The Deck

Nikole Bakoles (3 of Hearts, Utah)

October 30, 2024 33m
When duck hunters discovered human remains in an area called Saltair near The Great Salt Lake in Utah in the fall of 2000, investigators began the difficult task of trying to learn the real name of the woman they called “Saltair Sally". It took 12 years for the remains to be identified as those of Nikole “Niki” Bakoles, a 20-year-old mom originally from Washington state. Now, nearly another 12 years have passed, and investigators are still trying to figure out what happened to Niki and who left her by that lake.

Listen and Follow Along

Full Transcript

Hi, everyone. Ashley Flowers here.
If you love the mystery, twists, and investigations you hear on this podcast, then you are going to absolutely love my new novel, The Missing Half.

Set where I grew up in northern Indiana, two young women go missing within weeks of one another.

The only trace of them left behind are their cars, left abandoned on the side of the road, door open, key in the ignition.

And police are convinced that their cases have to be connected, but they can't solve them and the cases go cold for years. That is until these girls' sisters team up and do what police never could.
But learning the truth sometimes has grave consequences. And this book will have you questioning how far you would go for someone you love.

The Missing Half hits shelves May 6th.

Be the first to solve the mystery by pre-ordering your copy now at ashleyflowers.com or wherever books are sold.

Make every celebration feel uniquely you. Your dog's birthday coming up? Throw a pepperoni pizza party.
Or maybe you're planning a game night. Make it a silent disco and charades night.
From inspo to all the items you need, Amazon can help you create a truly custom celebration. From birthdays to holidays, Amazon offers convenient one-stop shopping for any party.
Shop everything for every party on Amazon. At Firestone Complete Auto Care, we hold our service to the highest standard.
That's why we have thousands of ASE-certified technicians nationally. So don't wait any longer.
Give us a call and book your next appointment today. Welcome to What's Next.
For your community, for your career, and for the healthcare field. At Carrington College, we're training the next generation of dental assisting professionals.
Bringing you the hands-on training to be ready for a career in the dental health world. We're building on a proven legacy of career training, going back over half a century.

So if you're ready to train for a career in dental assisting and make a difference in your community, we're ready for you. For information about student outcomes, visit carrington.edu.
Our card this week is Nicole Bacolis, the Three of Hearts from Utah. For 12 years, no one knew the name of a young woman whose skeletal remains were discovered near a lake in Utah.

Now, Nicole Bacolis has her name back.

But her family and the detectives working her case are still hoping to uncover another name.

The name of the person or persons who left Nicole's body by that lake 24 years ago.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. By 2011, Nancy Bacoulas had been searching for her daughter Nikki for over a decade.

The last time Nancy saw her daughter was at the end of 1999.

She and her three other kids had spoken to Nikki on the phone a little after that,

but they couldn't pinpoint exactly when Nikki made her last phone call home

because at the time, they didn't know it would be the last. The family had once been as close as close could be, especially Nikki and her little brother James, who was less than a year younger than her.
When we were younger, we were just peas in a pod, you know. We did everything together all the way up until maybe fifth and sixth grade when she went off to middle school.
And I think that our particular bond was kind of stronger all the way up until that point. And then inevitably, like any older sibling would, she needed a little independence.
And so I kind of turned into the trailing kind little brother. But she always looked after me.
She also let me know I was annoying at times, you know. Like so many teenage girls, Nikki started going to parties and hanging out with boys.
But it wasn't until she met an older guy named Joel that things really took a turn. She actually met him through church, of all places.
Even though Joel was the child of very strict religious parents, he seemed to have quite a bit of freedom. Maybe because of his age.
I mean, he was over 18, so what were his parents really going to do? Whatever the draw, 16-year-old Nicky fell for Joel hard and fast. James said that before he knew it, his sister and Joel were on an overnight camping trip with another couple, which he said raised red flags for him, even as a teenage boy himself.
Within a couple weeks of having had known each other or gone out, they went camping east of the mountains.

Do I have any idea how a couple of 16-year-old girls went camping with a 19-year-old and a 21-year-old in eastern Washington?

No, I don't.

