There’s a trope in horror movies where a character walks into a dangerous situation, even though the risk is predictable and avoidable. Perhaps its a dark basement, or a creepy cabin in the woods. The audience reacts by shouting at the screen.
“Don’t go in there!” precedes the inevitable outcome: destruction.
Heidi Holmberg and Tori Riddle felt something similar when they discovered their father, Thomas Jackson, had moved to Idaho after their mother divorced him.
“That’s when he met his [second] wife that had the four little girls,” Tori said.
Tom Jackson’s 1986 child sex abuse case
By that time in 1991, former East Layton, Utah police officer Tom Jackson had already pleaded guilty once to child sex crimes. Jackson’s first conviction, in 1986, carried the potential of a years-long prison sentence. Instead, the judge who sentenced Jackson gave him an unusually lenient punishment of 200 hours community service.
The judge sent Tom home with his victims, his daughters Heidi and Tori, who were then just 11 and 9 years old.
Journalistic ethics typically prohibit identifying victims of child sex crimes. However, in this instance Heidi and Tori have provided consent to share their names and experiences in COLD.
By showing Tom Jackson such mercy, the judge in his 1986 child sex abuse case unwittingly provided Tom the opportunity to continue molesting his own daughters. When Heidi and Tori’s mother, Geraldine, discovered the abuse was continuing a few years later, she at last filed for divorce.
“I have definitely quite a large book of regrets,” Geraldine O’Farrell said during an interview for COLD. “Why didn’t I leave [Tom] sooner? The regret. And also the remorse of why I wasn’t more aware of what was going on.”
Geraldine obtained a crime reparations grant to fund counseling for her daughters after making the split from their father. Both Heidi and Tori made disclosures of additional abuse during those counseling sessions, yet no additional criminal charges were filed against Tom at that time.
Seeing the signs of child abuse
Tom Jackson, meanwhile, moved to a tiny town on the outskirts of Twin Falls, Idaho to start a new life. There he met and quickly married his second wife, who has asked not to be publicly identified.
Tom’s second wife had four daughters who were under the age of 10.
Heidi and Tori, Tom’s daughters, felt an immediate fear that their father might harm his new wife’s children. During visits to their father’s home in Idaho, Heidi and Tori tried to ascertain whether any molestation was occurring behind closed doors.
“We went therein part to see if we could see the same signs,” Tori said. “He was good at manipulating that wife into thinking that we were just crazy and making a big deal out of nothing.”
To Heidi and Tori, it seemed religious leaders, law enforcement officers and social services workers were all unwilling to intervene.
“I even remember calling social services and I said, ‘He did this to me. I can see the signs. I know he’s doing stuff out there. I see the signs that I saw growing up. Just go check it out,'” Heidi said.
COLD is unaware of any efforts by Idaho child welfare agencies to check in on Tom Jackson at that time in the 1990s.
Tom Jackson’s Idaho child sex abuse case
Tom Jackson and his second wife remained married for five years. In late 1995, two of Tom’s step-children disclosed to their mother that Tom had been molesting them for years. As a result, prosecutors filed two counts of lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor against Jackson. He pleaded guilty and a judge in Twin Falls, Idaho sentenced him to life in prison in early 1996.
Jackson appealed the sentence, arguing it was overly harsh. In a split decision, the Idaho Supreme Court agreed with Jackson and reduced his sentence to 15-years-to-life.
1997-4-10 Times-News Thomas Jackson Apr 10, 1997 The Times-News (Twin Falls, Idaho) Newspapers.com
At the completion of his sentence, Jackson was released on parole and resumed living on the business property of his sister and brother-in-law along the Snake River in the town of Buhl. The terms of Jackson’s parole prohibited him from having unsupervised access to children. In the years that followed, some of his sister’s children raised their own families on the same property.
Jackson’s daughters, Heidi and Tori, feared their father might be abusing those young relatives, though they had no evidence to support their suspicion. By that time, decades after their own abuse at Jackson’s hands, the sisters had no contact with their dad.
“I think at that point we’d moved on with our lives so much and, and I hope he never did anything with any other kids,” Tori said. “I mean, you would think that if someone went to prison for molesting kids, you would be careful with your kids around them.”
Tom Jackson as a suspect in the Nancy Baird case
Tom Jackson was still living on that property, near children, when COLD approached him in April of 2023 to request an interview about his work as a police officer on the Nancy Baird cold case. Jackson agreed to an interview about the Baird case, which had long been blamed on serial killer Ted Bundy.
Jackson told COLD he understood his criminal history might make him a suspect in the Baird case.
“I wouldn’t doubt if I was a suspect and all that, and that’s ok with me,” Jackson said.
The Idaho Department of Correction required Jackson to undergo annual polygraph examinations as part of his parole supervision. Jackson said the polygraph examiner always asked a full disclosure question. The gist of that question was, are there any other crimes which you’ve committed which you have not yet confessed?
“I says, ‘I’m guilty of only what I have confessed to,’” Jackson said. “I don’t want you to see me, as some people do, as a vulgar, insensitive, child molesting, blah, blah, blah kind of person. I’ve proven to ‘em on my polygraph that I’m not that person.”
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
KSL companion story:
Episode transcript:
