Jeffrey Dale Nichols (6 of Diamonds, Utah)

the unknown stirs, its trail leads to our podcast, so supernatural, I'm Eva Gentile.

And I'm her sister, Rochofe Carrero.

“Together, we explore all of the world's most bizarre mysteries.”

Listen to so supernatural, every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. Our card this week is Jeffrey Dale Nichols, the Sixth 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 8, 2004, Jeff was never seen again.

And not only does his story include an honest-to-got 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. So I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. On the morning of June 8, 2004, Carla Eddie was up early.

Her boyfriend, Jeff, had asked her to give him a 5am 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 needed to make 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.

See where 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 lunch, caucus, and 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 gotta 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 4,500 South 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.

“"That's why 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, and then probably 9 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 this clothes were there, all of this medication was there, all of this, 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 the HEVGVs, and I think, you know, you dumb girl all by yourself down here."

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 person's 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 more to see if any one 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 person's 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 Moreno, 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 the guy is just looking at me, like, "Come on, come on, get it over with." Like, he couldn't wait to get away from me. And he said to me, "You are a jilted girl, I would 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. Carl 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 a breath of fresh air, he was happyful lucky, just a good guy, and very giving, very loving, very affectionate, he was really just kind of a dream. Now, it's not to say everything was easy for them. Jeff and his ex-shell be shared custody of their seven-year-old son Sam, which meant Jeff

wasn't willing to totally sever communication with Shelby. And after their post-divores relationship got contentious, sometimes Carla would hear Shelby "scream" at Jeff over the phone, but he just had to put up with it, or his son. And his son is the reason Carla knew Jeff didn't just take off.

He would never leave Sam.

So when she checked with Sam's school and found out that he'd been attending classes as normal, she knew she needed to start notifying his family. So she called Jeff's sister from his duplex and left word with Jeff's brother-in-law, and when Jeff's phone rang later, it wasn't his sister calling, but his ex-shell be. "I answered the phone, and Shelby was acting like this also concerned mother, and oh my gosh,

I hear Jeff Smith saying, do you know where he is? What happened to him? And I'm like, how do you know? And she says, "Well, the school called me, they told me that you'd been there looking for Sam and Jeff."

Shelby didn't mention anything about the plan meeting with Jeff, or asked Carla when she last spoke to him, which is odd considering Jeff was the father of her son. And in the back of Carla's mind, she remembered something Jeff had said to her just weeks before, at the end of May. He told her, "If he ever went missing, Shelby and her father

were Vernon Brown had something to do with it." The day after Carla's initial report, SLCPD Detective Carl Marino was officially assigned Jeff's case. Cole Case Consultant and former Detective Gordon 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 and 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.

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 "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 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, it's a murder attorney and Salt Lake." Why did you hire a murder attorney? Like, "What?" Hi everyone, Ashley here with some exciting news. The deck will not only land right here in your feed for you to listen to every week,

but now we are also on camera for you to watch on YouTube. Now you can see the cards, the case files, and the people behind the coldest cases as I share these stories with you. So no matter where you get your podcast, whether you prefer to listen to watch or maybe both, I will be there with stories you need to hear.

Join me for the deck on YouTube. Subscribe to Audio Check Investigates on YouTube today. By the time Shelby came in to talk to Detective Murano a few weeks later, she showed up with her criminal attorney. This was on June 24th over two weeks after Jeff's disappearance.

And Shelby's account of the morning of June 8th was very different from Carlos. Shelby said they were required to have a "family meeting" every month with Shelby and Jeffrey and their son. And usually that took place in a dinner setting. But for some reason, this meeting was arranged for early morning hours, 6 a.m.

On the 8th of June, her statement is that the meeting was supposed to be at a McDonald's. This is the same story Shelby gave the PI. And of course, is not what Jeff told Carlos he was doing that morning. I looked this McDonald's up and it's almost 5 miles from where Jeff told Carlos that he was supposed to meet Shelby.

We're talking about two completely different locations. And Shelby's account didn't include any mention of golf clubs.

Now, Shelby went on to explain that Jeff just never showed up, but she did say that she spoke

to him.

“He called her early 603 a.m. I believe and he said, "Where are you?"”