But it sounds ridiculous to me, and there's lots of things where I look back and I get frustrated, like, who was in charge?

Who was paying attention?

By this age, James remembers that Nikki was very strong-willed, even a little stubborn. And as a busy working mom, Nancy was kind of at a loss with how to handle her sometimes.
She'd already ran away a few times at this point. My mom had reached a point where she just didn't tell her nothing.
She just wanted her to stay home and be happy. And she just was putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds, just trying to keep her happy in the moment, hoping that she would change on her own, you know? And James said that Nikki did change.
In fact, something happened on that camping trip that changed the course of his sister's life forever.

James said that the day Nikki got back from the trip, she just seemed off.

He asked her what was going on, and she ended up telling her younger brother that while they were in the mountains, she and Joel used heroin.

And that was the first time they hung out, you know, like for real.

And as a grown-ass man, he did that to a 16-year-old girl, and she never came back. James and their older sister, Adrienne, said that from then on, Joel and Nikki were both struggling with substance use disorders.
They started spending more and more time together, and it wasn't long before Nikki found out she was pregnant. Her siblings said that even though she was so young, Nikki was beyond excited to be a mom.
She ended up going to a treatment center and came out hopeful for her future with her baby. And she had big dreams of a white picket fence life with her new little family.
So when Joel decided to move to Utah to work on a construction project with his dad, Nikki wanted to go with him. James and Adrian said that their family literally begged Nikki not to move away.
But as anyone who was once a teenage girl will tell you, when someone says you can't do something, especially something involving the boy you love, you're going to do it anyway. So Nikki moved to Utah with Joel while she was pregnant and her family said that once she was there, Nikki had patches of sobriety.
And for a while, it seemed like she was on a good path, but it didn't last long. When her family came to visit at the birth of Nikki's daughter, Chloe, it was clear that Nikki was using heroin again.
As Nikki and Joel both continued to struggle with substance use, they were moving around quite a bit. They lived with Joel's parents for a few months when Chloe was a newborn, and they talked about checking into treatment centers, though it's unclear if they actually did.
And then they had a little apartment of their own for a bit. But at some point when Chloe was still an infant, they moved out of that apartment and started bouncing around between different extended stay motels in downtown Salt Lake City, which meant that getting in touch with Nikki had become pretty tricky.
Her communication with her family was, I mean, unpredictable at best. It wasn't uncommon for them not to even know Nikki's phone number or where she was living.
And when they did hear from her, it was only for one reason. Here's Nikki's older sister, Adrienne had all kind of put their foot down at that point.
They told Nikki that if she wanted to come home, they would buy her a ticket, but sending her money just wasn't an option anymore. And they figured that was why she stopped calling, because they weren't giving her what she wanted.
Adrienne had what would end up being her last conversation with her little sister in January 2000, and she can still remember what she heard. She called from a motel because it came up on caller ID.
It was a motel, and it was her asking for help from me. And there was just a man in the background yelling at her to hang up the phone, and she wouldn't.
I just remember he just kept yelling, like, hang up, get off the phone, hang up. And then the phone just clicked.
Not long after that, the calls just stopped coming for everyone in the family. What they would come to learn about a year later is that while moving from motel to motel, Child Protective Services had stepped in and decided baby Chloe wasn't safe anymore living with her parents.
She was taken into protective custody and placed into a foster home until her grandparents, Joel's mom and dad, came to get her. I think that once they took her baby from her and gave it to her grandparents, I think that broke her.
She didn't care anymore. She told us if she lost Chloe, that would be it.
That would be the bottom. She wouldn't be able to get over that.
When Nikki's family learned that Chloe had been taken away, it made even more sense that they hadn't heard from her in a while. They thought that maybe she was just distraught or even ashamed that she'd lost custody of Chloe.
Maybe she was back in treatment trying to get on track and regain custody. Or maybe she was just really mad at them for refusing to give her money.
James and Adrian said they figured Nikki would just call them when she was ready to talk or, more likely, when she needed something, like she always eventually did. But as more and more time ticked by and that call for money or to check in never came, there did come a point where Nikki's family became worried that something had happened to her, something bad.
And that's when Nancy started trying to track her daughter down. She had no idea how to get a hold of Joel, who was as transient as Nikki had been, so she reached out to Nikki's friends.
But even then, she really only knew the people Nikki had hung out with up in Washington, where they lived, so no one had seen her since she moved, which had been quite a while. When she got really worried, Nancy hired a private investigator to try and locate Nikki.
But they couldn't find her daughter either.

