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Vegas Story: A mysterious disappearance and the questions left behind

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Melissa Petersen shares her Vegas Story.
Photo: Christopher DeVargas

On a lazy afternoon in a Downtown art gallery, a couple of locals were sharing their Vegas stories. It happens from time to time. Las Vegas, for many reasons, stands apart from most everywhere else. Some who live here never imagined they would, while others had no idea they’d stay so long. Natives, who’ve seen the landscape change dramatically, take pride in its history and resilience. After years of hearing “Vegas stories,” I felt it was time to document them, beginning with that afternoon when Melissa Petersen shared hers.

In 1969, a millionaire developer was walking out of a law office on Third Street Downtown when two men—one wielding a gun, the other a bottle of acid—forced him into a car, bound him, then drove him to Reno, where they phoned his wife and demanded a ransom of $800,000. It was to be delivered in person by his sister, Faye Johnson, who, along with the abducted developer, Dean Petersen, owned the Westward Ho.

Melissa Petersen with her father.

Melissa Petersen with her father.

The bizarre kidnapping and subsequent escape—Petersen broke free and ran across a field to a supermarket—made headlines with its juicy details, including the unconvincing claim from one of the convicted kidnappers that it was a hoax. But the disappearance nearly two decades later of Petersen’s nephew and Johnson’s son would not make headlines. The family was famously private. And when Scott Petersen vanished in the late 1980s, he left two daughters under the age of 10. To this day, they can only speculate on what might have happened.

He “Vegas disappeared” says the eldest, Melissa Petersen, explaining that after their parents separated, their father would come pick the girls up for weekends.

“That Friday he didn’t show up. I remember being so angry with him. I remember going up to my bedroom and crying. Friday night came and went. Saturday night came and went. I don’t remember anybody talking to us about it. Then I remember people asking, ‘Has your father called you? If he calls you, you need to tell us.’” But Melissa says he never did.

Until then, she says, her life had been pretty ordinary. Her parents owned a house near Flamingo and Decatur, which was then the edge of town. She and her sister played in the desert, spent time with their cousins (it was a large, close-knit family), went boating at Lake Mead and took day trips to Mount Charleston. Melissa says she and her father would go to the Westward Ho to pick up her grandma (whom they all called “boss”) and head to the Desert Inn for Monte Cristo sandwiches.

By many accounts, Las Vegas is a small town for being an international destination. And in the ’80s, Clark County had only a quarter of today’s population. The opening of the Mirage, which launched the hotel-building boom, wouldn’t come until 1989, and corporations hadn’t yet taken over the Strip. The Westward Ho sat on Las Vegas Boulevard and was famous for its colorful umbrellas out front that lit up at night. The casino felt like home when Melissa was growing up. “It was a family business,” she says. “A lot of my family worked there, and the employees were like family.”

Her dad, whom she describes as a “man’s man,” standing 6 feet 4 and stylized very Western—Wrangler jeans, snap-button shirts, cowboy boots (he rode horses)—also worked there. As a child, she went to the same elementary school that he did, but she’d graduate from high school elsewhere. About four years after her father’s disappearance, her mother walked out, she says, recalling the moment they stood by the door with her mom’s suitcases: “I remember her saying she’d be back. I said, ‘No, you won’t,’ and walked away.”

In the custody of her grandmother, Faye Johnson, Melissa says she was sent to boarding schools, first in Utah, then Arizona, finally landing at one she liked in Colorado Springs. It was there that she learned Halloween (on Nevada Day here) is not a national holiday, that grocery stores close in the evenings and that people have fixed ideas about Las Vegas.

“That’s probably where I started to get passionate and defend Las Vegas,” she says. “A lot of people’s perception of the casino industry is Hollywood. They’ve made a dramatization and inserted salacious comments that aren’t reality. It’s a heavily regulated industry populated by intelligent businesspeople.”

Aside from growing up with a heightened sense of caution and being treated so kindly as a casino owner’s grandchild, she says daily life was normal. But after the chaos with her parents and uprooting for school, she hadn’t planned to return: “I only had negative experiences here. Vegas was symbolic of loss.”

Two years into college in LA (where she first fell in love with museums and art), Melissa’s “Uncle Dean” passed away, and she returned to Las Vegas to be with her family. She worked in marketing and attended UNLV. Her mother was still gone, she says, and she never saw her again, learning later that she’d gotten into trouble and was sentenced to seven years in prison, moving to Pahrump afterward and living there until she died in 2009.

As for what happened to her father? “I honestly don’t know,” she says, adding that it could even be foul play. “Over the years, I’ve thought different things. He wasn’t the type of person who got into trouble. A lot of people thought he skipped town. Some still do.

“When I turned 18 and the Internet came out, I would search for him online. Then I learned everything I could about how to disappear. There were a lot of ways to do it, but after all those years, it seems something would pop up.

“There was a period in my life where I thought if I disappeared he would search for me. That’s the narrative that suits me. At some point, you pick the one that feels the best in a bad situation.”

Now settled back in Las Vegas, where she’s involved in the arts community and serves as the president of the Contemporary Arts Center, Melissa says she feels like she’s home.

“People move here all the time for a fresh start,” she says. “I moved back and made my own life here that is very different. I’ve been able to, in typical Vegas fashion, reinvent myself. Las Vegas has been good to me.”

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