On the afternoon of September 12, 1980, Virginia Uden drove her mother’s station wagon out of Riverton, Wyoming with her two sons, Richard, 11, and Reagan, 10.
They were on their way to meet her ex-husband to go bird hunting, a .
22 rifle in the car.
Virginia was 32 years old and had just moved to Fremont County to be closer to her mother.
The three of them never arrived at the meeting point.
Three weeks later, the car was found at the bottom of Trout Creek Canyon, 75 ft below the rim, covered with pine branches.
Someone had tried to push the car over the edge, but it had gotten stuck on the rocks.
The car seats were soaked with Virginia’s blood.
No bodies, no trace of the two boys.
The only suspect was Gerald Uden, the ex-husband who had arranged to take the children hunting that day.
He said they never showed up.
The case went cold.
In any other circumstance, with a blood-filled car and three people vanishing at the same time, a trial would have come within months.
But this was Wyoming in 1980, a place where the land was bigger than the people, where three human beings could simply evaporate without a single witness.
For 33 years, Gerald Uden lived free, remarried, moved to Missouri, and grew old in peace.
It was not until a body from another murder was found at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine, a secret from 1974 was pried open, and a fatal misunderstanding caused Gerald to open his own mouth, that the truth finally surfaced.
This is the story of Wyoming’s longest cold case, of a mother and two boys erased from the face of the earth, and of the thread connecting two murders six years apart, committed by the same husband and wife pair.
But this story does not begin on the day they disappeared.
It begins six years earlier, when Alice Uden shot her third husband while he slept.
If you want to know not only what happened, but why justice had to wait three decades, you have come to the right place.
Subscribe to Cold Case Reopened.
We dig into the cases everyone else has forgotten.
Gerald Lee Uden was born in 1942 in Wyoming.
An ordinary man so ordinary he was nearly invisible in the small community of Fremont County.
He worked as a maintenance man at the local iron mine, steady shifts, hourly pay.
The kind of man neighbors nodded to at the post office, but no one could remember what kind of car he drove.
Three marriages, three divorces.
Investigators who later examined Gerald’s background noted that he had no criminal record, no history of violence, no documented signs of mental illness, nothing in his past that foreshadowed he would kill three people.
That difference matters, and I will come back to it because the version of this story usually told on true crime programs tends to turn Gerald into a born monster.
When in reality he was something far more terrifying, a completely ordinary man who made a choice.
Fremont County, where Gerald lived and where the three victims would vanish, sits in the center of Wyoming, more than 23,000 square kilometers, larger than some Eastern US states, yet with a population of fewer than 40,000.
This is a land of vast valleys, the Wind River Range running along its western edge, and small towns separated by dozens of miles of dirt roads.
Lander, Riverton, Pavilion, names most Americans have never heard.
Here neighbors lived 5 miles apart and never saw each other’s faces.
Here a family could vanish on an afternoon and no one would notice until someone started asking.
This land did not create killers, but it created perfect conditions for hiding a murder.
Gerald’s third wife was Virginia Uden, about 32 years old in 1980.
Virginia had two sons from a previous marriage, Richard Loren Uden, 11, and Reagan Cordell Oden, 10.
Gerald was not their biological father, but had legally adopted both boys.
That meant when the marriage to Virginia ended, Gerald did not simply lose a wife.
He carried financial obligations to two children who shared none of his blood.
>> >> Child support, $150 a month.
On a Wyoming miner’s wages in the late 1970s, that was not a small sum.
And that figure would haunt the entire case.
Then Alice appeared.
Alice Prunty was born on March 8th, 1939.
When she arrived in Fremont County in 1976, she was 37, had been married three times, had five children, and was looking for what she called a new beginning.
Alice’s biography was a mirror of Gerald’s.
The same number of divorces, the same weariness, the same desire to find someone who would stay.
But Alice carried something Gerald did not know, a secret.
That secret involved her third husband, Ronald Holtz, a US Army veteran, 25 years old when he disappeared in late 1974 or early 1975.
No one ever found Holtz.
Alice filed for divorce in February 1975 and was granted it by default because her husband could not be located to be served papers.
In rural Western America in the 1970s, men disappearing was not unusual.
People left, changed names, started over in another state.
No one dug deeper.
Gerald met Alice and saw in her everything he was looking for.
Investigators later described that for Gerald, Alice was the complete package.
Independent, resourceful, knew how to run a ranch, knew how to fix things, knew how to take care of herself without needing anyone.
Five months after they met, they married.
Remarkably fast, but in Pavilion, Wyoming, no one commented.
They bought a ranch and began building a life together.
Two people who had failed three times at marriage finally found each other.