In 2003, Nancy finally called to report Nikki missing in Midvale, Utah,

which was the last place she knew her daughter and Joel to be living.

She talked to the Midvale police again in 2004, in 2007, and in 2008.

But it was as if her daughter had just disappeared.

Adrian said that as time went on, their family really didn't talk about Nikki's disappearance a whole lot. They all thought about it, I mean, all the time.
But it was kind of just this unspoken thing they all dealt with quietly, mostly because of how it affected Nancy. She was just always so sad.
There was just always a missing place, you know, at the table. My poor mom just wasn't the same after that.
It's heartbreaking because it never got easier. You just always felt it.
Just something's always missing. You don't get over that.
After so many years, her searches for her daughter had been reduced to what she could do on the internet. But they never stopped.
Year after year, she scrolled newspaper articles and NamUs profiles until one day in 2011. That's when she saw her.
It was just a digital reconstruction of a Jane Doe dubbed Saltair Sally by the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office. But Nancy knew it in her bones.
This was her daughter. And the more she learned about how and when this Jane Doe had been found, her heart broke.
Sketch or slip-ins are the easiest, most innovative, comfortable footwear ever. You just step in and they're on.
You don't have to bend down. You don't even have to touch them.
They're completely hands-free. Just think, you never have to tie your shoes again.
Sketchers slip-ins are for the whole family. They come in so many styles.
Casual shoes, dress shoes, boots, work footwear, even sandals for the spring and the summer. Experience slip-ins at a Sketchers store, Sketchers.com, or wherever stylish footwear is sold.
Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids' spending with real-time notifications.
Kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely, and parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Sign up for Greenlight today at greenlight.com slash podcast.
Saltair Sally's remains had been found by the sheriff's office back in October of 2000 on the edge of the

Great Salt Lake in Utah. Hunters had come across skeletal remains that were next to but not in what looked like the start of a shallow dug grave on a stretch of land where field met sand and briny water.
This was a place where the scent of salt was so heavy in the air and plant and animal life were a bit wild, but it wasn't exactly remote. The spot where these remains were found is about two miles east of an old resort called the Salterre Pavilion.
It now acts as a concert venue called the Great Salterre. Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office Detective Ben Pender, who is now the lead investigator on this case, took our reporters out to that area, and they were surprised to see that this place is not at all remote.
The lake and the mountains are on one side, and the other is a heavily trafficked highway. In our audio recordings, you can hear the cars whizzing past as they looked out at the scene.
And Detective Pender said that this road was just as busy back in 2000. Now, what was initially collected there was limited, just 26 bones, including a skull, some wavy brown hair, a t-shirt, and a necklace.
But it was testing they'd done on the hair and teeth that Nancy found so compelling. The hair revealed that this Jane Doe had likely been in the geographic area between Great Falls, Montana, and Salt Lake City, Utah, during the past 22 months.
And then the hair testing and the teeth showed that she likely lived in the Pacific Northwest before that, just like Nikki. So Nancy reached out to the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office.
But according to her kids, this wasn't the first time she'd called them. And the first time hadn't gone very well.
James and Adrian couldn't remember what year Nancy first contacted police in Salt Lake, but they remembered that when she did, whoever she spoke to kind of just shut her down. They said it can't be her.
That's what we always heard. It can't be her because of how long he said she'd been there.
We asked Detective Pender about those first calls from Nancy, and here's what he said. That very well could have been said to her by a detective at the time.
I don't see anywhere where it says that or it's documented. But again, I'm not saying that it couldn't have happened.
I hope it didn't. A mother's intuition kept Nancy pushing.
She would call again. And when she eventually reached Detective Todd Park, she was prepared to convince him of what she knew to be true.
Along with the geographic connections to the Pacific Northwest and Utah, Nancy also knew that Nikki often wore a large white t-shirt, just like the t-shirt that had been found near the shallow grave. But Nikki's brother James said that the other piece of evidence found, that one was really important to their mom.
When Nancy ran through all these similarities with Detective Park, it had been 11 years since Saltair Sally's remains were found, and nearly eight years since Nancy had first reported her daughter missing. But Park saw it too.
He asked her if she'd be willing to provide a DNA swap, and right away, Nancy said yes. She went to her local police precinct to give a DNA swap, knowing that the last thread of hope was about to be severed if she was right.
And she was. In July 2012, detectives went to Washington to tell Nancy that the DNA sample she gave was a match to Salt-Hair Sally.
To this day, Adrienne can still vividly remember the moment that her mom broke the news to her. I was actually in Vegas in a friend's wedding.
Mom found out a couple days before, but didn't want to tell me while I was gone. So I had just got back from Vegas and went straight to her house.
I had had a dream the night before, and I told her it was a strange dream that there was a box on my front step, like it was mailed to me. And I opened, and it was just a box of bones, which was strange.
I didn't understand what that meant. You know, it was just a weird dream.
And I walked in her house, and she just hugged me really long. I was like, what's going on?

