Since 2013, confessed triple-killer Gerald Uden has told the same story about what he did with the bodies of Virginia, Richard, and Reagan Uden after he murdered them in 1980. He says he put them in barrels and sank them in Wyoming’s deep, dark Fremont Lake.
In the past 13 years, searchers have returned again and again with increasingly sophisticated technology, extraordinary patience, and the stubborn hope that they might find an answer. The most recent search ended last month and, again, there were nothing but silt in a barrel they found. That, of course, proves very little. Fremont Lake is vast and deep and unforgiving. Things can disappear there.
But after all these years, the question has become impossible to avoid: What if they were never there?
Gerald (left) and Alice Uden
I’ve known Gerald Uden for a long time now, in the peculiar way a journalist can know a murderer. During the research and writing of Alice & Gerald: A Homicidal Love Story, we corresponded extensively. I interviewed him in prison. I listened to his memories, his explanations, his evasions and, occasionally, what seemed like moments of candor. I’ve spent many hours thinking about what he’s said—and what he hasn’t.
I had no illusion that one more letter from me would suddenly produce a new, revelatory confession … but I wrote it anyway.
There comes a point in a story like this when the question is no longer merely What happened? It becomes What do we owe the people to whom it happened?
Virginia, Richard, and Reagan have been missing for 46 years. Their killer has grown old in prison. Searchers have spent years trying to bring them home. And time is running out.
Gerald Uden is 84 years old. Whatever he knows, whatever he has withheld, whatever truth might still exist only inside his head will die with him unless he chooses to tell it. That’s why I wrote to him one more time.
Not because I was confident he would answer differently. Not because I believed I possessed some magic arrangement of words that no detective, prosecutor, interviewer, or passing year had yet discovered.
I wrote because I could not live comfortably with the possibility that someday Gerald would be gone and I would wonder whether I should have asked once more.
So I asked him plainly to finally tell the truth. I asked him to surrender the last thing he still possesses that belongs, morally, to somebody else: the location of the dead. I sent that letter expecting nothing.
Today, Gerald Uden answered.
What follows is my letter to him, followed by his response. I offer both without embellishment. Readers can decide for themselves what to make of his words.
~~~~~~~
August 31, 2026
Dear Gerald,
I am writing to you again about Virginia, Richard, and Reagan. You know that I’ve asked you this question many times over the years, and I’m asking again, maybe for the last time.
You told me you placed them in barrels, then dumped them in Fremont Lake. You even drew a map for me of where you remembered putting them; you recently drew another for a woman with whom you corresponded. This summer, using her map, they searched again. They found a 35-gallon barrel. For days, a lot of ordinary people who never knew Virginia, Richard, or Reagan held their breath, because there was suddenly a possibility that they might be found. But today we learned the barrel was empty and unrelated to your crimes.
Gerald, I have known you a long time now. We’ve exchanged letters for years. I’ve sat across from you and listened to you tell your story. And I am going to say something plainly that I suspect will not surprise you: I have never been convinced that Virginia and the boys are in Fremont Lake. And neither are some very experienced forensic people who have looked closely at this case.
Virginia and boys, 1971
Maybe for reasons only you understand, you have never told anyone exactly what happened after you murdered Virginia, Richard, and Reagan.
Whatever your explanation, time is running out. You are an old man now. Prison carves you down. You know you’ll die there, like Alice. There are no deals left to make, no sentences to avoid, nothing compared with the simple human question that remains: Where are they? How did you and Alice actually dispose of their bodies?
I am begging you to tell me the whole truth while you still can. I’m not a cop or a judge or a warden. I cannot punish you, and I cannot forgive you. I’m just an ink-stained wretch who has devoted a lot of years trying to make sure Virginia, Reagan, and Richard are not reduced to the worst thing that ever happened to them. I can carry the truth out into the light if you will finally give it to me. Whatever else has been lost, there is still time to give those three people back to the world.
I came to know you as a man who places a great value on being tough and defending people who need a hero. On facing things without flinching. On the old-fashioned idea that a man owns what he has done. You might not use those exact words, but I think you know what I mean. So I am asking you to do something that requires more courage than repeating the same old story again and again.
Just tell the truth. If you lied about the lake, say so. If Alice helped move or hide the bodies, tell me exactly what she did. If there were no barrels at all, say that.