From the outside, it was the story of two lonely people finding a late harbor, but there was a problem the new marriage did not solve, and that problem had a name, Virginia Uden.
Every month $150 left the household budget of Gerald and Alice.
A co-worker at the mine later said Alice constantly complained that Gerald never had any money because he had to support Virginia and the kids.
$150 was not only a financial burden.
It was the uninvited presence of the ex-wife in the new marriage.
Every month when Gerald wrote the check, Alice saw Virginia, and Alice wanted Virginia gone.
According to author Ron Franscell and the investigators, Alice began applying pressure.
Virginia was using kids to demand more money.
Virginia was trying to drive them apart.
Virginia was a problem that needed to be solved.
Gerald was trapped between two women.
On one side, the new wife he loved and feared losing.
On the other, the old wife he resented and owed money to.
In the summer of 1980, Virginia, Richard, and Reagan moved to Lander, Wyoming, near Virginia’s mother, Claire Martin, in Riverton.
Suddenly, the ex-wife was no longer just a name on a monthly check.
She was right there, in the same area, within the same living radius of Gerald and Alice.
For Alice, that was unacceptable.
Claire Martin, Virginia’s mother, lived in Riverton.
She was the kind of mother who kept track of everything, knew her daughter’s schedule, knew where the kids were going.
She would be the first to notice something was wrong, the one who called the police, the one who refused to stay silent when everyone else gave up.
Claire Martin began to worry on the evening of September 12.
Virginia had said she would be back after the bird hunt, >> >> but night fell, and there was no sign of her daughter or the two grandchildren.
She called.
>> >> No one answered.
She called again, still silence.
The next morning she called Gerald Uden.
He picked up and said the same sentence he would repeat for the next 33 years.
They never showed up.
Gerald said Virginia and the two boys never arrived at the meeting point.
He waited, saw no one and went home.
His voice was normal, no worry, no urgency, no question back about where they might be, just one statement, they didn’t come.
Mrs. Martin did not believe him.
She knew her daughter.
Virginia was not the type to leave without a word.
Virginia was not the type to vanish overnight without calling her mother, not the type to let two small children lose contact with their grandmother without a reason.
Something was wrong.
Mrs. Martin knew it in her bones, in her gut, the way only a mother knows.
She called the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.
And from that moment, Claire Martin stepped into the longest fight of her life, a fight she would never fully win, but would never surrender.
Police began searching, but in Fremont County in 1980, a search did not look like what you see on television.
No security cameras along the roads, no cell phones to track, no GPS, no location systems, no digital data to pull up and analyze, only 23,000 square kilometers of vast land, dirt roads connecting towns dozens of miles apart and silence.
Officers asked a few neighbors, no one had seen anything.
They checked a few roads, no traces.
They recorded the disappearance and waited.
>> >> Because in rural Western America, people sometimes vanished and then came back on their own.
Sometimes a wife left a husband, took the kids and started over in another state.
Police had seen that before, but Mrs. Martin knew her daughter had not left.
Virginia had no reason to run.
She had just moved closer to her mother.
She had a job.
She had a life she was building in Lander.
And more importantly, Virginia would never abandon her mother without a single word.
Never.
Three weeks passed.
Three weeks without a call, without a sign, without a clue.
Then on October 4, 1980, a discovery.
Claire Martin’s 1973 Ford station wagon, the car Virginia had borrowed that day, was found in Trout Creek Canyon in the Wind River Canyon area of Fremont County.
The car lay about 75 ft below the canyon rim, stuck on a rock ledge, covered with pine branches.
Someone had tried to push the car to the bottom of the gorge.
If it had fallen all the way, it might have gone years without being found in that rugged terrain.
But the car refused to fall.
It caught on a rock outcrop, stopped halfway down, and refused to disappear completely.
And then someone had covered it with pine branches to hide it.
A hasty, imperfect effort that was enough to show this was not an accident.
This was concealment.
When officers opened the car doors, they found blood.
A large amount.
Tests confirmed it was Virginia Udell’s blood.
Not a small scrape, not a bloody nose.
The quantity of blood on the seats and interior indicated someone had been seriously injured inside or near the vehicle.
The kind of injury people usually do not survive.
But there were no bodies.
No Virginia, no Richard, no Reagan.
Three people and their bodies, if they were dead, had vanished completely from the face of Fremont County.
All that remained was blood, pine branches, and a car someone very much wanted never to be found.
Everything pointed in one direction, Gerald Uden.
He was the last person who had an appointment with Virginia and the two boys that day.
He was the ex-husband with child support obligations.
He was the only one the entire Martin family suspected from the first minute.
And he was the only one with an answer.
>> >> That answer never changed.
They never showed up.
On November 14, 1980, about 2 months after the three disappeared, police went to the home of Gerald and Alice Uden for a formal interview.
