Open Desert

Tonight on Dateline.

We were close because we had the same love for horses and rodeo.

Rodeo was like a dream for her.

Definitely. She said, hey, have you heard anything from Brittany?

Her phone was off. I started getting a little panicky.

I just kept thinking. there's no way that this is real. She stood up for herself and people didn't like that.

So she had like actual enemies at age 15, 16?

Yeah, there's one girl I was thinking of.

He was a rodeo guy. They might have been DMing. She was really into him.

He said he saw her with a cowboy.

They were both standing outside the truck.

The messages were horrible. They were like, we've got your daughter.

This was my best friend.

That's my daughter.

I told him, I will forever, as long as I'm breathing, remind the world of the evil that you are.

A teenage girl dreamed of becoming a rodeo queen. Did that dream die at the hands of a mysterious cowboy? I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Help me.

Here's Josh Mankiewicz with Open Desert.

We were best friends, but I was her father first, then her best friend second. I gave her plenty of room to make mistakes, but stepped in when the mistakes were getting out of hand.

Her mother, Alicia, loved her daughter's free spirit.

She was a firecracker. She was always looking for the next adventure. She was always looking for the next person that needed a friend.

Sunday, March 8, 2020.

We were called File, Not Found. Hairband stuff, classic rock, heavy metal. And she was the critic. That was Brittany. She'd storm in like she owned the place.

On that Sunday, Brittany grew bored with a hairband featuring guys with very little hair, even if her dad was one of them. She made plans to have a friend drive her home. They'd meet up at a park nearby.

I'm like, oh, no, you can go home with me. No, he's coming to pick me up. No, I'll meet you home. Don't worry, I love you, Dad. I said, I love you, too, because that was one of the things I had with her.

After practice, Jim grabbed dinner with his band.

So we kind of ate real quick. When I got in my truck, I started calling her, and it went right to voicemail.

That was not normal for Brittany.

No matter what, just out of pure respect, she didn't have to, but Brittany called me every hour. No matter what. Just to check in, Dad, I'm right here, I'm fine, just to let you know.

As he drove home, Jim called Brittany again and again.

And after the third time, it started getting a little panicky.

It was possible. Brittany had made it home before him. Maybe she was there zoned out, watching TV, taking a nap. Except she wasn't there. Now it was approaching 7 o'clock.

Mom's really worried. That's only about 45 minutes away.

She should have been home by then.

Yeah, so at that point, I'm making calls.

Brittany's parents were divorced, and she lived with her dad. He thought maybe her mom had heard from her.

Her dad called me in full-on panic, where's Brittany? I'm like, what do you mean, where's Brittany? And he told me that she had left with Bryce.

Bryce was 18-year-old. Bryce Dickey, a close friend of Brittany's. He's the guy Brittany told her dad she was meeting.

And I called Bryce, you know, just to see where was she at.

Brittany's brother, James Jr.

He told me he had dropped her off with some new friend at the high school. I'm like, what new friend, what was his name?

And Bryce didn't know.

Your heart literally drops to your feet. You go numb. You can't breathe. The room spins. It's a really very terrifying feeling to feel as a parent.

I couldn't track her. Her phone was off. I couldn't find out anything.

It's scary. Jim couldn't put it off any longer. He called 911.. The Elko County Sheriff's Office fielded Jim's call. Lieutenant Doug Fisher was a sergeant at the time.

Yeah, they're just overdue. It was from the expected time.

Do you have any gut instinct as to whether or not this was that or not?

When I initially got it, I was uncertain to where we were at. As far as the juvenile, there was definitely some plausibility of Brittany being overdue and just not communicating.

Right away, investigators looked for Brittany's digital footprint. Like any teenager, Brittany was endlessly attached to her phone. They pinged it and got a hit. Somewhere off a road out past Spring Creek High School. Nick Stake was a supervising detective in the Elko County Sheriff's Office.

The patrol deputies that night went out and searched that area and they didn't find anything.

Investigators immediately talked with Bryce Dickey.

He drove up to the park, picked her up, and they drove around for a little while.

Bryce told detectives, he and Brittany hung out for three and a half hours. And sure enough, Brittany posted photos of them together that day, smiling, joking around.

At some point, 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 a unknown cowboy.

What description does he give of that guy?

He was a tall, white cowboy. He had a cowboy hat on. He was driving a Ford F-150, one of the older models. Stepside, early 2000s model.

Now they had a description of a guy and of his vehicle. Only one problem. That turned out to be a lot less helpful than it might seem.

They were coming out of the woodwork.

A lot of ranches around here.

