Talking Dateline: Open Desert

22m
Andrea Canning talks to Josh Mankiewicz about his episode, “Open Desert.” On March 8, 2020, 16-year-old Britney Ujlaky told her dad she was leaving a park to meet up with a friend. She never came home. Her partially-clothed body was found three days later in the Nevada desert. Detectives investigated multiple potential suspects before they turned their attention to the last person to see Britney alive. Josh and Andrea discuss Britney’s strong relationship with her father, Jim Ujlaky, and the blackmail scheme that gave her family false hope after she disappeared. Later, Josh shares a podcast-exclusive clip from his interview with Jim about his first impressions of the killer. Plus, Dateline producer Ann Preisman joins the conversation to share her experience making the episode and to answer viewer and listener questions from social media.

Listen to the full episode of “Open Desert” on Apple: https://apple.co/3ZD8uRI
Listen to the full episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2TsAqez4bG3bmKKbz31Yhg

Press play and read along

Runtime: 22m

Transcript

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Speaker 4 Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Canning, and we are Talking Dateline.
Today I'm here with Josh Mankowitz. Hey, Josh.

Speaker 3 How you doing?

Speaker 4 Good. All right, so this episode is called Open Desert.
If you haven't seen it, it's the episode right below this one on your list of podcasts.

Speaker 4 So go there and listen to it or stream it on Peacock and then come back here. Today, Josh has an extra clip that he's going to play for us from his interview with the victim's father.

Speaker 4 Plus, we're going to be joined later by this episode's producer and a good friend of mine, Anne Priceman, to answer some questions from social media.

Speaker 4 To recap this story, back in March of 2020, 16-year-old Brittany Ulackey was reported missing from her hometown of Spring Creek, Nevada.

Speaker 4 She was last seen with her friend Bryce, who said he had dropped Brittany off to meet a mysterious cowboy named JT.

Speaker 4 Detectives and Brittany's family searched far and wide for her body and her killer.

Speaker 4 Eventually, they found her remains in a nearby desert, and DNA evidence at the scene showed them that her killer wasn't that cowboy, but her trusted friend, Bryce.

Speaker 4 Okay, let's talk dateline. Josh, what really hit me from the very first line of this episode was the child not answering the phone.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 4 That happens to all of us as parents. You know, at first, it's like, no big deal.
Your kid didn't answer their phone. You don't really think much of it.

Speaker 4 And then if they don't answer the second time or the third time, or they're not answering texts, your mind immediately goes to the worst place.

Speaker 4 At the same time, you're like, no, no, no, everything's fine. And usually it is.
But then, unfortunately, as we've learned on this show, sometimes it's not okay.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And that's what Jim Yolacki was going through.

Speaker 3 He also, you know, there's one more component to that, which is in this case, he knew how long it took to get from where he last seen his daughter to where his daughter said she was going.

Speaker 3 So, like, she should have been home. She should have been reachable.

Speaker 3 You know, that's an age where kids want to start having some portion of their life for themselves and they don't want to tell you, the parent, everything.

Speaker 3 But in this case, in this family, Jim yolaki he knew this is not my daughter you know misleading me so she can run off and you know have a beer behind the gym with somebody she's not supposed to be hanging out with he knew something was wrong sounds like such a great dad such a softy with his daughter yeah because she completely changed his life and i loved how he said you know i'm dad first and then i'm the best friend or the friend yeah he was super protective of her i mean he paid a lot of attention to where she was what she was doing where she was going I mean, he was on her.

Speaker 4 And in this case, of course, we had the worst outcome that they had to discover her body in that way.

Speaker 4 You know, and it's amazing that they eventually even found her when you look at that landscape and, you know, as the name of the show, right? Open desert.

Speaker 3 Right. I mean, it's gorgeous country.
I sort of wasn't prepared for that. There's no easy way to get there.

Speaker 3 You got to, you know, fly somewhere and then drive for a long distance, but it is absolutely gorgeous when when you get there. And yeah, there's this town and then around it is

Speaker 3 a great deal of just nothing, just

Speaker 3 natural beauty, but a lot of areas where

Speaker 3 if you are up to something that you shouldn't be up to, nobody will see you. And if you want to hide a body, there's a lot of places to do that.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And it's interesting because it sort of reminds you of the Wild West, you know, old-fashioned, but then it's got this edge to it where I noticed the teenagers, you know, have nose rings.

