Davis County sheriff explains personal ties to Nancy Baird cold case

LAYTON — When Nancy Perry Baird disappeared from the gas station where she worked on July 4, 1975, the four-person East Layton Police Department requested assistance from the Davis County Sheriff's Office.

Sheriff's deputies joined the search for Baird on the second day of the investigation, dividing workload with the East Layton officers. That work included interviewing Baird's friends, family and romantic partners in an effort to determine who might've abducted the 23-year-old woman.

Case records obtained by KSL's investigative podcast series COLD through an open records request in 2022 reveal one of the men interviewed by an East Layton officer in 1975 was Baird's ex-boyfriend, John Thomas Sparks. Today Sparks' younger brother, Kelly Sparks, serves as Davis County sheriff.

Sheriff Sparks also has a personal connection to a former East Layton police officer, Thomas Richard Jackson, whom detectives currently consider a "person of interest" in the Baird case. As a teenager in the mid-1970s, Sparks went on ride-alongs with Jackson.

The East Layton Police Department disbanded in 1980, leaving the Baird case under the sole jurisdiction of the Davis County Sheriff's Office. Over the two decades that followed, former officer Jackson was charged with and pleaded guilty to child sex crimes in both Utah and Idaho.

Sheriff Sparks' personal connections to two key figures in the Baird case were not public knowledge until KSL obtained the Baird case file through an open records request in 2022. The Nancy Baird case is the subject of COLD season 4.

'Who is Tom Jackson?'

Brian Weese was employed with the Davis County Sheriff's Office from 1982 to 1991, serving as a deputy and paramedic. During that nearly decade-long stint as a cop, Weese worked alongside then-deputy Kelly Sparks.

"Kelly and I worked on the rescue truck together several times back when the sheriff's department ran all emergency rescues," Weese said. "We were both sergeants together in the emergency services division."

While Weese left law enforcement to pursue a career in finance, Sparks remained at the sheriff's office for another decade before taking a position as deputy director of Utah Peace Officer Standards and Training, the state's police academy.

Sparks served at POST, overseeing investigations into police officer misconduct, until he ran for sheriff of Davis County in 2018. Weese, who at that time was running a non-profit police benevolent organization called the Davis County Honorary Colonels, described attending a dinner with Sparks around the time of the election.

"I brought up the Nancy Baird case," Weese said. "When I brought this up, [Sparks] goes, 'Oh yeah, I'm very familiar with it. I know who did that: Tom Jackson.'"

Weese did not know who Thomas "Tom" Jackson was. He'd not previously heard Jackson's name associated with the Baird case.

"I was stunned. I went, 'Who's Tom Jackson?'" Weese said.

Sparks, for his part, recalled the conversation with Weese differently. During an interview for COLD, Sheriff Sparks recalled discussing Jackson simply as someone who cold case investigators might want to interview.

"I had mentioned to Brian [Weese] that Tom Jackson was a police officer at the time that Nancy [Baird] disappeared and that I wasn't sure because I hadn't been directly involved in the investigation whether or not [Jackson] had been investigated in relation to that," Sparks said.

Weese said he'd searched Jackson's name on his phone during the dinner with Sparks and learned Jackson was at that time a registered sex offender, living in Buhl, Idaho. Weese suggested Sparks ought to travel to Idaho and attempt to interview Jackson himself.

"I said, 'You're the perfect guy. You're not the sheriff. You should go up and interview [Jackson]. He'll talk to you, you know him,'" Weese said.

Sparks did not approach Jackson upon taking office in 2019, nor did Davis County detectives.

COLD obtains the Nancy Baird case file

COLD first requested the Nancy Baird case file from the Davis County Sheriff's Office under GRAMA, Utah's open records law, in January 2022. The sheriff's office initially refused to release the file, stating its release could interfere with an "ongoing investigation."

The Baird case was at that time more than 45 years old. It was not being actively pursued, as many investigators believed serial killer Theodore "Ted" Bundy had killed Baird.

COLD appealed the denial of its records request, arguing the apparent lack of any substantial work on Baird's case in decades, along with the fact Bundy had been dead since 1989, suggested release of the records could not reasonably be expected to interfere with the official investigation. The sheriff's office subsequently agreed to release a partially redacted copy of the original 1975 case file, marking the first time those records had been made public.

One page of the case file included a list of people who East Layton police and Davis County deputies interviewed. Fourth on that list was a "boyfriend" of Baird's: John Sparks.

COLD shared that list with former deputy Brian Weese, who identified John Sparks as Sheriff Kelly Sparks' older brother.

"[Sparks] was a lot more tied to that than I realized," Weese said. "I had no idea that Kelly had a relative that close to the case, actually in the report."

John Sparks and the East Layton officer who interviewed him, Gerald Burton, are both deceased. The case file did not include any summary of what questions Sparks was asked, or his responses. The records provided to COLD did not establish Sparks' whereabouts on the date of Nancy Baird's disappearance.

Tom Jackson's comments about Sheriff Kelly Sparks

In an effort to learn more about John Sparks' potential connection to the Nancy Baird case, COLD approached former East Layton officer Thomas Jackson in April of 2023. Jackson agreed to an interview, during which he spoke about John Sparks as a "friend."

"Oh, I knew John Sparks," Jackson said. "He was in Washington when this all went down and they went up and talked to him. And he knew I was a cop. And later on, years later when he came back, he said, 'Man when they come up there I thought you'd ratted me and I come down. I was going slit your throat.'"

Records provided to COLD by a relative of Sparks showed he was living in Montpelier, Idaho in 1975, not Washington State.

"I can't see John [Sparks] committing murder," Jackson said. "Maybe rape, because he was pretty hot-headed."

During the interview with COLD, Jackson suggested Sheriff Kelly Sparks would be a good source for further information about John Sparks. Jackson also invoked the sheriff's name after acknowledging Jackson might himself be a suspect in the Nancy Baird case.

"Kelly is a really neat guy, I really like Kelly," Jackson said. "I wouldn't doubt if I was a suspect and all that. That's OK with me. Because if I was a suspect and Kelly felt that way, he'd have really come down on me."

Jackson said he believed Sheriff Sparks would've personally traveled to Idaho to handcuff him and administer "a few slaps" if Sparks truly believed he'd been involved in Baird's presumed murder.

Keeping aloof from the Nancy Baird case

COLD published a portion of Jackson's interview in a May 2023 podcast episode titled The Convenient Alternative. Jackson's two daughters heard the podcast and approached Davis County deputies to speak with them about the possibility of their father's involvement in Nancy Baird's disappearance.

Detectives subsequently interviewed Jackson, identifying several acts of previously undisclosed molestation committed by Jackson against his daughters and another relative during the 1980s. Deputies arrested Jackson in August of 2023 on 5 felony counts of 2nd-degree felony sexual abuse of a child. Jackson pleaded no contest to the charges in 2025 and is currently incarcerated.

Sheriff Kelly Sparks told COLD he was not surprised Jackson brought his name up.

"His family and my family were friendly," Sparks said. "He knows the role I have."

But the sheriff, whose term expires at the end of 2026, disputed former deputy Weese's assertion that his personal ties to the Baird case might create a conflict of interest.

"Anybody who looked at it deeply at all or even just past the surface would not have those concerns," Sparks said. "The reason I wouldn't be up there with handcuffs is I intentionally kept myself aloof from this case, for obvious reasons. Let our investigators do their job. They don't need me interfering or interjecting."

Today, the Davis County Sheriff's Office classifies John Sparks as a "potential witness" in the Nancy Baird case.

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