
BONUS: Alice and Gerald Uden (Snapped: Killer Couples)
The disappearances of a mother and her two sons in 1980 leads to three-decade quest for justice.
Season 15, Episode 10
Originally aired: Jun 25, 2021
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Full Transcript
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We are bringing you a special bonus episode today from Oxygen's hit series, Killer Couples. You can also watch full episodes live or on demand on the free Oxygen app or on Peacock by clicking the link in our description.
Enjoy.
A 40-year-old mystery rattles a small Wyoming community.
There's just a desperation to understand what happened to this woman and her two children.
A cold case task force uncovers disturbing new clues within the family. We found human blood in the back deck of that station wagon.
There could be a serial killer who's stalking people and killing people. But as authorities expose more deadly secrets, the body count continues to escalate.
We had remains exhumed because we wanted to determine if in fact he had been poisoned. And the suspected killers behind it all leave everyone stunned.
She said, you're going to hear that I killed somebody. I know you're not telling the whole truth, okay? Yes.
They looked at killing people as a solution to a problem.
These were two profoundly evil people who found one another.
And together they held these incredibly dark, violent,
sadistic secrets.
For someone looking to disappear or get away from it all,
you can't do much better than Fremont County, Wyoming. Fremont County is rural.
People there can live the life they want to live without a lot of interference from the rest of the world. So it's a place where you can escape the prying eyes of your neighbors.
In 1976, 37-year-old Alice Prunty
moved to Fremont County in search of a fresh start. A mother of five, Alice had just left her third husband.
Alice was an Illinois girl who grew up in a normal family. She was divorced, then widowed, then divorced.
She moves in her trailer to Wyoming. I was the baby.
I was a very spoiled baby. My mother supported me.
My mom was an awesome mom.
She loved music. Saturdays was housecleaning day, and she put Tammy Wynette and Tanya Tucker playing on the record player.
Three failed marriages hadn't dampened Alice's determination to find lasting love. She finally found it in the summer of 1976, when she began dating her next-door neighbor, 32-year-old Gerald Uden.
One day, there was a knock on Gerald's door, and it was Alice. She wanted him to help her connect her trailer to the power.
He was immediately smitten. She was, to him, the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen in the world.
A maintenance worker at a local steel mine, Gerald was also coming off his third failed marriage. To Gerald, Alice was the whole package.
She was independent, she was resourceful, she could support herself. He fell head over heels in love with my mom.
Just five months after meeting, Gerald and Alice tied the knot, and the couple bought a farm in Pavilion, Wyoming. Mom milked cows.
She had chickens. They had their own pigs.
As their child, I never really wanted for anything. In the summer of 1980, Gerald received some unexpected news.
his ex-wife Virginia Uden and her two young sons, 11-year-old Richard and 10-year-old Reagan, moved to the same small town. They were not the biological children of Virginia and Gerald Uden.
They were her children from a previous marriage. But Gerald had adopted the boys prior to the divorce.
When Gerald learned the boys were moving with their mother to Lander, Wyoming, he was elated.
Gerald took his father role very seriously, and he was a good father.
When the boys would visit, they were one big family in Gerald and Alice's home.
Sadly, the reunion would be short-lived.
On September 13, 1980, two months after Virginia and her sons move to Lander,
her mother, Claire Martin,
enters the Fremont County Sheriff's Office with disturbing news. She wanted to speak to an officer about a missing persons report.
And at that time, she started telling us about her daughter. Virginia was supposed to go meet Gerald Juden with the boys so that they could go bird hunting.
But when Claire called Gerald to check in on her daughter and grandsons,
he informed her that the trio never showed up to meet him.
Virginia doesn't show up at the time that Claire expected her to, and Claire begins to worry. Gerald agreed to come help her look for them, and so Gerald and Claire went and drove around looking for Virginia and the boys.
They go around places in Riverton that Virginia might have been. They don't find her.
Now that Virginia and her sons have been missing for nearly 24 hours, Claire is concerned that something bad has happened to her daughter and grandsons. Claire knew her daughter better than anyone, and she knew her daughter wouldn't have just up and left without saying a word or taking any money with her.