Speaker 4 They were free spirits, right? They were just being themselves.

Speaker 4 I looked at Brittany's eyeshadow and it was multiple colors, like one of those really pretty sunsets in the mountain that has like every color in it.

Speaker 4 It just kind of told me that this, this girl was a free spirit. You know, she was doing her thing.
She was riding her horses, dressing the way she wanted to dress.

Speaker 4 She was being the person she wanted to be.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, like a lot of the people we cover, this was somebody who was just, you know, on the cusp of adulthood and, you know, loved the rodeo and loved being around horses and, you know, really wanted a life that encompassed some part of that world.

Speaker 3 And whereas, you know, a lot of people that you run into in a small town like that, they can't wait to get out. Like, I got to go.
I want to be in LA or I want to be in New York.

Speaker 3 I want to go to the big city. And she was like, no, no, I love it here.
You know, she embraced that culture and the stuff you do there. And, you know, she was all about the rodeo.

Speaker 3 Where was Brittany going in life? She was going to go someplace that made her happy. That's where she was going.

Speaker 4 One thing that made me really sad in this episode, and it was a really powerful red herring, was that girl fight that was caught on video at the rodeo.

Speaker 4 I did not like watching that video.

Speaker 3 Well, first of all, you can see in Brittany her dad, right? I mean, like that, I'm not backing down from a fight. I'm not afraid of you.

Speaker 3 And she got in a fight with some kids in school but then it ended up spilling over into the rodeo and some of that was caught on video and i mean law enforcement had absolutely no choice but to like figure out who that is because you know is it conceivable that somebody who's 16 years old could be killed by other 16 year olds that they had some kind of like you know nebulous dispute with absolutely and that's one of the roads that law enforcement went down i mean they they found those girls and ultimately determined that they were not involved but that's one of the things that you have to do because any defense attorney worth their salt is going to say, wait a minute, you did not check out these people who were clearly angry enough to get in a fist fight with her.

Speaker 3 You didn't check those people out as suspects. Of course you will.
You have to.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I didn't know how this story ended.
So for me, I was thinking, this is a viable lead right here.

Speaker 3 Right, exactly. I mean, there were a lot of twists and turns in this case.
It was the blackmail thing, the kidnap scam.

Speaker 4 So cruel. And all you want is to cling to some hope.

Speaker 3 Yeah. The toughest thing I think the police had to do in this was say to Brittany's mom, listen,

Speaker 3 this is not real. There's no chance this is real.
These people don't have your daughter. They may be committing a crime here.
But we've talked about this before on talking date line.

Speaker 3 When the thing that you are hoping for as a parent is that your child is still alive, but imprisoned by some maniac, when that's the best case scenario, you have gone to a very bad, very dark place.

Speaker 3 And that's where Brittany's mom was at that point, which is, okay, well, at least in that scenario, she's still alive.

Speaker 3 And the hardest thing that law enforcement had to do was say to her, Hey,

Speaker 3 this is nothing.

Speaker 4 Okay, after the break, we'll be back with an extra clip from Josh's interview with Britney's dad, Jim Ulacki.

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Speaker 3 One of the things that I've had to learn in this job is that the traditional rules or the rules that I grew up with of dating or going steady or who's with who, you know, the idea that like I'm going to come to your house and I'm going to pick you up and I'm going to have some flowers for you and your dad's going to grill me in the entryway and then I'm going to make sure that I have you back by, you know, 10.59 p.m.

Speaker 3 or whatever the curfew is. Which I'm okay with.
I am okay with that. I know that you, with all those, with all those girls in your house, I know you are okay with that.
But that has changed.

Speaker 3 And it's sort of hard to figure out what an involvement is. And so that's kind of, you know, a little bit about what was going on between Brittany and Bryce.
I mean, they were friends.

Speaker 3 Also, clearly, he thought there was more going on there and or could be more going on there. And we don't know what else had happened before that.

Speaker 3 We do know that it went very, very wrong and that he was the aggressor in that.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And her dad said clearly this was someone before he, you know, figured out Bryce, someone that she trusted.
Right.

Speaker 3 There's no question about that. She did not see him as some annoying guy who was pestering her, who was stalking her, who wouldn't leave her alone.

