The Amazing Double Life of Paige Birgfeld

February 18, 2008

Paige Birgfeld lead an seemingly normal, if not peripatetic, life. A single mother of three in Grand Junction, Colorado, she worked hard to maintain her home and to care for her three beloved children. She worked hard at several enterprises to provide for her family. She did everything cheerfully and with a giant smile. She obviously loved life, no matter how difficult it might have seemed. Gorgeous, shapely, perky and full of life, Paige seemed to be an ideal woman leading a very good, if not ideal, life.

Paige at Moms Club
Paige Birgfeld

Whatever you needed, Paige was there for you. If you needed a costume for your child’s dance recital, from a class Paige probably taught, she’d sew the costume for you. If you needed a baby seat for your car, you could buy it from Paige. If you needed kitchen equipment, you’d call Paige to schedule a Pampered Chef show in your home. In fact, Paige was a very successful sales director with The Pampered Chef, a multi-national corporation based in Addison, Illinois. Paige earned two incentive trips with the company, the last one, to Atlantis in the Caribbean, took place last Spring. She even took her children on that trip.

On June 28, 2007, Paige left her home and went on an all-day picnic with her ex-first-husband. She was wearing a blue-flowered tube top and blue jean shorts, driving her red 2005 Ford Focus, Colorado license plate 022-00x. She left her three children in the care of her live-in nanny, as she often did.

Paige never returned and no one, that we know of, has seen her since.

Her car was found three days later, fully engulfed in flames, in a parking lot near her home. Her parents closed up their home in Denver and raced to Grand Junction to take care of their grandchildren while the search for Paige got underway.

Paige Smiling
Paige Did Everything With A Smile
Can You Help Bring Her Home?

It was during the search that a bizarre discovery was made. Paige had been leading a double life.

Paige Birgfeld Dixon Biegler has three names because she has been divorced twice. Her first husband, Howard Biegler, lives in Colorado and Paige had indicated to friends that their relationship was beginning to restart. She seemed to have high hopes for a reconciliation.

Her second ex husband, Rob Dixon, is the father of her three children. He has had his own run-ins with the law in the past and was the initial focus of local speculation. According to numerous media reports, Dixon is infamous in the area for donating millions of dollars worth of fire fighting equipment to fire departments around the state except that none of the equipment had been paid for. He also lost more than $3.24 million for a fire district board on which he served. He had invested the district’s money with the same New York investment firm that lost all of his own inherited fortune. (All but about $1 Million has been recovered. No charges have ever been filed in these cases. He was never named in any of the resulting lawsuits because he had filed for bankruptcy. Dixon lives outside Philadelphia now.) Dixon cooperated fully in the investigation, according to authorities. Dixon’s lawyer says his own scrapes with the law are not important. “He’s hoping the focus is on finding his wife,” the attorney told reporters.

Somewhere along the timeline of her life story, Paige Birgfeld’s story took an unusual twist. After high school, she attended the University of Florida on a scholarship, but dropped out to marry Howard Biegler. (The similarity in the names has also caused some confusion over the years and in this investigation.) She divorced Biegler, according to her friends, because he did not want to have children.

From there, Paige began a career as an exotic dancer in Denver, where she reportedly met Dixon. They married and eventually had three children together.

Rob and Paige moved to Grand Junction, Colorado in the late 1990’s and bought a large home that was part of a fast lifestyle, reportedly with lavish parties and a collection of automobiles. It was at that time that Paige began her home based businesses.

When Dixon’s finances began to fail a few years ago, Paige apparently began to utilize her exotic dance skills to bolster the family income. Dixon was arrested on a domestic violence charge after he allegedly slapped and shoved Paige while she was nursing their youngest child. Court records show that, in October 2005, he accused Birgfeld of giving topless massages, slapped her on the shoulder and punched her in the throat as she held their baby.

Dixon pleaded guilty to a charge of harassment after he was arrested on suspicion of third-degree assault and misdemeanor child abuse. The case was dismissed after he complied with a year-long deferred sentence.