And she told him, "Well, we're at the McDonald's waiting," and he said, "Oh, I'm in the wrong place." And then they hung up and he was supposed to be in a route to the McDonald's from 4,500 cell state and so on. He never arrived, and so she called him back some minutes later, about half an hour later

he called her back, or she called him back to see where he was, and he said, "Some even to come up and he wasn't going to make the meeting." And that was the last contact anybody had with Jeffery. During the meeting with Detective Marino, Shelby also whipped out a giant binder. And we have copies of some of the documents that she had saved in there.

And it reads as kind of a burn book.

On the first page, Shelby included a letter to the detective explaining that the documents

in it were all gathered as part of her divorce and custody battle with Jeff, which explains why they're so explosive. She made a lot of claims about Jeff, and one claim that she made was that he was a drug user. He liked cocaine, and he used cocaine to reduce his stress, and then she described in detail how he beat the regular routine drug tests of the FAA gives their employees.

She also insinuated that he was a closet homosexual. She's made statements in the binder that she had caught Jeffery lying about going out of town

And she made another statement about Jeffery, and that was that he was being inappropriate

“with their son, and not sexually, but that he was trying to poison the son's mind again, Shelby.”

We can't say for certain what police did to verify or dispute any of these claims. But we do know that Jeff's family independently tried to get to the bottom of some of them. Our reporter spoke to Jeff's sister, Wanda Schmidt, at length. She's essentially done her own investigation into her brother's disappearance. He said her interactions with law enforcement didn't leave her with a lot of hope.

My interaction with the police was, it was like an argument, I was trying to convince them that something was wrong, and this is already two to three weeks after. Wanda told us that she went so far as to contact both Sam's school and the Utah Department of Child and Family Services to see if any claims, complaints, or concerns, had been

filed about Sam or his father.

She found nothing. But Wanda was well aware of how contentious Jeff and Shelby's communications had become.

“In an interview with our reporting team, Wanda shared a number of documents that paint”

a troubling picture of the months leading up to Jeff's disappearance. Vicious emails back and forth about their custody battle, and sometimes just personal attacks. Additional records show that Shelby and Jeff had been fighting about money since the divorce. And when I say fighting about money, I don't mean just griping about child support. I mean possible fraud.

Wanda told us that back in February 2003, this is 16 months before Jeff's disappearance. Jeff found out that two checks had been cached against his home equity line of credit. But Jeff hadn't written them. Then was for $5,000, and one was for $50. What Jeff learned was that in December 2002, a man had called the bank and requested that

checks for the account be rushed delivered. This man correctly answered all of Jeff's security questions, and four days later, while a UPS delivered the checks to a woman at the address the man had provided. About a week later, those checks were written and cached against the line of credit. So he filed a complaint, because he knew it was Shelby and her dad that did it.

Someone, a male, called the bank, got the checks on the equity line, and Shelby was really good at forging his name. On Jeff's end, nothing ever came from the complaint. But within a week, Shelby filed a protective order against Jeff. In a four and a half page letter, she accused Jeff of abandonment, violent outbursts,

threats, substance abuse, and causing Sam to have nightmares. Similar to the claims that were in her binder when she talked to Detective Marino in 2004, she requested that any contact with Sam be supervised by her father. Within a week of that, Jeff had hired a lawyer and responded to the protective order. In his almost ten-page response, Jeff flat out denied Shelby's claims, saying that he

never abused or threatened her and that he financially supported her and Sam even after

their marriage dissolved. In fact, he countered that Shelby and her parents Vernon and Barbara Brown were the ones that could be engaging in fraud and manipulation and said that he intended to fight for custody of Sam. In lieu of the protective order, a mutually agreed upon restraining order was issued the

first week in March, and it prevented Shelby and Jeff from committing any kind of abuse against each other. It also barred them from contacting one another unless it was about Sam. And Shelby and Jeff had to stay away from each other's homes and workplace except to pick up and drop off Sam.

Their divorce finalized in November of 2003, and the court-order granted Jeff joint custody of Sam. The order stated that neither parent was allowed to move Sam more than an hour's drive away without the other parent's permission, which brings us to the next pressure point for Shelby.

March of 2004, that is the month that Shelby filed for bankruptcy. Now, I'm not going to go into all the details of all of this.

“The important part is that those bankruptcy proceedings show that Shelby neglected to report”

a significant amount of money that she received from Jeff as part of the divorce settlement the month before. Court records showed that she allegedly concealed more than $39,000 by moving the money to an account under an assumed name. And the whole situation gave Jeff some hope.

