Nancy Lagerquist & Bertha Scott

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail as well as talk of sexual assault. Please listen with discretion. All witnesses, suspects, and purses of interest are considered innocent until proven guilty in a. Court of law. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now on true crime, and then together we're going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome to this week's episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. We are going to get into a little right now in true crime, and then we're going to get into this week's case. So very More feu'sed trial has officially been scheduled to begin on July nineteenth of twenty twenty seven, and they are expecting it to last for at least six weeks. Now, if you remember, he was originally going to be going to trial this year, but they have since postponed it and it will officially be happening in the summer of next year. So we are about a year away from very going to trial. So let's talk a little bit about this case out of Ohio. I kind of alluded to it last week that I wanted to talk about it, but I wanted to get a little bit more backstory and familiarize myself with it a little bit. But honestly, it seems like every single day there's been new things coming out and it's just ever evolving. There is a lot going on. So we are just going to start with what we know. So this took place in Venton County, Ohio, and law enforcement responded to this home in response to something not related and when they went into the home, they found four people and sixteen children living in an absolute hot mess, disaster of a home and squalor basically. So the people who were arrested, I'm going to go through who they are and their relation. So Gary Sider Senior, he is seventy three years old. He is married to Christina Siders, who is sixty seven. They have a son, Gary Siders the second. He is thirty six, and Elizabeth Siders is his wife and she is thirty three. So they have all been arrested and charged with second degree felony child endangerment, and there are other charges that have been reported to be pending. Possibly there could be more charges coming. So these sixteen kids were in a twelve x twelve room that was absolutely disgusting, full of human waste. Basically, they were living in their own filth, and it seems that they have been living in that room for a long time. The kids range in age from one and a half years old to eighteen years old, and it is believed that Elizabeth gave birth to all of these children, including a couple of twins who were born conjoined and passed away shortly thereafter. All of the children, of course, were removed from the home and were being treated in the hospital. Two of the children had to be airlifted to a hospital for immediate medical attention. They said some of these kids were literal days away from not being alive if they didn't get the medical intervention they needed. So this was a very dire situation. These kids were obviously being abused, they were living in their own filth, and there was just a lot going on inside of this home that nobody knew about. They are also running paternity tests on all of the children because there is a lot of rumor and speculation that Gary Sider Senior might have fathered some of these children. That is just kind of what is going around right now. But that is definitely going to be part of this ongoing investigation because there is a lot going on here. So Gary the second was eighteen years old when he married fifteen year old Elizabeth. Now she was pregnant at the time with this child who is now eighteen years old. However, from what I have heard, Gary was not the father of this child, but he married her when she was fifteen years old, and it truly does seem that ever since she had this first baby, that she has been pregnant very very frequently and often and living in not. So great conditions. So there's also been a lot of again rumor and speculation online due to one of the mugshot photos of Elizabeth, you can see a mark on her arm that almost looks like a mark that is from like a restraint or something. So there's a lot of people that are saying that she very well could be a victim as well, and was obviously very young when she was brought into this family, and she has been having baby after baby after baby four years and years and years, and there are a lot of people who are looking at her. As a victim as well. Now, elizabeth attorney has come out and said that he does not believe that Elizabeth is evil and that he doesn't see any malice in Elizabeth. And it's also been said that Elizabeth, after she was arrested, all she really wanted to know is if her kids were okay and when she was going to be able to see them. So it's entirely possible that this girl was groomed, abused, and in this situation that she just couldn't get out of, and unfortunately it turned into what it's turned into. The attorney for Elizabeth also said that Elizabeth hasn't said herself that she is a victim. But again, it is really early in the investigation, and as law enforcement and investigators are looking into everything, I am sure things are going to be slowly trickling out and things are going to becoming a lot more clear. But the adults in this family weren't Hermit's at all. They would go out in the community, they would interact, they would go get food from a local food bank, they would go to the Dollar