It was a beautiful two-layer cake, decorated to reflect a fun childhood activity.
“All done up like a merry-go-round with the top, horses, and everything,” Vickie Goulette told Dateline. “I mean, it was incredible, and I still have all those decorations.”
It was 1974, and the cake was for Vickie’s eldest daughter, Michele, who had just turned 1. It was baked with love by Michele’s grandmother, Nancy Hartley.
“She was an incredible baker,” Vickie said. “I mean, she could make anything.”
In March of 1975, Michele was about to turn 2 — an event that typically would have called for another of Grandma’s special cakes.
But not that year.
“Michele was 12 days shy of 2 when my mom died,” Vickie told Dateline.
Nancy Hartley didn’t just die. She was murdered.
Nancy grew up in Indiana, where she met and married Ronald Hartley. The two eventually moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where they raised their two children -- Vickie and her brother, Ronnie.
“She was very, very, religious,” Vickie said of her mother. And, of course, an amazing baker. “She made my first wedding cake and all the little candies,” she recalled. “The cake had yellow roses on it.”
Vickie says her parents split up when she was a teenager. “I originally lived with my dad until my mom was granted custody during the divorce,” she said.
A self-described Daddy’s girl, Vickie says she and her mother were polar opposites. “The things that I liked, she didn’t,” she said. “We were just very different.”
Vickie married young and had her first daughter, Michele. While Vickie may not have been especially close with her mother, Nancy and little Michele had a special bond. “She absolutely adored my oldest daughter,” Vickie said. “Which is the only grandchild she lived long enough to see.”
On March 12, 1975, Vickie got home from work and turned on the radio. “And it said a female service station attendant had been shot at the station at 31st Avenue in Roosevelt,” she recalled. “I knew there were five employees, four were male and one was female. So, by process of elimination, I assumed it was my mother.”
Nancy had been working as a clerk at a Pasco Self-Service gas station in Phoenix that had a convenience store. Vickie heard the victim had been taken to a local hospital. “So, I called the hospital that they said she had been taken to and confirmed that it was her and then immediately headed for the hospital,” she told Dateline.
When Vickie arrived, her mother was in critical condition. “So, the doctor came out to tell us they did an EEG, and he said, ‘You’d get more response from a bowl of Jell-O.’”
Nancy was brain-dead. Machines were the only thing keeping her alive.
That’s when Vickie, at just 19 years old, had to make an impossible decision. “I said, ‘Then turn the machines off,’” she recalled. “And to this day, I know it was the right decision.”
Vickie watched as her 47-year-old mother took her last breaths. “That’s burned into my memory,” she said.
The Phoenix Police Department is investigating the case. Dateline spoke with Detective Dominick Roestenberg, who says that at about 5:35 p.m. on March 12, 1975, Phoenix patrol officers responded to an emergency call of “unknown trouble” at the gas station.
“The witnesses told officers that there was a female inside who was bound at her feet that appeared to have an injury to her head,” Roestenberg said.
When officers responded, they found a troubling scene. “The phone cord appeared to be ripped from the wall. There was scuff marks on the floor, and there were what appeared to be tennis shoe impressions,” he said.
They also saw Nancy, who had been working alone, unresponsive on the floor. Roestenberg says she had been shot in her left temple. “There was no casing recovered, so the suspects may possibly — may have had a revolver or possibly took the casing from the scene,” he said.
Vickie says her mother’s side of the family blamed her father initially. Even though her father had remarried, Vickie says her parents were still going back and forth in court. “Either an increase in alimony or an increase in child support,” she explained. “It was just one thing after another.”
However, Vickie told Dateline, her dad had an air-tight alibi. He had recently gotten a DUI. “He was sitting in traffic school at the time she was shot,” she said.
Roestenberg says investigators interviewed multiple witnesses who said they believed they saw two young Black men fleeing the scene. “At least three witnesses came forward describing two African American males between 17 and 18 years of age, possibly students at a nearby high school,” he told Dateline. “One had a heavy build; one had a thin build.”
He says the safe at the gas station also appeared as if someone had attempted to break into it. “No money was taken. There was a ring on one of [Nancy’s] fingers that we believed was taken by one of the suspects,” he said. Vickie told Dateline it was her mother’s wedding ring.
Investigators believe Nancy was the victim of a robbery gone wrong.
“The first two years after she died, I mean, I was literally on the phone with [the police] so adamant that they solve the case and it was literally destroying my life,” Vickie said. “Finally, you have to come to the realization that even if they find them, your mother’s not going to miraculously come back.”
For Vickie, it was a difficult realization. “I was such a young mother. I couldn’t ask her — ‘What do you do when the kid does this?’” she said. “It was hard to figure out all the mother things myself.”
In 2015, Detective Roestenberg took over the case. Since then, he says he’s re-interviewed witnesses. “I recontacted an additional witness, who reported that she had observed two African American males acting strangely,” he said about the day of the murder. “One of the males attempted to grab her. She broke free of him, and they continued to walk in the direction of the store.”
Roestenberg also interviewed a potential suspect — someone he says police first spoke to back in 1975. “He was brought in — I believe it was a burglary charge,” he said of the initial interview. “He believed he was going to be questioned for a potential murder.”
While reviewing the case, Roestenberg says he found it strange that a burglary suspect thought he was being questioned for a murder, so he wanted to speak to him again. “I was able to locate him in Washington. I flew out there, interviewed him extensively and acquired a sample of his DNA,” he said. “This DNA was directly compared to the evidence at our crime scene; however, it was not a match.”
Roestenberg says several pieces of evidence — including a pantyhose mask — were collected from the crime scene. “There are at least four [DNA] profiles currently in CODIS, so they could technically hit any day now,” he said. “These cold cases can be really challenging. Evidence just deteriorates with time.”
Vickie says she’s hoping that advanced DNA testing will help solve the case.
Roestenberg is hoping for the same. “She was a kind, defenseless, harmless woman trying to support her family,” he said. “For them to murder this poor woman for no reason was just cold, callous.”
In 2021, Vickie lost her brother to COVID, and their father died six weeks later. “I got this really pretty memorial bench that’s out by my pond that has two butterflies by it,” she told Dateline. “I consider the bench as my mom and the two butterflies, my dad and brother.”
Every night, Vickie says goodnight to the family members who are no longer with her—to the mother whose case she still prays will be solved. “I want to hold out hope.”
Silent Witness is offering an award of up to $2,000 for information leading to the arrest and/or indictment of the suspect(s) of this crime.
Anyone with information about Nancy’s case is asked to call Detective Dominick Roestenberg of the Phoenix Police Department at 602-534-5920.
If you have a story to share with Dateline, please submit it here.
xxx