She described the vehicle that they were in, which was actually Claire's vehicle, a Ford station wagon. An attempt to locate was put out with all other agencies, the police departments and things, to watch for the car that she was driving.
Three weeks pass without a word from Virginia Uden or her sons. Then, on October 4th, authorities receive an ominous tip.
A passerby reports to the sheriff's office that he saw a half-hidden station wagon on the edge of a very deep canyon in the Wind River Mountains. The station wagon's tags identify
it as belonging to Claire Martin, the same vehicle Virginia had been driving when she and her sons disappeared. We found that there was human blood in the back deck of that station wagon.
The blood was a type A, which matched Virginia's blood type.
And there was a Type A, which matched Virginia's blood type.
And there was also some .22 caliber shells in the car.
Fearful that Virginia and her sons had met foul play,
authorities released their findings to the media
and asked for the public's
help in locating the missing mother and children. It was scary for us because Virginia Uden actually
was an employee of mine and so we got to know Virginia and knew her two boys fairly well.
People went all over and combed that mountain looking for bodies. With zero leads, authorities turned back to Virginia's mother, Claire Martin, to see if she can provide any additional insight into her daughter's life.
That's when Claire offers a shocking theory.
She was totally convinced that Gerald Uden had killed her daughter and her two sons.
Investigators press Claire for more information about Gerald's relationship with both Virginia and her sons.
Virginia and the boys were, they were a tremendous source of tension
in the relationship between Alice and Gerald.
And part of that was because
Virginia wanted more child support.
Alice wrote really hateful things
in correspondence with Virginia.
She called Virginia brainless, you tricked my husband into marrying you. And everyone knows you didn't love him.
You only did it for the money. There was a lot of hatred between Alice and Virginia.
And really, it was not any kind of a fight over Gerald. It was really over money.
On November 14, 1980, nearly two months after Virginia and her sons went missing,
investigators request to speak with Gerald and Alice Uden.
We talked to Alice individually.
Alice was kind of a basket case at that time. She was crying and emotional and really couldn't answer much.
Gerald, however, visibly resents Claire's accusations. He became very physically upset, was shaking, and couldn't hold a cup of coffee.
You could see the carotid artery in his neck pulsating,
and Larry said that he's covering up something.
I knew right away we had our guy
and that he had something to do with it,
with the missing people.
We just didn't know why.
Without warning, Gerald abruptly ends the interview,
but not before leaving investigators with one final and disturbing thought. He said that, you know, even if there was a crime, that we couldn't prove it because there was no body.
Coming up, the case is sent spiraling in a new direction when an informant comes forward with a shocking allegation. We're here today to give you a chance.
We know where he is because we have him now. More than five months after the mysterious disappearances of Virginia Uden and her two sons, Richard and Reagan, investigators with the Fremont County Sheriff's Office have received information from Virginia's mother, Claire Martin, who believes Virginia and her sons were murdered by her ex-husband, Gerald Uden.
Claire Martin felt in her bones that Gerald Uden played a role in the disappearance.
I believe that she knew deep in her heart that they had been killed.
Despite their suspicions, investigators are unable to find any evidence connecting Gerald
Thank you. her heart that they had been killed.
Despite their suspicions, investigators are unable to find any evidence connecting Gerald or his wife Alice to the disappearances. There's absolutely no evidence, and their hands were tight.
Years pass without any new leads. Claire was doing everything in her power to find her family.
We all suspected the same thing. At that point, we didn't have it as far as the law requires.
In 1982, citing police pressure and suspicion from their neighbors, Alice and Gerald suddenly sell their Wyoming farm and move 1,100 miles to Chadwick, Missouri. Honestly, when we moved to Missouri, I don't think I understood all of it.
I was eight years old. For 12 more years, nothing new materializes in the investigation.
If you understand what's happening in that community at that time, there's just a desperation to understand what happened to this woman and her two children. Then, in 1994, 14 years after Virginia and her boys went missing, the case takes a sudden and unexpected turn when an informant comes forward with a bombshell allegation.
The informant is Alice Uden's oldest son, Todd Scott, and he tells police that his mother had once confessed to being involved in a murder.