And then she told me that it was Nikki, that they had told her that it was Nikki.

And we just hugged and cried in her living room.

Our reporters talked to Nikki's daughter, Chloe, who's now 26 years old.

And she remembers the moment that she learned the news too.

I was still pretty young and nobody even sat me down and told me I found an article about it online. Chloe was only 11 when she read that article and she said she remembers crying and yelling at her grandfather asking why no one told her.
I mean she knows now that no one really knows how to break that news to an 11 yearold and that there were even bigger feelings behind those tears. Like they did for her grandma Nancy, the DNA results shattered Chloe's hope that someday she would have her mom back.
And until that moment, there had always been this dream of a future with her mom in it. I have a lot of dreams about finding her or just maybe what she looked like or what she acted like.
So she was definitely kind of part of my world. It's not like I went around my early life not really thinking about her.
I have a very vivid memory of being in like early elementary school at school with my friends, like spitting in the little field on the playground. And I was like, guys, I'm packing up my stuff.
I'm going to run away. I'm going to go find my mom.
I was, like, very dedicated to that for, like, a week. I did not run away.
But I packed up my little, like, Barbie backpack and everything, and I was like, time to go. I don't know what I thought in my mind, but I was like, I'm just going to walk out and I'm just going to keep walking and eventually I'm going to just find her.
I guess when I was younger, before we found her remains and things like that, I think my only theory was maybe DNA match. In August 2012, Nikki's mom and siblings went to Utah to collect what was left of Nikki.
And while they were there, a detective took them out to Salter to visit the spot where Nikki's bones had been found. And Adrienne said being there and then bringing her home made the weight of it all really sink in, especially for their mom.
My brother and I knew, I mean, most likely that she was gone, but she held on to that hope. She said she had to keep that hope.
So I think that then she just could breathe in a different way. And for us to be able to bring home what was left of her was a big deal.
It was a big deal for investigators too, because now that detectives had Nikki's name, they were able to start working backwards to figure out how Nikki ended up all alone at the edge of that lake. And they started with Nikki's on and off again boyfriend, Chloe's father, Joel.
Investigators went to Washington to speak with Joel in August of 2012, the same month that Nikki's family had gone down to Utah. And in the 12 years since Nikki disappeared, Joel had racked up quite a long criminal record, mostly for things like theft and drug possession.
He'd been in and out of jail a few times while Chloe was being raised by his parents, and he was actually incarcerated when detectives first sat down with him. Detective Pender said Joel cooperated, but there was one problem.
They still don't know exactly when Nikki died, so they really couldn't pinpoint when they needed Joel to account for his time. And even if they did know, it had been 12 years, so could they really expect him to remember exactly where he was? What Joel could tell detectives was that the last time he saw Nikki was on New Year's Eve 1999, so about nine months before her body was found.
He told police that he and Nikki had partied that night, and he said that while he was in recovery for his substance use at the time, Nikki apparently wasn't. He indicated they got into a bit of an argument due to the drugs.
And he had actually took Nikki's backpack and put it outside the door and told her to come back when she was clean. So she left and apparently the cops had showed up as well.
She had taken off and was walking up the street. And when the cops got there, he just informed them that she had left and that they had an argument and there was no other issues.
Joel told detectives that about a half an hour after Nikki left, she called and told him that she'd talked to her mom and she was trying to get money to get a U-Haul to drive back home. This is something that Nikki's family told us she was known to do.
She'd call home, ask for money for something like a rental or a plane ticket to come home, but that money would just disappear and Nikki wouldn't actually go back to Washington. Joel said that Nikki called him one more time that night, but he didn't answer.
After that, he said he never saw or heard from her again. But his father, Sonny, did.
Our reporters actually got in touch with Sonny, and while he still couldn't remember exactly when he saw Nikki, he said he thinks he was the last person in the family to see her. He was able to narrow down the timeline a little bit based on the construction work that was being done in the area back then.
You see, Sonny worked in construction for a long time. He's actually still working now at 84 years old.
And when he ran into Nicky, he was working on a highway building project being done in preparation for the city to host the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. He said he remembered it being dusty outside from construction when he saw Nicky at the Flying J truck stop, and that based on where the road had been built to by then, it was likely sometime in the late spring or maybe early summer of 2000.
He said he interacted with her. He bought her lunch, and then they sat and talked for about 30 minutes.
And he said that Nikki seemed like she was in recovery and that she was talking about going to school. Sonny said he also spotted Nikki at a gas station in downtown Salt Lake City around that time.

