The Ice-Cold Case

Eckert tells the Pitch that there was nothing more the KCPD could do about the ring at that point. Police could not legally seize it or search Selph's jewelry box; it had been years since Morgan's source said she had seen the ring on Selph's finger. "Too much time had passed for us to get a search warrant," Eckert says. "Now, if someone sees her wearing the ring tomorrow, then that would be a possibility."

Citing a lack of new leads coming in, Eckert says she shelved the case. KCPD Detective William Martin says the Cold Case Squad is not handling the Vilott case because that case came to the department before the squad was formed in December 2002. The squad is investigating the more recent of the department's 850-plus cold cases first and working backward, he says. "It would take awhile [to get to 1978]," Martin says.

Only the police can subpoena phone records of the period or search Selph's jewelry -- leads that a frustrated Morgan wants to pursue. She continues to forward e-mails to the KCPD with information about the case, but the police have all but stopped replying.

"What they are finding sounds good to a journalist writing a book or to the average person," Eckert says, "but it doesn't make my case."

To try to move the investigation along, Morgan and Wylie hired a Kansas City-area private-detective agency, which put several investigators on the case.

Despite the brushoff she's received from the KCPD, Morgan continues to talk to people who knew Louise Vilott. She contacted everyone she could find who had worked for Phillips as a secretary during the late 1970s -- about a dozen women -- and flew to Bartlesville to meet with them. Through those interviews -- especially with Louise Vilott's personal secretary, Nina West -- she found out that during the summer before the murder, Bill Vilott had called Louise at the office repeatedly to remind her to fill out her applications for life insurance.

And from the secretaries, Morgan learned that Louise's portrayal of her marriage as perfect -- even to her own family -- was far from true. Several secretaries told Morgan that when Vilott would stop in at the office, he would flirt with them and make fun of his wife, referring to her as "the elephant woman" -- a dig about her weight. Office gossip speculated that the relatively unsuccessful Bill Vilott, who had held a series of low-paying jobs and had briefly operated a failed optical shop called The Spectacle, had married Louise Vilott for her income.

West told Morgan that after Louise's return from a business trip to London and Norway a week before leaving on her Kansas City trip, Louise had gotten several calls from her bank about bounced checks. The calls seemed to make her very angry; West noticed that Louise flushed a deep red as she was juggling money from other accounts to cover the deficits. West and others described Louise Vilott as a meticulous manager of money. Morgan believes Louise Vilott may have been angry enough to consider divorce. "Maybe Louise discovered he was spending it all on his toys and the girlfriend," Morgan says.

In fact, West told Morgan that a few days before the murder, Vilott had drawn up a new will and asked her to sign it as a witness. (West didn't pay attention to what the new will said.) A will Louise had made 3 months earlier left everything to Bill Vilott. That document was accepted in probate court as her official will. Morgan has not been able to find the will that West says she saw Louise sign.

Morgan tried to verify Vilott's alibi for the morning of the murder by calling the three security guards from Tulsa Junior College who were cited by the homicide log as the men who tracked down Vilott in the school's library and notified him about his wife's murder. She found that none of them remembered doing any such thing. She later learned that the KCPD had never sent anyone to Tulsa to interview the guards; they'd made their statements by phone.

For Morgan, the information she had amassed only convinced her of Bill Vilott's guilt. But it didn't prove a thing.

Morgan says she's not about to give up on her quest, even after discouraging setbacks. There was the bullet-riddled tree, for example.

In interviews with Janie Selph's ex-husband, Jim Selph, whom she divorced the month before the murder, Morgan's investigators had learned that Jim Selph had purchased a small handgun -- he couldn't remember the caliber -- which he had left with Janie when they separated. Morgan's private investigators theorized that if the Vilott had committed the murder, he might have used his mistress's gun.

Jim Selph said he had taught Janie to use the gun in the woods in a rural area north of Tulsa, where they had shot at an old oak tree near a creek. Morgan's investigators thought they might be able to find the tree, retrieve a bullet and have it tested by the KCPD crime lab for a match with the bullet retrieved from the crime scene at the Alameda Plaza Hotel.