But to everyone's surprise, it's not the murder of Virginia or her sons.
Todd Scott, who was one of the children of Alice Uden, knew his mother had killed her husband,
Ronald Holtz. And he knew that because she told him that she did.
Investigators learned that Ron Holtz, a Vietnam War veteran, had been Alice's third husband. The two had met and married in 1974 after a whirlwind romance that began in a psychiatric hospital.
She'd been a psych nurse. She was sympathetic to the trauma that he suffered in Vietnam.
And, you know, she thought she could, you know, save him or whatever. I believe I was two or so when she married Ron.
According to Todd, Alice and Ron's marriage was tumultuous from the start. Ron had abused Alice.
Ron had a very volatile history.
Todd explains that Alice had initially told everyone she had kicked Ron out when she filed for divorce in December of 1974.
Ron had never contested the divorce.
In fact, no one had ever seen or heard from Ron Holtz again.
Disappearing was completely in keeping with his character. That was the reputation he had.
But years later, Alice had told her son a very different story about what really happened to his former stepfather. One night, he was about 14 or 15,
his mom had been drinking,
and she was feeling a little bit emotional,
and she told him that years earlier,
when she'd been married to Ron,
he'd been very abusive, and she was afraid of him.
And so one night when he was sleeping,
she got her .22, and she shot him in the back of the head while he was in bed. She had taken his body out of the trailer, put him in a barrel and thrown him down the abandoned gold mine in the Remount Ranch.
His mother had told him that Ron had been abusive and deserved what he got.
Todd, for a very, very long time, carried what had to be an enormous burden. And he just eventually had to get this off of his shoulders.
Investigators dig into Todd's claim and discover that there's no paper trail for Ron Holtz since the winter of 1974, when Alice had told her family she'd left Ron. His social security, for instance, had had no activity.
A man who had been in and out of mental hospitals for years had no more medical reports. They were pretty convinced that Ron Holtz probably was no longer alive.
Investigators theorize that if Alice had killed her third husband, it increased the likelihood that she and potentially Gerald were responsible for what happened to Virginia and her sons. They widened the scope of their investigation to focus on finding the remains of Ron Holtz.
Coordinating with police in Cheyenne, Wyoming, detectives launch a search of Remount Ranch. Everybody knew that abandoned mine shaft was there, and commonly, when there would be an animal that would die on the ranch, they would dispose of the remains down the mine shaft.
At one time, the hole had been 90 feet deep, maybe a dozen feet across. The surrounding dirt and rocks were unstable.
Sending anybody down there would be difficult. Without the proper resources, investigators must call off the search.
And just like the unsolved investigation into what happened to Virginia Uden and her sons, the search for Ron Holtz hits a brick wall. We had nothing else to go on.
No new information. No bodies were discovered.
So it became a cold case. It was very frustrating.
It was always on our minds. Eleven more years pass with no leads for either case.
Then, in 2005, both Virginia Uden and Ron Holtz's unsolved cases receive renewed interest. It's several years later when a Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation investigator begins to look through the cold case files.
At the time, I was a special agent for the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation. My role in this case is one of the investigators.
The cold case team decides to focus their efforts on Alice Uden.
We're going to interview her, have a conversation,
and find out what happened if she would give us more insight into the murder of Ron Holt.
On January 18, 2005,
detectives with the cold case task force
make the surprise visit to Gerald and Alice's home in Chadwick, Missouri. Gerald had become a trucker, and at the time, Gerald is on the road on a trucking assignment.
When they knock on the front door, Alice answers. Alice is a kind of grandmotherly type at that point.
They ask her if she'll answer a few questions, which she does.
Alice seems to think nothing about it.
She even invites him inside.
They bring up her past relationships,
and she goes down the list of husbands that she'd had.
But she conveniently leaves out Ron Holtz.
When Alice neglects to mention Ron, the detectives ask her directly about her third husband.
And her reaction is telling.
When confronted with the name Ron Holtz, she falls out of her chair, half-fainted. Who doesn't love the good things in life? Once you get a taste of luxury, it's hard to go back, and thanks to Quince, I don't have to.