A lot of ranches. A lot of little cowboys.

Where, in this vast desert landscape, had Brittany gone?

I had no clue who JT was. But you never know. Your teenage daughter's not always going to tell you who she's crushing on. So I went hardcore investigator mode with best friends.

and they're like, JT. While mom worked the phones, dad headed out to where Brittany's phone had last pinged.

And I went out that Monday, driving up and down trying to find her. And we were looking in the sky for birds. We were out looking for a body.

No birds, no body.

No, we couldn't see anything, didn't find anything.

Cops were looking for Brittany, hopefully alive. Her dad says he already knew they should be looking for Brittany's remains. He and his daughter had always been that connected.

From the day she was born, she kind of saved my life.

That's.

How'd she save your life?

I was on drugs and I was single. Lived the party life, everything, making really good money and just lived it up. And first breath she took, looked at it and I straightened my life up, sobered up and devoted my life to raising my kids.

Sounds like you did a pretty good job with her.

Yeah, I hope. I thought I did or hope I did.

I mean, she was not living the life that you led.

No.

She did love action. She loved to fly. On horseback. Through the fields and hills around town.

Yeah, this was her getaway.

Anything to do with ranching?

Yeah, horses, ranching, just being out here.

All girls that age seem to love horses, but she not only just loved them, she lived it.

Yeah, she was a natural with it, too. Just get on and go, no fear.

What was it about this life that she loved so much?

The freedom. She could ride wherever. She could do whatever she wanted.

Selena Winkler was a friend who shared Brittany's love of horseback riding.

She loved the rodeo, that's for sure. She wanted to do barrel racing like I did.

Rodeo was like a dream for her.

Yes, definitely.

And one that came up all the time.

Yep. I think that's why we were so close is because we had the same love for horses and ranching and rodeo and anything that has to do with pretty much country life, so.

Rambunctious, stubborn, Brittany had a big personality. Kara Ashby was her closest friend since middle school.

The way that she carried herself was very, like, you don't want to mess with me. She stood up straight and she squared her shoulders. She never slouched.

Kara and Brittany would explore the hills together.

And then, at the end of the day, we would just lay, just staring up at the trees or the stars and just talking for hours.

Brittany held her friendships close, mostly girls and boys who loved to ride, including Bryce Dickey.

Bryce was a good friend. If you needed him, he would be there, you know, like a friend should.

I always trusted things when he was involved. And, Mom, Bryce is going to bring me home. Okay, cool, because he'd always get you home.

Now investigators were following the lead Bryce gave them. They were looking hard for a tall cowboy driving a green pickup, likely named JT. That rang a bell with Kara.

She had started talking to a guy named JT. She had told me about him.

So you put that together with Bryce's story, and maybe that's the same guy.

We thought that might be a possibility, yes.

There's a lot of ranches around here. There's a lot of Ford pickups.

Correct.

Even green ones, there's a lot of those. I saw a few today. Correct. And probably a lot of guys with the initials JT.

Correct. As a matter of fact, what's ironic about that description is we had a couple members of our task force, their initials were JT, and then we also had a retired sergeant that had just retired. He was driving around a pickup truck that matched the description almost exactly. So there was a lot of JTs and green pickups that we had to run down during this investigation.

They combed databases, property records, and DMV files, looking for anyone with the initials JT. None of those searches yielded an actionable lead. Just a lot of guys, some with the right initials, all who vaguely matched Bryce's description of JT.

Hey, Bryce.

How's it going? Investigators needed more details and asked Bryce to meet them in the parking lot where he and Brittany had parted ways. And the F-150 was over there, but I didn't know that was where she was going at that time. And they were both standing outside the truck.

Like that winter green, dark forest green?

Like a dark forest green.

Single cab, extra cab?

I think it was a single cab, but I didn't see if it was the crew cab.

The crew cab? All right. So did you talk to her after that?

No. I started heading back home.

Even if she would have gone out and done what every teenager does and gotten to a bottle of Jack, that's not an issue, because my daughter was never afraid to call me. It was like somebody grabbed my kid.

She wouldn't be just off the grid trying to, you know, get away from you?

Nope. Nope. The last thing in the world she would ever do was try to get away from me.

JT was still a mystery, but there were other theories floating around. Brittany had a big personality, maybe too big for some.

One of the impressions that I got, you either loved her or you had a problem with her.

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Have you ever seen such a thing before?

For podcast fans, nothing is more chilling than listening.

What goes through your mind when you make a discovery like that?

