Nancy Baird
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Nancy Baird
“We had five missing women at one time”
On July 4, 1975, Nancy Baird vanished from where she worked at a gas station in East Leyton. Police soon found eye-witnesses who saw two men talking with Baird shortly before she disappeared. After investigating several persons-of-interest in the Baird case, detectives came to suspect she had fallen victim to serial killer Ted Bundy.
Nancy Baird: The Utah Disappearance
By July 1975, Nancy Perry Baird was living in East Leyton, Utah, and working as an attendant at a Fina-brand gas station and convenience store near the southwest corner of U.S. Highway 89 and Cherry Lane. Baird was 23-years-old and a single mother with a four-year-old son, who she was raising on her own with help from her parents.
Born in Provo, Utah, on January 14, 1952, Baird married young, shortly after she left high school and had a child with her then husband, Floyd Dee Baird. The union was not a happy one and lasted only a few brief years. Her husband moved to Wyoming, and Nancy relied on her parents to look after her young son.
On July 4, 1975, Nancy left her son with her parents at their home in the small town of East Layton, Utah, and went to work. That day seemed like any other, and Baird served customers who stopped for gas and store items. Between 5:10pm and 5:15pm, the town’s only full-time officer, David Ray Anderson stopped at the Fina station.
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In his report for that day, Anderson wrote that he interacted with Baird, with nothing out of the ordinary. He then left the station and drove to another gas station on the opposite corner of the highway. Anderson wrote in his report that when he looked back in the direction of the Fina station, around 5:30pm, he noticed a green van parked outside.
He “went over to check it out,” but it is unknown if officer Anderson made contact with the driver, or what became of the incident, but by the time he arrived back at the Fina station, he found that Nancy Baird was no longer there. Her purse, containing medication and $167 from a cashed check, and keys were still inside, and her car was still parked outside.
When Bonnie Peck, manager of the gas station appeared, she asked officer Anderson if he had seen Baird, to which he said he had seen her 20 minutes previously. There were no signs that a struggle had taken place inside the convenience store and together they conducted a search of the area, but found nothing.
Anderson called in to his chief, who requested assistance from the Davis County Sheriff’s Office in mounting a search for Nancy Baird. East Layton was a town of only about 1,000 residents, and at that time, its police department comprised of only four officers, which included a part-time chief, one full-time officer and two part-time reserve officers. None of these individuals had attended Utah’s police academy, leaving the department under-staffed and under-experienced.
Nancy Baird: The Police Investigation
East Layton police set about working out what happened to Nancy immediately after she vanished from her place of work. They put out a missing persons bullet, with information about Baird. She was described as 23-years-old, 5’2″ in height, weighing 100 lbs with long strawberry blonde hair, hazel eyes and small scars on the inside of each wrist.
She was known to wear a small gold pinky ring with rubies, and was wearing a smock with the Fina logo, blue shorts, and a blue halter top. Police then began finding out the identities of customers who had potentially interacted with Nancy by using credit card receipts from the Fina station. One of them was Denzle Williams, a resident of the neighboring town of Kaysville, Utah.
Williams was interviewed by Davis County sheriff’s detective Kenny Payne on July 5, 1975, the day after Nancy was last seen. Williams told Payne that he had taken his two children, 14-year-old David and 9-year-old Jana to the Fina station at about 5:15pm. None of the Williams family saw a police officer at the station that day.
This meant by the time they arrived there, officer Anderson had already left for the next station. The Williams children entered the station, with their father remained outside, filling his car with gasoline. Payne then interviewed the Williams children, who reportedly told him they saw two men at the counter, talking with Nancy Baird.
David Williams said many years later, “I didn’t want to interrupt this conversation they were having, they weren’t in a hurry to leave or anything.” David handed his credit card over to Baird to pay for the gas, and while she complete the transaction, Jana Williams brought over a bottle of raspberry soda.
As Jana only had 28 cents for the 29 cent soda, Nancy left her have the bottle for the amount she had. “I do remember that she was very kind,” Jana Williams Grow said. As officer Anderson had already left, the Williams children were the last people to see Nancy Baird alive. “I didn’t know how someone could take a pretty lady like that,” Jana said.
Detective Payne asked David and Jana Williams to describe the two men they saw speaking with Baird. They said both men appeared to be either 23 or 24-years-old, and the first was skinny, with shoulder-length hair, a full beard and mustache, and wore a frayed denim jacket. The second man also had a full mustache and beard. His hair was dark but sun-bleached, and he wore a yellow long-sleeved shirt.
A tool called Identi-kit was used by Detective Payne to build composite images of the two men, based on information provided by David and Jana Williams. These images were never shown to the children, and were subsequently lost from the case files held by the Davis County Sheriff’s Office.