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That's 20% off your first order with code SNAPT at liquidiv.com. Cold case agents with the Wyoming Department of Criminal Investigations
have just caught Alice Uden off guard
after confronting her about the disappearance of her third husband, Ron Holtz,
more than 30 years earlier.
When they bring up the story that she had supposedly told her son
about shooting a guy named Ron,
she defended herself as saying,
oh no, that didn't happen, I just made it up as a kind of cautionary tale.
Alice claims that Ron was abusive
and that she kicked him to the curb and divorced and moved on.
With no physical evidence to prove Aliceice wrong investigators end their interview dci agents next speak with alice's youngest daughter erica hayes when they ask her about the claims surrounding her former stepfather's death erica admits that that her mother had recently contacted her.
My mom found out that my brother, Todd, had told on her. She said, you're gonna hear that I killed
somebody. And I went, did you? And she said, yes I did, because I was protecting you.
Investigators also ask Erica if she knows what happened to Gerald's third ex-wife, Virginia Uden, and her two sons, Richard and Reagan.
Erica tells agents she doesn't know, but she has a theory on who is responsible for their disappearances. She suspected Gerald was involved with the disappearance of Virginia and the boys, but she didn't believe her mother was involved.
Investigators press Erica
to explain her theory
and her response is unsettling.
Erica Hayes is talking to her parents
and Gerald makes an offhand statement.
You got to have some pigs
to get rid of the body.
And for the uninitiated
who haven't spent a lot of time around pigs, they eat just about everything. Erica says at the time, she brushed off Gerald's comments as some kind of twisted joke, but she now fears that Virginia and her sons may have suffered a similar fate.
At the time that Virginia and the boys went missing in 1980, Alice and Gerald Uden had property where their home was. And they also had some pigs.
Armed with this new theory, agents head back to the Uden's old farm in Wyoming. We did a search warrant on Gerald's house.
We basically excavated and screened about 200 square meters of that hog pen looking for human remains. We turned the place upside down.
We didn't come up with any evidence. Once again, the investigation appears to be at a standstill.
Eight years pass without
any new leads or developments. Then, on April 4th, 2013, Virginia's mother, Claire, passes away.
Claire Martin died at the age of 92, never finding justice for her daughter and grandsons. I know that Claire Martin never rested.
She always was wanting the answers behind what happened to Virginia and Richard and Reagan. Everybody wanted her to have that closure so she could go to her final resting place knowing this was over.
And unfortunately, she didn't get that. For several of the Wyoming DCI agents working on Virginia's cold case, Claire's death strengthens their resolve to solve the two-decade-old investigation.
Miraculously, they get a new break just a few months later. A bigger team returns to the Remount Ranch and to that abandoned gold mine.
After a day and a half of searching, the crew finds what they've been looking for.
They find the pieces of a barrel.
And inside that, they find a human skeleton.
And in the back of the skull of this skeleton
was a neat little bullet hole, probably caused
by a .22 caliber gun. The discovery matches the story that Alice's children had told police.
To verify whether the bones belonged to Ron Holtz, agents are able to track down Ron's biological daughter from his first marriage.
They find her in Alaska, and they dispatch a state trooper to draw her DNA to compare to Ron Holtz's, and it's a match. The discovery of Ron's remains are enough for police to arrest
Alice Uden for his murder
on September 26, 2013. They got a warrant, went to Missouri and arrested her while Gerald was out.
He was a long-haul trucker. Once in custody, the 74-year-old denies any role in the murder.
She claimed she didn't even know who Ron Holtz was, and we knew that that was a lie. It was at about that time that Agent Tina Trimble from the Division of Criminal Investigation pulled out a photograph of a skull, Ronald Holtz's, and showed it to Alice.
Do you know who that is?
No.
This is Ronald Holtz.
Is it?
Hmm.
We're here today to give you a chance.
Okay?
We know where he is because we have him now. The evidence convinces Alice to finally admit the truth.
Yeah, I was threatening to kill Erica because she probably takes this little girl. I was screaming and he ran.
She said he was going to kill her.
And I put my .22 rifle and shot him over the head.
What happened then?
How did he get into that hole?
