It’s 2014, and 53-year-old Todd Scott is in the witness box during a sensational murder trial at Laramie County District Court in Wyoming. The evidence he is giving takes the court back decades to the 1970s when Scott was just a young child. And the accused who he is testifying against is his own mother, Alice Uden.
And as we’ll see, Alice Uden and her fourth husband, Gerald Uden – not Todd Scott’s biological father – had more than their fair share of the darkest kind of secrets. And when those secrets were finally revealed, after the couple were arrested in September 2013, the Udens’ children and their neighbors were shocked to their cores.
Alice and Gerald Uden lived in the sleepy Missouri hamlet of Chadwick in Christian County, having settled there some 30 years before Alice faced her son in court. The township is set in the midst of the scenic hills and rivers of the Ozarks, in the Mark Twain National Forest. Founded in 1883 at the end of railroad, not much had happened there since then – until the truth about the Udens emerged.
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Consisting as it does of nothing more than a few houses and a school, you could almost drive through Chadwick without even realizing it. And as far as their fellow citizens were concerned, the Udens were a perfectly respectable couple, both in their senior years and both regular church attendees.
All that most of their neighbors could have told you about the couple was that Alice had worked as a nurse before she retired and was not in great health, suffering from cataracts and diabetes. Gerald had served in the U.S. Navy and had later worked as a truck driver.
Speaking at the time of the arrests to CNN affiliate KSPR, one of the Udens’ neighbors, Allen Bishop, said, “They were good people; we’ve known them for about 12 years now. They’re the kind of neighbors that you leaned over the fence and talked about your chickens with. They were just the old neighbors next door.”
But these positive opinions were to be shattered in the fall of 2013 when the Udens were both arrested, with Alice aged 74 at the time and Gerald aged 71. And soon after their arrest the couple were both charged with first degree murder.
But they weren’t charged with jointly murdering someone. Astonishingly they were charged with entirely separate and independent murders. Let’s first deal with the indictments that Gerald faced – the first degree murder of his former wife and her two children.
The disappearance of Virginia Uden and her two children in 1980 had been a complete mystery for Wyoming authorities more than three decades. Virginia was married to Gerald and the two boys, Richard, 11, and Reagan, 10, were her biological sons and the adopted children of Gerald. Finally, in November 2013, Gerald told the world what had happened to them.
Pleading guilty to three first degree murder charges for the slaying of Virginia, Richard and Reagan, Gerald told the court the gruesome story of what had happened. He and Virginia had married in 1974. After they divorced in 1975, Gerald started his relationship with Alice. And then he murdered Virginia and the two children in 1980 in Fremont County, WY.
Gerald disposed of the bodies in the depths of Fremont Lake. Chillingly, People magazine reported that Gerald told the court, “I knew that if I killed one, I was going to kill all of them. I have no excuse.” Gerald’s step-daughter Erica Hayes, Alice’s child, told People, “He finally admitted it. I sat there and thought, ‘Son of a b****.’”
Gerald had killed his three victims by pretending to take them on a hunting trip and then shooting them to death in cold blood with a .22 rifle. In his evidence to the court, Gerald said that he’d shot Virginia and Ronald at close range and gunned down Reagan as he tried to run away. “Killed him instantly,” Gerald said. “As far as I’m aware, none of them suffered.”