The Ice-Cold Case

Media attention waned as the case went cold. Morgan, meanwhile, stopped following the story -- she had other things to worry about. Her radio station, which had struggled financially almost from the start, cut her job. In need of work, she signed on as news director at KYYS 102.1, an FM rock station that had little interest in hard news. After that, she took a job at KMBC Channel 9 as a reporter and anchor. For the next year, she worked long hours, overwhelmed with trying to learn the television business. When she heard that her bosses were considering offering her a 5-year anchor contract, she called her boyfriend, who was living in San Francisco. He proposed over the phone, and she agreed to decline the offer and move to California.

Today, Morgan works as a conservative talk-show host at San Francisco's ABC-owned AM station, KSFO 560. But she spends much of her spare time trying to find out who killed Louise Vilott. For the past 3 years, she has spent hours each day and all 6 weeks of her annual paid vacation working with another reporter and private investigators to try to solve the case. She has dogged the Kansas City Police Department, made phone calls around the world, tracked down and interviewed hundreds of people who either knew the victim or had potentially useful information. She has flown from California to Tulsa and Kansas City numerous times with another reporter and spent $60,000 she may never recoup. And now she thinks she knows who committed the murder. She believes it was Louise's husband, Bill Vilott.

Twenty-six years later, the murder of the young lawyer remains one of the city's most fascinating unsolved crimes. Morgan's persistence convinced the Kansas City Police Department to take another look at the crime -- at least for a while. But now the case seems as cold as ever, and police seem uninterested in leads that Morgan considers compelling.

Although police considered Bill Vilott a suspect, he never was arrested or charged with the crime.

Morgan admits that her obsession with the case is personal -- she identifies with Vilott. In 1978, both women were in their twenties and starting promising careers in fields that traditionally had been reserved for men. Vilott's career ended that day on the floor of a hotel room. And Morgan still wants someone to pay.

Morgan's quest to solve the case began in her living room. On a January evening in Marin County, California, in 2002, she sat on the couch in her two-story home, chatting with her neighbor Sheldon Siegel, a best-selling author of legal thrillers. As Siegel's twin boys played with Morgan's son, the conversation turned to books -- Siegel was working on his second novel, Incriminating Evidence.

"Melanie, you should write a book," she recalls Siegel telling her. But she brushed off the idea, telling him she didn't have anything to write about. "You have lots of stories. Look at everything you've covered," she says Siegel told her.

It was true -- Morgan had covered some exciting stories. Not long after she moved to California in 1981, she began working for the local ABC radio station and also covered news for ABC's national radio and TV networks. Morgan's bosses sent her to cover the U.S. Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983. She covered Mexico City's devastating earthquake of 1988 and the 1989 uprising in Tiananmen Square in China. "I was a hard-news reporter, a hot-spot reporter," she tells the Pitch.

But when Siegel asked her for a story, she didn't talk about her international travels or political clashes. Instead she told the story of Louise Vilott's murder.

"It was the first thing that just popped up in my brain, and the words just came tumbling out," Morgan says. "He was fascinated by the story, and he said, 'Why don't you go back and check and see what happened?' And I said, 'Oh, I'm sure that this thing was solved a long time ago, and I don't even know how to begin to go about finding out details about it.'"

As a reporter, Morgan had covered breaking news. She didn't specialize in investigations, digging up records or dealing with police, crime and courts. And she'd been away from beat reporting for several years.

While at KSFO in the '90s, her politics had slowly changed. To the dismay of her liberal mother, she had become an opinionated right-winger and talk-radio cohost. On The Lee Rodgers & Melanie Morgan Program, she's more pundit than reporter. She loudly called for the recall of then-Governor Gray Davis and helped to launch conservative nonprofit Move America Forward. More recently, she has spoken out against Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 film and appeared as a commentator on the Fox News Network. But despite her busy schedule, Morgan decided early in 2002 to find out what had happened to the Vilott case.

She was shocked to learn from a KCPD captain that the case had never been solved.

As she began to pursue information on the case, she discovered that she wasn't the only journalist still obsessed with it.