Some cases stick with you long after you’ve read the last line. The story of Britney Ujlaky is one of those. She was a bright, horse-loving teenager from a tiny corner of Nevada, the kind of place where folks leave their doors unlocked and everybody knows everybody. And yet, in the spring of 2020, this quiet community found itself at the center of a murder investigation that would eventually draw national attention through shows like Dateline and Oxygen. If you’ve stumbled onto her name and want the full picture — who she was, what happened to her, and how her family has carried on — here’s the complete, carefully pieced-together account.
Who Was Britney Ujlaky?
Gabrielle Lynn Ujlaky, known to nearly everyone simply as Britney, was born on June 4, 2003, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. By all accounts she was a spirited, warm-hearted kid who grew up to be a confident young woman with a soft spot for horses and a backbone that didn’t bend easily. Friends described her as someone who carried herself with quiet authority — she stood tall, looked people in the eye, and wasn’t shy about standing up for herself or the people she loved. At just 16, she had already built a reputation as a genuine cowgirl, the sort who’d be first in the saddle and last to complain. Her life ended far too soon, but the version of her that lives on in the memories of those who knew her is full of grit, kindness, and a little bit of sass.
Growing Up in Spring Creek, Nevada
Britney spent her formative years in Spring Creek, a rural community tucked into the northeastern corner of Nevada, not far from the town of Elko and roughly a six-hour drive from the bright lights of Las Vegas. This was ranch country — wide-open desert, big skies, and a way of life built around livestock, rodeos, and hard work. Britney thrived in that environment. She poured much of her free time into the 2U Ranch, where she helped train, groom, and feed horses, and she never needed convincing to pitch in with cattle brandings or cattle drives. There was a romance to her life out there, the kind you can’t fake. She loved the rodeo scene and even held the title of rodeo queen in her hometown, a small honor that meant the world in a place where that tradition runs deep.
The Ujlaky Family: A Close-Knit Circle
To understand Britney, you really have to understand the family that raised her, because they were everything to her. Her father, James “Jim” Ujlaky, was a gold miner who shared an extraordinarily tight bond with his daughter. After her parents divorced, Britney lived with him, and the two were inseparable in that easy, ribbing way that fathers and daughters sometimes are. Jim has spoken openly about how becoming her dad changed the entire course of his life, pulling him out of a rougher chapter and giving him something worth straightening up for. Britney even appointed herself the unofficial music critic of his heavy metal band, never hesitating to march in and offer her honest opinion.
Her mother, Alisha Tolhurst, has been just as central to the story, both in life and in the painful aftermath. Alisha — also referred to in some records as Alisha Ujlaky — described her daughter as a bright, beautiful light who touched countless lives. The grief she has carried since 2020 is the kind no parent should ever have to know, and she became one of the most visible voices for Britney once the case moved through the courts. Alongside her parents, Britney was the middle child and the only daughter in the family, sandwiched between two brothers who adored her in their own ways.
Her older brother, Austin Tolhurst, lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, while her younger brother, also named James Ujlaky, remained in Spring Creek, Nevada. The family tree stretched further still, with relatives who helped shape Britney’s world. Her grandmother, Linda Tolhurst, of Colorado Springs, and her great-grandmother, Carol Tolhurst, of Spring Creek, were both part of the close circle she left behind. Taken together, the Ujlaky and Tolhurst families painted a portrait of a young woman who was loved deeply from every direction — and whose loss tore through that circle with devastating force.
The Day Everything Changed: March 8, 2020
Sunday, March 8, 2020, began like any other day for the family. Britney tagged along with her dad to his band’s weekly rehearsal, doing what she always did — hanging out, scrolling through her phone, chatting with friends online. She told Jim that a friend named Bryce Dickey, an 18-year-old she knew from the local rodeo scene, was going to swing by and pick her up. That detail seemed perfectly ordinary at the time. Britney left the rehearsal early, climbed into Dickey’s vehicle, and headed off. It was the last time her father would ever see her alive. As the evening wore on and Britney didn’t come home, Jim’s gut began to twist. He tried calling and texting, but her phone rang once and went straight to voicemail every single time. That wasn’t like her at all.