He said he saw her talking to a man in a work truck that had some sort of signage on it for a temporary fencing company.

Another thing that was common during the prep for the Olympics.

But he said he didn't get a good look at the guy.

Again, Sonny couldn't say exactly when this was, but he does know it was before September 2000.

He remembers that month vividly because that was when he, his wife, and Chloe moved to Wisconsin to be closer to his wife's family. But shortly before they moved, he said they got a visitor.
Sonny told our reporter, Taylor, that sometime after those sightings of Nikki, he saw a man drive by his house a few times. Eventually, he said the man stopped and knocked on his door.
The man was married, apparently, and Sonny said that this guy told him that he'd kind of been taking Nikki like under his wing, and he asked if Nikki was living there. When Sonny told him no, that she hadn't lived there in quite a while, the guy kind of like pushed back.
Sonny said he actually had to get a little short with the guy who didn't seem to believe that Nikki wasn't there. Now, eventually,

the guy left, but Sonny said he saw him drive by a few more times. He said he never talked to him

again, and unfortunately, he couldn't tell police much more about the guy. Sonny gave all this same

information to detectives back in the day, and they did try to track this guy down who'd knocked on the door. They even tried to track down the man Nikki was talking to in the fencing truck.
But without much information to go off of, they didn't get very far. So investigators were left to chase down other new leads and revisit old ones.
driving reports. Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding, and more.
These reports provide real data for meaningful conversations about safety. Plus, with weekly updates, you can track their progress over time.
Help keep your teen safe. Sign up for Greenlight Infinity at greenlight.com slash podcast.
Hi, everyone. Ashley Flowers here.
If you're like me, diving into true crime is about more than just the details of a case. It is also about giving a voice to the victims and understanding the lives behind the headlines.
And this is what host Kylie Lowe does each week on her podcast, Dark Down East. Every Thursday, Kylie dives into New England's most gripping mysteries, uncovering stories in a way you won't hear anywhere else.
And she digs through archives, connects with