General, and one of the employees at the Dollar General interacted with them on a pretty regular basis, and she said that when they would come in, you could always tell when they were in the store because they. Did have a odor to them. Meaning, I'm sure that these people aren't the most hygienic humans on earth. They were living indeplorable, disgusting conditions, living literally in their own waste. And I don't want to be mean, but you can look at the pictures of them and just tell that they probably aren't the cleanest, most hygienic humans. And I can't even imagine what these poor children were living in if they had that odor to them, what the children must have been living in, because the conditions for the children seemed like they were worse than the conditions for the adults. Now, in the last twenty four or forty eight hours, there was some type of medical episode that Gary Senior had and he is actually in the hospital right now and has been temporarily released from jail due to this ongoing issue with his health. I think he fell, and there's other ongoing issues as well with him medically, and also within the last day, Elizabeth has asked that her bond be modified. It was set for a three hundred thousand dollars cash bond, and she just wants to be reunited with her children, so she has asked that that be modified, and that is still at the moment up in the air. I definitely think that this case is going to be very ever evolving. There has already been so much that has come out. There are other family members who have also spoken out. There's a lot going on in this one. It is really hard to keep up with. I am doing my best. I wanted to give just kind of a broad overview on it, and then as things continue to come out, I'll be sure to give updates. If anything major happens, I will be sure to let you know. But all I know is that I'm so grateful that the kids are out of that environment and out of that situation. I know the eighteen year old child that Elizabeth had is very delayed. She has very limited speech, and it sounds like some of the other children as well. Also, none of these children were in school, so their communication vocabulary is also very very limited. So I'll be staying on top of it, trying to keep you guys updated as much as I can with this. I follow Abby Blabby on Instagram, Facebook, and she has been staying on top of things and doing updates as they are coming in. So if you want in depth updates and reporting, be sure to go and follow her. That is where I'm getting all of my information right now on everything that is breaking in the Sider's case. If there is any more, I will be sure to keep you guys updated. And that is for right now in true crime. I did want to spend some time on that story, so I wanted to make that the bulk of right now in true crime. And we are going to go ahead and get into this week's episode. Alrighty, guys, Today we are jumping into a brand new case. In today's episode, I'm going to be telling you about the nineteen ninety homicides of two elderly women who were living at a nursing home in Montana. Both of our victims were elderly and in their eighties, and both of them were suffering from Alzheimer's. They were also killed about two months apart. So initially after the first death, nursing home officials just thought that the cause of death was natural causes due to the elderly age of the victim. But two months later, when a resident was kidnapped from her room at the nursing home and killed, they quickly realized that there might be something more at play. I was personally not familiar with this case. But it's been back in the news recently as they have officially named a suspect in the case and he has been apprehended, finally, after all of these years. We're going to be getting into that in further detail as the episode goes, but first, as always, I want to spend some time telling you about the two victims in this case and a little bit about who they were before they had their lives stolen by this horrific monster. Let's get into it. Bertha Scott was born on March nineteenth of nineteen oh four and was raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She married a man named Charles Scott in nineteen twenty four, and together they had six children. Unfortunately, Charles passed away in nineteen sixty three. Bertha very much enjoyed gardening, traveling flowers, houseplants, needle point, and painting. She had sadly lost four of her six children and had only moved to Missoula, Montana, in nineteen eighty eight. To be closer to her daughter who lived there. She was unfortunately suffering from Alzheimer's and had recently moved into a nursing home called Riverside Healthcare Center that was located at thirteen oh one East Broadway Street in Missoula, Montana. She was eighty six years old at the time of her death. In the early morning hours of May second of nineteen ninety Bertha was found deceased in her bed. Back in the nineties, it was very normal for Alzheimer's patients or dementia patients to be restrained due to their need to wander at night, so Bertha was found deceased and restrained in her bed. It was assumed that Bertha had passed from natural causes due to some ongoing heart issues that Bertha had. Upon the discovery of Bertha, there was a nurse that noted that she had some odd coloring on her neck, but nothing else seemed out of the ordinary. The death of Bertha was not marked as suspicious, and her family