The interview did not last long.
Alice was overly emotional, crying, saying she knew nothing.
>> >> She did not understand what had happened to Virginia and the children.
Gerald reacted differently.
When Claire Martin was present at the interview and directly accused him, Gerald became physically ill.
He vomited.
He ended the interview.
No lawyer was called.
No arrest warrant was signed.
The officers left empty-handed.
They suspected Gerald.
Everyone suspected Gerald.
Claire Martin looked him straight in the eye and said she knew what he had done.
But suspicion is not evidence, and that was exactly the wall the case slammed into.
No bodies meant no direct physical proof of a murder.
Blood in the car proved someone had been injured, but legally blood does not prove someone is dead.
No witnesses saw Gerald with Virginia that day.
No murder weapon was found.
No confession, no cracks in the statements, no fragment of Gerald’s story that police could seize and pull apart.
Gerald said they never came.
He stuck to that.
Alice said she knew nothing.
She stuck to that.
Two people, one story, not a single crack.
The silence of Gerald and Alice was more effective than any defense team in America.
>> >> They did not need complicated denials, elaborate alibis, or fabricated details that could be disproven.
They only needed to say, “I don’t know”.
And then stay silent.
In the American justice system, the burden of proof rests on the prosecution.
You cannot convict anyone of murder when you cannot even prove the victims are dead.
And in Fremont County in 1980, with 23,000 square kilometers of land, dozens of abandoned gold mines, hundreds of canyons and rock crevices, with dense forests and rivers and stretches of ground that had not seen a human footprint in decades, three bodies could be anywhere or nowhere.
Police could not search an entire county the size of an Eastern state.
They did not have the resources.
They did not have the technology, and honestly, they did not have a direction.
The case began to die.
Not with an official decision, not with a declaration that the file was closed.
It died the way most cold cases die.
Slowly, quietly, each week that passed without a new clue, another layer of dust settling on the file.
Until the file lay still in a drawer and no one opened it again.
Virginia Uden, 32.
Richard Uden, 11.
Reagan Uden, 10.
Three people who vanished on a September afternoon in Wyoming.
In the months after the case went cold, Gerald and Alice Uden made a decision that in hindsight looks like the action of people who had something to run from.
They left Wyoming.
Not immediately, not in the middle of the night with hastily packed suitcases.
They sold the ranch in Pavilion, packed up their lives, and moved to Chadwick, Missouri.
A tiny town in the Ozarks with a population of a few hundred, nestled among gentle hills and oak forests, more than 1,000 miles from Fremont County.
Far enough that no one in Missouri knew about a missing family in Wyoming.
Far enough to start over without questions.
Gerald became a long-haul truck driver, a job that kept him on the road for weeks at a time, away from home, away from any community long enough for someone to grow curious.
Alice stayed home, raised children, lived the quiet life of a middle-aged woman in a small Mid-American town.
They went to church.
They greeted the neighbors.
They paid their bills on time.
If you met Gerald and Alice Uden in Chadwick at any point during the next three decades, you would have seen an elderly couple so ordinary they were boring.
He worked on cars in the garage.
She cooked for the grandchildren.
They aged slowly, hair graying, backs stooping, like millions of other American couples living out their final years in quiet.
No one in Chadwick asked about their past in Wyoming.
No one knew.
And Gerald and Alice did not tell.
But in Fremont County, the story did not end that neatly.
Claire Martin did not leave.
She did not move to another state, did not start over, did not accept that her daughter and two grandchildren were gone forever.
She stayed in Riverton, and she asked.
She asked the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.
She asked the County Attorney’s Office.
She called, wrote letters, showed up in person, sat waiting in hallways until someone would talk to her.
The question was always the same.
Is there anything new? Any clues? Is anyone doing anything? And the answer was always the same.
Nothing new, no new evidence, no new witnesses.
We’re very sorry.
Year after year.
Every time Mrs. Martin asked, she received the polite silence of a system that had run out of options.
But she did not stop.
She could not.
That was her daughter.
Those were her grandchildren.
And she knew, with the certainty of a mother who had looked into Gerald Uden’s eyes, and seen something the police had not, that he had done something to them.
She had no evidence.
She only had instinct.
And that instinct kept her standing through decades, when anyone else would have given up long ago.
In Lander, the small community where Virginia had once lived, people whispered.
In coffee shops, in grocery stores, in church parking lots, people talked about the Uden family in low voices.
Everyone had a theory.
Everyone thought Gerald had done it.
>> >> But thinking and proving are two completely different things in Wyoming, where the land can swallow evidence and never spit it back out.
People talked, and then people forgot.
Life went on.
Children grew up, went went school, left town.