Paige also belonged to a local Mom’s club and some of her friends suspected there was more to Paige’s life than met the eye. She was a type-A personality, always doing something and more than willing to help out anyone in need. She sewed costumes for dancers, presented Pampered Chef shows and administered her “cluster” of consultants that she had recruited to The Pampered Chef business. She quickly rose to the level of Director and earned two all-expenses paid incentive vacation trips with the company. She took her children with her to Atlantis in the Spring of 2007.

Paige was a member of an online forum for Pampered Chef consultants where she developed a number of fast friendships. “None of us had any idea she led a secret life,” one member, who asked to remain anonymous, told us. “Frankly, we don’t care, either. She is a hard working mother who is dedicated to her children.”

A Pampered Chef Director from Michigan posted on the forum, “Paige didn’t win those trips, she earned them. It galls me when the media says she ‘won’ those trips. Winning has nothing to do with it, consultants earn those trips through dedication and hard work.”

Curiously, several days after her disappearance, her account was accessed but only one thread was opened. Whoever was accessing the account under her name logged off almost immediately, after other members noticed “she” was online. Site administrators immediately locked her account. Was it law enforcement who logged into her account? The site administrator said he didn’t know. “They haven’t contact[ed] me at all.”

Besides her home based businesses, Paige also had an office. It was on the second floor of a Grand Junction building, near a back stairway. The door read “Grand River Acupuncture” but she did not have a license for acupuncture. Other tenants report they hardly ever saw her during regular business hours, and if they saw her at all, she wore “skimpy clothing” and “high heels.”

Her father discovered yet another part of a secret life. He found a business card in her home that indicated Paige was working as an escort. A web site (now closed) featured Paige using a different name and contained a photograph of a suggestively dressed, woman’s torso, ostensibly Paige. Whether the photo was of her or not was never determined. Her slogan read, “Tired of chopped meat showing up when you ordered Fillet Mignon?”

Friends who knew her were devastated at the revelation of her secret life, caught completely unawares. “It does add complexity. She was associated with a lot of people that people who knew her didn’t know,” said Mesa County Sheriff Stan Hilkey. Some of them are still quite bitter, but for the most part, everyone in the area wants closure.

Just the same, while these discoveries were being made, the search for Paige continued. Friends, relatives and concerned members of the community joined together to search for the missing mother. Shoulder to shoulder, the team marched through fields, continuing to look for Paige.

Vigil
About three dozen family and friends
held a candlelight vigil for Paige
on July 3 to pray for her safe return.

Contents of her purse were found strewn along the median of US Highway 50, a deposit slip, a shoe, a membership card and other items. Law enforcement has never released a list of everything that was found. Speculation of how those items landed on the median ran rampant. Some saw it as Paige, alive and being held against her will, tossing items out of a car in an attempt to leave a Hansel & Gretel trail of breadcrumbs. More pessimistic theories pictured Paige’s body in the back of a pickup truck, the wind pulling items from her purse, inadvertently left open by her murderer.

The search for Paige continued for weeks, including divers searching the muddy waters of the Gunnison River. The search was difficult and fruitless. The river was “…like chocolate milk,” divers reported. Despite the extensive efforts of searchers, no sign of Paige has ever been found.

On October 2, 2007, law enforcement cleared Paige’s two ex-husbands and named a primary person of interest in her disappearance. Lester Ralph Jones was named the lone remaining “person of interest” in the case. Authorities had searched Jones’ home in Grand Junction at least twice. Investigators focused on Jones and other people who had contacted Birgfeld by cellphone in the hours before her disappearance. Mesa County Sheriff Stan Hilkey said those callers included customers or “wannabe” customers of Birgfeld’s. Jones works as a recreational-vehicle mechanic across the street from the parking lot where Birgfeld’s car was found.