If you buried them, burned them, fed them to the pigs, moved them, concealed them in some other place, or did something you have never admitted because it was too ugly or too difficult to describe, then describe it now. Don’t clean it up for me. Don’t protect yourself. Don’t protect Alice. Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear.
Just tell me what happened.
There is no version of this story that will undo what happened in 1980. Virginia won’t come home. Richard and Reagan won’t grow older. Their lives can’t be restored. You won’t be released from prison. Alice won’t come back. But one thing can still be restored to them: Their names can be attached to a place.
Maybe their remains can be found. Or maybe you and Alice disposed of them so thoroughly that they can never be found. But people can stop wondering whether they are beneath hundreds of feet of black, freezing water, buried under Wyoming’s dirt, scattered somewhere else, or hidden in a place nobody has ever thought to look.
We human beings have always understood the importance of bringing our dead home. We cross oceans for them. We search battlefields for them. We dig through ruins for them. We identify bones decades after wars have ended. We do these things because the dead still belong to somebody.
Virginia belonged to people. Richard and Reagan belonged to people. They still do. You know what it’s like to love someone. And you know what it’s like to lose that person.
But you took their lives. You cannot give those back. But you still possess one thing that might matter enormously to the people who knew or loved them: the truth about where they went afterward. That truth shouldn’t die with you.
And I want you to consider something else.
You have very little control over how the world will remember Gerald Uden. Most of that story has already been written by what you did. But this chapter is not finished. You can spend the rest of your life guarding one last secret, and take it to your grave. If that happens, people will spend another 50 years searching lakes and fields and old roads and wondering if anything you ever said was true.
Or you can decide that before you die, you will finally end the mystery you created. Not because it erases anything or earns forgiveness. Not because anyone will suddenly call you decent. Only because telling the truth now would itself be a decent act. It might be the last important thing you can do in what’s left of your life.
You have a chance to be kind. You can show mercy to those who knew Virginia, Richard, and Reagan, even if you didn’t show them mercy.
There is an old idea of courage that I think you understand. It isn’t about being fearless. It is about standing up when there is something difficult that has to be done and doing it anyway. This is difficult. I know that. But you’ll face no more judges. Nobody is asking you to save yourself. I am asking you to face the truth.
If there is something about that day that you have never told anyone, tell me. Write it down carefully. Start at the moment Virginia, Richard, and Reagan were dead out there on the road near the canal. Tell me who did what. And most importantly, tell me where you left Virginia, Richard, and Reagan.
You needn’t try to make yourself look better, and you can’t make yourself look worse. You just need to tell it straight. I have spent many years trying to understand this story. But at this point I care less about solving a mystery than I do about three people who have been missing for almost half a century.
They deserve to be found. You might find a strange kind of peace by finally telling me where and how.
Gerald, you once had the power to make Virginia, Richard, and Reagan disappear. You still have the power to help bring them home. Please use it.
Tell me what really happened.
For the three who cannot ask you themselves,
Ron Franscell
~~~~~~~
[Gerald Uden’s response, postmarked Sept. 11, 2026; received Sept. 15]
Sir: I am not used to being called a liar. That is the only reason I will answer this letter from you. I am not going to defend anything I have said in the past or change any of it. Since you think I have lied how about I give you a couple of scenarios to think about.
First. After I did the deed I loaded them in barrels and drove them to Astoria Oregon, launched the boat and took them 20 miles out to sea and buried them in 12,000 feet of water. That was what I told the investigators in Missouri. I should have stuck to that story.
Second. When Virginia was late for the rendezvous I went hunting and while I was gone Virginia came to our house looking for me. Alice hated Virginia and there was a fight. Virginia lost. Alice enlisted the help of her adoptive father Sam Barbier and they took the bodies up north to the owl creek mountains and buried them there. Alice never told me exactly where. I know she could have done this because not only did she murder Ron Holtz but I believe she also murdered her second husband Donald Prunty. I would not have believed that of her except for the fact that when the prunty family had his body exhumed for reburial in Illinois, for some reason they had an autopsy performed and found anti-freeze in his bones. Make of it what you will. Anyway, I took the hit for Virginia and the boys.
One last thing. Even if you could give me ten million dollars and a pardon I still could not tell you where the bodies are. I would even take a lie detector test to that end. It is not my fault that the bodies cannot be found in the lake. I have done my best to help in this endeavor. So you have to decide where you think the bodies really are or did I tell the truth after all. I would appreciate you not contacting me anymore. No apology necessary. Gerald.