Adults grew old, retired, died.
The community changed slowly.
And the Virginia Uden case became one of those stories people told new neighbors when there was nothing else to talk about, the local mystery everyone knew, but no one could solve, like a toothache you learn to live with instead of extracting.
But there was one person besides Claire Martin who did not forget.
At the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, known as DCI, an investigator named Andy Hanson kept the case file open.
Hanson had not been assigned the case from the beginning.
He was the one who picked it up when others had set it down, and he refused to set it down again.
For years, Hanson collected every scattered piece of information he could find.
He reviewed the old files.
He talked to people who had lived in Fremont County in 1980.
He looked for connections between Virginia’s disappearance and other unsolved cases in the area.
He had no breakthroughs.
He had no new leads strong enough to reopen an official investigation, but he had patience, and in investigative work, patience is sometimes the only thing that keeps a case from dying completely.
Hanson believed Gerald Uden had killed his ex-wife and the two boys.
Most investigators who ever touched the file believed that.
The problem had never been who.
The problem had always been proof.
And to prove it, they needed something Wyoming would not give, bodies or a confession or a witness.
They had none of the three.
Time passed the way time always passes when nothing happens, slowly and without mercy.
Five years after the disappearance, Richard Uden would have been 16, learning to drive, playing ball in high school.
Reagan would have been 15, maybe starting to think about the future, about college, about life beyond Wyoming.
Virginia would have been 37, still young, still with a whole life ahead.
10 years later, Richard would have been 21, perhaps a college graduate.
Reagan 20, Virginia 42.
But none of those would have became real.
They did not grow up.
They did not age.
They froze at 11, 10, and 32 forever while the world around them kept moving without them.
15 years, 20 years, Clare Martin still asked.
Police still had no answers.
>> >> Gerald and Alice still lived quietly in Missouri, and the distance between the crime and justice widened each year like a crack in dry ground.
Evidence did not get newer.
It only got older.
Memories did not get sharper.
They only faded.
Potential witnesses did not appear.
They only died or forgot.
Every year that passed was a small victory for Gerald and Alice and a small defeat for Clare Martin and Andy Hansen.
If you believe that forgotten cases still deserve to be told, that a 32-year-old mother and two boys of 11 and 10 >> >> should not vanish from history simply because the system lacked the power to find the truth, then you understand why we make this channel.
Hit subscribe for Cold Case Reopened.
There are many stories like this waiting to be told.
In 2000, 20 years after the disappearance, Gerald Uden was 58, Alice 61.
They had lived in Missouri longer than they had ever lived in Wyoming.
The past in Fremont County felt like another life of two different people in a different era.
Gerald still drove trucks.
Alice still lived the life of a grandmother in Chadwick.
If you asked their neighbors in Missouri, >> >> they would say they were a sweet old couple who lived at the end of the road.
He was quiet.
She was independent.
>> >> They never bothered anyone.
No one in Chadwick knew that under the ground in Wyoming, >> >> in two abandoned gold mines, and at the bottom of a lake deeper than 180 m, >> >> four bodies were waiting.
No one knew that the sweet old couple carried the secret of four murders between them.
Four people erased from the earth by two different pairs of hands that slept in the same bed every night.
Gerald and Alice bet their entire lives that time would finish the work silence had begun.
That Wyoming would forget.
That Claire Martin would grow tired and stop.
That Andy Hanson would retire and the file would close.
That the earth would keep its secret and the water would keep its secret and no one ever would dig in the right place or ask the right question.
They were almost right.
In 2005, 25 years after Virginia and her two sons disappeared, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation decided to reopen the file.
That decision did not come from a breakthrough or new evidence.
It came from the persistence of people like Andy Hanson, investigators who had kept the case alive in their minds even when the file lay dead in a drawer.
Hanson had spent years connecting the scattered pieces, asking questions no one wanted to answer, and looking at the larger picture of which the Virginia Uden disappearance was only one part.
That larger picture included a name most people had long forgotten.
Ronald Holtz.
Remember, Holtz was Alice’s third husband, a 25-year-old veteran who disappeared in late 1974 or early 1975 in Cheyenne.
Alice obtained a divorce by default.
No one found Holtz.
No one asked further.
But Hanson had asked.
In the process of reviewing the entire history of Gerald and Alice Uden, Hanson realized that Alice had an ex-husband no one had ever found.
That Holtz had disappeared under circumstances no one had verified.
And that the disappearance had occurred only 6 years before Virginia and the two boys vanished.
Two disappearances, two people connected to the same family six years apart.
That was not evidence, but it was the kind of coincidence a good investigator never ignores.
On January 18th, 2005, a DCI team made an unannounced visit to Alice Auden’s home in Missouri.