Speaker 3 I mean, they were friends and they were thought of as friends by everybody who knew them.

Speaker 4 And her dad actually talked to you about that in a clip that did not make the show that we're going to play right now that that's right up that alley of what you're talking about.

Speaker 3 Going back to now, now, back when Bryce seemed like a decent, trustworthy guy when they were friends. What was her relationship with Bryce?

Speaker 7 I only met Bryce twice. Every guy had to meet me before she could do anything with him.
And I'd do the typical dad thing. But I've been to jail a lot in my younger radical years.

Speaker 7 and everything and I would tell him I'm not that dad who says I've been to jail and I haven't. I've been to jail many times and I'm not afraid to go back to jail.

Speaker 7 Whatever you do to my daughter, I'm going to do to you. And I was just my little spew and I actually really meant it.
I mean, I'm very protective of my kids.

Speaker 3 That would have worked with me.

Speaker 3 So it

Speaker 7 seen him for probably two or three minutes and then they left. He came by one other time.
I very briefly seen him, but he mainly showed up around her mom.

Speaker 3 Okay, so you had that conversation with Bryce, but he wasn't really a boyfriend, right? I mean, she sort of made clear, this is just my friend.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and it was not her boyfriends that she brought over, just any guy that she was hanging around with. I would just say that.

Speaker 4 So there was nothing really

Speaker 4 to fear with Bryce initially.

Speaker 3 There was nothing suspicious. And like, he and his family had been in that town forever.
Like, they were all sort of known quantities.

Speaker 4 And it's amazing. Because usually it's like you look back, oh, the red flags were there, you know, oh, he did this or he said that, and it all makes sense, but not in this case.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 Bryce did a fairly good job of steering the investigation away from him, even to the point of coming to a memorial for her, because I'm guessing something told him, if you don't go, it's going to be suspicious.

Speaker 3 And he went and people were putting their arms around him.

Speaker 4 Well, we know that law enforcement detectives, they go to the funeral or they sit outside the funeral, you know, that usually, usually trying to hide the fact that they're law enforcement.

Speaker 3 Right. But sometimes they're taking photos of every license plate in the parking lot.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 very often the killer does go to the funeral, just like an arsonist might go to the burned down building.

Speaker 3 Right. And a killer might go to the funeral, one, because not going might make them seem suspicious.
Second, because so often murders are committed by somebody that the victim knows.

Speaker 4 That the victim knows, exactly. And that's, you know, the majority of our dateline episodes.

Speaker 3 In a way that maybe should give people a little bit of comfort, which is the, you know, the random madman or mad woman who, you know, breaks into your house, kills you. Like, that's pretty rare.

Speaker 3 Like, this,

Speaker 3 you're mostly in danger from people you know, from relationships you already have. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But one of the things about this story that made it an interesting story to tell was that there was this mythical other suspect, this cowboy named JT

Speaker 3 that, you know, drove a, you know, a particular kind of pickup truck. And Bryce gave a description of this guy and of the truck.

Speaker 3 And that, I mean, the police turned over a lot of stones looking for JT, looking for that truck, and

Speaker 3 looking for those initials. And in nearly every law enforcement agency that I know of, there's a nickname database.

Speaker 3 So if you're looking for somebody named Sugar or Beefy or JT, it's going to be in there.

Speaker 3 I was actually known as Sugar back in high school.

Speaker 3 And so they spent a lot of time looking for the mythical JT until they figured out that the way Bryce was talking about this guy kept changing.

Speaker 3 Like one time he was in the truck, one time he was out of the truck. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I made a note of that as, you know, his story kept changing

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 4 this is why defense attorneys tell people not to open their mouths.

Speaker 3 That's right. Right.

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 this is what got him in trouble. If he had just not said anything, and I, you you know, it's, it's, of course, it's that you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

Speaker 4 If you're innocent and you don't say anything, then you look guilty. If you're guilty, you say something, you potentially could incriminate yourself.
So it is tricky.

Speaker 4 But in this case, he absolutely should not have opened his mouth.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 yes, in the sense that a defense attorney would have said, don't, don't talk with police or just talk with police once and then say, look, if you're going to treat me like a suspect, I'm not going to talk with you anymore.