I put him there.
Got him into a barrel and rolled him to my heart
to the back door and put him in the trunk.
I took him back to the mine and put him in there.
So you're going to take me to jail?
Yes, I am.
Here's what I'm asking.
If we can go to the prosecutor and tell them that you told the whole truth, because I know you're not telling the whole truth, okay?
I know that they're looking to figure out what happened to Virginia and those boys.
Yes.
So what about Virginia and the boys?
I've told you everything I know about them.
What has Cheryl told you about it? Nothing. Alice was charged with one count of first-degree murder for killing Ron Holtz.
We were hoping that that arrest would have enough of an impact that maybe Gerald would want to talk about Virginia and Richard and Reagan. We're given the opportunity to give Gerald a phone call.
And in this phone call, we told Gerald, essentially, that Alice had been arrested for the things that happened in Wyoming. We didn't tell him what.
He agreed to drive back to meet with us.
And it was our hope as investigators that he would use that drive to let his mind wander.
And we were hoping he would allow himself to give the truth.
Gerald wanted to talk to us.
He literally started his conversation off with telling us that he doesn't know why we arrested Alice, because we arrested the wrong person. Coming up, after three decades, investigators finally uncover what really happened to Virginia Uden and her sons.
That fast, it was 10 seconds, and they were gone.
And newfound evidence suggests the body count may continue to rise. We had these remains exhumed because we wanted to determine if, in fact, he had been poisoned.
Wyoming DCI agents have arrested Alice Uden for the 39-year-old murder of her third husband, Ron Holtz, after finding his remains at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine. Both Alice and her husband, Gerald, remain suspects in the unsolved disappearances of Gerald's ex-wife, Virginia Uden, and her two sons.
At the time Alice is arrested, Gerald is on the road on a trucking assignment.
When Gerald finally arrives home, agents meet him.
They tell him Alice has been arrested and they'd like to talk to him a little bit more about what he knows I don't know how she could know anything about it really because she had nothing really to do with it 33 years I have said no, I never did nothing.
But now that you guys are here, I've got to assume that you must have either found some bodies or you've done something else.
And I've got to tell you, if you found bodies, that's a miracle.
He apparently thought she'd been arrested for Virginia and the boys, and he said, well, she didn't do it, I did it. They were startled.
They were incredulous, but they kept their cool and let Gerald talk. And he proceeded to paint a picture of what he perceived Virginia to be like.
He felt that Virginia was after him strictly to get child support.
Gerald claims that Alice had been particularly upset that he had to pay child support to Virginia,
even though he had adopted both boys prior to their divorce. Alice was raising a little havoc about that, because why should we be paying child support for these two boys and they're not yours? And you need to do something about it and take care of it.
I was paying her $150 a month. I'm trying to juggle two women, and it ain't flying.
No. And so finally, it just went off.
And I said, I've had it. I'm going to solve this problem.
And so I did. Gerald tells police that on September 12, 1980, he lured Virginia to meet him under the premise of taking her sons, Richard and Reagan, dove hunting.
Gerald says Virginia and the boys come to the medium a little before two o'clock on the 12th, and the are excited to see him and he jumps in the passenger seat and directs Virginia to just drive up this dirt road to a point that he knows where they can safely shoot the gun she drives to that place and they stop the kids get out Virginia was there the there. I was there.
And I shot her right square in the back of the head and she went down. Richard was standing behind the station wagon and I whirled and I shot him in the back of the head.
At this point, Reagan realized things were going south quickly and took off running.
He took them, he fell in the ditch, and I walked over to him and I shot him down.
And they were all three dead.
That fast. It was ten seconds.
And they were all three dead. That fast, it was 10 seconds, and they were gone.
He said he put them in steel drums, like an oil drum.
He poked holes in the drum.
He took them and put them in a boat and went out onto Fremont Lake,
which is a natural, deep, clear water lake, and submerged the barrels in that lake. Just a travesty that Virginia and the boys were killed.
It's sad, because we've got two little boys that never got to get married or get a job or raise a family of their own. Gerald says he later disposed of the gun and tried to make Claire's station wagon disappear.