Gerald was on the road driving a truck somewhere across America.
Alice was home alone.
The interview began gently.
The investigators asked about life in Wyoming, about the time in Fremont County, about Virginia and the two boys.
Alice answered calmly, politely.
The answers of a 65-year-old grandmother drinking tea in her own living room.
She said she knew nothing about Virginia’s disappearance.
She said she felt sorry for the family but had no information to offer.
Her voice was even, her eyes dry.
25 years of practicing silence had built a wall the investigators could not penetrate with polite questions.
Then they said the name Ronald Holtz.
Alice’s reaction was something the investigators would remember for years afterward.
According to what they later told the program Killer Couples, Alice fell out of her chair, not figuratively.
She lost her balance, nearly fainted.
Her body betrayed her mind in a moment when 25 years of self-control were not enough to hide.
The name Ronald Holtz hit her like a punch to the stomach, the kind of punch you do not see coming and cannot prepare for.
After she regained her composure, Alice had an explanation.
She said that years earlier she had told her son a story about Holtz, that she had taken care of him.
But that story, Alice said, was only a cautionary lesson for the child, the kind of threat mothers make to teach their children to stay out of trouble.
She had not actually done anything to Holtz.
She had simply run him off and continued her life.
The investigators did not believe her, but not believing and proving remained two different things, just as 25 years earlier.
Fremont County deputies had not believed Gerald but could prove nothing.
Alice stayed calm for the rest of the interview.
She said nothing more of value.
The investigators left with deeper suspicion but still empty hands.
Another dead end.
Three years later in 2008, another effort was made in Fremont County.
This time the goal was to find bodies.
An archaeologist from the University of Wyoming led a team of eight students to Pavilion where Gerald and Alice had once lived to dig around an old pig pen on the ranch.
There was information suggesting Gerald might have hidden the bodies near the house before moving them elsewhere.
For days in the hot summer, the archaeology team dug earth, sifted sand, searching for anything.
A bone fragment, a scrap of cloth, a sign that the ground here had once been disturbed to bury someone.
They found nothing.
The pig pen in Pavilion held no secrets or if it did, it held them so tightly that shovels and human hands were not enough to uncover them.
The archaeology team packed up and left.
The case continued to go cold but Andy Hansen still did not stop.
He continued connecting the pieces, continued placing the two disappearances side by side, and looking at the gap between them.
Virginia Uden disappeared 1980.
Ronald Holtz disappeared 1974.
Both connected to the same husband and wife pair.
Both vanished without a trace in Wyoming.
Both never found.
And both had been married to one of the two members of that couple.
Hansen knew that if he found Holtz, he might pull everything else along with him.
Holtz was the easier piece because there was a witness, Alice’s son, to whom Alice had once told the story of having taken care of her ex-husband.
If they found Holtz’s body, if they proved he had been murdered rather than simply left, then Alice’s cautionary tale story would collapse.
>> >> And when Alice collapsed, Gerald might collapse with her.
That was the theory.
And in August 2013, that theory became reality.
DCI investigators conducted an excavation at Remount Ranch, a stretch of wilderness between Cheyenne and Laramie that contained abandoned gold mines from the 19th century.
About 40 ft down in an old gold mine, they found what they had been searching for for nearly 40 years.
Human remains inside a barrel.
Forensic examination confirmed it was Ronald Holtz.
Cause of death, a small caliber bullet fired into the back of the head.
The .
22 bullet was still inside the skull, lying there for nearly four decades, waiting.
Pause on this discovery for a second.
Remember section one, when Alice Prunty arrived in Wyoming in 1976 with the story that her ex-husband Ronald Holtz had simply left.
Remember that she obtained a divorce by default because Holtz could not be found.
Remember that no one asked further because men disappearing was not unusual in the West.
Now the truth was out.
Ronald Holtz had not left.
Ronald Holtz had been shot in the back of the head by his wife while he slept in their bed in Cheyenne.
Alice had stuffed his body into a barrel, driven it to the wilderness, and dropped it down a 40-ft abandoned gold mine.
Then she went home, cleaned the bed, filed for divorce, and started life over as if her husband had simply walked out the door and never come back.
She lived with that secret for 39 years.
39 years while Ronald Holtz’s body lay in darkness under Wyoming ground, the bullet still in his skull, waiting for someone to dig in the right place.
And now someone had dug in the right place.
Alice’s reaction when she heard the name Holtz in 2005, that fall out of the chair, suddenly took on entirely new meaning.
That was not the reaction of a woman being asked about an ex-husband who had left.
That was the reaction of a killer hearing the name of her victim from the mouth of police for the first time in 30 years.
In September 2013, authorities in Christian County, Missouri, arrested Alice Euden at her home.
