Some have vanished without a trace while others left a string of mysteries in their wake. Learn more about some unsolved cases and see what you can do to help.
Visit Investigation Discovery's new Missing Person information and resource page at:
http://investigation.discovery.com/investigation/missing-persons/missing-persons.html
I receive several e-mails each day, usually from readers desiring to connect with me about one or more of the many true crime books I've written over the years. Some people write to compliment me with a pat on the back for a job well-done; others write to express their disappointment in the manner that I handled a particular story. But it's all in a day's work, and reading and responding to them keeps me comfortably nestled within the confines of my "big boy" reclining office chair that sits in front of my computer which, admittedly, I rarely leave except to go on an errand or to occasionally interview a subject that I'm writing about. Once in a blue moon, however, I receive an e-mail of another sort, from a person or persons who are hoping that I can help them in some way—usually to aid them in solving the mystery of a long lost loved one, which is what this week's blog article is all about.
The first e-mail came to me late Thursday evening, while I was busy working through the remaining chapters of my book about Robert Pickton, the Canadian pig farmer-turned-serial killer. The e-mail was from Mona Mansfield-Erhardt, and her motivation for sending it to me was to solicit my help in renewing interest in finding the remains of her grandmother, Nan Cecile Dixon, 72 at the time she disappeared, who Mona and other family members believe was murdered at some point after setting out from her home in Grass Valley, California on September 21, 1978 for a nearly three-hour trip to visit her brother, Harry Leighton, his wife, Lulu, and their adult son, Arthur, also known as "Butch," at Seven Troughs, Nevada, near Lovelock in the northern part of the Silver State in an unincorporated part of Pershing County. The Leightons were gold miners and ceramicists in the Seven Troughs area, and the purported purpose of Dixon's visit was to collect her original $6,000 investment that she had made in her brother's mining operation in 1961. She had needed the money, family members said, so that she could make it financially through the rest of 1978. According to those interviewed by law enforcement and private detectives at the time, as well as newspaper accounts of her disappearance, Dixon never arrived. It turned out to be a bizarre mystery far stranger than fiction, one that hasn't been solved to this day.
Dixon's family reported the 4'10," 110 pound woman with reddish-grey hair missing to the Pershing County Sheriff's Department a short time later. She was last seen driving a 1976 Datsun B210 4-door, the color of which was somewhere between lime and yellow. Even though air and ground searches were conducted throughout much of the desert mining area, the sheriff at the time said that his office didn't have any evidence that Dixon had ever reached his county. Then, nearly three months later, Dixon's husband, Robert, received a charge card bill for $4.18 from a Texaco gas station in Lovelock. The new revelation prompted a subsequent round of searches, but there were no results.
Dixon's family then sent psychics that they had hired to advise the Pershing County Sheriff of their purported findings, but their efforts, when all was said and done, yielded nothing that could definitively point to Dixon's whereabouts. The relatives also hired a private detective and sent him to Nevada. According to a report that appeared in a Lovelock newspaper more than two years after Dixon's disappearance, the family believed that a Lovelock police officer had tampered with...
Continue Reading The Baffling Disappearance of Nan Cecile Dixon
Photos courtesy: Mona Mansfield-Erhardt
our sites
video
shop
stay connected
corporate
Recent Comments