Dateline: Double Lives - Who was Paige Birgfield and what happened to her? Disturbing details of the 2007 incident, revealed 

Dateline NBC featured an episode titled Double Lives on March 31, 2017. It mainly centered on the disappearance and murder of Paige Birgfeld, a mother of three from Colorado.

The Dateline episode dealt with her intricate personal life, and especially the aspect of her being an escort secretly, and displayed the impact of this disclosure on the investigation of her disappearance. The episode helped the public to understand Birgfeld's story as it tied up years of investigation, interviews, and evidence that had been collected by police and journalists.

In Double Lives, Dateline narrated the complete story of the case. It traced Birgfeld's life from a suburban mom to the startling revelation of her concealed employment. Furthermore, the show pointed out several suspects interlinked with her confidential world.

Moreover, the episode brought out the efforts of the police, the opinions of her relatives, and the tumultuous happenings of the case with horrifying details of her abduction. It also included the arrest and conviction of Lester Jones, who was pronounced guilty of her murder.

The audience was presented with fresh interviews, original field reporting, and expert review. Dateline focused on the bitter truth of Birgfeld's double lives and the court’s extended struggle for justice.

Dateline: Who was Paige Birgfeld, and what happened to her?

Paige Birgfeld, a 34-year-old mother, was living in Grand Junction, Colorado. She had divorced twice and was simultaneously raising three kids and working in multiple jobs to support her family. To her friends and family, she appeared to be a loving mother and an ordinary woman trying to cope with life’s difficulties.

However, Paige was leading a double life. Besides her daytime jobs, she was working secretly as an escort under the name "Carrie" at a private company called Models Inc. Such an astonishing secret was only revealed after her disappearance, which was initially reported by her 8-year-old daughter in June 2007.

Even her nearest and dearest were not aware of her secretive life. The escorting included stripping, dancing, and role-playing for clients who paid a good amount of money. This was the complete opposite of the image of a committed mother whom everyone knew. As per Dateline, the police concluded that her disappearance was connected to this covert aspect of her life.

Paige Birgfeld was reported missing after she spent a day with her first husband, leaving her kids with their nanny. As she did not come back home, her family and friends got anxious. The Mesa County Sheriff's Office was informed by her 8-year-old daughter, which led to the start of a police investigation.

According to Dateline, on July 1, 2007, the red Ford Focus belonging to Paige was discovered in a parking lot. The vehicle was vacant, and Paige was missing, which alarmed the police that she might be in trouble.

The police were quick to expand their inquiry and stumbled upon Paige’s secret job as an escort. This transformed the investigation and directed the authorities towards numerous potential culprits, such as her two former husbands and some of her customers. Among them, Lester Ralph Jones, a previous client with a past of violence, was the one who drew the most attention from the investigators.

Lester Ralph Jones was detained in November 2014, over seven years after the disappearance of Paige, reported Dateline. The investigators unearthed some crucial evidence that tied him to the crime. His scent was detected in Paige's burnt-out vehicle, and a gas can was located close to his workplace, which indicated that he set the car ablaze.

Moreover, a video footage captured his wife’s vehicle around the vicinity of Paige's workplace on the very day she went missing. Even though Jones refused to accept any participation, circumstantial evidence pointed towards him.

Additional clues were located near the road where Paige was abducted. The items indicated that there had been a struggle and that she had attempted to escape. The duct tape found with her body was an indication of her being kidnapped and subsequently killed. The motive of Jones was tied to his violent past and to his relationship with Paige, thus making him the primary perpetrator in this horrendous case, Dateline revealed.

Lester Jones went through two trials. The first trial did not provide a verdict, and a second trial was conducted at the end of 2016. During this trial, the prosecution relied heavily on the evidence of timeline and location; they used phone records along with surveillance footage to show that Jones was present at the main locations on the day when Paige disappeared.

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The jury took four days to come to a unanimous decision, and Jones was convicted of first-degree murder, felony murder, second-degree murder, and kidnapping concerning the death of Paige Birgfeld.

As per Dateline, the judge gave him a life sentence in prison without the possibility of parole, which is the highest punishment in Colorado for these kinds of crimes. Even after being convicted, Jones has continued to file appeals against the verdict, maintaining that there is no direct physical evidence to associate him with the crime scene and requesting that his kidnapping sentence be combined with that of felony murder.

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