She was 74 years old, gray-haired, small-framed, looking like any grandmother you might meet in a supermarket.
She was charged with first-degree murder for the killing of Ronald Holtz nearly 40 years earlier.
She was put into a police car, handcuffed, and taken away.
The news spread.
Gerald Euden, 71, was at home when he learned his wife had been arrested.
And here, at this exact moment, the story of the Euden family was about to take a turn that no one, not even Gerald, not even the investigators, could have predicted.
Gerald knew Alice had been arrested.
The question was, what did he think she had been arrested for? Gerald Euden did not understand why the police had arrested Alice, but he thought he understood.
>> >> And that misunderstanding would destroy him.
When investigators came to the house in Chadwick, Missouri, after Alice had been taken away, Gerald voluntarily said he wanted to talk.
He did not ask for a lawyer.
He did not ask what Alice had been charged with.
He simply said he wanted to explain.
Investigators later recounted that Gerald seemed to believe Alice had been arrested for the Virginia Euden case and the two boys.
That somehow the police had connected Alice to the 1980 disappearance.
And that he needed to confess in order to protect his wife from that charge.
He did not know that Alice had been arrested for Ronald Holtz, for the body under the gold mine, for the .
22 bullet in her ex-husband’s skull.
He did not know that at that point the police still had no direct evidence linking him to the Virginia case.
He voluntarily walked into the interview room and opened his mouth because of a misunderstanding.
That was the moment 33 years of silence collapsed.
Not because the police solved the case.
Not because of new technology.
Not because a witness suddenly appeared after three decades, but because Gerald Uden loved Alice Uden enough to take the blame for her.
And he did not know she was being charged with an entirely different murder.
What Gerald said in the interview room that day was recorded, and that recording was later played on the Oxygen Channel program Killer Couples.
His voice was flat.
No emotion.
No hesitation.
He described the killing of his ex-wife and two adopted sons in the tone of a man recounting a job completed long ago.
The kind of voice you use when talking about fixing the roof last summer.
Gerald said he met Virginia and the two boys on September 13, 1980 at the meeting point near Pavilion.
Virginia drove her mother’s station wagon there.
Richard and Reagan in the back.
The .
22 rifle in the car for the bird hunt.
Gerald said he drove all three to a remote area in Fremont County.
Dirt road, open grassland, not a house in sight.
All four got out of the vehicle.
Gerald took the rifle.
The rifle Virginia had brought.
The rifle the two boys believed would be used to shoot birds.
He shot Virginia first.
In the back of the head.
Then Richard.
Then Reagan.
He told the investigator verbatim on the recording, “Virginia was there.
The gun was there.
I shot her right in the middle of the back of the head.
10 seconds and they were gone.
10 seconds.
Three shots.
A 32-year-old mother and two boys of 11 and 10 on a Wyoming field on a September afternoon under a sky that Richard and Reagan thought they would be shooting birds with their father.
When investigators asked about motive, Gerald offered several versions.
He said Virginia had become impossible.
He said she used the children to drive a wedge between him and Alice.
He said he had to choose between the two women.
But on the recording he also said something more direct than all those justifications.
I didn’t take any pleasure in doing it, none at all, but it ended the child support payments.
$150 a month.
That was the price Gerald Uden put on three human lives.
According to author Ron Franscell and the investigators, Alice played a far larger role than Gerald admitted.
Alice had turned Virginia into a problem Gerald had to solve.
She complained constantly.
She applied pressure.
She issued an ultimatum.
Take care of Virginia or I leave.
Gerald could not lose another wife.
He had failed three times.
He could not bear a fourth.
And he solved it the only way he could think of.
Three bullets into three heads less than 10 seconds.
Gerald went on to describe the part the police had never known in 33 years.
What he did with the bodies.
After shooting all three, he temporarily hid the bodies in an abandoned gold mine near Pavilion.
The kind of mine scattered across the hillsides of Fremont County.
Deep, dark, unvisited.
That was temporary.
Gerald returned later, retrieved the bodies, and took the next step.
He put Virginia into a 55-gallon steel drum.
He drilled or shot holes in the drum so it would sink.
Richard and Reagan, small enough to fit together, he stuffed into a 35-gallon steel trash can.
Gerald hauled the containers to Fremont Lake near Pinedale, about 75 miles northwest of the crime scene.
>> >> Fremont Lake is the deepest natural lake in Wyoming.
Deeper than 180 m.
Cold year round, black bottomed.
The kind of lake where anything that sinks never comes up on its own.
Gerald pushed the containers under the surface and watched them disappear into the darkness.
Then he dealt with the car.
He drove Clare Martin’s 1973 Ford station wagon to Trout Creek Canyon and tried to push it over the edge.
