Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi everyone, I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D'Ambra, and every week on my podcast, Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings.
From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to Park Predators now wherever you listen to podcasts.
Chapter 2: What happened to Jeffrey Dale Nichols on June 8, 2004?
Our card this week is Jeffrey Dale Nichols, the Six of Diamonds from Utah. Early one June morning in 2004, Jeffrey Nichols told his girlfriend that he was meeting his ex-wife in a shopping center parking lot to buy a set of golf clubs. But his ex-wife told police that they were getting together at a McDonald's for a family meeting. No matter which version is true, one thing is for certain.
After the morning of June 8th, 2004, Jeff was never seen again. And not only does his story include an honest-to-God, real-life burn book, we also found a clue that had been sitting in plain sight for the past 20 years that just might prove someone is lying. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. On the morning of June 8th, 2004, Carla Eddy was up early.
Her boyfriend Jeff had asked her to give him a 5 a.m. wake-up call so he could go meet his ex-wife Shelby about a set of golf clubs that she'd gotten a lead on. She had a client that was needing some extra cash and had a set of golf clubs. And Jeff was an avid golfer and whatever these clubs were, I knew nothing about golf.
So I don't know, but they were this fancy set and they were super expensive, but they were going to sell them to him for 200 or $300. So I called him and he says, Carla, I am so tired. Could you call me back in 15 minutes? And, you know, just kind of like a snooze on my alarm clock. I said, sure. Well, I forgot to call him. So it was half an hour later.
I called and I'm like, oh my gosh, Jeff, sorry. I forgot to call you. Hurry, get up. And you know, you got to get up. So obviously he got up in a panic because I forgot to call him. And that is the last time I actually spoke to him. Of course, Carla didn't know it would be the last time.
She just thought Jeff would call her on his way to work after he met up with Shelby in the parking lot at 4500 South State Street in Murray, Utah. When Carla didn't hear from him that morning, she thought maybe he'd gotten a little too excited about the new clubs and played hooky so he could test them out. But with every call to him that went unanswered, she questioned that conclusion.
So I called him and I said, Hey, where are you? Did you leave and go golfing instead? You know, not go to work and never heard from him. So later in the day, I don't know how many times I text and called and they never got through. So then later in the day, I went to the gym and I thought, okay, when I get out of the gym, he'll call. Never heard from him.
So of course I'm calling again and don't hear from him.
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Chapter 3: What were the conflicting accounts regarding Jeffrey's whereabouts?
And then Probably nine o'clock that night, I started just getting the creeps. And I thought, you know what? Something's wrong. Something's happened to him. Carla got in her car and drove about 60 miles from her house in Brigham City, Utah, to Jeff's place in Salt Lake City. She had a key to his duplex, so when Jeff didn't answer the door, she let herself in.
And I went in and nothing was misplaced. All of his clothes were there. All of his medication was there. All of his, I mean, everything was there. Like he left in a hurry. His bed wasn't made, which was unusual. His lunchbox was still sitting on the floor because obviously he didn't have time to make his lunch because I called him late.
And I just walked around looking at everything going, where is he? What happened to him? That's when Carla decided to look for Jeff the last place she knew he was going, that parking lot where he was supposed to pick up those golf clubs. I actually drove down to that parking lot and drove around and looked and I started getting heebie-jeebies.
And I'm thinking, you know, you're a dumb girl all by yourself down here. There was no sign of Jeff or his truck, a 2000 Ford Ranger Super Cab. So Carla called a friend in another county who worked with Search and Rescue. That friend told her that she couldn't file a missing persons report until Jeff had been MIA for at least 24 hours. So while those hours ticked by, she hit the phones.
Carla called local hospitals, police departments, even morgues to see if anyone had made contact with Jeff. But there was nothing. The next morning, Carla called Jeff's boss. And when she learned that he hadn't seen or heard from Jeff either, that's when she called Salt Lake City PD to file a missing persons report. Carla's memory of what the officer told her on the phone is fuzzy.
But she remembered going to the police department and speaking to Detective Carl Marino. That is a meeting that she doesn't remember fondly. He was just arrogant and almost like I had no right to be there. Like, this is stupid. What are you doing here? And I said, you know, he's missing. This is uncharacteristic of him. He would not do this. His boss even said, you know, that this is weird.
And and the guy is just looking at me like, come on, come on, get it over with. Like he was he couldn't wait to get away from me. And he said to me, you are a jilted girlfriend. Would you just get over it? He's a big guy. He's just fine. He'll be back when he's ready to come back. People do this all the time. Just get over it. I was shocked to say the least. Carla couldn't just get over it.
And she didn't know where this jilted lover stuff was coming from. She and Jeff had been together for nearly a year after meeting on a dating website in August of 2003. When they met, Jeff was separated from his wife, Shelby. Their divorce was finalized later that year. And by the following March, Carla and Jeff were talking about living together or even getting married. Jeff was fun.
Jeff was a breath of fresh air. He was happy-go-lucky. Just a good guy and very giving, very loving, very affectionate. He was really just kind of a dream. Now, that's not to say everything was easy for them.
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Chapter 4: How did Carla Eddy react when Jeffrey went missing?
The day after Carla's initial report, SLCPD Detective Carl Marino was officially assigned Jeff's case. Cold case consultant and former detective, Corden Parks, told our reporter that one of the first things Detective Marino did was give Shelby a call. He made an attempt to contact her to find out if she was present at this meeting that she was supposed to be involved in.