buried her without an autopsy, assuming natural causes. Nothing suspicious surrounded the time of Bertha's death, except there was a random window that had been left open in the therapy room. However, at the time, it didn't really seem like it had anything to do with Bertha's death, and for me, this makes sense. It seems obviously Bertha was elderly. She had some ongoing health issues, and it did seem. That her death was just related to natural causes. She was in her eighties, she, like I said, had a lot of medical issues going on, and I'm sure it wasn't unusual for residents to pass away at the nursing home, so this was in their eyes, just another unfortunate death, and a Bertha's family, i'm sure also just assumed that she had passed from natural causes. Didn't really ask many questions because she had been living with some illnesses, so it didn't really stand out as anything that was suspicious in any means. Moving on to our next victim, Nancy Zema Lagerquist. She was born on December thirteenth of nineteen oh two in Hamilton, Montana. She never married nor had children. She would eventually move to Missoula, Montana for work, where she worked as an executive secretary at the Missoula Mercantile Company and also the Montana Mercantile Company until her retirement. She was survived by her sister, two nieces, and three nephews. She was eighty seven years old when her life was taken at the Riverside Healthcare Center. She had moved in there in December of nineteen eighty eight, and she did have Alzheimer's and she was wheelchair bound, which is an important facet of this story. She very much needed the staff's to be able to get up out of bed and get into her wheelchair. This is not something she could independently do. So it's July first of nineteen ninety and this is just two months from the time. That Bertha had passed away. In the care center, there were five people working the night shift. That night, the evening of July first, the employees did hourly rounding on the patients and they had gone into check on her around three thirty am, and all was normal and calm. Nothing stood out, nothing out of the ordinary. The facility had alarms on all of the doors, so that way, if anyone exited, the doors would make a sound, which is very common in a facility that houses patients that have any type of memory deficits, because often they will wander and they want to make sure that they are kept safe and they don't get outside of the facility. Around four thirty am, they went to make their hourly checks and that is when they noticed that Nancy was missing from her room. So of course they all began to search the facility trying to find her. It was pretty clear that whatever happened to Nancy, it wasn't on her own accord, because she couldn't have gotten up and moved on her own. There's no way she would have been able to independently get herself out of bed and into her wheelchair and leave the facility. They ended up reporting her missing at four forty one am, so this was shortly after they discovered that she was missing. They also noticed that the window screen to Nancy's room had in fact been cut, so this was obviously setting off alarm bells for the staff. Police came and they began to search the grounds that surrounded the nursing home. Now, this nursing home is set in a very very pretty area in Montana. It is surrounded by mountains. There is water behind the nursing home. It is really gorgeous views. I'm going to be posting a picture of it on my Instagram and Facebook pages. In the carousel that's going to be associated with this episode, so please check that out. Law enforcement also ended up calling in the fire department to help search the Clark Fork River that is the river that runs behind the nursing home. Nancy's room at the nursing home did indeed face the river. Unfortunately, in their search, at six point thirty am, they found the body of Nancy in the river. She was still dressed in her night clothes, but the adult brief that she was wearing was missing, and this discovery made them realize that this was no accident. Nancy had been murdered. Her death is described as ritualistic, and she had been sexually assaulted with an object that had also caused various injuries to her. This was a horrific, horrific death. Authorities searched the area where Nancy was found and they couldn't find a murder weapon, but they also couldn't find the adult brief that Nancy had been wearing, and they had put out kind of a bulletin to ask people if they found this brief to please contact them because they believed that this brief could hold potential evidence. That brief was never in fact found, it likely got washed away in the water. Law enforcement did then search Nancy's room and they took her bed sheets as evidence because they knew that whoever did this had to have entered Nancy's room, come into the nursing home and taken her from her bed, so there could be some physical evidence left over on her bed sheets. Police began their line of questioning with the people closest to the case, which, unfortunately, in this case, was the people that worked at the nursing home, and they also questioned some of the residents of the nursing home as well. Now, there were several residents that were called seeing a man lurking around the nursing home at night, but this alleged person wasn't somebody that staff had ever seen, so they weren't able to officially say if this was a real person or