The car stuck on the rocks 75 ft below the rim.
Gerald covered it with pine branches and left.
He discarded the rifle.
He went home back to Alice and continued living as if that afternoon had never happened.
33 years of silence ended in an interview Gerald walked into on his own.
Gerald Uden was charged with three counts of first-degree murder on September 27th, 2013 by the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation.
Both Udins, now in their 70s, were held in Christian County, Missouri awaiting extradition to Wyoming.
On November 1, 2013 in the Lander courtroom of Fremont County, Gerald Lee Uden pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder.
Before Judge Norman Young, he repeated what he had told investigators.
He said Virginia had become impossible.
He said he had no justification.
He said he put the bodies in containers and sank them in the lake.
Judge Young said he agreed there was no justification.
Gerald Uden received three sentences of life in prison.
He was 71 years old.
Alice’s trial came later in May 2014 in Laramie County Court in Cheyenne.
Alice was tried for the murder of Ronald Holtz nearly 40 years earlier.
Prosecutor Scott Homar presented the evidence.
Holtz’s body in the gold mine, the .
22 bullet in the skull, the account of Alice’s son Todd Scott that his mother had once confessed to shooting Holtz while he slept.
Alice’s defense team offered a different story.
Holtz was violent, aggressive, unpredictable, had threatened to kill Alice and their 2-year-old child.
Alice shot him not because she wanted to kill, but because she feared for her life.
Self-defense.
The jury weighed the two versions.
They concluded Alice Uden was guilty of murder, but not intentional first-degree murder.
The jury rejected the first-degree charge and convicted Alice of second-degree murder.
The defense attorney asked for a suspended sentence.
Prosecutor Homar requested a minimum of 20 years.
The judge chose the harshest option, life in prison.
Alice Uden, 75, was entered into the Wyoming prison system.
She and Gerald were both incarcerated at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington.
The husband and wife pair who had shared the secret of four murders for more than three decades now shared the same prison.
They had come to Wyoming as neighbors, married after five months, built a ranch, and between them lay four bodies no one knew about.
Now the whole world knew.
Crime experts noted that Alice and Gerald Uden were a rare example of a killer couple.
Two individuals, each independently capable of murder, who found each other and created what one expert on killer couples called a perfect storm of sociopathy and self-regard.
But justice for the four victims, though delayed 33 years and 40 years, had arrived.
Alice Uden died on June 12th, 2019, at Regional West Medical Center in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska.
>> >> She was 80 years old cuz chronic health problems.
She had been transferred from the Torrington prison to the hospital one day before her death.
Five years in prison, from 75 to 80, and she never walked free again.
News of Alice’s death reached Gerald in the same prison.
And what happened next showed that the story of the Uden couple had never been as simple as the confession suggested.
Two days after Alice died, Gerald Uden wrote a letter to Ron Franscell, author of the book Alice and Gerald, a homicidal love story, who had researched and written about the case for years.
In the letter, Gerald recanted his entire 2013 confession.
He said he did not kill Virginia, Richard, and Reagan.
He said Alice killed them.
He said he only confessed to protect Alice.
That when police came to the house in Missouri in 2013, he feared Alice would be charged with both murders.
Both Holtz and Virginia.
So, he took the Virginia case to share the burden.
He said now that Alice was dead, he was free to tell the truth.
And the truth was that Alice was the real killer in both cases.
Francelle, who had spent years studying the case, wrote about the letter on his personal site.
He described again what Gerald had said in 2013.
The detailed, cold, unrepentant confession describing three shots in 10 seconds with a strange pride.
He reminded readers that Gerald had provided details only the perpetrator would know.
The shooting positions, the method of disposal, the type of containers, which lake, how deep.
And he pointed out one simple thing.
If Gerald did not kill them, how did he know where the bodies were? Gerald filed a petition in Wyoming State Court under the Actual Innocence Act seeking to vacate the convictions and be released.
The Fremont County District Court, under Judge Jason Conder, reviewed the petition and denied it.
Reason: Gerald presented no new evidence.
He only resubmitted the trial transcript and his own guilty plea.
To be considered under this act, a defendant must present new factual evidence proving innocence, not merely withdraw an old statement.
>> >> Judge Conder wrote in the order that Gerald’s argument was entirely without foundation.
Gerald appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court.
The high court denied the appeal.
In its opinion, the justices noted that Gerald had admitted the details of the crimes in open court, had pleaded guilty voluntarily, and had been advised by counsel before pleading.
One justice added in a footnote that with confessions of such detail given in court, withdrawing the statement after the wife’s death was not persuasive.
Gerald Uden, now 84, remains serving three life sentences at the Torrington Prison.
He will die there.
