Robert Dean Weeks was the first person convicted of murder in Nevada without a body. Four people vanished around him over eighteen years and none of them has ever been found. He was convicted of two of the deaths, was never charged with the other two, and died in prison in 1996.
He was born in Alabama in 1929 and graduated from Mississippi Southern College in 1952, having worked his way through as a mortician and a parachute stuntman. He used a series of false names: Robert Howard Smith, Robert Downey, Robert Hinkle.
His ex-wife Patricia Weeks, forty-one, disappeared from Las Vegas on April 25, 1968, weeks after their divorce was finalised. Her car was found abandoned; Weeks took custody of their four daughters and told them their mother had deserted them. His business associate James Shaw disappeared on May 5, 1971 after an argument with him; Shaw's bloodstained car was found in a Las Vegas parking lot. Cynthia Jabour, a real estate agent who had been with him six years and intended to end the relationship, was last seen in the lobby of his Las Vegas condominium on October 5, 1980; her car turned up at Caesars Palace. Carol Ann Riley, forty-two, a San Diego nurse who also planned to break off with him, disappeared in 1986 before a dinner date. Weeks told police she had cancelled, then left town.
A private investigator hired by Riley's fiance established that the man she knew as Smith was Weeks and that the same pattern had already happened twice. Weeks was named on Unsolved Mysteries as a fugitive wanted for embezzlement and for questioning in the disappearances. He was arrested on May 26, 1987 and convicted of first-degree murder in April 1988 in the cases of Patricia Weeks and Cynthia Jabour, with no remains in evidence in either. He never disclosed where any of them were. He was sentenced to life without parole on two counts and died at Southern Desert Correctional Center on September 20, 1996.
In July 1987 a skull was found near Bonelli Landing at Lake Mead, and further remains in a shallow grave wrapped in a yellow blanket. They could not be identified at the time. On August 7, 2025 the Mohave County Sheriff's Office announced that they were Carol Ann Riley. Thirty-eight years after they were found, and twenty-nine years after the only man ever suspected of killing her had died. Patricia Weeks, James Shaw and Cynthia Jabour are still missing.