REMEMBERING: Valaine Briggs (Ace of Spades, Utah)

Hi, everyone. Ashley Flowers here.
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The deck is off this week. We will be back next week with a brand new episode.
But in the meantime, I wanted to bring you an episode that we released a few years ago.

Because last week, the victim Vilaine Briggs would have been celebrating her 67th birthday. But instead, a a still unknown killer cut Vilaine's life short at the tender age of 18.

Detectives in Utah are still actively testing DNA in her case and still encourage anyone with information to call them. So our card this week is Vilaine Briggs, the Ace of Spades from Utah.

It's midday on May 5th, 1977, and a young woman named Moana is waiting for her roommate, Belaine, to get back from her morning class so they can go for a shopping date.

She's waiting and waiting and waiting.

Vilaine had left their apartment at around 9.30 that morning for the short walk to the LDS Business College, where she was studying for a certificate or degree in court reporting.

But her class only ran until 11.20, so Vilaine and Moana had plans to head to the Crossroads Mall in downtown Salt Lake City after Vilaine got home.

It should only have taken her like 10 minutes to get there, but 11.30 came and went and there was no sign of her.

And honestly, I'm guessing that at some point, Moana probably felt a little frustrated with Velaine for keeping her waiting.

But as the minutes ticked by into hours, that feeling was overtaken by concern. And it wasn't just Moana who was concerned.
Their other roommates were getting worried as well.

Yeah, so the roommates were really concerned because Velaine was very, very good about telling them every time she was going somewhere and when she'd be home. So they were concerned.

That's Unified Police Detective Ben Pender, the cold case detective who's been working this case since 2015.

But Detective Pender told us that early afternoon, the roommates weren't quite ready to involve law enforcement just yet. So they called Vilaine's ex-fiancé Scott to see if he knew where she was.

He didn't.

But he knew something was wrong because she wasn't there. He actually responded over to their apartment and stayed with her roommates until about one or two in the morning.

Now, even though Scott and Vilane were broken up, the roommate's decision to involve him made sense because A, they had only been fully broken up for a few days. And B,

Vilaine wasn't from Utah. She was from all the way up in Dillon, Montana, and Scott was from Dillon, too.
So he knew Vilaine's parents and more importantly, he knew how to get a hold of them.

So they dialed long distance to get her parents on the phone, hoping maybe they had heard from her by chance. But when they spoke, they learned that her parents hadn't been in touch with her either.

So Vilaine's parents took over. And they called her uncle Elwood, who lived locally in Utah, and they asked him to file a missing persons report, which he did at 11.15 p.m.

Now, the ex-fiancé Scott spoke with the police either that night or early the next morning to help bolster the uncle's concern.

And he told police that he hadn't spoken to Vilaine since late on the 4th.

So, according to Scott, said he had last talked to Vilaine on Wednesday, May 4th of 1977 at approximately 11 o'clock at night.

Scott told them that he and Vilaine officially broke off their engagement about three weeks prior, but they'd kind of continued to see each other.

It wasn't until that May 4th call that they officially ended things for good, and he admitted that it didn't really end well. Vilaine was crying and hung up on Scott.

Of course, investigators wanted to know why they broke up. Vilaine was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Latter-day Saints, and I think she was trying to convert Scott over to that.

And I think there was a little bit of resistance from Scott. So as time went on, I believe what occurred is they just kind of drifted apart that way.

I mean, Vilaine wanted that in her marriage, and I don't necessarily believe Scott did. So I think that's really kind of what happened as they went their separate ways.

So there were no immediate red flags to police. Maybe she was just upset about her breakup and needed some time to cool off.

I think at that point,

I don't want to say what they were thinking, but possibly that she ended up just taking off with somebody else, a friend or something like that.

So I don't think it was one of those things like we look at today that we would be immediately doing stuff to investigate it where it's unusual.

But I think, you know, in the years past, it was more of if they're an adult, let's give it a couple of days and we'll see if they just come back or not.

Given this casual attitude, which we know wasn't unique to Salt Lake City or even the 1970s, the Salt Lake City PD actually got off to a pretty strong investigative start on the 6th.

First, they issued a bulletin to nearby law enforcement agencies about Vilaine's disappearance, putting them on notice to keep an eye out for her.

