Britney Ujlaky was a free spirit.
The beautiful 16-year-old loved riding on horseback through the picturesque hills of Spring Creek, Nevada, where she lived. She was close with her friends, wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself, and had an exceptionally tight bond with her gold-miner father, according to Dateline: Unforgettable.
But on Sunday, March 8, 2020, Britney mysteriously vanished, leaving her family desperate for answers.
“Some stories are memorable for their twists, or their characters, or where they happened,” correspondent Josh Mankiewicz said in the “Open Desert” episode of Dateline: Unforgettable. “This one checked all three boxes.
“Spring Creek is in Elko County, Nevada, a place I’d never been,” he added. “It’s genuine cowboy country and its natural beauty is stunning. It’s also where the Ujlaky family came face to face with a cold hard truth: You can do everything possible to keep your child safe and sometimes that still won’t be enough.”
Growing up in the rural wilderness, Britney was a girl who loved horses and the rodeo, and often displayed her own blend of cowboy bravado.
“The way that she carried herself was very like you don’t want to mess with me, like she stood up straight and she squared her soldiers. She never slouched,” her best friend Saquarra Ashby remembered.
The high schooler loved to spend time with her friends and had a close relationship with her father, Jim Ujlaky, whom she lived with after her parents divorced.
“From the day she was born, she kind of saved my life,” Jim told Mankiewicz through tears. “I was on drugs and I was single, lived a party life and everything, making really good money and just living it up and (the) first breath she took, (I) looked at it, and straightened my life up, sobered up and devoted my life to raising my kids.”
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Sunday, March 8, 2020 started out just like any day for the Uklaky family. Britney, a self-appointed music critic of her dad’s heavy metal band File Not Found, accompanied him to his weekly band practice.
“She’d storm in like she owned the place,” Jim remembered of her frequent advice, telling the band members every time they missed a note or didn’t sing something right.
But she was also a typical teen and eventually tired of the middle-aged musicians. Britney arranged for her friend Bryce Dickey to pick her up at a nearby park in the mid-afternoon, promising her dad that she’d be home later, likely even beating him home from practice.
Jim grabbed dinner with the band and then drove home, calling Britney along the way. But his calls went unanswered, something that was highly unusual for the teen.
“After the third time, [I] started getting a little panicky,” Jim said.
It was now nearly 7 p.m. and Jim hadn’t heard back from Britney. He called her mom, Alisha, thinking maybe she’d gone to visit her, but she hadn’t heard from their daughter either.
Britney’s younger brother James Jr. called Dickey to find out what time he last saw her.
“He told me he’d dropped her off with some new friend at the high school,” James Jr. said.
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Dickey later told the same story to the Elko County Sheriff’s Office, insisting that after hanging out with her for about three and a half hours that afternoon, he dropped Britney off at the school.
“He said that she wanted to get dropped off at the Spring Creek High School because she was going to meet a new friend and he saw her get into a truck with an unknown cowboy,” Nick Stake, then a detective, told Dateline.
Dickey — who had been a close friend of Britney’s since middle school and acted as a big brother of sorts — described the truck as an older model green Ford F-150 and said the man was a tall, white cowboy, adding that Britney never told him the stranger’s name.
As news of Britney’s disappearance began to spread, her mom got a tip on social media that her daughter may have been out with a man named JT.
That tracked with what Ashby knew about her friend.
“She had started talking to a guy named JT,” she recalled. “She had told me about him.”
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Detectives set out to try to track down the mysterious stranger driving a green pickup truck, who possibly went by JT. But after combing through databases and DMV files and chasing down false leads, they weren’t able to find anyone that appeared to match the description.
They also knew that Britney had been bullied by a group of girls at her high school and found video of Britney getting into a physical altercation with two of them at a rodeo about a year before she disappeared.
They considered the possibility that Britney had been the victim of foul play at the hands of one of the girls, but that theory didn’t pan out either.
Investigators and Britney’s family launched an extensive search effort through the vast Elko County wilderness. Britney’s friends, including Dickey, came out in droves to try to find any sign of the missing teen.
Jim took his truck, driving through the remote woods looking for any sign of her. By then, he had a sense that his daughter was no longer alive.
“We’re looking in the sky for birds cause we were out looking for a body,” he said. “We couldn’t see anything, couldn’t find anything.”
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But on the third day of the search, someone stumbled on a blue tarp and discovered the teen’s body hidden underneath it. She’d been strangled, had a single knife wound to the neck and there were signs of a possible sexual assault.
Britney’s mom Alicia was at the sheriff’s office when Stake got the news.
“I couldn’t walk,” she said. “My legs didn’t work and he just had this look on his face, just this, such tortured look on his face and he’s like, ‘I gotta go, I gotta go, are you ok?’”
For Jim, it brought a sense of relief, knowing his daughter wasn’t out in the elements any longer, but he also deeply grieved the loss of his daughter.
“I lost the only person who ever truly loved me, without any conditions, nothing,” he said. “My son loved me too, but she was the first born and you know living the life I led didn’t think anyone ever cared. She did.”
At the crime scene, detectives found what looked like chewing tobacco on the ground and recovered a used condom about 60 feet away from the body.
After still finding no sign of the mysterious stranger that Britney allegedly went off with, detectives turned their attention to the last known person to see the teen alive: Dickey.
