no interest in attending another: ‘well, I was hitchhiking. He picked me up then asked if I wanted to go to a party, he said do you smoke dope, I said yeah, and he said do you want to go to a party, and I said no, and he lit up a joint, and he asked me if I wanted to go to a party out in Toole and said no, and he said, and then I said who is going to be out there, do you know a lot of people out there and he said, ‘I know a chick named Joan and one named Sandy and this dude named Glade, that Glade was supposed to be having it,’ and I told him no I was, and he just dropped me off.’ … ‘They said Sandy and Joan, I don’t know if they were the same chicks but he said Sandy and Joan. Might be two different chicks, I don’t know.’ When questioned about the day Sandra disappeared Phillip said that he ‘thought she was going back to work, she was going to work, and anyway they didn’t want me back over there and so I just went down to my moms’ and that he never saw either girl again after July 1st (I deduced that he was briefly employed with Manpower but was terminated). He acknowledged to LE that he was aware that Elkins was trying to get in contact with him around the 13th of July but wasn’t successful in her attempts. When asked if he knew that Weaver was missing at this point in time Phillip said no and that he didn’t know she was gone until the month before (which would have been December 1974).
Quintana said that he and Joan went back to Jones’ trailer at around 3 or 4 in the morning and crashed immediately; they woke up around 6 PM the following evening. He said Monday morning Sandy called Joan at Ken’s trailer and asked if she was going to go to work, and he told her that Joan wasn’t going to but he was getting a ride to SLC and could bring her along. He reported that Manpower attempted to get in touch with him about Sandra’s disappearance around the 1st or 2nd week of December but that he never talked to Bruno Weaver. In response to that, investigators said that ‘he claims he did, how about him calling you on the phone Phillip. I am going to try to refresh your memory. And you told him: ‘he asked you if you were at a party with his daughter in Toole, and you said no not me but my friend Martinez.’ Do you recall that?’ … ‘see, I talked to Mr. Weaver, Sandra’s Dad and he said he called you on the phone, I have the date written down and I will be getting it; him and his attorney was out here and he called you on the phone and he asked you, he talked to Phillip Quintana, he asked about the party, you said, or this Quintana said that he knew Sandra, that he didn’t attend the party in Toole but a friend Martinez did. You don’t recall him saying that to you?’ In response to the third degree, Phillip said, ‘I don’t even remember talking to him, I am pretty sure I didn’t.’
This is when he talked about his two last names, clarifying that his legal name is Quintana and it’s the one he always went by: ‘I guess you came out to my moms, she said that you were looking for me, she said that you asked for Phillip Martinez, or a Phillip Quintana, and she asked me if I was using another name and I told her no. Because I found well, when my Dad got married when he first married my mother I was on probation and I started using his last name and it took them six months to find me, and when they did they told me if I used it again they would stick me in state school because I was using an illegal name.’ When asked what the illegal name he used was he responded with ‘Gurule,’ but that he has used his real name ever since and that he now has a clean record. Later in the interview he repeated himself that he never spoke with Bruno Weaver and when asked if anyone at the party went by the last name of Martinez he said he wasn’t sure because people mostly only went by their first names.
When the investigators asked how the girls got to work everyday Phillip said that after the first day they all drove in together, and ‘when Manpower had a job for them they have them a call out in Toole and they hitchhiked to the job. The very first day they started Manpower called them about 8:00 I guess, they got there around 10:00 10:30.’ When asked if he recalled what time Sandra arrived back at the trailer the Monday morning she disappeared Phillip responded that ‘she had to be to work at 8:00 AM so it was around 7:00 AM;’ he also shared that after she left for the day he wasn’t sure who was left behind in the trailer. Also in the vehicle were two other guys, Steve Simons and Scott Williams; they dropped Weaver off near the Wyckoff building at 3rd West but that she wanted to stop at the store before her shift started to buy some cigarettes. The boys dropped Phillip off at his moms, which wasn’t far from Weaver’s POE. He commented that on their drive Williams and Simons mostly talked to each other and didn’t really seem interested in chatting with him or Sandy. When LE asked him if ‘Sandy gave him any indication when she got off that she was going to come back at noon, or that she didn’t feel well, or that she was going to go back and see Joan or anything like that,’ Quintana responded that ‘she said that cause she didn’t feel well that morning she was kind of burned she said that if she still felt that way at lunch she was just going to go back to Toole’ but didn’t elaborate on how she was going to get there. The detectives shared with him that they knew she took some speed that morning before she left for work and that he took some as well (she gave him five and a friend named Danny another five). To that Phillip responded that he thought she took downers and had a baggie of about 50 of them with her (apparently she purchased 100 of them at the beginning of the weekend but was going through them pretty quickly).
