Twenty-three-year-old Nancy Perry Baird was a divorced mother of a four-year-old son and worked as a service station attendant at a Fina gas station on south Highway 89 in East Layton, Utah. She was working there on the afternoon of July 4th, 1975, and was spotted by a patrolling police officer at around five-thirty p.m., but fifteen minutes later, she had completely vanished.
Nancy had been working at the station alone. When authorities arrived, they found her locked car in the parking lot where she had left it. Inside the station, they discovered her car keys and her undisturbed purse, which still contained her medication and $167 in cash. Robbery was clearly not the motive for the disappearance, as no money was stolen from the till, though one of the outside pumps registered $10 worth of gas that hadn’t been paid for.
Though there was no sign of a struggle at the gas station, detectives were certain that Nancy would not have left of her own free will. Investigators first questioned Nancy’s ex-husband and two male friends about the crime, but all had been out of the state at the time Nancy went missing, and all easily passed polygraph tests.
Witnesses reported seeing a truck parked in front of the gas station at around the time of the disappearance, but the vehicle was never tracked down, and it remains unknown whether the truck had anything to do with the assumed kidnapping.
As the inquiry continued, police began to suspect that Nancy Baird may have been a victim of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, who was known to have murdered at least eight women in Utah alone, three of whom are still unidentified. Bundy denied the allegations up until his 1989 execution, and admittedly the kidnapping of Nancy Baird was a bit outside of his usual modus operandi, but the suspicion persists.
Nancy Baird’s body has never been found, and her fate remains a mystery more than fifty years later.
Crime Immemorial 