And when you subscribe to Dateline Premium, it gets even better. Excuse me if I sound a little skeptical. Every episode is ad-free. Ooh, wow. So this could be your ace in the hole.

It is. It's got very unique challenges.

There's a lot of wide open spaces. There's a lot of abandoned mine shafts. There's a lot of places to hide someone.

There is. It's a very wide open area out here.

And you don't exactly have a ton of people able to go do that searching.

That's correct. Also, just the sheer size, Elko County's approximately 17,000 square miles, so just in the Elko proper area, trying to cover all the open desert, that's a huge undertaking.

That didn't stop Brittany's friends from trying.

There was quite a few of us, probably like 10 or 12 of us girls that were in these group chats, and we were just trying, like we organized our own searches, and we made missing flyers, and we were handing them out. We were like, you know what, let's just go drive around. It's an area where her phone was last pinged at, and I mean, it's nothing but desert out there.

Her friend Bryce Dickey was with Brittany's family from the start of the search.

He was setting up search parties. He was reassuring my son.

He was there, making me feel better, you know, that. okay, I've got more people out looking for her, you know.

Investigators had fanned out across the county looking at security tape from local businesses and still asking about the mysterious JT. In came a tip. Brittany had been direct messaging with a guy on TikTok.

And the guy in New York, he was a rodeo guy. They might have been DMing. She was really into him.

It was a possibility. The TikToker from New York coming all the way out to Nevada to meet her in person. So you don't really know whether the online guy is this guy that she was seeing with JT or whether we're talking about two different men here.

At that point in time, we did not. We were trying to piece it together, and where does JT fit into it? Where does this guy? that's on TikTok?

Gossip spread through Elko like a fire.

There was a lot of theories. Everyone said that she had run away. The next thought was, you know, maybe she ended up in a bender somewhere, which I didn't think was true. There were some people talking about human trafficking.

We got at least 200 tips.

And each one of those is somebody saying. this could mean nothing or it could be important, but here's what I know.

Correct. Yep.

Investigators certainly heard about Britney's larger-than-life personality, and that spawned another theory.

Britney was somebody who you either loved her or you had a problem with her. She was a very strong personality. So that was definitely something that caused a lot of areas that we had to look into, different people that may have had problems with Britney or gotten in previous fights with Britney.

Other students that she might have rubbed the wrong way. Correct. In high school, Britney had been popular, then not.

I know there was a lot of drama, and, you know, her friends came and went a lot.

Then came the bullying. According to her family and friends, it was vicious and relentless.

There was just girls in school that were mean to her. They would just bully her and talk her down, and for almost no reason at all.

What did they think was the reason?

She didn't let people take advantage of her easily and they didn't really like that too much.

So she had, like, actual enemies at age 15, 16?

Yeah, it's middle school and high school and, you know, girls just don't like other girls.

And then there was this, a video that made it to investigators. Britney at the rodeo. She's in the white shirt, and she's fighting two girls. This happened a year before she went missing. What exactly started this fight and whether bad feelings still lingered was unclear to detectives and to Jim.

Yeah, there's one girl. I was thinking of. Everything's racing through your head. You start thinking, well, what if this girl's probably in on it? And you're just trying to piece it all together.

Jim didn't know for sure if the girls who'd fought Britney were involved. One thing Jim did know was the feeling he had. Where'd your head go at that time?

It was gone, literally gone, because I knew something happened.

Something happened like what? Nothing good.

I knew nothing good happened.

48 hours after Britney disappeared, Alicia received a text offering equal measures of hope and despair.

But we've got your daughter.

The message said Britney was alive and money could bring her home. That's the best evidence so far that she's still alive. Yeah.

It said that we have your daughter.

It came from an unknown number, someone claiming to have kidnapped Britney.

And she's not doing very well from the medicine that we gave her, and she's sick. And if you don't give me $10,000, I'm gonna give her to my dogs. Messages just kept coming. I'm serious, she needs her mom. We met her answer.

The kidnapper demanded the ransom be paid in Apple gift cards. To Detective Stake, that was a big red flag.

It seemed like one of the gift card scams that in law enforcement we're seeing all over the nation.

Yeah, my eyes rolled in the back of my head.

You didn't believe that for a second?

No.

Investigators told Alicia the kidnapping, probably phony.

I didn't believe them. I was convinced that somebody had my daughter and she was sick and she needed me.

So Alicia started raising the money. By the next day, she knew she wouldn't need it.

I couldn't walk. My legs didn't work. And he just had this look on his face, just this such tortured look on his face. And he was like, I gotta go, I gotta go. Are you okay?