A “Cowboy” Story That Didn’t Quite Add Up
When concern turned into alarm, Jim contacted Alisha, and the family kicked off a frantic search. The next day, officials filed a formal missing persons report. From the start, the explanation for Britney’s whereabouts came largely from Bryce Dickey himself, and his account would prove to be the crux of the entire case. Dickey claimed that he had dropped Britney off at Spring Creek High School so she could meet someone new — a mysterious man with a “cowboy look,” tall, and supposedly driving a green Ford F-150. According to Dickey, Britney had been chatting with this person over Snapchat and willingly hopped into the stranger’s truck. It was a story tailor-made to send investigators chasing a phantom, and for a short while, it worked. Because Britney was a teenager, authorities initially leaned toward the possibility that she had run away.
The Search and the Heartbreaking Discovery
The community refused to sit still. Friends, family, and neighbors organized searches across the rugged terrain surrounding Spring Creek, holding out hope that Britney would turn up safe. That hope was extinguished on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, just three days after she vanished. Her body was discovered in an isolated stretch of desert known as the Burner Basin area, wrapped in a blue tarp. The discovery transformed the investigation overnight from a missing persons case into a homicide. Forensic examination revealed that Britney had been sexually assaulted and killed, with the cause of death linked to a stab wound to her neck and strangulation. For a town with almost no violent crime, the brutality of what had happened was almost impossible to comprehend.
The Investigation Closes In on Bryce Dickey
Once Britney’s body was found, the spotlight swung back toward the last person known to have been with her — Bryce Dickey. His green-truck story started to crumble under the weight of physical evidence. Investigators reportedly recovered a used condom near the scene, collected DNA swabs from Britney’s neck and from beneath her fingernails, and found chewing tobacco at the location. Piece by piece, the forensic trail pointed away from a mysterious cowboy and squarely back at Dickey. To make matters worse, his version of events kept shifting as detectives pressed him, and authorities came to believe he had deliberately tried to mislead them. What’s especially chilling is that Britney reportedly viewed Dickey as a big-brother figure, one of her closest friends. He was also dating someone else at the time, a relationship that had lasted more than two years.
Bryce Dickey Goes to Trial
It took two years for the case to reach a courtroom, but in 2022, Bryce Dickey finally stood trial for what he’d done. Prosecutors laid out a methodical case built on the forensic evidence and the inconsistencies in Dickey’s statements. The defense, for its part, tried to chip away at the prosecution’s narrative, including raising challenges around expert testimony and other procedural points. But the jury wasn’t swayed. After weighing the evidence, they convicted Dickey of first-degree murder, sexual assault, and use of a deadly weapon in the commission of a crime. For Britney’s family, the verdict was a long-awaited acknowledgment of the truth they had suspected all along — that the “cowboy” story was a lie designed to cover up a horrifying act.
The Verdict, the Sentencing, and a Mother’s Words
The sentencing phase was where the raw human cost of the case spilled out into the open. Britney’s parents gave emotional testimony about how her death had upended their entire world. Alisha Tolhurst, who had spent two years waiting for the moment, confronted Dickey directly in the courtroom. She told him that she had believed his story about the green truck and had even tried to comfort him in the aftermath, never imagining he was the one responsible. Jim Ujlaky spoke about how unbearable it had become to simply see other fathers and daughters together, the everyday sight now a fresh wound each time. A jury deliberated for about two hours before settling on the sentence: 20 years to life in prison on the first-degree murder charge. It was justice, of a sort, though no sentence could ever balance the scales of what the family had lost.
The Appeal and the Nevada Supreme Court
Dickey didn’t accept the conviction quietly. His defense, led by a public defender, filed an appeal arguing that several issues warranted overturning the jury’s decision. A number of those arguments centered on testimony from Dickey’s former girlfriend, who told the court about being choked during their relationship — testimony the defense contended was improperly admitted. The defense also challenged expert testimony related to rigor mortis and argued that the trial court should have granted a mistrial. The Nevada Supreme Court reviewed these claims and ultimately rejected the appeal. In an opinion authored for the court, the justices concluded that whatever errors may have occurred during the trial were harmless and did not justify reversing the conviction. The court affirmed the judgment, closing yet another chapter in the long legal saga and reaffirming that Dickey would remain behind bars.