families, and shines a light on the voices that deserve to be heard. From cold cases to moments of long-awaited justice, Dark Down East is the perfect blend of investigations and honoring the stories behind them.
You can find Dark Down East now, wherever you're listening. In 2018, Detective Pender flew to Washington to meet with Joel again.
He said Joel was cooperative, but to this day, he still feels like Joel may know more than he's letting on. At this point, he's still somebody definitely on our radar, somebody who we believe that may have more information than he has provided.
Apparently, Nikki's mom, Nancy, always thought that too. Adrienne said her mom always thought Joel knew something.
And she died having questions for him that now she'll never get the answer to. Chloe, Joel and Nikki's daughter, isn't sure what to think.
Her relationship with her dad has been kind of on and off over the years. But she actually tried to call him after we reached out to her to see if he would talk about the case with her.
He didn't return her call, so she told us about the conversations she'd had with him about her mom in the past. He spoke very fondly of her, but I feel like we never really got into you know maybe what happened

when i did talk about her it was more like did you love her how did you meet like when you were

younger so just fond memories not so much about her case i'm sure i asked him some things and i

won't say that he was not open i think if i like really got in there he might have told me some

things i'm sure someone in some part of my family or friends or something has probably blamed him

Thank you. I think if I like really got in there, he might have told me some things.
I'm sure someone in some part of my family or friends or something has probably blamed him at one point. Whether or not he was involved, I don't know.
But, you know, as a significant other of Nicole, you know, he's like probably the first suspect. So I'm sure someone has accused him of something at some point.
So I never really felt like I wanted to bring it up with him specifically, but I wasn't sure how he felt. She said that although it's a hard thing to grapple with, she hopes anyone investigating her mom's case will look at every possible suspect, including her dad.
I have no idea if it's ruled out now, but I know that my father is at least some sort of suspect or was. And again, I don't have any, I'm so neutral when it comes to him.
Our reporters called Joel, but he didn't answer. And Detective Pender said that while they can't rule Joel out, they can't rule him in either.
At this point, I don't have evidence to necessarily connect him. So Detective Pender and his team continue to work Nikki's case, and they're holding out hope that new technology will someday make the little evidence they have more useful.
We continue to look at other individuals, continue interviewing individuals out there that either knew Joel or Nikki or or both or may have some information about the case as well.

So it's an ongoing investigation.

It's something that's not stopped.

We're not just idle waiting on technology to change. There's still other things that are being done in the case that may also provide information at some point.

He actually told us they do have some evidence that they're waiting to test

and that they have the full support of their sheriff to access whatever new resources they need to to keep working the case. At this point, we know we have evidence.
We just are limited on what we can and can't test currently. But we're constantly watching and monitoring that and the advancements and things that we can do.
That evidence that you're hanging onto to test is a DNA evidence? I won't say at this point. What Detective Pender would say was that he believes whoever killed Nikki, or whoever left her body by the lake, was somebody who knew her.
I don't think this is necessarily a stranger. I'm not going to 100% rule that out.
He also thinks that it's possible that Nikki died of an overdose, and whoever she was with left her out in Salterre rather than helping her or reporting her death. That's definitely a possibility where there was drug use involved and whoever she was with at the time maybe panicked.
And instead of calling the authorities, they decided to just abandon her out there to not have any involvement in the case. James also agrees with Detective Pender that that's a possibility.
I do believe that if Joel was involved, that it was more likely an overdose and him dumping her. In my personal opinion, I could just see him just a sad boy digging that hole.
I could just see it breaking his heart while he did it. There's really the two scenarios, the culminating thing with Joel, or she pushed him away and ran off and was in unfamiliar territory.
She ran into the wrong person. James and Adrian both say they actually just learned about that hole dug near Nikki's remains this year.
For Adrienne, that brought forth new questions about what happened to her sister.

Questions she's not sure she wants answered.

I don't want the answer to be somebody did something bad to her and that she suffered.

Because that won't bring me any peace.

So do I want an answer? Yes.

Something I can live with.

I don't want the answer to be that she suffered. That's how her last moments were.
Adrienne doesn't want the last few years of Nikki's life to be all that she's remembered for. I just feel when people hear drugs, they just kind of get a picture of who that person is.
And that was just such a small part of her life. She was only doing drugs and that kind of stuff the very end of her life.
That's not who she was. I hate that that's how she's seen instead of the first 17 years.
She always shopped at the goodwill. She always was just about nature, a colored flower child, but she was very shy.

She would go with the flow, just trying to make, you know, everybody happy.