They also headed to the LDS Business College to confirm that she'd actually made it to class the day before, which she had.

So there was several witnesses that identified her attending the class. One individual actually walked with her down the stairs to the end of the class.

And when they got down to the bottom of the stairs, the classmate she was with went one direction and Vilaine went a different direction and they parted ways at that point.

As best they could tell at this point, that was the last anyone had seen of her. It was like she walked down those stairs, said her goodbyes, and just vanished into the landscape.

And in the middle of the day, coming from a building that was on a busy road with houses and businesses all around.

So surely if something had happened to Vilaine after class, especially something violent, someone would have seen, right?

So they began to canvass.

They checked the hospitals, they checked cab companies, bus companies, and none of them at the time were able to identify her as being seen there in their cabs or on the buses.

Her doctor was contacted as well, who worked up at the area, and he indicated that he hadn't seen her since since a previa visit back in March.

After that, police went door to door in Vilaine's neighborhood, showing residents her photo and asking if anyone had seen her the day before. But with that, too, they came up empty.

By May 7th, when Villain had been missing for two days, her parents had driven down from Montana to Salt Lake City.

And when they sat down with Salt Lake PD, there were a few things the family thought were critical for officers to understand about Vilaine.

So it was their general consensus would have never gotten into a vehicle, whether by force or fear without putting up a tremendous struggle. They stated that she's not intimidated easily.

She was very athletic. They also felt as though she would never solicit rights or acting in any other carefree manner.
They indicated she was not a wild type of girl.

In fact, that she was the complete opposite as being rather reserved and shy around people she didn't know really well.

Vilaine's friends all said the same thing too. Even her ex, Scott, agreed.

And speaking of Scott, even though they had spoken to him briefly already, they thought maybe talking to him again would give them some more insight into Vilaine's life since he was possibly the person who knew her best.

I mean, just weeks ago, they were planning to get married after all.

Now, it was supposed to be pretty routine, but what was strange about Scott's second interview was that his story actually changed a bit from what he first told officers.

Because now he said that the last time he spoke to Vilaine was around 7 p.m. on May 3rd, instead of closer to midnight on May 4th.

And this is a little confusing to me because I could understand mixing up the days, but confusing 7 p.m. and 11 p.m., that seems odd.

What also seemed odd was what Scott told them he spent the day doing the day after Vilaine disappeared.

And the next day, Scott had contacted his father who had driven down, I believe from also Dillon, Montana, and they actually began searching for Vilaine in the canyons.

And Scott had indicated that they were going, quote, pretty crazy about it. He was asked about why he would have gone to the canyons.

He had replied, quote, if something did happen to her, she'd probably end up in a canyon.

To be fair, this statement wasn't quite as out of left field as it may sound. A young woman's body had been found out in the canyons just a year prior.

But still, it seemed like everyone else in Vilaine's life was clinging to the hope that she was okay, and Scott was jumping straight to murder.

But he was adamant with police that he had nothing to do with Vilaine's disappearance, and he was able to provide an alibi to investigators.

He said that he'd been working at a local hotel where he was a cook from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
on the 5th. And they confirmed this with his supervisor.

Sure, when they asked him, he declined to polygraph, but so do a lot of people. So maybe Scott's changing story, his morbid focus on the canyons, was all innocent after all.

Although, you might think differently when you learn where Vilaine was found that very day.

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The sheriff's office had been been dispatched earlier that evening to a brutal scene out in a nearby canyon.

At around 6 p.m., they'd received a report from four teenage hikers who said that they'd stumbled upon a woman's nude body in Lamb's Canyon.

The boys had hightailed it back to one of their houses, debated whether there was any way they might get blamed for whatever this was, and ultimately decided that they had to alert authorities to what they'd found.

So at the time, one of the detectives picked up the four teenagers and they transported them back to Lambs Canyon. The teens led the detective right to their gruesome discovery.

There, at the bottom of a steep hill near a stream, was a woman curled up in the fetal position. Her hands were bound to each other with some sort of lady's stocking.
And the same with her ankles.

But then all four were bound together with what appeared to be a black belt with flowers on it.

They noticed a mark on her neck, approximately an eighth inch wide, and that extended from the rear of both ears across the front portion of the neck and in the rear of the neck.