Speaker 3 But, you know, once her body was found and once DNA is found from the tobacco that was spit on the ground near the body,

Speaker 3 then that's going to lead back to Bryce.

Speaker 4 That leads me to talk about the clues in this case, which were really good ones,

Speaker 4 especially if you're really eagle-eyed, apparently unlike me. You know, he spit in that body cam video, the police body cam video, which I noticed.
I really noticed him spitting.

Speaker 4 But then the chewing tobacco, when they say they found it at the scene, I didn't put two and two together with the chewing tobacco and the spitting.

Speaker 4 So I missed that clue, but then thought, wow, somebody out there watching Dateline surely picked that up.

Speaker 3 Oh, surely.

Speaker 4 And the other one that was so good was the desert landscape, you know, in the photo with the mountain ridge and how they were able to line that up.

Speaker 3 That was a great, that was, I mean, there was, there was very good police work in this. And that was part of it was lining up the mountain ridge that really existed behind them and the photo.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it was, it was really right out of a movie, you know, that clue, I feel like it was an exact match, right? I mean, it was pretty amazing.

Speaker 3 No, they did a great job with that.

Speaker 4 Now we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with a special guest, Dateline producer Ann Priceman.

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Speaker 4 What we're going to do now is we're going to bring in Ann Priceman, who, as I said, is a good friend of mine. And I've done many Datelines with her.
And she was your producer on this episode. She was.

Speaker 4 And she is going to tell us a little bit about her experience with the story and answer some questions from social media. So let's bring in the incredible Ann Priceman.
Hello, great to be with you.

Speaker 4 Anne, so you made a vlog while you were out filming this episode. Let's just play it for our listeners really quickly.
Hi, I'm Anne. And I'm Rachel.

Speaker 4 And today we're we're taking you along on a shoot for an all-new episode of Dateline.

Speaker 4 We're in Elko County, Nevada, which is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been while traveling for Dateline. In fact, this area is known as the Swiss Alps of Nevada.

Speaker 4 After a couple of hours of filming, we headed back to town.

Speaker 3 Although we ran into a problem, a lot of big problems, actually.

Speaker 3 So we're driving back from our b-roll shoot

Speaker 3 and we're having some trouble getting home.

Speaker 4 Eventually, they moved out of the way and we made it back to town.

Speaker 4 So, what the listener can't see is that you're driving through this gorgeous valley, and then your SUV is suddenly surrounded by a herd of huge dairy cows.

Speaker 11 Eventually, they turned around and they're like, oh, there's a car.

Speaker 3 It's the same philosophy that Ann uses when dealing with me, which is you just wait and eventually like it works out.

Speaker 3 You're patient enough.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Josh, you made a vlog as well in Canada.

Speaker 3 I did because I had that

Speaker 3 trip, which, by the way, was the other kind of story that we were just talking about, which is it was not a friend of the victim. It was somebody completely random.
And that was

Speaker 3 kind of a kind of a swerve for us in that there was no relationship at all between killer and victim. And where we were going in Canada was so far away and it was so hard to get there.

Speaker 3 And it took so long. It was a real planes, trains, and automobiles experience.
So

Speaker 3 I made a little video travelogue.

Speaker 4 If you hadn't have documented, I don't know that I would have believed it that you were in Moosane, Canada.

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it took two days to get there and two days to get back. I was only there a little while.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 I was so proud of you for braving the cold, Josh, you California guy.

Speaker 3 I know that you and Keith grew up with that, but I did not. Yeah.

Speaker 4 All right. So we are going to dig into some social media questions.
The first one one is from Dallaron7 at Daniel R. HawkerOne.

Speaker 4 He talks about how this is, you know, a very tragic story and sad story that all parents should watch with their kids and tell them, this is why we ask questions. This is why we keep tabs on you 24-7.

Speaker 4 This can be this episode a teachable moment for sure if you feel comfortable either having your kids watch it or just telling them what happened.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I think Jimmy Olackie did everything right.

Speaker 3 I mean, he paid a lot of attention to where his daughter was, who she was hanging out with, what was going on in her life. He was not some absentee father.
He was very, very involved.

Speaker 3 And yet, this still happens.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, if there is any kind of teachable moment here, it's that you say to your kids, you know, even people that you feel comfortable with, it doesn't mean that nothing can ever happen.