not. Now, of course, some of the residents of the nursing home did have memory deficits, and a lot of the times when you're questioning people about something, sometimes they see things that might not necessarily be there, so the validity of what they're saying is of course a little skewed. And due to the fact that there wasn't any staff that saw this person, they weren't really sure if this was a true story or not, or if it was just something that maybe some of the residents had thought that they had saw and due to Nancy being taken from her room and subsequently murdered. They assumed, oh, I saw this person, it must be the person that killed Nancy. Now, there was a staff member who reported that he saw a man in the parking lot around four am, which was about the time before they realized that Nancy was missing. Put a pin in that for a minute, because we are going to come back to that statement. So law enforcement is now a couple of days into their investigation and they don't have any suspects that they have at their forefront. But law enforcement does announce that they are interested in talking to a man that was seen in the parking lot of the Missoula Athletic Club, which was directly next door to the nursing home back in nineteen ninety and that man was confirmed to have been seen around four am. And although it's not confus I do believe that this is the same man that the worker had reported seeing in the parking lot around four am. But this man wasn't in the nursing home parking lot. He was in the fitness center that is directly next door to the nursing home. I think regardless, anybody that was around the nursing home. Seen kind of loitering or lurking around four am is somebody that law enforcement would want to talk to. So this man is described as a white man, aged forty and weighed about one hundred and eighty to two hundred pounds. He had a light brown hair that was cut above his ears and a mustache and brown rimmed glasses. He was reported to be wearing a white and brown striped T shirt and had tan shorts on and white top tennis shoes. Investigators, of course, tried to make sure that the public realizes that this person is not a suspect. They are not a person of interest. It is just somebody that they want to talk to to see if this man saw or heard anything, because if this person was around when Nancy was kidnapped, he might hold all of the clues for what happened that night. He might have saw something he didn't even realize that he's at saw or again, this could be the person that committed the crime because he is loitering in the parking lot at four am for. An unknown reason. At this point in time, police also disclosed to the public that they have begun the first stages of running forensics on some of the evidence that they have collected. But please remember it was nineteen ninety and things were a heck of a lot different back then when it came to forensics and crime scene analysis. So law enforcement is continuing. To follow up on leads, questioning people that they feel like they need to question, and they are unfortunately coming up empty handed every single time. Nancy's body is ultimately cremated and Nancy opted out of having a service, So investigators at this point are at a loss. They have no idea who did this to Nancy or why. They initially had looked into an employee that worked at the nursing home, but that individual was ultimately cleared. So at this point we are well into August of nineteen ninety and they still don't have any leads. So investigators decide to ask the employees of the nursing home if there had been any other suspicious deaths that had occurred at the nursing home in the recent months. A nurse brought up Bertha Scott and her death. The nurse disclosed that it was assumed that she had passed away from natural causes, but the nurse brought up that she had noticed some unusual coloring around her neck, and they also brought up the fact that the window in the therapy room had been noticed to be open and that kind of coincided with Bertha's death. So investigators made the decision to exhume birth of Scott's body on August sixteenth of nineteen ninety, so this was about six weeks after Nancy's death. They're still trying to investigate and figure out what exactly happened. So they exhume Birtha's body and they take it to the State Crime Lab in Missoula and they go and perform an autopsy. Investigators at this point and didn't think that Bertha's death was going to be related, but they wanted to just kind of mark it off as something that they looked into and they investigated, but they very much wanted to try and solve Nancy's murder, and they figured this might rule at least that connection out. But to their surprise, Bertha's autopsy showed that her death was in fact not due to natural causes. It was in fact a murder. Her death was reclass as a homicide. They determined that she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. It was assumed that she was manually strangled while lying face up in her bed, still in her restraints. Police were able to recover DNA from her body and they sent it off for forensic testing to Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI crime Lab was located. But obviously, with this being the second homicide confirmed, everybody that had family at the nursing home and the employees were all very much on edge because it seemed like somebody was targeting the residence of this nursing home, which is just terrible. I do not understand a rationale behind doing something like this. On August twentieth of nineteen ninety, there was a call that came into nine one one and the staff was in a panic because they found a window that looked like it had been tampered with, and they were worried that this was going to happen all over again, and there was no way that the staff that worked at this nursing home could monitor every single resident and every single window and door twenty four to seven. Notoriously, nursing home, any type of care facilities like that are going to be, in my opinion, understaffed, and there's no way that. Unfortunately, they could take on this job of making sure every single one of the residents was safe twenty four to seven, it's just impossible. So them dealing with what they were dealing with at this point in time, two people having lost their lives at the hands of some type of monster, and having scares of other windows in the facility being tampered with, I'm sure they were terrified that this was going to keep happening. They also noted that the week before for this nine to one one call came in that a windows screen at the facility had been removed. So obviously there was. Something going on at this facility where somebody was continuously tampering with the windows of this facility for one reason or another. And investigators were also at a loss because they didn't know if this was somebody from the outside that was tampering with the windows, or if this was potentially an inside job and it was somebody from the inside that was tampering with the windows. On August twenty first of nineteen ninety, law enforcement offered a five thousand dollars reward for any information leading to the arrest of Bertha and Nancy's killer. At this point in time, they very much did believe that Bertha and Nancy had been killed by the same person. Then, on April thirtieth of the next year, so nineteen ninety one, they finally got the DNA forensics back, but everything unfortunately came. Back in conclusive. They weren't really able to pull any of the DNA profile from the evidence on Bertha's body except for Bertha's DNA itself. The technology, of course, was not very advanced back then, so they were not able to separate the DNA into two separate DNA profiles. They were only. Able to obtain Bertha's DNA profile. And this just goes to show you how much our DNA technology has advanced, because if this happened today, it would be no problem. It also probably wouldn't take over a year for that DNA to have come back. This took a year a year's time for the DNA that they extracted from Bertha to come back, and in that they came up again empty handed. Investigators continued to be super baffled by this case because it just didn't make sense that somebody was targeting elderly residents of a nursing home. In the second homicide, they actually went as far as to remove the resident from the nursing home and dispose of them in the river behind the nursing home. And that is a huge. Undertaking to do something like that because Nancy was completely dependent on others for all of her mobility, so she couldn't have willingly walked or traveled on her own. So the person that did this probably struggled a lot getting her out of bed and then carrying her to the river. So law enforcement knew that they were working with somebody who was very skilled and very calculated and knew what they were doing. So as of very recently, that's where this case stood. There was no new information pretty much since nineteen ninety since these crimes occurred, and there was little to no movement over the years as far as any possible or potential suspects in this case. And luckily that we know of, there were no more victims of this mysterious assailant at this nursing home. There were no more lives that were taken at least in horrible circumstances at this nursing home. So just a few weeks ago, in early June, it was announced that they had made an arrest in the deaths of Nancy and Bertha. They announced that sixty nine year old Nikki Dean Gardner had been arrested in connection with the deaths of Nancy and Bertha. So within the past year, starting in two thousand and five, they had been kind of working behind the scenes. The Montana State Crime Lab and Abode Technology conducted new DNA testing of evidence that was originally collected in nineteen ninety from both Bertha and Nancy's crime scenes, and this is how they were able to connect this individual, Nikki, to both of the crimes. He has no personal connection to either victims, and honestly, my first initial thought when I first heard the story was it was obviously probably random. Whoever this person was is probably just a creepy sexual predator and wanted easy targets, and that's why he targeted two people that were very vulnerable. They were elderly, they had cognitive deficits due to their Alzheimer's and he was unfortunately able to get away with it for a really, really long time, which is so infuriating. And I do think that he probably has more victims out there. I think it's more than just the two. That is just my personal opinion. So Nikki his name is spelled Nickie by the way, made his first court appearance on June eleventh, where he officially pled not guilty to the two homicides that he is now charged with. So let's dig into this Nikky guy a little bit. Given the fact that he is now sixty nine years of age, he was around thirty four