They were very light, which possibly indicated pressure had come from the rear being pulled, possibly a quarter rope. There was bruising on Vilaine's left shoulder and smaller bruises on her back.

Sexual assault was immediately suspected based on the presence and location of blood on her body, as well as the more obvious fact that she had been disrobed.

Strangely, there appeared to be marks on her arms near her elbows too, which suggested to investigators that she may have been bound in a different position prior to being left here with her wrists and ankles tied.

You know, it doesn't appear that she'd been there for very long. It almost appeared as though she had been restrained in other locations of her body.

So I think at this point, nobody knows for sure whether or not she was dropped there after she had been murdered or if they took her there to murder her.

Scattered nearby, up to around 30 feet away, were what investigators could only assume were the deceased woman's shoes and clothes.

Jeans, a blouse, a jacket, bra, and underwear, as well as textbooks, a notepad, and some keys.

From what they could see, it almost looked as though these items had just been tossed down into the ravine from the road above because of the messy way they were strewn about.

Now, investigators were already wondering if this woman was Vilane Briggs because they had received the Salt Lake City PD's missing person bulletin just a few days earlier.

And their suspicions were only solidified when they found that some of the discarded textbooks nearby bore an inscription of her name. They still needed a positive ID though.

So the remains were transported by ambulance to the medical examiner's office at the University of Utah Medical Center.

And that's where Vilaine's uncle Elwood was brought in the next morning for the devastating task. He confirmed that it was his niece.

It was also that next morning, May 8th, that an autopsy was performed. And cause and manner of death were determined to be homicide by ligature strangulation.

Detectives speculated that a cord or rope was possibly used. And the ME confirmed initial suspicions that she had been sexually assaulted, but all swabs taken during the exam were negative for semen.

Now, because she'd been found outside of the jurisdiction of the Salt Lake City Police Department, which had been handling her missing persons case, responsibility for investigating her homicide fell to the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office.

So the two agencies coordinated the following day and the investigation was officially handed off. And the sheriff's office got to work.

So they started contacting neighbors at the apartment complex, doing other neighborhood canvases up in the area where Villain lived, started talking to not only her roommates, but classmates as well.

One name her roommates all seemed to mention was this older neighbor who lived in their building, a guy we're going to call Fred. And Fred had this way of making the girls feel very uncomfortable.

He was known to drink a lot, become vulgar and loud. According to Vilaine's roommates, Fred liked to leer at the girls when they walked by, would even cat call them and stuff like that.

I think that he was just kind of somebody that made him all uncomfortable. When he would say things and he would watch him, those types of things, I think he just made him uncomfortable.

Right off the bat, Fred started looking pretty suspicious. For one, when investigators sat him down on May 10th, he didn't have much of an alibi for the day Villain went missing.

I mean, to be honest, he didn't have one at all. He said he'd been home on the 5th, all day alone.
It didn't help the matter that Fred also had quite an illustrious criminal history.

He was 65 years old at the time, and he had a criminal history for child molestation, assault, larceny, DUI, and forgery.

Needless to say, the fact that Fred had a history of sexual offenses was a big red flag. But for a guy with so many past run-ins with the law, he was surprisingly cooperative.

They actually just asked for permission to check his truck camper,

and he gave them permission.

Wouldn't you know it, Fred just so happened to keep rope on hand in there?

Then, when he gave them permission to search his apartment, they found something else weird. They found a pair of women's panties inside of his garbage.

They located four pair of women's panties in the living room and a dish towel in a trunk inside the living room as well. So those items were collected.

Now, Belaine's underwear was found near her body, so investigators weren't necessarily thinking that any of the ones from Fred's Fred's apartment were hers.

But that just begged the question: whose were they?

And you guys, this is gonna be one of the more frustrating loose ends of this case because while Detective Pender said that Fred provided some sort of explanation for the underwear, what that explanation was is nowhere in the case file.

But whatever it was, Fred didn't seem too concerned about sharing it with investigators, and he even agreed to a polygraph. He was asked to submit to a polygraph, which he did and passed a polygraph.

Fred also permitted investigators to take some hair samples to compare to a few strands found at the scene.

But at that point, they kind of had nowhere else to go with Fred with the technology available in the 70s. At the time, they really had nothing else to follow up on with him.

They really had no other things that were indicating that he was involved. I mean, he had cooperated up to this point.