He thought that, you know, she could go to jail and then he thought maybe he could get custody of Sam.

The $39,000 Shelby hadn't reported ended up being a bit of a sticking point.

“At the end of March 2005, Shelby was eventually indicted by the federal government.”

And the charges included concealment of assets, fraud transfer, false bankruptcy declaration, false bankruptcy documents, and last but not least, false bankruptcy oath. But that's getting a little ahead of the story. Back in the summer of 2004, Wanda just knew that her brother was missing. And that the person he had been having the most trouble with was his ex-wife.

Wanda shared all the details that she had with the police. And when we spoke to detective parks, he acknowledged that law enforcement was aware of Shelby's bankruptcy case. But from the records that we reviewed, we weren't able to see much movement that focus on investigating her.

I mean, they didn't have much physical evidence to go on. Does that tomorrow did check Jeff's credit and banking records and discovered that there

“was no activity on Jeff's accounts after June 8?”

And phone records that police subpoenaed actually did line up with Shelby's account of that morning. The subpoenaed cell phone records showed just a few phone calls on June 8th in the morning. At 603, it showed Jeffery called Shelby. And then at 6.34 a half hour later, Shelby called Jeffrey.

And then at 6.52 AM, the victim called Shelby again. And that was sort of go along with Shelby's version of events that Jeffrey had arrived at the wrong place and called her to see where she was. It's 603. And then she waited for half an hour and called him to say, "You're not here or are you."

And then at 6.52, the victim called Shelby back and said, "Someone has come up and I can't make the meeting. We have to reschedule."

The document police shared with us showed that Jeff's first call to Shelby at 603 AM

connected to a cell tower in Murray, Utah. Then the calls at 6.34 AM and 652 AM 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 657 AM. Honda believes this timeline is super significant because if Jeff had gone to that state

street location, that carless that he was headed to. And then he realized he was in the wrong place, it should not have taken him 50+ minutes to drive from the state street location to the McDonald's where Shelby was waiting. Those two places are about 4.5 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 62 AM 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 110 pm 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 pinged that morning.

And that call was the last one from Jeff's phone, his phone was never active after that.

Detective Marino 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 and 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.

It's worth mentioning that there was a really high pro-file missing person's case in Salt Lake

City that happened right after Jeff's. Lori Hacking

“The pregnant 27-year-old went missing in July of 2004 and that story took over local news.”

Carla actually told us that she had tried to get local outlets to cover Jeff's disappearance too, but everyone was focused on Lori, whose remains were found that fall. And the trial of her husband, who was eventually convicted of her murder. So very quickly after Jeff disappeared, the investigation stall. But not just because of the Lori Hacking case.

Perhaps it was also because police didn't really talk to many people. Carla was not interviewed by detectives, for example. Even though she was the person who had reported Jeff missing, there was barely any canvassing of Jeff's neighborhood or the areas around where he was supposed to meet Shelby. And by the way, that lag in the case also had a lot to do with Shelby.

About one week later, after her one interview with Detecta Marino, she moved to her parents' house in Phoenix, Arizona.

Of course, she took her son Sam Luther, which meant Sam has never been available to the

police for an interview. And then within months of that, the whole family, Vernon, Barbara and Shelby all moved to Ireland. So it appears that Shelby had scotted from the investigation, late June, 2004, and then as soon as they could arrange it, they moved to Ireland.

And with the family's move, the only people of interest in this case were now on foreign soil, Carla didn't get many updates after that, not that police were talking to her much before. But then, out of the blue, in June 2010, years after Jeff disappeared, the phone rang. It was detective Charles Anderson with the SLC PD.

"And I said, "Oh my God, did you find Jeff?"

“And he said, "No, but that's what I'm calling you for," he said, "Okay."”

He said, "I'm looking through all these records, and I'm not finding anywhere that they

interviewed you," and I said, "Well, they never did," he says, "What do you mean?

They didn't. Didn't you turn in the missing person?" And I said, "Yeah, I did," he said, "Well, there's no interview," he said, "No." And he said, "Would you be available to come down to Salt Lake and talk to me?" So the next day, I went to Salt Lake, and they put me in this gray padded cell room.

So he and I were in this room, and also as a table, and behind all these walls, our bunch of microphones." Carla said she learned from detective Anderson that when they'd been reviewing missing person's cases, Captain Marino said that this case haunted him, and he wanted someone to look at it again.

“Detective Anderson had two citrus crates of four-inch thick binders containing various records”

and photographs. Anderson showed the pictures to Carla, some of which included the inside of Jeff's duplex. So the guy saw me these pictures, and he said, "Well, you know, there's these pictures, and I said, "Well, that's not Jeff's house," and he went, "What do you mean?" I said, "That's the one next door to Jeff, Jeff's kitchen's on the other side.

That's not the same rug Jeff has in his house, and that's not his couch. Those aren't his dishes on the counter." We've tried to confirm this with Salt Lake City PD, but there aren't any notes about this in the documents that they have. And since Detective Parks wasn't involved in the case at the time the photos were taken,

he hasn't been able to confirm one way or the other if Carla is correct. However, we've seen some of the evidence photos. And to anyone who knew Jeff, it seems reasonable that this wasn't his house. I mean, one photo has a child's playpen and a bass and a, Sam was seven at that point. And it just so happened that the couple that lived on the other side of the duplex had just

had a baby that sprayed. And Carla and Jeff visited them to give them a baby gift. And the guy goes, "What do you mean?" And he said, "This is why 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." And I, everyone, Ashley here was some exciting news.

The deck will not only land right here in your feed for you to listen to every week.

Now you can see the cards, the case files, and the people behind the coldest cases as I share these stories with you. So no matter where you get your podcast, whether you prefer to listen to watch or maybe

“both, I will be there with stories you need to hear.”

Join me for the deck on YouTube, subscribe to AudioChuck Investigates on YouTube today.

Now that Carla finally had the detective's attention, she told him which 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 ten-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 Cummings and Goans with Sam, and he is nearly finished

investigating your finances for the last three years," end quote. 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.

All of us 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 run, everything, and the person that answered the phone with the rental

company said, "As a matter of fact, I've got them come in available July 1st."

“Well, this would have been May 27th that we were calling, and I'm like, "Oh, really?”

Which one is it?" you know, and he gives the Shelby's address. Sure, Shelby might have been just moving apartments, but to Jeff, it didn't feel that way. And Jeff's concern made Carla concerned. Now, little did Carla know, but when Detective Anderson brought her in, he'd already been suspicious of the same thing.

He'd already searched the family's former rental property with a cadaver dog. The dog didn't alert on anything, but detectives did learn something interesting while they were there. The property owner had told Detective Anderson that Vernon and his wife had given notice that they would be moving out by the first week of June, 2004, and at the time, apparently Vernon was very upset that Shelby couldn't move with them because of custody issues.

According to the homeowner, Vernon was, quote, "On the edge of a threat towards the guy." Over the years, Wanda has wondered if Shelby and Vernon were more of a team than Shelby and Jeff were. And as she's gone back through her memories, there were a number of different interactions that all seemed strange in hindsight.

She just always had a front, like, really tough, and I remember her telling us about a revenge

book that her and her father shared. This was at a family gathering, not long after Jeff and Shelby got married. It was Wanda's first time really getting to know Shelby, so, obviously, this was insane. Our reporter asked Wanda to describe the book. "It was just a small, little book."

I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't really the, it was.

“And I don't remember if it was her copy or paper, I think it might have been a paperback.”

Wanda remembers Shelby saying, "This is where she kept dirt she collected on an ex-husband." Someone she'd been married to before Jeff, and that some of the dirt was gathered by a private detective that Vernon had hired. Her ex-husband had cheated on her and her dad hired a private detective to follow him around and that he was in the shower and she removed him from the house, naked at gunpoint is what she told us.

Then she said she'd they took animal urine and had injected it through the rubber in this car. And this was an Arkansas. And so in the middle of summer, 90 degrees, the guy had to drive around with all of his windows down because of the smell. But perhaps the wildest part.

Years later, Wanda tracked down Shelby's ex-husband and found out not everything Shelby said was true.

I actually got a hold of him and he said none of that happened.

“Detective Park says that Shelby is and was a suspect.”

As is Vernon, although finding opportunities to talk to them hasn't been easy with the whole international move of it all. In July 2009, Shelby came back to the US and when she returned, she was taken into custody on charges related to the false bankruptcy filing. The judge ordered that she was a flight risk and held her without bond.