Believe it or not, I was relieved. Why? Because I knew they finally found her. She wasn't out there anymore.

Doug Fisher was already at the scene. He says it was gruesome.

On the side of the two-track road, a fairly sizable bloodstain. You could see a portion of the lower torso and kind of the feet.

When Detective Stake pulled up, he noticed what looked to be chewing tobacco on the ground. You'd probably get DNA out of chewing tobacco, right?

We could, yes.

Forensics recorded the terrible state of Britney's body. It was a map of extreme violence. She'd been strangled and had a single stab wound to her neck.

We were able to locate a puncture wound to her neck, various scratches and some different abrasions to her body. Also sort of a ligature mark around her neck.

And signs of sexual assault.

At that time, it definitely seemed like that could be a possibility.

Investigators would later find a condom about 60 feet from where Britney's body was found.

And I just remember the look on her mom's face. And we both just laid on the grass of her front lawn and cried.

I had absolutely no idea how I was going to take another step forward. I just kept thinking, what am I going to do? How do I do this? She was my everything.

Her father's grim intuition had been proven correct. You lost your best friend.

Yeah, yeah, I lost. I'm the only person who ever truly loved me.

What had been a frantic search was now a murder case. One that was woefully short on suspects. Nothing came of that lead about the TikToker. And they looked into those girls who'd tangled with Britney at the rodeo. Ultimately, the story's about her and other girls at school.

Correct, yeah. Pretty much anybody who may have had previous problems with her, when we investigated those leads, they died out fairly fast.

High school drama.

Yeah, correct.

Among a multitude of cowboys, investigators were still searching for JT and his green pickup. They knew JT could be anyone or a phantom. They also knew there was someone else who was quite real. Someone they now saw in a different light.

He was crying, and I remember telling him that it wasn't his fault. And I remember feeling so bad for him.

Brittany met Bryce in middle school. He was two classes ahead of her. Now he was a senior, who had the cowboy persona down pat. Boots. Hat.

Not that I knew of.

Just friends, part of a group, just like everybody else? Yeah.

He's kind of just one of those geeky kids. Just a shy, little cowboy kid that would kick his feet, look at the ground. when you talked to him. He'd come sit over at the house while Brittany was getting her makeup on to go to the rodeos. He was always her ride to places.

I appreciate you meeting me here.

Yeah. While he seemed happy to help police, Selena says after that meeting in the parking lot, Bryce did not seem himself. At one point, Bryce texts you that he's been interrogated by the cops, at least in his telling.

Yep. He was pretty mad about that. I don't even think they interrogated him as hard as he was claiming. I think it just...

He definitely seems freaked out.

Yep. He seemed really freaked out. He was pretty mad, and saying stuff like, they apparently think I did it, and, like, they interrogated most of us, you know. We're not freaking out about it like that.

His reaction seemed odd, unless Bryce had something to worry about. Unlike Brittany's other friends, Kara, her closest, was never tight with Bryce.

He was kind of awkward. There's just something about him that you don't really feel comfortable talking to. He's just there, and you don't really know why he's there.

Brittany's brother, James, says he had a bad feeling about Bryce and his story from the start.

He needs to be in the police station. He needs to be getting questioned on question on question. You know, he needs to get every single detail he can remember. Was there a pebble on the ground there? Tell him.

And Brittany's dad could not have agreed more. To him, Bryce's story was off somehow.

She would never have gotten in a truck with a stranger. Ever. Okay. She would have called me immediately and said, hey, can I go with JT over here? And I would have said, absolutely not.

Okay, maybe that's why she wouldn't tell you?

No, she would tell me. Without a doubt, she would tell me.

And so that says to you, Bryce is lying. Yeah. Yeah.

I could not imagine, as a guy, dropping off my little sister and go, okay, I'm gonna let you go with this guy and I'm not gonna really examine who it is. And not only that, but there wasn't any names exchanged with them. A typical truck, that... Yeah, a typical Spring Creek truck.

Looking back at that interview in the parking lot, something stood out.

As he gave the description, it was almost scripted to the fact that he made sure that all the little boxes were checked.

Like it was rehearsed.

It was rehearsed. It was vague enough that there was just tons of possibilities for that. There was nothing that really stood out to make it, like, unique.

Two days after Brittany's body was found, detectives asked Bryce to come down to the station and donate a swab of his DNA. He gives up his phone and he opens his mouth with a swab. No attorney.

That's correct, he did.

Which is what an innocent person would do.

That's correct.

Or a foolish, guilty one.

That is also correct.