Almost 50 years later, the COLD podcast used an antique Identi-kit to recreated the composites based on the information contained in Kenny Payne’s report. The composites were shown to David and Jana Williams, who both agreed they resembled the men they had witnessed talking to Nancy Baird on the day she went missing.
Denzle Williams also told Detective Payne that he noticed a third man outside the Fina station while his kids, David and Jana, were inside the convenience store interacting with Nancy Baird. He described this third man as about 55 to 60-years-old, very thin, with prominent veins on his arms. Williams said he didn’t see the older man go into the store, and didn’t know if he had interacted with Nancy Baird.
Nancy Baird: Persons of Interest
In the days and weeks after Nancy went missing, police began to narrow down a list of potential persons of interest they wished to talk with. One of these was Baird’s ex-husband, Floyd. Baird was quickly ruled out as a suspect after he provided an alibi, telling detectives he’d been camping with a friend in the area of Jackson Hole, Wyoming on the date in question.
Detectives then spoke with several of Nancy’s current and ex-boyfriend, one of whom was named Dennis Forsgren, who said he had been out of state vacationing with his family at the time. This alibi was later verified by investigators, who next conducted a search of Baird’s home. There, they seized her address book, as well as a hairbrush, with strands of her hair tangled in the bristles.
They also came across one of her photo albums, the photos of which were compared to the two composite images of the men the Williams children reported seeing inside the Fina station that day. A sheriff’s lieutenant wrote, “There was a very similar likeness of one of the Identi-kit composites to a picture” from the photo album.
The report said the photo was marked with the name Monty, a person who was soon identified as Monty Torres. Jana Williams was shown the photo by detectives, and she “positively identified Monte [sic] Torres as one of the hippie type individuals that was in the service station.” Davis County detectives learned Torres was in Pocatello, Idaho.
They asked the Bannock County, Idaho Sheriff’s Office to locate and interview Torres, who was described by a Bannock County detective as “quite jittery.” Torres said he had an alibi, claiming he’d been at Lava Hot Springs on the afternoon of Nancy Baird’s disappearance. He then submitted to a polygraph examination.
The outcome of this examination is unknown, however newspaper clippings from the time seem to indicate the polygraph revealed no signs of deception on Torres part. As a result, he was cleared as a person of interest. Davis County detectives then decided to speak with Nancy Baird’s friends, one of whom had pertinent information for the case.
Nancy Baird: The Yellow Volkswagen
An Ogden woman named Deloris Drake was interviewed in the early days of the investigation and provided information about an incident that occurred in the days before Baird’s abduction. Drake reportedly told detectives that two nights prior to Nancy’s disappearance, they had gone bar-hopping along Washington Boulevard in Ogden.
At approximately 2:30am on the morning of July 3, 1975, Nancy Baird dropped Drake off at her home on Ogden’s 36th Street. Baird then departed alone, with Drake saying that she presumably headed for her home in Layton. Then Deloris said Baird returned a half-hour later, at about 3:00am.
According to Drake, Baird “appeared to be quite shaken and frightened and that this fellow named Tom in a yellow van had followed her home and was molesting her.” Drake said she had reportedly overheard “Tom” as he made threatening sexual comments towards Baird. Drake ordered the man to leave, at which point the man drove away in a yellow Volkswagen van.
With the death of Doloris Drake, her accusations against “Tom,” whose full name is known to law enforcement, cannot be verified. It is unknown if this individual was ever questioned by detectives. By July 28, 1975, Ray Adams, the part-time chief of the East Layton police told the Deseret News “We are at a dead end” in the search for Nancy Baird.
Nancy Baird: The Ted Bundy Theory
After six weeks, and with assistance from the FBI, the investigation into the disappearance of Nancy Baird left detectives no closer to discovering what happened to the single mother of one. Baird’s disappearance was one of several of young women who seemingly vanished in Utah between 1974 and 1975.
Beginning on October 2, 1974, Nancy Wilcox went missing after she was last seen riding in a yellow Volkswagen near her home in Holladay, Utah. Just over two weeks later, Melissa Smith, daughter of the Midvale Police chief vanished after leaving a pizza parlour. Smith’s body was later found in American Fork Canyon. She had been beaten, raped and strangled.
On November 8th, a man posing as a police officer attempted to abduct Carol DaRonch from the Fashion Place shopping mall in Murray, Utah. DaRonch managed to escape from the Volkswagen Beetle, with a pair of handcuffs still fastened to one wrist. Later that same day, Debra Kent disappeared after leaving a school play in Bountiful, Utah.