She was a creative. She was like definitely a hippie at heart.

We haven't even scratched the surface on what her spirit was like.

The way she would light up a room and the power of her smile or the power of her scowl,

if you're on the wrong side of it, or just the types of poems and pictures and dreams and conversations. Whoever's responsible, James and Adrian are still hopeful that someone will come forward with information that will bring some sort of justice.
Justice for their mom who spent the rest of her life looking for answers. Justice for Chloe, who grew up without her mom.
And justice for Nikki, whose life was discarded just as it should have been starting. She wanted so badly.
She just wanted to be a mom, like, her whole life. And she finally was.
And she just couldn't be the mom she wanted to be It made her sad. And I knew that because, you know,

in her little bits of clarity every once in a while,

she told us she was enrolling in school

and she was getting a job

and she was going to be a good mom.

Adrienne told our reporters that

although everyone always says Nikki was 20 when she died,

and that's even what we said earlier,

no one can be sure that she even made it to her 20th birthday in August 2000. She may have been just 19.
Now, as an adult who is older today than her mom ever got to be, Chloe said she still hopes someone will come forward to answer the questions that she's had her entire life. It's just so crazy that you guys are doing this.
I'm so appreciative. There's so many times where I was listening to crime junkies or the deck or whatever it may be and just thinking, like, I wish that there was a way for me to, you know, have this for my mom's case or to get in contact.
It's crazy to have any interest in our case just because it's been so long and there's just not a lot of information. If I was going to say anything to anybody that was around her at that time or does maybe know something, that one, it's not too late to say something.
And even just the slightest bit of information could mean so much. Like just knowing one thing of like she was was staying at this place at this time or I actually spoke to her at this time.
Anything like that, I could like narrow down her whereabouts at that time could give so much information. I would just want to tell them that it still matters what they know.
And, you know, even if they're afraid to give them information that they shouldn't be, that we just want to find out what happened to her and what her final days were like and get some answers. And if there really is somebody out there that actually did her harm and it wasn't any sort of mistake, then any information that someone could give us could bring that person to justice.
So I think I would just want to tell him to not

be afraid and that even the little thing that seemed insignificant could make the biggest change in the case. James said that whether or not he ever learns the name of the person who killed his sister or left her by that lake, he knows what he would say to them if he got the chance to talk to them, or if they're listening right now.

What I believe in is... He knows what he would say to them if he got the chance to talk to them, or if they're listening right now.

What I believe in is the divine light and the everlasting consciousness, and that our energetic souls live forever,

and that the greatest miracle of this little life that we're suffering through, you know, in all of its ups and downs, the greatest miracle in this life is its death because we get to go home, right? So, hey, thanks for giving my baby sister a quick ride home. I'm walking, though.
I'll see you soon. Investigators are still looking to talk to anyone who knew Nikki and Joel in early 2000.

Or if anyone you know knew them or has any information about Nikki's death,

please contact the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Detective Ben Pender at 385-468-9816.

Or you can email him, bpender at saltlakecounty.gov

The Deck is an audio truck 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? Hi, everyone.
Ashley Flowers here. If you're like me, diving into true crime is about more than just the details of a case.
It is also about giving a voice to the victims and understanding the lives behind the headlines. And this is what host Kylie Lowe does each week on her podcast, Dark Down East.
Every Thursday, Kylie dives into New England's most gripping mysteries, uncovering stories in a way you won't hear anywhere else. And she digs through archives, connects with families, and shines a light on the voices that deserve to be heard.
From cold cases to moments of long-awaited justice, Dark Down East is the perfect blend of investigations and honoring the stories behind them. You can find Dark Down East now, wherever you're listening.
Did you know 39% of teen drivers admit to texting while driving? Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights. Shockingly, 94% know it's dangerous, but do it anyway.
As a parent, you can't always be in the car, but you can stay connected to their safety with Greenlight Infinity's driving reports. Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding, and more.
These reports provide real data for meaningful conversations about safety. Plus, with weekly updates, you can track their progress over time.

Help keep your teens safe. Sign up for Greenlight Infinity at greenlight.com slash podcast.