How the Ujlaky and Tolhurst Families Have Coped
There’s no roadmap for surviving the murder of a child, and the Ujlaky and Tolhurst families have had to find their own way through an unimaginable grief. Jim Ujlaky has been candid about how profoundly the loss reshaped his daily life, turning ordinary moments into reminders of what was taken. Alisha Tolhurst has channeled her pain into keeping her daughter’s memory alive, describing Britney again and again as a beautiful light who left the world far too early. The extended family — including Austin Tolhurst, the younger James Ujlaky, grandmother Linda Tolhurst, and great-grandmother Carol Tolhurst — has had to absorb the same shockwave. What’s striking in the years of coverage is how consistently they’ve refused to let Britney be defined solely by how she died. To them, she remains the girl who handed out flowers to strangers, who lit up around horses, and who carried herself with that unmistakable cowgirl confidence.
Why Britney’s Story Still Resonates
Plenty of true crime cases fade from public memory within months, but Britney Ujlaky’s has endured, and it’s worth asking why. Part of it is the setting — a place so peaceful that violence of this kind seemed almost unthinkable, which made the betrayal at the heart of the case land even harder. Part of it is the nature of that betrayal itself: she was harmed by someone she trusted, someone she thought of as family, who then spun an elaborate lie to send searchers in the wrong direction. And part of it is simply who Britney was. Her personality leaps off the page in every interview with the people who knew her. National programs like Dateline’s “Open Desert” episode and Oxygen’s coverage brought her story to a wide audience, but the reason it stuck wasn’t the sensational details — it was the human one. People saw a real kid, a real family, and a real, preventable tragedy.
Conclusion
The murder of Britney Ujlaky is, at its core, a story about a young woman who deserved a long and full life and didn’t get one. She was 16 years old, full of fire and tenderness in equal measure, and she was failed by someone she had every reason to trust. The case wound its way through investigation, trial, conviction, and appeal, ultimately leaving Bryce Dickey to serve 20 years to life — but the legal process, however necessary, was never going to undo the loss at the center of it all. What remains is the memory of Britney herself, kept alive by a family that loved her fiercely: her father James “Jim” Ujlaky, her mother Alisha Tolhurst, her brothers Austin Tolhurst and the younger James Ujlaky, and the grandmothers and great-grandmothers like Linda Tolhurst and Carol Tolhurst who watched her grow. If there’s any lasting takeaway, it’s that a name like Britney Ujlaky shouldn’t be remembered only for the worst day of her life. It should be remembered for the flowers she handed out, the horses she loved, and the unmistakable way she squared her shoulders and refused to back down. That’s the version of her worth carrying forward.
FAQs
Who was Britney Ujlaky?
Britney Ujlaky (full name Gabrielle Lynn Ujlaky) was a 16-year-old cowgirl from Spring Creek, Nevada, who loved horses and the rodeo. She was murdered in March 2020 in a case that later drew national attention.
Who killed Britney Ujlaky?
Bryce Dickey, an 18-year-old she knew from the local rodeo scene and viewed as a close friend, was convicted of her murder. He initially blamed a mysterious “cowboy” in a green truck before evidence pointed back to him.
What happened to Bryce Dickey?
In 2022 a jury convicted Dickey of first-degree murder, sexual assault, and use of a deadly weapon. He was sentenced to 20 years to life, and the Nevada Supreme Court later rejected his appeal.
Who are Britney Ujlaky’s parents?
Her father is James “Jim” Ujlaky, a gold miner she lived with, and her mother is Alisha Tolhurst. Both gave emotional testimony during the killer’s sentencing.
Where can I watch the Britney Ujlaky case on TV?
Her story has been featured on Dateline NBC in an episode titled “Open Desert,” as well as in true crime coverage from Oxygen.