Utah police became aware that other disappearances had taken place during 1975 in both Colorado and Idaho, but law enforcement were unsure if these incidents of missing women were connected. On June 28, 1975, Susan Curtis disappeared from a youth conference at Brigham Young University.
“We had five missing women at one time,” said former sheriff William “Dub” Lawrence. “Half we found part of the bodies, some of them.” Lawrence had worked as the Davis County sheriff who was in charge of the Baird investigation. With little clue as to what happened to Nancy Baird, detectives could only speculate if her fate was connected to the other missing women.
But in August 1975 they got their first clue of a possible suspect. On the evening of August 16, 1975, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle was stopped by police officer Bob Hayward in West Valley. A search of the vehicle produced tools often used for burglaries, however there were other, more sinister items, such as handcuffs, panty hose and a rope.
The owner of the vehicle, Ted Bundy, was immediately arrested and soon he was implicated in the DaRonch kidnapping, for which he was charged. “When a police officer does this for years you develop a sixth sense,” he said. “You feel it. (Bundy) was the worst of the worst criminals and it took its toll on most of us.”
Lawrence’s team of investigators set out to prove it was Bundy who killed Baird. “We had him in Rock Springs, Wyoming which put him on Interstate-80 coming back from Colorado,” Lawrence said. From Rock Springs, Lawrence claimed 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,” Lawrence said. It was Lawrence’s theory that Bundy headed south on Highway 89, the same highway along which the Fina gas station in Layton was located. “There’s no women missing (along I-80),” Lawrence said. “There was no abduction on 80-coming in.”
Sheriff Lawrence stated his belief that Bundy kidnapped and killed Baird and then buried her body in lambs canyon. “Ted Bundy was tired, he had driven all day,” Lawrence surmised. “I believe he went to some where that was close. It was handy it was safe, it was secure.” Bundy was familiar with the area, with the body of one of his victims Melissa Smith found in Parleys Canyon.
As part of the Baird investigation, the Davis County Sheriff’s Office provided a sample of Nancy Baird’s hair, taken from her hairbrush, to the FBI for comparison. This was tested against the unidentified hairs collected from Bundy’s car. FBI records indicate the federal agents did not find a match to Nancy Baird’s hair in Ted Bundy’s car.
Ted Bundy and the Death Row Confessions
During his 1979 trial for the Chi Omega murders, Bundy spoke with a reporter in a recorded telephone call, reiterating that he was innocent of all the crimes for which he had been accused and convicted. “Police officers, they want to solve crimes and sometimes I don’t think they really try to think things through,” Bundy said during the call.
“They’re willing to take the convenient alternative. And the convenient alternative is me.” At trial, Bundy was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death for the first time. At a later trial, he was found guilty of the murder of Kimberly Leach, and received his second death sentence, for which he was placed on death row.
While incarcerated on Florida’s death row, Ted Bundy spoke with numerous law enforcement officials and journalists about his alleged crimes. He always protested his innocence. Bundy spoke about his crimes in the third person during his interviews with Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, but never admitted to any involvement.
By January 1989, Ted Bundy had run out of time and with his scheduled execution nearing, he decided to confess to crimes he had previously denied. He granted interviews with police investigators from several states, who wanted to talk to Bundy about unsolved murders of missing women in their jurisdictions.
Over the course of these interviews, Bundy claimed responsibility for a number of unsolved murders, describing to police the circumstances of the kidnappings and killings he carried out in Washington, Utah, Colorado and Idaho. On January 22, 1989, Salt Lake County Sheriff’s detective Dennis Couch interviewed Bundy for about 90 minutes.
During the course of the interview, Bundy admitted to committing five murders, along with three unidentified in Utah. Bundy had long been suspected of involvement in the deaths or disappearances of Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Smith, Laura Aime and Debra Kent in Utah, and many in law enforcement speculated that Bundy could have been responsible for kidnapping and murdering Nancy Baird.
The Bundy interview with detective Couch was audio recorded, and Bundy can be heard denying having any knowledge of Nancy Baird. “Do you recall what type of place it was [Baird] was working at or where it was located?” Couch asked Bundy. “No, I didn’t have anything to do with that,” Bundy replied.
Later in the interview, Couch showed Bundy a picture of Nancy Baird. “Nancy Baird, who’s that,” Bundy asked Couch, seeming not to recognize Baird in the photograph. Bundy then goes on to say, “I’m not sure who you are talking about… No… I didn’t have anything to do with that.” With his denial of this crime and others, Bundy dashed hopes of detectives in identifying three of his alleged Utah victims, who remained identified.
