The Ice-Cold Case

John Wylie, a former Kansas City Star energy and environment reporter who had covered the Phillips Petroleum Co., had spent more than 6 months trying to solve the murder case in 1980 at the request of Louise Vilott's mother, Marguerite Wolfe.

Wylie had vowed to Wolfe that he would solve the murder -- a promise he now regrets. "I always have felt like I just missed something, that if I had worked a little harder or a little smarter, it could have been resolved," says Wylie, who spent hundreds of hours working on the case in Kansas City and during trips to Oklahoma to cover his energy beat. He ended up writing a long story for the Star in October 1980, on the 2-year anniversary of the murder.

In the story, Wylie hinted at various possible motives for the killing -- the unlikely robbery gone bad, a murderous love triangle, corporate malfeasance. He revealed that Louise Vilott's husband, Bill Vilott, had "adopted the robbery-murder theory," suing the Alameda Plaza Hotel for $8.6 million for providing inadequate security. (Vilott later settled with the hotel for an undisclosed amount.) And, Wylie wrote, Bill Vilott had received life-insurance payments totaling almost $250,000 after his wife's death -- and had admitted to an affair with Janie Selph, whom he married soon after Louise Vilott's death.

But other details complicated the picture. One of Louise Vilott's former supervisors at Phillips told Wylie that Louise Vilott had twice mentioned working on a top-secret internal probe at the company that may have involved bribery at high levels. (Other coworkers told Wylie they doubted this was true.)

Even after Wylie quit his job at the Star and, with his wife, bought a tiny Oklahoma paper, the Oologah Lake Leader, he never stopped feeling bad about his failure to solve the Vilott case.

So when Morgan called Wylie almost 3 years ago and left a voice-mail message mentioning Louise Vilott's name, Wylie called back immediately. The two reporters had different skills -- Wylie was adept at tracking down documents and court records; Morgan had a talent for getting people to open up during interviews -- and they agreed to try to solve the murder together and possibly write a book about it.

That April, Morgan flew to Kansas City, where she and Wylie met with Capt. Randy Hopkins and Sgt. Barbara Eckert of the KCPD homicide unit. They provided Morgan with a copy of the entire homicide log from 1978, which contained every police report from the case. "Barb Eckert seemed very excited about the case," recalls Romain Morgan, Melanie's mother, a former teacher whose southwest Missouri farmhouse serves as a clearinghouse for case records.

In fact, many KCPD higher-ups seemed eager to help -- they were in the process of forming a cold-case squad, and solving this case would give them an excellent start. In June 2002, a group went to the Hereford House for dinner -- Eckert, Morgan, Wylie, Romain Morgan and William Schweitzer, a former police detective who had worked the case. They ate steak, mulled over the case and then went to KCPD headquarters, where they stayed until 1 a.m., poring over the old homicide log and talking strategy.

Later that month, they got bad news. Although the KCPD had agreed to re-activate the murder investigation (the KCPD says no case is ever closed unless it's solved), Eckert revealed that phone records, flight manifests listing passengers who flew from Tulsa to Kansas City near the time of the murder and Vilott's bank records -- documents that should have accompanied the old homicide log -- had been destroyed by mistake in the mid-'90s.

In October 2002, the Star reported that the KCPD could not find documents in at least eight old homicide cases, including the Vilott case. In some of them, the records inexplicably had been destroyed by a homicide sergeant; the cop was transferred to a desk job and investigated. In others, police didn't know how the documents had been lost. The Star also obtained an internal audit that called the KCPD's storage space for physical evidence "leaky" and "rodent-infested." In the Vilott case, a lot of physical evidence was also missing -- including Louise Vilott's clothes, the pubic hairs collected at the scene and scrapings from under the victim's fingernails that, if available, could have been tested for DNA. Eckert told them that the only evidence the police had left was the bullet, a shell casing and one fingerprint.

Wylie, who handles most of the searches for documents and records in the case, says that many of the businesses that provided the original records for police, such as Braniff Airlines and Vilott's bank, have folded, merged or changed management.

"There's a great deal of material that can't be reconstructed, and there's nothing anybody can do about it -- it's just plain gone," Wylie says.

Morgan and Wylie started with what little they had -- the old homicide log. Morgan made a list of every person named in the log. She called all of them.