Family members wrote letters of complaint regarding the Pershing County Sheriff's Department's failure to find Nan Dixon, as well as about the family's perceived lack of effort on the part of the sheriff's department, to no avail. As far as the sheriff was concerned, Pershing County was just too vast and desolate for them to search all 6991 square miles of it, and he cited that the difficulty was further compounded by the 50,000 or so cars that traversed Interstate 80 each day.
A year after Dixon's disappearance, Dixon's son, Vic, her firstborn, went to Nevada to look further into his mother's vanishing. After he returned home and within a year of his Nevada probing venture, Vic was killed on his first day on a new job as a log truck driver in what the family believes was "freak" and unusual. The truck that he had been driving went over a cliff, and he was apparently decapitated by the logs that he had been carrying. A follow-up investigation did not find any mechanical problems with the truck that Vic had been driving, nor did it find any medical condition that Vic may have had to cause him to lose control and drive the truck over the cliff. The family considered Vic's death suspicious because he had reportedly seen gold bars beneath a bed at a relative's home in Nevada at a time when the gold mine's investors had been told that gold had never been found in the mine. In other words, Vic and other family members thought that they had reason to believe that investors were being bilked and cheated out of the returns on their investments, but their claims were never substantiated.
Little else occurred in the investigation into Nan Dixon's disappearance until November 1982 when her car was found by coyote hunters in a ravine below the main road of the Seven Troughs turnoff. Although the investigation became active again at that point, the discovery of Dixon's car only served to add to the aura of mystery surrounding her disappearance, in part because it had been discovered in an area that had been previously searched from the air and by ground, according to Erhardt.
According to an article published in the Lovelock Review-Miner and to Dixon's family members, Dixon's car appeared to have been deliberately driven over a rocky road and into the ravine. Tire tracks could be seen where it left the road and traversed down into the gulch. The tires at that late date were badly scuffed from having been driven over the rocky road, but otherwise held air and were considered to be in reasonably good condition. The car also contained a half tank of gasoline. Dixon's body, however, was not with the car, and was nowhere else to be found.
A "possible suicide" note, Erhardt said, "had been carefully planted" inside the car. Suicide, according to Erhardt and other family members, had not been an option for Nan Dixon. Erhardt and others did not believe that Dixon would kill herself because she was "strong and lively." Also, the "suicide" note had not been signed.
"Of course, if she had killed herself," Erhardt said, "she did one helluva job hiding her own body and relocating her vehicle from beyond the grave."
Disturbing evidence was found inside the car that included four empty cigarette cartons. Although Dixon had been a light smoker who only took part in the habit occasionally, it seemed highly unlikely that she had consumed four cartons of cigarettes within the confines of her vehicle. Besides, the cartons were not of the same brand that Dixon had smoked. Portions of black electrical tape were found inside the car as well, and one roll that was intact contained a single hair and what appeared to be tissue attached to it. What appeared to be bloodstains were found on a mat inside the trunk, as well as on a tire and a rim, suggestive of the possibility that a body had been transported in the car's trunk. Nonetheless, the Pershing County Sheriff's Department closed the case as a "suicide," and in the years since Dixon's disappearance all of the evidence in the case has also disappeared, according to Erhardt. Erhardt also said that instead of keeping her grandmother's car for evidence, the sheriff's office sold it at auction.
Erhardt has been in touch with investigators with the Pershing County Sheriff's Department, Lovelock Police Department, Nevada Department of Public Safety—Investigation Division, and others since August 2007, all of whom have provided her with a sympathetic ear. However, her efforts have not yet yielded any results in this 30-year-old mystery, but Erhardt plans to search the desert herself sometime in the not-too-distant future in the hope that she will find her grandmother's skeletal remains.
Dixon's family believes that someone may have talked, said something about Dixon's disappearance, saw something but chose to keep quiet about it—perhaps out of fear, or otherwise heard details of what really happened over the three decades since Nan Dixon disappeared, and they are hopeful that such a person or persons will come forward now with what they know. If anyone can shed any light on this bizarre and mysterious case with any details or eyewitness accounts, no matter how small or insignificant such a detail might seem, they are urged to call the Pershing County Sheriff's Department at 775-273-5111; the Lovelock Police Department at 775-273-2256; or to e-mail me at: readermail@garycking.com.
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