Former East Layton police officer Tom Jackson, one of the initial investigators on Nancy Perry Baird’s disappearance, only worked as a cop a little over a year.
Jackson hired on as a part-time reserve officer in April of 1975, about three months before Nancy Baird vanished. He attended Utah’s police academy starting that September. By the following spring, East Layton’s city council was telling the police chief to place Jackson on probation for undisclosed misconduct.
“I heard that people liked me as an officer there, but I didn’t like being one,” Jackson said during at interview with COLD in April of 2023. “At that time I don’t think I was, I don’t know. I wasn’t a good cop.”
So, Jackson’s short-lived stint as a police officer came to an end on July 20, 1976, when he resigned.
Over the years that followed, Jackson bounced from job to job. He took a position doing private security for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as an undercover investigator role with the company Northwest Pipeline.
In 1980, the Northwest Pipeline job introduced Jackson to a young man named James Hydrick who claimed to have telekinetic powers.
The rise and fall of James Hydrick
Hydrick had arrived in Utah from California telling a wild story about his past, including that he’d been raised in a Tibetan monastery by a monk who trained Hydrick to be an assassin. A lawyer who worked for Northwest Pipeline took Hydrick in, giving Hydrick free room and board while the mercurial martial artist wowed the lawyer’s family with demonstrations of his “powers.”
James Hydrick also showed off his impressive physical skills and apparent ability to move objects without touching them to reporters at the Salt Lake Tribune and KSL-TV. The Tribune’s story received wide syndication, republished in newspapers all across the United States. KSL’s video caught the attention of producers at national TV shows such at Ripley’s Believe it or Not and That’s Incredible.
1980-10-6 Salt Lake Tribune James Hydrick Oct 6, 1980 The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah) Newspapers.com
The fall from grace for Hydrick came almost as quickly. In late 1981, independent journalist and magician Dan Korem released a scathing documentary titled Psychic Confession that proved Hydrick’s alleged telekinetic powers were bogus. Korem reverse-engineered each of Hydrick’s feats and demonstrated how they were artful illusions.
At the same time, Salt Lake City police were investigating Hydrick on suspicion the martial artist had coerced several young boys to burglarize homes and steal guns, electronics and other property. Hydrick took a plea deal to criminal charges in 1982 but while serving a prison sentence escaped and went on the run.
An FBI manhunt brought agents to South Carolina, where Hydrick had actually spent his youth in a series of foster homes and at the Whitten Center. As agents closed in, Hydrick surrendered.
Tom Jackson and James Hydrick
James Hydrick’s connection to former East Layton police officer Tom Jackson has never previously been documented or explored.
Jackson’s ex-wife, Geraldine O’Farrell, and several of Jackson’s children told COLD they remember Hydrick visiting their home during the early 1980s. Hydrick took a particular interest in Jackson’s oldest son, Jason, who was at the time in elementary school.
“Tom was interested in martial arts,” Geraldine said. “Tom started taking lessons from James Hydrick. He loved the guy.”
Geraldine recalled that one time, prior to Hydrick’s arrest in Utah, Hydrick asked to sleep over at the Jackson home, in the bedroom of Tom and Geraldine’s son Jason.
Hydrick, Geraldine said, “said he was afraid of the dark.” She refused to allow Hydrick to share a bedroom with her son.
In 1989, Hydrick pleaded guilty to felony charges of child molestation in California, where police alleged he’d inappropriately touched multiple young boys in exchange for food, drugs and martial arts instruction. A judge sentenced Hydrick to 17 years in prison.
James Hydrick remains in custody today, having been declared a “sexually violent predator” by a jury in 2014.
Tom Jackson’s dark secret
Former officer Tom Jackson, it would turn out, also landed in legal trouble during the 1980s for child sex offenses. In August of 1986, the Davis County, Utah Attorney’s Office charged Jackson with two felony counts of sexual abuse of a child.
The case did not make the news at the time, which was ironic considering the Ogden Standard-Examiner had photographed and quoted Jackson just a short time earlier, in a feature article about the popularity of drive-in movie theaters.
Journalistic ethics typically preclude reporters from publicly identifying victims in child sex abuse cases. However, Tom Jackson’s victims from his 1986 arrest have agreed to forego their anonymity for COLD. Those victims, perhaps better described as survivors, are Jackson’s daughters, Heidi Holmberg and Tori Riddle.
“It never felt like danger. It felt wrong,” Tori said. “We knew something was wrong and we would say something sometimes. And when I would say something, he’d say, ‘Oh, you’re just so sweet. And Heavenly Father sent you to me so you could help keep me good.’”
The two sisters are speaking out about their father’s abuse, in part to encourage other silenced survivors of child sex abuse but also to raise the question about whether their father’s past abuse might also make him a suspect in the unsolved disappearance of Nancy Baird.
“It’s a hard thing to talk about,” Heidi said, “but it just goes to show that you need to, you need to talk about it.”
Episode credits
Research, writing and hosting: Dave Cawley
Audio production and mastering: Aaron Mason
Cold main score composition: Michael Bahnmiller
KSL executive producer: Sheryl Worsley
Episode transcript:
