The Deck - Jeffrey Dale Nichols (6 of Diamonds, Utah)

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Our card this week is Jeffrey Dale Nichols, the 6 of Diamonds from Utah. Early one June morning in 2004, Jeffrey Nichols told his girlfriend 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 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  If you know anything about the disappearance of Jeffrey Dale Nichols, detectives want to hear from you. Please contact the  Salt Lake City Police Department at 801-799-3000. View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/jeffrey-dale-nichols Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media. Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuck Twitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuck Facebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllc To support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers.  Instagram: @ashleyflowers TikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkie Twitter: @Ash_Flowers Facebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 8, 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 cock. 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 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. So I called him and I said, hey, where are you? Did you leave and go golfing instead? 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 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 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 heave-jee-jeeves and I'm thinking, you know, you're a dumb girl all by your street. 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 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 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's 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 and 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. Jeff and his ex Shelby shared custody of their seven-year-old son Sam. which meant Jeff wasn't willing to totally sever communication with Shelby, even after their post-divorce relationship got contentious. Sometimes Carla would hear Shelby scream at Jeff over the phone,

but he just had to put up with it for 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, Shelby. I answered the phone, and Shelby was acting like this, oh-so-concerned mother, and, oh, my gosh, I hear Jeff's missing. 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 planned 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 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 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

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 4,500 South, and we each took a grid and drove through every parking lot and every street we could

to see if we could find it. 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. It's a murder attorney. felt like, why did you hire a murder attorney? Like, what? By the time Shelby came in to talk to Detective Marino 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 8 was very different from Carlos. Shelby said they were required to have a, quote, 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. And her statement is that the meeting was supposed to be at a McDonald's at 7,200 South and 700 East in Midville. This is the same story Shelby gave the PI. And of course, is not what Jeff told Carla he was doing that morning. I looked at this McDonald's up, and it's almost five miles from where Jeff told Carla 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, you know? And she told him, well, we're 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 en route to the McDonald's from 4,500 South State and sullate. 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 something had come up and he wasn't going to make the meeting. And that was the last contact anybody had with Jeffrey. 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 she described in detail how he beat the regular routine drug test that the FAA gives their employees. She also insinuated that he was a closet homosexual. She made statements in the binder

that she had caught Jeffrey lying about going out of town to one location when in fact Jeffrey actually went to San Francisco and frequented gay bars. And she made another statement about Jeffrey and that was that he was being inappropriate with their son, not sexually, but that he was trying to poison the son's mind against 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. She said her interactions with law enforcement didn't leave her with a lot of hope. My interaction with the police 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 cashed against his home equity line of credit, but Jeff hadn't written them. One 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, voila, UPS delivered. checks to a woman at the address the man had provided. About a week later, those checks were written and cashed against the line of credit. So he filed a complaint because he knew it was Shelby and her dad that did it.

Someone, a mail called the bank, got the checks on the equity line. And Shelby was really good at Forge in 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, death 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 10-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 bring me. 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 showed 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. Jeff wasn't wrong to be optimistic.

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, bankrupt, 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 a of Shelby's bankruptcy case. But from the records that we reviewed, we weren't able to see much movement that focused on investigating her. I mean, they didn't have much physical evidence to go on. Detective Marino did check Jeff's credit and banking records and discovered that there was no activity on Jeff's accounts

after June 8th. And phone records that police subpoenaed actually did line up with Shelby's account of that morning. The subpoenaed cell phone records show just a few phone calls on June the 8th. in the morning. At 603, it showed Jeffrey called Shelby. And then at 634, a half hour later, Shelby called Jeffrey. And then at 652 a.m., the victim called Shelby again. And that would 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 at 603. 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 603 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 Carlos 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 6.57. 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 Saltwater. 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 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, an evident 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 back seat. It's worth mentioning that there was a really high-profile 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 stalled. 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 Detective Moreno, she moved to her parents' house in Phoenix, Arizona. Of course, she took her son Sam with her, 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 absconded from the investigation in 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 SLCPD. 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 talked 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 all those areas of the table and behind all these walls are a bunch of microphones. Carla said she learned from Detective Anderson that when they'd been reviewing missing persons 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's showing me these pictures and he's like, well, you know, there's these pictures.

And I said, well, that's not Jeff's house. And he went, what? What do you mean? I said, that's the one next door to Jeff. Jeff's kitchens 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 bassinet. 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 spring. And Carla and Jeff visited them to give them a baby gift. 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 is not Jeff's house. So, 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. 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." 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. Carla specifically remembered talking about this on a 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 and everything. And the person that answered the phone with the rental company said, as a matter of fact, I've got one coming available July 1st.

Well, this would have been May 27th that we were calling. And we're like, oh, really? Which one is it? You know, and he gives us 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 like 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 really thick. And I don't remember if it was her copy or paper. I think it might have been a paper bag. 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 they took animal urine and had injected it through the rubber in his car, and this was in 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. It turns out she lied about the whole thing. I actually got a hold of him, and he said none of that happened. Detective Parks 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 U.S., 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 Parks 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 way 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 in 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 were. eventually search, 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 reported a day, I think that's very likely would have a different outcome. And that's because there's so much more available to police now than there was in 2004. Now we have license plate readers put up all over town. We have video is everywhere in our society. If Jeffrey were parked in the parking lot of 4,500 South 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, it's very, very likely this case would have been solved that would have 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 Regine Wright 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 Jen. Jeff's phone to someone else. His cell records also have another code, MF. That is short for mobile forwarded, aka an incoming call to Jeff going to his voicemail. So a 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 SLCPD that they actually spoke. But that is not what the call log says. Now, we've confirmed this with a telecommunications expert Ben Levitin, who has three decades of experience in the industry, including at Nextel Sprint and Verizon. He actually worked at Verizon back in 2004 when this case took place. Regine 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 manage to sit down and talk with her again. We've also shared this news with Wanda, though I'm not sure it changes much for her. Just further confirms 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 dad, dog, he never recovered from Jeff Stee. disappearance ever. He's since passed away. I think it's been hard on everybody. This is for the deck, right? I was trying to figure out what card he would be. And I said that to my mom. But I got to tell you what she said first. She goes, he's the Joker. Because he just, he was always like telling jokes and corny jokes. Carla remembers Jeff's sense of humor too.

want them to remember about Jeff. Fun love and happy-go-lucky man that absolutely adored his little boy. Samuel Nichols, if you ever see this, you know that your dad loved you more than 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 801-799-3000.

The Deck is an audio Chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit the Deckpodcast.com. I think Chuck would approve.