She eventually pled guilty to one count of falsification of records and ordered to pay $10,000. She also spent five months in jail and was released in December 2009. You'd think that would have been the perfect opportunity for the Salt Lake City investigators to sit down with her, maybe even explore the possibility of working out a deal with federal authorities. But that didn't happen.

Salt Lake PD has not talked to Shelby since that very first time and they never interviewed Vernon.

Detective Park believes that the family is living in Ireland now. Our team tried to get in touch with Shelby and Vernon to ask for comment on this story, but we couldn't reach them. Neither Vernon nor Shelby have ever been charged in connection to Jeff's disappearance. But lack of cooperation doesn't mean detectives have been totally out of options.

In 2010, Detective Anderson and a forensic team searched a warehouse where Vernon had once owned a business looking for DNA evidence. According to the police report, Vernon had sold that business in 2001,

telling the new owner he had cancer. Now this was several years before Jeff disappeared.

So Vernon no longer had access to the property around the time and question. But a note from 2010 in the files says that the location where Jeff was supposed to meet Shelby, the apartment complex where his car was found. And this warehouse that they eventually searched were all within less than a mile of each other. So the proximity alone made it worth a closer look.

As you've probably guessed though, they didn't find anything. So now, it is Detective Park's turn to take a stab at this case with fresh eyes. But he feels a bit hampered by the era in which this case took place.

“If this case were recorded a day, I think this very likely would have a different outcome.”

And that's because there's so much more available to police now than there wasn't 2004. Now we have license plate readers put up over town. We have video. It is everywhere in our society. If Jeffrey were parked in the parking lot at 4,500 stops in state today, very likely there would be a video camera that covered him. There's more that's done with cell phone technology. Cars have GPS locators in them now.

I mean, this very, very likely this case would have been solved at what had happened today. While all of that may be true, I can't help but wonder what might have happened. If back in 2004, detectives had slowed down, taken a closer look at everything. Especially the call logs. At the 11th hour, our reporter regime right took a fresh look at the call logs from Jeff and Shelby's phones on June 8th. And she was trying to make sense of each one.

The duration, what cell tower it pinged from, and she looked closer at the coding on the

“Verizon logs. And she realized that there was an important piece of information that had been”

hiding in plain sight for 20 years. Standard outgoing calls were all coded MO, short for mobile origination. That would be a call from Jeff's phone to someone else. His cell records also have another code, MF. That is short for mobile forwarded. A.K.A. an incoming call to Jeff going to his voice mail. So, quick question. Why does the call from Shelby at 6.34 a.m.? Say MF. This is the call where Shelby says she's asking Jeff where he is. She told S.L.C.P.D that they

actually spoke. But that is not what the call log says. Now, we've confirmed this with a telecommunications expert Ben Levitton, who has three decades of experience in the industry, including at next-held sprint and Verizon. He actually worked at Verizon back in 2004 when this case took place. regime took this information back to detective parks to see what he had to say. Well, that would mean that Shelby lied then, wouldn't it? Yes, it would. So, any idea on how that

would impact the investigation? Well, it would give us a twist to use on Shelby if we ever managed

it changes much for her. Just further confirm suspicions that she's already had.

“Our family misses him terribly. It was devastating. I mean, I told you, we have a blended family.”

Our natural debt dog, he never recovered from Jeff's disappearance ever. He sends past away. I think it's been hard on everybody. This is for the debt, right? I was trying to figure out what card he would be and I said that to my mom.

But I gotta tell you what she said first. She goes, he's the Joker. Because he just, he was always

like telling jokes and corny jokes and... Carla remembers Jeff's sense of humor too.

“What I want them to remember about Jeff. Fun love and happy go lucky. Man, that absolutely”

adored his little boy. Samuel Nichols, I, if you ever see this, you know that your dad loved

you with life itself. One thing that would really help detectives get traction in this case

would be locating Jeff's body. So, if you have any information about the disappearance of Jeffrey Dale Nichols, the location of his remains, or if you have any insight into the lives and dealings of those mentioned in this episode back in 2004, you can call the Salt Lake City Police Department at 8-0-1-799-3000. The deck is an audio truck production with theme music by Ryan Lillis. To learn more about the deck in our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

“I think Chuck will 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 hosts 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.