And she immediately invoked her rights to an attorney who would not answer Marino's calls or contact him. While Shelby was dodging police, Carla was joining a search party organized by Jeff's co-workers. The co-workers and I all got together and we plotted the whole grid of Salt Lake around 4500 South.
And we each took a grid and drove through every parking lot and every street we could to see if we could find his truck. And we never found it. Jeff's family was involved too. They flew into Salt Lake City and hired a private investigator to push for answers. And concerned that Jeff could have driven off the road or into a ravine, his brother, a pilot, flew a private plane to search the area.
Now, we were obviously interested in what the private investigator, Richard Romano, was able to find out. But sadly, he passed away in 2022. Lucky for us, though, Jeff's sister, Wanda Schmidt, still had the report that he wrote, and she gave us a copy. The first thing that caught my attention was that the private investigator, unlike police, was able to get Jeff's ex-wife, Shelby, on the phone.
According to Richard's notes, Shelby told him that she was supposed to meet Jeff the morning of June 8th at McDonald's for a, quote, family meeting. But Jeff never showed. When Richard tried to talk to Shelby for a second time in person at her house on June 10th, that's when he had about as much luck as police. She refused to speak to him.
Carla remembers Richard describing the interaction as troubling. She only opened the door a crack. And when they asked her about Jeff or anything, she sticks a business card through the door and says, I've got nothing to say about this. You need to call my attorney and you need to leave me alone. You're harassing me and slams the door. Well, they look at the card.
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Chapter 5: What did Carla discover when she entered Jeffrey's home?
Jeffrey had arrived at the wrong place and called her to see where she was at 6.03. And then she waited for half an hour and called him to say, you're not here, where are you? And then at 6.52, the victim called Shelby back and said, something has come up and I can't make the meeting. We have to reschedule. The document police shared with us show that Jeff's first call to Shelby at 6.03 a.m.
connected to a cell tower in Murray, Utah. Then the calls at 6.34 a.m. and 6.52 a.m. both hit towers in Salt Lake City. Within five minutes of the last call, Shelby's home phone registers an outgoing call on the landline at 6.57 a.m. Wanda believes this timeline is super significant.
Because if Jeff had gone to that State Street location that Carla said he was headed to, and then he realized he was in the wrong place, it should not have taken him 50-plus minutes to drive from the State Street location to the McDonald's where Shelby was waiting. Those two places are about four and a half miles apart. And Wanda pointed out something else that doesn't make sense.
That landline call from Shelby's home at 657. Again, if her story is correct, how could she place a call from McDonald's at 6.52 a.m. and then have her home phone be making a call five minutes later? Now, she could get home to use the landline. It was only about a mile away, but not that fast.
And it's unlikely that it would have been anyone else using it because Shelby told police that her parents had moved and she and her son were the only ones in the house. And there were even more strange things in the call logs from that same day. Jeff's records show that there was a single outgoing call at 1 10 p.m. that afternoon.
It lasted for 18 seconds and was placed to a car dealership in Sandy, Utah. That call pinged off a tower in the South Salt Lake area, almost 10 miles from the pings that morning. And that call was the last one from Jeff's phone. His phone was never active after that. Detective Moreno did try to get in touch with that car dealership, but he couldn't establish a reason the call was placed.
Jeff's phone has never been recovered by police, even though they were eventually able to track down his truck. That turned up at an apartment complex around mid-July, near the parking lot where Carla believed that Jeff planned to meet Shelby.
The manager of the complex had the truck towed, and unfortunately, it sat in an impound lot until the company sent notice to Jeff's address and it was intercepted by his family. Immediately the family notified the police and the police went out and seized the truck from the impound lot and it was brought to our impound lot, an evidence storage facility, and later it was processed for evidence.
By the time police searched the truck, there wasn't much to find. They didn't find any forensic evidence, and they weren't able to determine if the truck had been left unlocked while it sat in the lot. So without physical evidence or witnesses, there was nothing to push Jeff's case forward. And in the family's opinion, the investigation took a backseat.
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Chapter 6: What were the police's initial responses to the missing persons report?
And the guy goes, what do you mean? He said, this is where we found all the drug paraphernalia. And I said, yeah, the guy was a drug addict and got put in prison. That was not Jeff's house. So when Shelby told him that Jeff was a drug addict, they used these pictures and believed that for all those years to find out, no, that was not Jeff's house. And the guy was like, oh my gosh.
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Now that Carla finally had the detective's attention, she told him what she never got the chance to share back in 2004. Namely, that Jeff had been afraid of Shelby and her father Vernon. Jeff told Carla that they'd been watching him. He was even worried that they would shoot him. And this went back years before he'd gone missing.
All of this seems to be backed up by emails between Jeff and Shelby, along with the 10-page letter Jeff sent to his lawyer.
In one email from Shelby to Jeff, dated February of 2004, she wrote, My father hired a private investigator on you quite some time ago, and he already has a book about one and a half inches thick on your comings and goings with Sam, and he is nearly finished investigating your finances for the last three years."
Based on what Jeff told Carla, he thought all this came down to their custody agreement. He thought Shelby wanted to move away from the Salt Lake City area, but per the divorce order, neither parent was allowed to relocate Sam more than an hour's drive away, at least without the other's permission.
Carla specifically remembered talking about this on a trip that she took with Jeff a few weeks before he went missing. Jeff and Carla actually had done a little detective work of their own. They called Shelby's property rental company from the car as they drove. I remember the road we were on and everything.
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