Speaker 3 You just have to be aware all the time.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And it's kind of an instinctive thing, right? There's no manual.

Speaker 4 You kind of just have to figure it out and hope for the best and do everything you can, which is what Jim was clearly doing, which leads me to our next viewer, Jossie at JocelynD20,

Speaker 4 who said, and I think she speaks for all of us, this dad has me in tears.

Speaker 3 You know, and when we were originally talking with him, we sat down, he's very sort of taciturn.

Speaker 3 He doesn't talk a lot, but man, once we started him talking about this story, he was great all the way through.

Speaker 3 And he was one of the main storytellers of this story, which, you know, sometimes on Dateline, the people that know the victim the best aren't their parents, but not Jimmy Lacky.

Speaker 3 He was a player in her life all the way through. And he told this story better than anybody.

Speaker 4 And Katie Bumble said, Brittany's father left a deep impression on me. May all daughters have a dad who loves them this much.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 11 his

Speaker 11 pain was so palpable. I mean, we're around for what we do, a lot of victims, but this was so different.
Like, you felt it. You almost took it on yourself.

Speaker 4 So, on to Bryce, the killer. Nancy Carol Harvey on Facebook said, I knew right away Bryce did it, talking about the cowboy hat and the truck.

Speaker 4 There are so many of the same color truck in that town and cowboys.

Speaker 3 That definitely set investigators off on a whole other path, which they

Speaker 3 mean, I mean, if you were JT and you lived in Elko County,

Speaker 3 you probably were getting investigated. So, I mean,

Speaker 3 it was a clue just broad enough to guarantee a lot of investigator hours.

Speaker 11 It's the land of F-150s and cowboy hats.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 11 It's cowboy country.

Speaker 4 I think people around here forget that there's a whole other world out there in America. You know, there's places where there's not Starbucks on every corner.

Speaker 11 Josh found a Starbucks in town.

Speaker 3 I did find it. Okay, maybe there's one on the corner.
It wasn't actually a Starbucks, I think. It was a

Speaker 3 Starbucks type place.

Speaker 11 One of our cameramen is a like coffee aficionado. This is obviously a sidebar, but so every place you go, he finds the little specialty roaster place.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. There isn't a Starbucks in every town, but

Speaker 4 you don't need a Starbucks if they have these little cute specialty coffee places.

Speaker 3 There are places that serve coffee, and I will find that. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Okay, this is from the Dateline team.

Speaker 4 Brittany's main hobby was horseback riding, and she loved the rodeo of course during the show we asked viewers what their favorite hobby was as a teenager we got all kinds of answers um but we want to know josh and ann what were your favorite hobbies as teenagers and do you still do them today and you go first

Speaker 11 question like underlies how much of a dork i was um i watched a lot of tv uh every

Speaker 11 wonder why we're in this position

Speaker 4 my parents hated it too by the way i don't know about you My parents were like, stop watching TV.

Speaker 11 No, I mean, I was Gen X and a little bit latchkey. So, again, Love Boat Reruns and Magnum PI were my jams.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I remember one of my favorite hobbies was watching Keith on television when I was a small child. So that was.

Speaker 4 Wait, when, wait, are you joking? Or you mean when he was an anchor in LA?

Speaker 3 No, I mean when I'm joking.

Speaker 3 When I grew up, I read a lot. I'm still doing that.
I watched a lot of television. I watched a lot of crime dramas on television, kind of like now.

Speaker 3 My mom used to say to me,

Speaker 3 you know, Josh, television is not a life.

Speaker 3 You know, well, wrong again,

Speaker 3 wrong again. Okay.
All of our parents.

Speaker 4 All right. Well, on that note,

Speaker 4 thank you,

Speaker 4 Anne, for joining us today. That was a nice special treat.

Speaker 11 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 4 Thank you, Josh, as well for sharing all your insights into this episode.

Speaker 3 Thank you, guys.

Speaker 4 Okay. And that is Talking Dateline for this week.
Remember, if you have any questions for us about stories or about Dateline, you can reach out to us on social media at Dateline NBC.

Speaker 4 Also, be sure to check out the newest season of our podcast, Dateline Missing in America, featuring missing person cases brought to our attention by our followers on social media.

Speaker 4 Listen to the first episode now, wherever you get your podcasts. And see you Fridays on Dateline on NBC.

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