I tried to roll it over the damn cliff and you think it would go over the cliff? Not so much. Not so much.
I didn't get any pleasure out of doing it. None.
But it did stop the child support and that was going to come to about $16,000. The agents asked Gerald if Alice played any role in this and he denied that she did.
Nowhere in that statement does he ever acknowledge the wrongfulness of murdering Virginia or Richard or Reagan. He didn't show any remorse, nothing like that.
He just kind of a matter of fact, nonchal i did this did this did it when he was done they arrested him and took him to jail 33 years after gerald killed virginia and the boys on that roadside he was charged with three counts of first-degree murder. The day that I truly realized that, yes,
he had committed these murders was the day of his arrest.
On November 1, 2013, 71-year-old Gerald Uden agrees to plead guilty to the murders of Virginia and her sons. The judge accepted Gerald's plea deal, and he was sentenced to three life sentences.
Alice, however, decides to try her fate at trial.
But before court proceedings begin,
a tip comes in to suggest Ron Holtz may not have been the first husband that Alice had killed. There's a belief that my dad was her first victim.
After nearly 40 years of eluding authorities, justice has finally caught up with accused killers Alice and Gerald Uden. For the murders of his ex-wife, Virginia, and two adopted sons, Richard and Reagan, 72-year-old Gerald has been given three life sentences.
75-year-old Alice is still awaiting trial for the murder of her ex-husband, Ron Holtz. But before court proceedings begin, police receive a tip that suggests Ron Holtz may not have been Alice's first victim.
Alice's second husband, named Don Prunty, died at age 45 from a whole array of illnesses that stemmed from his alcoholism. I know that my dad was an alcoholic, and the death certificate says alcoholism.
They had no reason to do an autopsy. There is a belief, however, that my mom poisoned my dad.
There's a belief that my dad was her first victim. Following up on the tip, police re-examined Don Prunty's medical records from the months leading up to his death in 1973.
Alice had remarked she was giving Don something that would stop his drinking.
The symptoms that were described in Prunty's medical records
were consistent with poisoning, specifically by antifreeze.
We had Mr. Prunty's remains exhumed.
Unfortunately, he'd been embalmed, and so we weren't able to extract anything from his remains that would have helped us determine if, in fact, our hypothesis was correct and that Alice had been poisoning him. Though Don Prunty's cause of death remains unclear, Alice's trial for the 1974 murder of Ron Holtz gets underway in May of 2014.
Using the testimony of Todd Scott we were able to also establish our theory of the case which was Ronald Holtz was laying in bed sleeping when he was shot in the back of the head with a 22 rifle by his wife Alice. The defense counters by saying Alice acted in defense of herself and her daughter.
This was Wyoming of the 1970s.
There was no 911.
Women didn't have shelters.
So she took matters into her own hands, she said.
On May 8, 2014, the jury retires to deliberate. It takes them 13 hours to reach
a verdict. In the end, the jury acquitted Mrs.
Juden of first-degree murder, but they
did convict her of second degree. They believed that she shot him,
and the jury didn't believe it was premeditated.
Alice is sentenced to life in prison.
Five years later, she dies in prison at the age of 80.
Her death was welcomed.
Because I hated seeing her in prison.
I did.
No matter what she did, I loved her.
I loved her so much.
But just two days after Alice passes away, Gerald recants his confession to killing Virginia and her sons. When Alice died, he used that as an opportunity to capitalize on now that she's gone, I can put everything on her.
I talked to him on the phone and I told him, I said, I know what you did.
So just stop.
Stop.
Because I will not have you putting all this on her.
Have some respect for your dead wife.
In September 2019, the court rejects Gerald's attempt to withdraw his guilty plea. His hands are absolutely not clean.
I mean, he was, I totally believe that he killed Virginia and the two boys and was every bit in on every bit of it as much as she was. I genuinely looked at Alice as a person in our society who looked at killing people as a solution to a problem.
I think with Gerald and with Alice, we have a perfect storm of a sociopath and a narcissistic person.
I think the relationship between Alice and Gerald was unique in that these were two profoundly evil people who found one another.
Gerald Yudin is housed at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington. He is 82 years old.
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