years old at the time of the murders, and he lived east of Missoula, Montana. His criminal history includes burglary, several DUI offenses, any conviction for partner family member assault that required him to provide a DNA sample, which. Is exactly how he was caught so. In nineteen ninety one, which was a year after the murders, he was also involved in a domestic violence incident with his then wife and daughter where he brandished a pistol. He was also named in a sexual assault case involving a juvenile in nineteen ninety six, but charges in that case were never officially filed. So, like so many other cold cases that I cover that are eventually solved, we eventually have a suspect. The person that commits a crime like this is not some super great, outstanding citizen who has done no wrong and maybe made a mistake once or twice. These people who are named suspects in these cases always have bad things in their past, and it is a continuous pattern of making really really poor decisions and targeting other people continuously. For the most part, they unfortunately do continue to offend and reoffend until they get caught. And I will say it with my whole chest that I do believe that these two women are not his only elderly victims. I believe that this man didn't just do these two crimes and then he was a great human until he was caught at age sixty nine. I don't believe that to be true, and I assume that law enforcement is looking into other potential cases that have similar mos in Montana because it seems like this guy didn't just do this twice. Again, that is just my opinion. I also think it is so insane that if this man hadn't gone the route of taking Nancy out of her bed and taking her away from the nursing home and killing her in the manner in which he did, then nothing ever would have come up, probably about her death or about Bertha's death. They never would have questioned anything. If Nancy had her life taken in the nursing home, she hadn't been kidnapped from the nursing home, it would have looked probably like just another run of the mill natural causes death of an elderly woman. And that is really a scary thought because how many other deaths like that is he tied to and they were just assumed to be natural causes. So obviously this is one that is an ongoing case. He has just been arrested, he had his first court appearance where he pled not guilty, and I'm going to be really interested to see how this one develops. So I am going to stay on top of this one, and if there is anything new in this case, I will be sure to bring it to you. I know that they are in the process of building their case against this man, and I do fully believe that with the DNA evidence that they have linking this man to both victims Nancy and Bertha, that they are going to have a pretty easy time building their case against him. There's no way that coincidentally this man's DNA ends up on two victims who were killed months apart at the same care facility in Missola, Montana. While one is killed in her room in the nursing home, the other one is taken out of her room and then dumped subsequently in the river behind the nursing home. It's just not possible that coincidentally his DNA is on both women and they both ended up deceased. There is going to be more coming out about this, I am certain of it, So, like I said, I am going to keep you guys updated on this one. I am so glad that they have finally made an arrest in this case. Nineteen ninety to twenty twenty six is a heck of a long time, and I am so glad that this monster, this alleged monster, is off of the streets because anybody that prays on children and elderly, the very vulnerable populations of our world, are the worst kind of people. Obviously, all murder is bad, but there is something especially terrible and heinous about people that pray on children and elderly. These women were in their eighties, they suffered from cognitive deficits associated with their Alzheimer's, and they were in a place that was supposed to help them and keep them safe, and unfortunately they were targeted because they had cognitive deficits and they were vulnerable, and unfortunately this individual was able to gain access to them. And that is a really, really scary thought. I know over the years, security at facilities places like this has increased significantly and there is safety measures in place so something like this doesn't happen again. Nineteen ninety was a way different time. The world was a different place. But like I said, I am going to be staying on top of this one. I am sure there is going to be more to come out about it, so I will be sure to keep you guys updated. But at the end of the day, I am very glad to be able to say that there has officially been an arrest made and hopefully we are in the process of getting justice for these two women and their families. So thank you guys so much for listening to Nancy and Bertha's story. I really appreciate you tuning in every week. Please take time if you are enjoying the show whatever platform you're listening on, to give me a five star review. It really does help push the podcast out to other people and get these lesser known obscure cases into more eyes and ears, and that is really what it's about is getting exposure for these cases that desperately need it. So, as always, I thank you guys. I hope you have a great weekend coming up, and I will see you next week for a brand new unsolved case. Bye.