After Phillip mentioned that Joan wasn’t feeling well and had menstrual cramps the detectives asked if she started her period the day before. He replied that he thought ‘she started it that day because the night she was starting to get them bad’ and that she might have gotten her monthly on Sunday night (but he ‘didn’t check’). In response to this, the officers replied: ‘oh Jesus, you know you got me almost to think I am going to send you out to the nut farm and have you checked out there. Was she pretty well smashed out, Joan, that Monday morning or was it mainly from her cramps.’ (wow). To this, he responded it was ‘mainly from her cramps.’ When asked if Joan had a thing for Glade Gamble, Quintana replied that he wasn’t sure but it wouldn’t have surprised him because she ‘acted kind of funny towards him.’ When asked how she may have felt about Bruce Bolinder he said that it seemed as if she wanted nothing to do with him and when they all got in the car together she made a comment about Gamble sitting next to him, and seemed irritated when he refused. When the investigators asked him how the girls may have felt about Kenny Jones he said that ‘they said they liked him, he was a pretty nice guy, but they were just staying because of their relationship, just a place to stay I guess. I guess they were giving him something to say there, some money or something to stay with him but they never did say. He said that he showed up at the party but ‘came a little later.’ When the investigators asked Phillip if Elkins was afraid of any of the guys that they hung around with he answered ‘no, not that I know of, she didn’t tell me’ and when they asked the same question about Weaver he said ‘well they got along real good with everybody out there as far as I know.’
When asked if any of the guys Weaver hung out with ‘would kill that girl,’ Phillip’s initial answer was ‘I can’t really say… I don’t know them, but I know what kind of people they are.’ However he quickly changed his tune and said that the owner of the gold Cadillac (Bruce Bolinder) was the only person he could think of that ‘looked like he could do something like that.’ He elaborated that he didn’t talk much and was kind of mean; Bolinder was also where Gamble was getting his dope from. There’s something interesting that jumps out at me at the end of page 56: the detectives ask Phillip if he remembers telling anyone that ‘he saw Sandy talking to a Wycoff truck driver at about 11:30 on the 1st of July,’ to which there is no verbal (or written) answer. Quintana later stated that the last time he saw her was when she was dropped off at her POE and doesn’t remember ever seeing her talk to a truck driver. He also shared that he didn’t hear from Joan at all after she left for CO and that he knew she lived in WI but wasn’t exactly sure where. Just like with the other gentleman, LE asked if he was willing to undergo a polygraph examination, to which he responded sure and that he had nothing to hide.
As far as the confirmed victims go, Bundy killed 18 year-old Georgeann Hawkins on June 11, 1974 after abducting her from the University District in Seattle (just eleven days earlier he murdered Brenda Ball on June first). Almost two weeks after Weaver was abducted and killed on July 14, 1974 he abducted both Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah. When it comes to the unconfirmed victims, Brenda Joy Baker disappeared on May 27, 1974 from Puyallup and on August 2, 1974 Carol Valenzuela was last seen hitchhiking near Vancouver, WA. At the time of Weavers murder Ted was living at the Rogers Rooming house on 12th Ave in Seattle and was employed with the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia (he was there from May 3, 1974 to August 28, 1974). Obviously the drive to SLC wasn’t exactly impossible, as he eventually moved there for law school, but it definitely wasn’t just a quick jaunt down the street. The route Ted would have driven to SLC from Seattle then to DeBeque, Colorado where her remains were found was roughly 1,150 miles ONE WAY (he obviously would have had to take the same trip BACK to Seattle). This is a lot of driving. He was in between schooling at the time, as he graduated from the University of Washington in 1972 and didn’t move to Salt Lake City for law school (part deux) until September 2, 1974. Did Bundy kill Weaver on a trip to Utah to do something for his upcoming education (maybe he had to fill out something at the bursar’s office or check out an apartment)? According to the ‘TB Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ Ted went on leave (without pay) from the Department of Emergency Services in Seattle, WA on July 1, 1974 (the same day of Weavers abduction); additionally, gas receipts put him in Seattle the same day. Lets not also forget he was in a relationship at the time with Liz Kloepfer, which was just one more thing taking up his time.
This is a rare instance where the more I researched the more information I found, which I know sounds fairly obvious but I have run into countless dead ends writing about some of these girls. For example, I can’t even find Deborah Lee Tomlinson on Ancestry, so I tried to think outside the box and joined a few Facebook groups related to her hometown of Creswell OR, in hopes that maybe I would find a relative or an old friend of hers that could help fill in the gaps surrounding her background… but again, I got nothing. Right before I was about to re-publish this I found even more information about Weaver on cavdef.org… nothing huge or ground breaking, just a few small details. In a comment on the website ExecutedToday.com, an individual going by the name of Philip Conrad commented that he ‘knew Sandra Weaver, the Colorado detectives talked to me and my x wife in lacrosse wi because we thought the guy that left with her might have had something with her death. I do believe Ted Bundy killed her.’ Additionally I found Glade Gambles obituary (which I included below).
In an article written by a Salt Lake journalist after Bundy was executed, Pete Haywood said that authorities placed Bundy in Utah as early as 1970 when he was only 23, which ‘certainly widens the window of time we are looking at in terms of unsolved cases.’ There’s conflicting reports that say the serial killer mentioned Weavers during his death row confessions: some sources say he did, others say he didn’t. Former Mesa County Sheriff said two different television stations ran stories claiming that Bundy took responsibility for Weavers death, and the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story saying the same.
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
