The last photograph of Gabrielle "Britney" Ujlaky alive is a Snapchat photo taken on the afternoon of Sunday, March 8, 2020. In it, the 16-year-old is smiling from the seat of a pickup truck belonging to Bryce Dickey, an 18-year-old she had known since middle school and called her "big brother." A friend who saw the photo that day, Cheyenne Fry, noticed something off about it. "She looked pale and I asked if she was OK," Fry later testified. "She said she was having a day."

By that evening, Britney's phone was ringing unanswered. By Wednesday, two off-roaders would find a blue tarp in the high desert northwest of Spring Creek, Nevada. And for more than a week, the people searching for her killer would be chasing a man who never existed, invented by the person sitting next to her in that final photo.

Evidence Log · Trial record, Nevada Supreme Court opinion & investigative reporting
A — Vanished March 8, 2020, after a ride from a trusted friend; he claimed she left with an unknown cowboy in a green Ford F-150
B — Body found March 11, 2020, wrapped in a tarp in Burner Basin, roughly 15 miles from Spring Creek
C — DNA on a condom near the body, Snapchat geolocation data, and surveillance footage dismantled his story
D — Convicted May 2022 of first-degree murder and sexual assault; life with parole eligibility after a minimum of 46 years

A nitty gritty Nevada cowgirl

Britney Ujlaky grew up in Spring Creek, a ranching community in Elko County in the northeastern corner of Nevada. She was, in her mother's words, the real thing. "This girl was the real, legit, nitty gritty Nevada cowgirl," Alisha Ujlaky said. "Very rarely was she in an arena. She was out doing ranch work."

She had switched to homeschooling after being bullied. She was talented enough with makeup that friends asked her to do theirs for prom. She had plans: she intended to enlist in the Navy, and after that, her father said, "She wanted to be either a psychiatrist, wanted to help vets, or a nurse." She was scheduled to take the test for her driver's license the Monday after she disappeared.

March 8, 2020

That Sunday, Britney went with her father, Jim Ujlaky, to his band practice in Elko. In the afternoon she left with Bryce Dickey, a friend from the local rodeo community her family had known and trusted for years. Friends were clear about the shape of that relationship. "She called him her 'big brother,'" one testified. "She didn't like him like that."

By Dickey's own account, the two drove around for about three and a half hours. Somewhere in that window, Britney posted the Snapchat photo of the two of them in his truck. Investigators would later note that the desert landscape visible in the frame resembled the place her body was found.

When Britney had not come home by that evening, Jim Ujlaky started calling. "I was repeatedly calling her all the way home and I sent a text, 'Why aren't you answering my calls?'" he later testified. "It had never done that before." The family reported her missing that night.

The cowboy in the green truck

Dickey had a story ready. He told investigators he had dropped Britney off at Spring Creek High School, where she planned to meet a new friend. He said he watched her climb into an older-model green Ford F-150 driven by a tall white man in a cowboy hat. He said Britney never told him the man's name.

The detail was vivid enough to send the search in the wrong direction. Volunteers and deputies across Elko County hunted for the green truck. A tip that reached Britney's mother on social media suggested her daughter might have been out with a man called "JT." No such man, and no such truck, was ever found, because prosecutors would later argue neither had ever existed. While the community searched, Dickey stayed close to the family. Alisha Ujlaky would remember that closeness with particular bitterness.

Burner Basin

On March 11, three days after Britney disappeared, two members of a local off-roading group spotted a blue tarp off a dirt road in Burner Basin, a stretch of high desert roughly 15 miles from Spring Creek. Britney's body was inside, partially clothed. An autopsy found she had died of a stab wound to the neck and strangulation, possibly with a cord or ligature, and that she had been sexually assaulted.

The crime scene did not stay quiet about who had been there. Investigators recovered a used condom in the brush near the body. Chewing tobacco was found nearby. Both went out for DNA testing, along with swabs from Britney's neck and scrapings from under her fingernails.

The evidence

What came back took the investigation apart and rebuilt it around one person. The condom carried Bryce Dickey's DNA on the inside and Britney's on the outside, and it matched a box of condoms found in Dickey's truck. His DNA was on the chewing tobacco, on the swabs from her neck, and under her fingernails. Geolocation data from Snapchat placed both of their accounts in the area where her body was found. And surveillance footage collected along the route contradicted the one checkable fact in his story: his truck had passed Spring Creek High School without stopping.

When investigators searched further, they found a red-stained knife tucked into a pair of hiking boots in Dickey's closet and a red-stained shirt in a toolbox in his truck. On March 19, 2020, eleven days after Britney disappeared, Dickey was arrested at the Elko County Sheriff's Office on an open murder charge. He was 18 years old.

"I believed your ridiculous lies and your story about the green truck, and you let me come try and comfort you, knowing that you had raped and murdered my daughter."

— Alisha Ujlaky, at sentencing

The trial

Dickey went to trial in Elko County in May 2022. His defense leaned on the absence of an eyewitness. "You will not hear any evidence that anybody anywhere saw Bryce Dickey kill or rape Britney Ujlaky," his attorney told the jury. District Attorney Tyler Ingram countered that the state had no obligation to produce one; it had the DNA, the geolocation data, and the footage instead. Jurors also heard from a former girlfriend of Dickey's, who testified that he had choked her without consent on four occasions.

On May 19, 2022, the jury found Dickey guilty of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon and sexual assault with the use of a deadly weapon. Four days later, after about two hours of deliberation in the penalty phase, the jury set the murder sentence at life with the possibility of parole after 20 years. That August, District Judge Mason Simons stacked the remaining counts and deadly-weapon enhancements consecutively, including a sentence of life with parole eligibility after 10 years for the sexual assault. The aggregate result, as the Nevada Supreme Court would later describe it, was life in prison with the possibility of parole only after a minimum of 46 years.

At the sentencing, Jim Ujlaky tried to describe the size of the hole in his life and mostly could not. "I can't watch a movie with a father and daughter without doing this," he said, crying.

The appeal

Dickey appealed, challenging the ex-girlfriend's testimony, the jury instructions, the denial of a mistrial, and the state's expert witnesses. On January 4, 2024, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed the convictions. The court acknowledged errors at trial but held them harmless against what it called overwhelming evidence, writing that "the State presented overwhelming evidence to support the jury's conviction of Dickey for murder and sexual assault."

The case reached a national audience in December 2023, when Dateline covered it in an episode titled "Open Desert."

The last photo

There is a particular cruelty in how this case looks in hindsight. The people searching Elko County for a green Ford F-150 were searching for a phantom, while the last photo of Britney Ujlaky alive, smiling and pale in the passenger seat, had already recorded everything that mattered. She was sixteen. She trusted the person holding the wheel the way you trust a brother, because that is what she believed he was. Her mother believed it too, long enough to comfort him while he grieved in public for a girl he had left in the desert. The photo was supposed to be nothing, one more Snapchat on an ordinary Sunday. It became the last true thing anyone would learn about her for days, taken moments before the story about the cowboy began.

Sources

Criminal proceedings referenced above are matters of public record in Elko County, Nevada. Bryce Edward Dickey was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon and sexual assault with the use of a deadly weapon; the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed the convictions on January 4, 2024.