And again, they had exhausted everything, including the polygraph, to where I believe they felt like they didn't have anything legally to where they could have pursued anything else with him at this point.

Good thing he wasn't the only name on their list. You see, there was another name that kept popping up in their interviews, both with Vilaine's roommates and with her classmates.

Detective Pender asked us to conceal his real name, so I'm going to call him Richard. Richard was a professor of Vilaine's at the LDS Business College.

He worked during the daytime in the courts and doing court reporting, and then he taught in the evenings at the LDS Business College.

Richard seemed to have taken a particular liking to Vilaine, to the point that the other students noticed.

And it seemed like maybe he was crossing some lines because investigators were told that he had this habit of visiting Vilaine at the ice cream shop where she worked.

And it was known that he'd actually called Vilaine on the phone several times at her apartment. And I don't know about you, but none of my professors ever called me at home.

They asked about his relationship with her as far as a teacher-student relationship, if he had any other relationship with her other than that.

And he said, no, it was just a teacher-student relationship. They asked if he ever attempted to date her.
He said, no.

As for why he was calling her at home.

At some point, I believe he was indicating that he was verifying an assignment or something that he'd given out to the class, like maybe he had forgotten.

So it was just kind of odd that you would call your student and ask what you assigned out.

But not all conversations were strictly professional, because Richard acknowledged that he and Vilaine discussed her engagement to Scott on several occasions, sometimes at length.

He said she kind of kept him appraised of their evolving status, engaged, not engaged, but still seeing each other, fully broken up.

Now, Richard was only 24 at the time, but he was still her professor. And he was also married with a toddler at home.
So none of this was cool.

But when investigators asked him his whereabouts on May 5th, he provided a mostly solid alibi. He was at work that day in his day job as a court reporter.

And though his schedule depended a lot on the court calendar, which possibly had some last minute cancellations, according to Detective Pender, Investigators seem to have mostly taken his alibi at face value.

They never searched his property or even asked for permission to. And they also never asked him to sit for a polygraph.

By June of that year, investigators sent 20 or so pieces of evidence to the FBI crime lab in DC for processing.

And the FBI found some 62 latent fingerprints, as well as three latent palm prints on various items found near Vilaine's body.

They sent back a report to Salt Lake City saying as much, but this was pre-Aphis, and these prints never made it into any databases. And no one has been able to find them since.

The FBI either lost them or misplaced them or maybe they got lost in the mail. Detective Pender has had FBI personnel trying to find them for years, but so far he hasn't had any luck.

So on the off chance someone from the FBI is listening, I'd consider it a huge favor if you did a little digging around.

I'm sure you think finding anything that's been looked for would be unlikely, but on my other show, Crime Junkie, we covered a case where evidence had supposedly been lost, but a listener had a connection to the department, got them to re-look, and boom, they found it.

And it's literally solving the case and could get an innocent man out of prison. So, you know, maybe just take a peek if you can.

Anyways, they also sent those strands of neighbor Fred's hair that they obtained to the FBI for processing, but nothing ended up coming of that.

Although what they had from the scene was ultimately too limited to be of much value for comparison purposes, they did feel confident that they didn't appear to be a match with friends.

After that, things slowed down because police felt like they had exhausted every potential lead in Vilaine's case.

But then, something bizarre happened up in Montana, near Vilaine's hometown, that made the case heat back up.

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In July of 77, a 17-year-old girl hitchhiking in Montana was found to be in possession of Vilaine's ID.

And how it all unfolded is a little bit wild because this girl, this hitchhiker, just so happened to be hitching a ride near Dillon, where Vilaine was from.

And when she showed her ID to the driver who had pulled over for her, he recognized the name on it right away. I mean, Vilaine was a hometown girl, and her death had received local media attention.

So as soon as he dropped her off, he made a report to local law enforcement who were able to find the girl and bring her in for questioning. And we're not talking just a minor informal interview here.

They talked to this girl for days. According to reporting in the Montana Standard from July of 1977, officials even allowed Vilaine's family to question her at length.

But any possible connection was fleeting. It turns out the ID was a fake, and the girl had obtained it from a guy in Salt Lake City who manufactured them.

Bilaine's name had apparently just been chosen from her newspaper obituary. After that, Bilaine's case went ice cold.
I mean, years passed with no leads, no viable tips, nothing.