But there is one part of the case that even the court rulings could not resolve.
Virginia, Richard, and Reagan Uden have never been found.
46 years after they disappeared, their bodies are still somewhere no one knows exactly.
Gerald gave different locations over successive statements.
>> >> At first he said he dumped the bodies in the Pacific Ocean.
Later he said Fremont Lake.
He even participated in a trip to Fremont Lake under police supervision in 2013 with the Sublette County Tip Top Search and Rescue team scanning the lake with side scan sonar and thermal imaging drones.
They found nothing.
In 2014 another search, still nothing.
Fremont Lake is deeper than 180 m, cold year round, black bottom with a surface area of nearly 21 square kilometers.
Finding two containers on the bottom of that lake is like finding two grains of sand on a beach in the dark.
Many in law enforcement began to believe Gerald was lying about the location of the bodies, that he was still playing psychological games even from behind bars, that the truth of where Virginia and the two boys lay would die with him.
Then in 2026 a new effort appeared from an unexpected direction.
Stacy Koester, founder of the Wyo Find Search, Rescue, and Recovery organization in Gillette, Wyoming, began writing letters to Gerald Uden in prison.
She told him straight about her purpose.
She wanted to bring Virginia, Richard, and Reagan home to a proper resting place.
Gerald at first denied any involvement.
Then he changed, giving more specific directions about the location in the lake.
In In 2026 Bill Dokes, president of the nonprofit organized search and rescue, launched a campaign called Operation Cold Current, the first major search of Fremont Lake in more than a decade.
Doogs’ team brought more modern technology than any previous search.
Underwater drones, next generation sonar, high resolution lake bottom scanners.
They scanned the lake at depths previous searches had never reached.
And at a depth of 388 ft on the black lake bottom, they found a barrel.
The barrel was sealed with holes that looked like bullet holes on the surface.
Nearby, a little deeper, they saw what might be the remains of a smaller trash can.
Two containers, exactly as Gerald had described.
One 55-gallon drum for Virginia, one trash can for the two boys.
For the first time in 46 years, something on the bottom of Fremont Lake matched Gerald’s statement.
The news spread across Wyoming.
The victims’ family hoped.
>> >> The community hoped.
The search team hoped.
On August 29, 2026, after weeks of preparation, Doogs’ team recovered the 55-gallon drum from the lake bottom.
They fought harsh conditions using a special grappling device that Doogs and colleague Dave Sparks designed and built themselves to pull the drum up from nearly 400 ft beneath the surface.
The drum reached the surface that evening.
It was turned over to Fremont County Coroner Erin Ivy for forensic examination.
Two days later, on August 31, 2026, Ivy announced the results.
No human remains inside the drum.
Only a small amount of lake bottom sediment.
The drum was empty.
46 years of hope, weeks of searching the bottom of Wyoming’s deepest lake, the most modern technology, a large-scale volunteer campaign, >> >> and the result was an empty drum on the shore of Fremont Lake.
The search team said the trash can had not yet been recovered and might contain Richard and Reagan.
The coroner’s office pledged support if another campaign followed.
But at this moment, Virginia, Richard, and Reagan Uden still had not been brought home.
The Uden case produced a true crime book, Allison Gerald, a homicidal love story by Ron Franscell, a former Wyoming newspaper editor who had known both Virginia and Amy Bechtold, another woman who disappeared in Lander whose case remains unsolved.
The story was made into a documentary on the Oxygen channel in the series Killer Couples.
It became Wyoming’s most famous cold case, proof that time does not erase crime, that silence is not an eternal fortress, and that sometimes the perpetrator destroys himself with a misunderstanding.
But it is also a reminder that justice has limits.
Gerald Uden was convicted.
Alice Uden was convicted.
Both will die or have already died in prison.
But Claire Martin never learned what happened to her daughter and grandchildren.
Never got to bury them.
Never had a place to lay flowers.
And Richard and Reagan, 11 and 10 when their adoptive father shot them dead on a Wyoming field, are still somewhere in the dark, perhaps at the bottom of Fremont Lake, perhaps not 46 years untouched by anyone.
On September 12th, 1980, Virginia Uden drove the 1973 Ford station wagon away from her mother’s house in Riverton at 1:30 in the afternoon.
Richard sat in the back, 11 years old, Reagan beside him, 10.
The .
22 rifle in the car.
They were on their way to go bird hunting with their father.
Afternoon light in Fremont County, wind blowing through the valley, grassland running to the horizon, three people in one car on the way to meet the man the two boys called dad.
They were never brought home.
This is Cold Case Reopened.
We tell the stories of the forgotten victims and of those who refused to let them be forgotten.
If this story stayed with you, share it and hit subscribe.
The next case is waiting.