Dickey was two years older than Britney and had been a close friend for years.
“He’s kind of just one of those geeky kids, just a shy little cowboy kid that would kick his feet and look at the ground when you talked to him,” Britney’s mom, Alisha, recalled. “He’d come sit over at the house while Britney was getting her makeup on to go to the rodeos. He was always her ride to places.”
The family had no reason to worry when Britney left that day with Dickey, since she had done the same thing so many other days. Britney even posted a picture of the pair smiling from Dickey’s truck on the last day of her life.
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Investigators noted that the desert landscape in the photo was eerily similar to their crime scene. They called Dickey in for more questioning and he agreed to hand over his phone and give a DNA sample. It turned out to be a match to the condom and the chewing tobacco left at the scene.
Surveillance footage also confirmed he’d been lying to investigators about where he was that day and put his truck going in the direction of the crime scene, not the high school.
Confronted with the information, Dickey admitted to having sex with Britney, but said they both immediately regretted it. He insisted he didn’t kill her.
Dickey was arrested and charged with sexual assault and murder.
Authorities were never able to determine exactly why Dickey turned on his friend that afternoon, but those who knew him suspect he may have been tired of being relegated to the friend zone.
“You know, unfortunately, or maybe even fortunately, we’ll never know exactly what happened, but I know that the evidence supported that Britney and Bryce went out there willingly,” Elko County District Attorney Tyler Ingram said. “I think Bryce didn’t get what Bryce wanted and he took it into this own hands.”
Dickey went on trial in May of 2022 and was found guilty of murder and sexual assault. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole at the age of 64 years old.
For Jim, it could never be enough of a punishment.
“There’s no justice,” he said. “She’s not coming back.”
How smartphone apps turn your night sky into a space map
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Skywatchers across the U.S. are about to be treated to a dazzling weekend filled with not only two active meteor showers, but a celestial alignment starring the moon.
For two nights, Earth’s only natural satellite will host a cosmic party with three planets — Mars, Saturn and Uranus.
The phenomenon, often called a planet parade, presents spectators with a rare opportunity to see not only multiple planets, but also the moon, appear close together in the night sky — at least, from Earth’s vantage.
The best part of the show? Most of the striking spectacle — with the exception of Uranus — will be visible to the naked eye.
Here’s everything to know about the rare sight, as well as when, how and where you can see it across the United States.
The moon will appear in the night sky before sunrise on Saturday, July 11 and Sunday, July 12, NASA said in a monthly skywatching guide.
While the term “planet parade” is not an official astronomy term, it is an unofficial way for astronomers and stargazers to refer to certain celestial events.
The planets in our solar system orbit the sun essentially along a line across the sky in a flat disc-shaped plane called the ecliptic.
Another term for a certain kind of planetary alignment, planet parades are what happens when planets line up along the ecliptic in a straight line and appear to us on Earth to be marching across the night sky, according to NASA. So, while planetary alignments themselves aren’t special, it is notable to have an opportunity to observe multiple planets at once.
During the celestial alignment, the moon will be entering a waning crescent phase before we have a new moon, according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac. That means Earth’s only natural satellite is getting less and less full and bright each night as its crescent gets thinner and thinner, NASA explains.
That’s good news for stargazers, as the moon will still be visible without outshining the planets nearby.
Look toward the eastern sky to catch the cosmic lineup in the early morning.
While the moon will of course be the easiest to locate, Mars will look like a small reddish point of light, while Saturn is also bright and easy to spot, NASA explained in a video.
For the clearest views, there are several places that are an easy drive from Reno where you can get a clear view of the stars, including:
Cloudy conditions may bring relief from the recent heat wave, but they could spoil the early-morning view of the planetary parade in much of northwestern Nevada.
Mars and Saturn are among the five planets in our solar system visible without optical aid — along with Mercury, Venus and Jupiter. Telescopes certainly will enhance the view but spectators don’t need any equipment to spot those planets joining the moon in the pre-dawn sky.
As for Uranus, the planet is typically not as bright — despite being the third largest in our solar system — and will require a telescope to see, NASA said.
Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@usatodayco.com. The Reno Gazette Journal’s Carly Sauvageau and Brett McGinness contributed to this report.
A Nevada man is believed to have suffered a deadly fall while climbing in Oregon.
He’s been identified as 77-year-old Robert Pickering.
Search and rescue crews say they found his body along Mount Washington, northwest of Bend, according to a social media post from the Linn County Sheriff’s Office.
A climbing guide reported hearing a rockslide near the summit after Pickering passed his group.
The Washoe County Sheriff’s Office was one of several groups that assisted in the search.
RENO, Nev. – A homicide suspect from Montana took their own life on Thursday night after police surrounded their car in northwest Reno, reports KTVN 2 News Nevada.
The incident happened in the area of Sharlands Avenue around 9 p.m., according to a spokesperson for the Reno Police Department.
Officers located the suspect and surrounded their car, blocking them in. They then heard a single gunshot and backed away.
Reinforcements were called, and a drone was brought in by UNRPD. It was then confirmed the suspect was in their car, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the news agency reports.
The suspect has not been identified pending the notification of next of kin, and no additional information has been released at this time.
In addition to the Reno Police Department, the Regional Narcotics Unit and Washoe County Sheriff’s Office also responded.
The investigation is ongoing.
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