Detectives had been talking with Bryce since the night Brittany disappeared. Now they compared each of the tellings of his story and noticed something. In early conversations, Bryce described the cowboy next to his Ford F-150..

They were both standing outside the truck.

In his next interview, Bryce added a detail, saying the cowboy was inside the truck. at first. The hat looked towards the top of the cab. All I saw was a cowboy hat, and that was the only identifying mark that I could make. He changes his story in a little tiny way.

He did, which to me kind of stood out as a significant inconsistency.

They took a close look at that photo. Brittany posted to Snapchat the day she disappeared. You certainly don't see anything in there. that makes you think, oh yeah, that's a person who's about to disappear.

That's correct. She looked completely at ease, in my interpretation.

Look past those smiles, because the photo offers a big clue. Behind Bryce and Brittany is a desert landscape with the same sort of brush as where Brittany's body was found. Beyond that, a mountain ridgeline, caught at an angle that seemed identical to the view from the crime scene. It was time to talk with Bryce Dickey again, because now there were new questions, like where he and Brittany were really going in this video.

everything that happened on that Sunday?

Eight days after Brittany's body was found, investigators asked her friend Bryce Dickey to come tell his story one more time. We picked her up and then drove around town.

because we had no idea what we wanted to do.

I gave her a hug, dropped her off,

and then I was already pulling back off, and then she was walking back over to the F-150.

You can see a truck that appeared to match Bryce Dickey's, drive right past the first and the second entryway into Spring Creek High School and continue on down to Boyd-Kennedy Road.

where the road turns to dirt. So he's not doing what he says he's doing, and he's doing something that he didn't tell you, that he did. Correct. They showed Bryce stills from the video of he and Brittany driving past the high school and down Boyd-Kennedy Road, which leads to where her body was found.

I want him to tell me the truth, and I want him to tell me the truth in his own words.

People lie. DNA doesn't. Faced with that, Bryce Dickey changed his story... again.

So you're still expecting us to believe.

that you dropped her off and her body miraculously appeared.

where the condom and condom wrapper were.

by some strange frequencies? I did not kill Brittany. Though Bryce denied having anything to do with the murder, detectives also had his DNA from that chewing tobacco found at the crime scene.

That definitely eliminated just about everybody else in the country from being a suspect. Go ahead and stand up.

Detectives felt they had enough. Bryce Dickey was charged with the murder and sexual assault of Brittany Ulachi.

I think I went dumb with shock. I didn't think he could defend his own self in a fight, let alone hurt somebody.

A lot of people around here were shocked. One of them wasn't.

They brought us into the back and sat us down. The first words out of my mouth was, it was Bryce, right? They said, yep.

Bryce Dickey's trial began in May 2022.

You know, unfortunately, or maybe even fortunately, we'll never know exactly what happened.

But I know that the evidence supported.

that Brittany and Bryce went out there willingly.

This was no abduction?

This was no abduction. I think Bryce didn't get what Bryce wanted and he took it into his own hands.

Kara Ashby thinks Bryce did not enjoy life in the friend zone.

Brittany saw him as a brother and he had come on to her, and she did not see him in that way. and just something happened and he snapped.

Hard to be in the courtroom with Bryce?

Oh yeah.

Jim Ulacke sat in court. He was endlessly and homicidally furious.

I had it completely timed out. There's a guard over there. There's a guard over there. He's right there.

How quickly can I get there?

I can get there. I can put my finger through his trach. I can do all this in three seconds. I just kept saying you can't. You're going to ruin this trial.

Bryce Dickey's defense attorney, Gary Woodbury, argued the prosecution's case was circumstantial and said scientific evidence around Brittany's time of death contradicted the prosecution's timeline. He told the jury that all prosecutors could prove was a sexual encounter. The sexual relations, from my point of view at least, appeared to be almost certainly consensual on her part. So if Bryce was lying, it was out of embarrassment.

Well, it was out of protecting Brittany.

Brittany and he were very close friends. The evidence of that was overwhelming. After 10 days of trial, a jury found Bryce Dickey guilty of murder and sexual assault.

I will forever, as long as I'm breathing, I'm going to remind the world of the evil that you are, the evil that you embody, and the beautiful, brilliant light that you stole from this world.

Bryce Dickey's sentence, life in prison. He will be 64 years old before he's eligible for parole.

Yes, back here at the pasture, up there.

You don't go there.

No, I can't.

It's enough to know that she's near you.

Yeah. When I'm ready to accept she's gone, then I'll probably go up there more, but right now it's not good for me.

That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Friday at 10, 9 central, and of course I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News. I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News. Good night.