But starting in 1983, the investigation took a detour through the land of misfit serial killers.

That's when Henry Lee Lucas and Audis Toole hit the scene and began confessing to damn near every unsolved cold case in the continental United States.

But we all know how legitimate those confessions turned out to be. Yeah,

nothing materialized with him or anybody else they looked at. I think even at some point, some people even thought maybe Ted Bundy could have been involved.

I believe they exhausted all of that and they just weren't able to make any type of a match between them.

After that, not much happened again in Delaine's case all the way up to 2014. That's when cold case investigators obtained permission to conduct a ferro scan of the location where her body was found.

I actually had to look this up and it's a fascinating technology.

Basically, according to their website, it's kind of a 3D reality capture technology that quickly captures, quote, every detail of a crime scene for thorough investigation, reconstruction, and legal prosecution, end quote.

Sounds incredible, right? But I gotta be honest, I'm not sure what practical use this would have for investigators some 37 years after the fact.

But there were other exciting things happening in 2014 as well.

Like when a few items of evidence were submitted for further forensic testing and came back with some unknown mixed DNA profiles, specifically two or more unknown mixed male profiles.

What this might indicate isn't totally clear.

Detective Pender is quick to point out that evidence collection techniques in 1977 didn't exactly preclude the possibility of investigators inadvertently depositing their own DNA onto items from the scene.

So could one or more of these profiles actually belong to an investigator or investigateurs? Yeah, it's possible.

And unfortunately, the technology just still isn't there to fully isolate the profiles. But that's not to say that they haven't already provided critical breakthroughs for Vilaine's case.

What we have right now is we have enough to exclude somebody, but right now, we're right on the cusp of getting into an area where, at some point, hopefully sooner than later, that we can start working on these mixtures and separating them and seeing what we can come up with.

That, but currently, we have enough to where we can exclude.

So, we're still working on making sure everybody in the case initially that they may have thought to be involved or could have been involved, that we're trying to exclude them out of the case or include them in the case, depending on what comes back.

Already, they've successfully ruled out two of the initial persons of interest through DNA comparison, those being both the neighbor Fred and the teacher, Richard, who are both now deceased.

But when our reporter asked whether the same could be said of Scott, her ex-fiancé who is still alive, by the way, Detective Pender got a little cagey and he wouldn't give us a straight answer.

And that feels important because he's been working this case since 2015.

And this is what he said when we asked what he thinks might have happened to Belaine.

She was only a seven to nine minute walk from her place, so really had no reason to get her right unless, of course, it's somebody that she knew or trusted that she felt comfortable getting in that car with.

So to me, it's a combination of all of those things that lead me to believe that it is somebody that she knows or is acquainted with to the point where she was comfortable enough to get in a vehicle with.

He also believes that Belaine was held somewhere in between her disappearance and the discovery of her body.

I think she was taken obviously somewhere else to begin with, and whether that was just in a vehicle or taken to another building or residence or whatever, I don't know.

But clearly, based on the evidence and the information, it appears that she was bound somewhere else or in another location on her body. And

then when she was found, she was bound differently. So it tells me that there's obviously something else going on here, and I don't quite know what.

And though no one has yet to be able to successfully isolate those DNA profiles, Detective Pender is confident that that will change.

So we are actively working in this case and there is a number of things in the works such as some of the lab stuff is changing and so we're looking into that as far as with these mixtures, if we can separate them, we're looking if we could.

potentially to do YSTR surname searches or potentially if we can separate those and get enough DNA that we could potentially proceed with investigative genetic genealogy, that'd be another option in this case.

One thing Pender is 100% certain on is that he's not giving up. Hopefully, with technology and different advancements out there, hopefully, we can do something with what we have.

And if we can't now, maybe we will in a year from now or two years from now. But I'll never give up on the cases.
I believe that as long as we have stuff and stuff to do on the cases, I'm hopeful.

Belaine was only 18 years old with her whole life ahead of her, just waiting to unfold when she was robbed of the future she dreamed of.

And for over four decades, she's been denied the justice she and her family deserve.

So if you know anything about the murder of Belaine Briggs in Salt Lake City, Utah in May of 1977, please call Unified Police Detective Ben Pender at 385-468-9816.

The deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.
So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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