Former sheriff William Lawrence didn’t believe Bundy’s denial. “He admitted that he had some of the heads of his victims in Utah at his apartment,” Lawrence said. “He mentioned Lamb’s Canyon.” Lawrence is not alone in his refusal to believe Bundy’s culpability in Baird’s murder. Nancy Baird’s in-laws also believed Bundy was responsible for her murder.
Wally Baird said he believed Bundy’s denial may have been a coverup. “He may have been that way because he didn’t know at the time that she had kids, a child and had been married,” said Baird. “That was something that was contrary to his MO (method of operation).” Lawrence said that Bundy’s connection to Nancy had always been circumstantial.
It was never enough for prosecutors to file charges against serial killer Ted Bundy, and believed that “Nancy’s fell through the cracks in my judgement and I felt guilty about it.” Her case was eventually pushed aside when other major homicide cases happened during that time period. However, Bundy did seem to have an alibi for the Nancy Baird disappearance.
Nancy Baird: Ted Bundy’s Alibi
As the likely prime suspect in the disappearance of Nancy Baird, Ted Bundy has been considered responsible primarily due to the time frame she went missing, and the fact that he was active in Utah during 1974 and 1975. However, Bundy never admitted to kidnapping Baird, despite his eleventh hour confession to such crimes as the disappearance of Susan Curtis, who went missing in June 1975.
During some of Bundy’s crimes, his distinctive tan-colored 1968 Volkswagen Beetle had been seen, however on the day of Nancy Baird’s disappearance, there was no mention of a vehicle matching that description by witnesses at the Fina gas station. Furthermore, the suspects seen talking to Nancy at the store, described as “hippie types,” did not resemble Ted Bundy.
After Bundy’s attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, the case file records revealed that he had briefly dated a Salt Lake City woman named Leslie Knudson during the summer of 1975. Following Bundy’s arrest, Knudson provided a statement to police about her relationship with Bundy, giving details and dates.
One of those dates was July 4, 1975, when Knudson said Bundy had visited her family at a reunion that occurred at her family’s ranch. Knudson’s maternal grandfather was a prominent sheep rancher who owned a ranch in Fruitland, near Strawberry Reservoir, which is located more than 100 miles from the Fina station in East Layton.
From Knudson’s statement, Bundy seems to have a solid alibi for the date of Nancy Baird’s abduction, in that he was over a hundred miles away at the time. It would have been difficult, albeit not impossible, for Bundy to make the journey that day. Bundy was known to undertake long journey’s in search of victims.
Nancy Baird: The Police Suspect
One former law enforcement officer believes that Bundy had no part in the Baird case, and offers his own suspect. Thomas Jackson, a former East Layton police reserve officer was in July 1975, the most junior member of the East Layton police force. Jackson had little participation in the Baird investigation, but did not agree with the Bundy speculation.
Jackson believed that a fellow officer, Dave Anderson, might have been the culprit. Anderson had been the law enforcement officer who was present at the Fina gas station on the day Nancy Baird went missing, and was one of the last people to see her before she vanished after the two reportedly spoke.
At the time of Baird’s disappearance, Officer Anderson had only been an officer at East Layton for 10 months, and the majority of his time with the department had been spent patrolling U.S. Highway 89. Former reserve officer Thomas Jackson stated that officer Dave Anderson had spent a great deal of time at the Fina gas station and convenience store.
“[Anderson] spent too much time looking at women, too,” Jackson said. Shortly after she went missing, Anderson left his job with the East Layton police department, and case records do not indicate he was ever challenged concerning his account of the circumstances of Nancy Baird’s disappearance.
Thomas Jackson replaced Dave Anderson as East Layton’s only full-time officer, but decided to defer handling the Nancy Baird investigation, telling the Davis County Sheriff’s Office he preferred they manage the case. “I wanted to let someone else handle it,” Jackson said. “I didn’t want to mess it up.”
By January 1981, The town of East Layton disincorporated and was annexed into Layton City. Five years later, Officer Jackson also quit the department to take a job in the private security sector. As a result, the Nancy Baird investigation became a cold case, with little or any developments beyond the Ted Bundy theory.
Over the years, Baird has been ruled out as the identity of several bodies of young women, including Salt Lake City Jane Doe and Washoe County Jane Doe. The Davis County Sheriff’s Office have assigned an investigator to review the cold case, in cooperation with the Layton City Police Department. The current focus of this new cold case investigation is on persons of interest other than Ted Bundy.
That Baird’s body has never been found still haunts the former sheriff William Lawrence. He continues to firmly believe that Ted Bundy was responsible for the disappearance of Nancy Baird. “It’s what we call the law of probability,” Lawrence said. “It’s not provable but if you work back by process of elimination you come up with the most logical scenario.”
Written by Nucleus
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