Hannibal Lester
Lester Ralph Jones - Person of Interest

Jones was arrested numerous times in Delta County, and in 1999, for kidnapping and other charges. He was sentenced to five years in prison and completed his parole in 2005.

As of this writing, he has not been arrested in the Birgfeld case and he has not made any public comment.

Paige remains missing and her case remains unsolved. The case has been profiled on the America’s Most Wanted website, ABC News did a prime time report last Fall, and another network news report is in the works.

The contents of this blog entry have been culled from media reports and interviews with people with an interest in the case. The media reports can all be found in Paige’s own forum here at Help Find the Missing.

If you have any information about this case, please contact us and we will pass it along to authorities. Can you help bring Paige home?

Written by Ghost Writer · Filed Under Missing Women, Paige Birgfeld 

Comments

13 Responses to “The Amazing Double Life of Paige Birgfeld”

  1. phat wolf on April 24th, 2008 12:22 am

    Someone knows the TRUTH about what happened to Paige and isn’t talking.

    Praying for justice, for her and her family.

  2. real life on June 10th, 2008 7:45 pm

    Well things like this happens when you live the life of a prostitute, high priced hooker. When you take money from strange men for sex you sometimes die.Stop making excuses for a striper and a whore.Grow up people hookers get killed everday.

  3. your a real A**hole on June 10th, 2008 8:12 pm

    How dare you judge ? I am sure you are not perfect and I bet you are a guy, she did what she had to do cause her deadbeat husband couldn’t do shit for her
    Idiot

  4. stacey on June 10th, 2008 8:22 pm

    My heart breaks for paige and her family. especially her 3 children!
    I pray to Gof that they will find her killer and that her family can finally have closure.
    AS I WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH I WILL FEAR NO EVIL.
    FOR YOU ARE WITH ME.. YOUR ROD AND YOUR STAFF.

  5. Ghost Writer on June 12th, 2008 6:13 am

    Real life, I had seriously considered doing you a favor by deleting your comment. I’ve decided to leave it here, however, because your comment says so much more about you than anything I could possibly say in explanation of your comment being removed.

    If you have taken the time to look at the rest of the site, even you should be able to recognize that everyone who goes missing is a daughter, son, sister, brother, cousin, aunt, uncle, mother or friend. No one deserves to perish at the hands of a murderer. No one deserves to go missing without a trace. No family should have to endure the emptiness brought on by a loved one suddenly vanishing without a trace.

    You appear to have more than a passing interest in this particular case, and it sounds like you know something about Paige that you’re not telling us. Would you care to share your intimate knowledge and help bring her home?

    Trust me, if anything were to happen to someone in your family, or even to you, we would publish your story and get the word out. We do everything we can to help bring everyone home again.

  6. Leslie S. on June 13th, 2008 2:19 pm

    My prayers are with Paige and her family. They are truly wonderful people and deserve to bring Paige home.

    I really hope that justice is swift for the monster responsible for this.

  7. bluesboxes on July 28th, 2008 8:06 am

    I know Paige from somewhere and I haven’t been able to place just where yet but it would have been prior to marriage. My memories are a bit vague but I do remember that the way she carried herself (meaning posture and an innate grace) made you want to dislike her (in an envious sort of way) but she was so kind and genuine that you couldn’t help but adore her. It’s sad to see the media sensationalize only a small fraction of the total individual. My heart goes out to her family and friends.

  8. Laura on July 30th, 2008 8:51 am

    Paige and her family remain in my thoughts and prayers and I hope she is brought home soon and answers are found.

  9. Sunshine on August 21st, 2008 10:57 am

    “Real Life”…..you must be a really cold-hearted person!? NO-ONE deserves to die, vanish, etc. Do you not have any sympathy for her children? Do you have children of your own? If so, maybe you should stop and think about your rude comments……

    Maybe GhostWriter is right….maybe you know more about this case……….

    One thing is for sure………GOD knows and who ever is responsible for this will one day pay!!!!!

  10. Angel Huntress on August 29th, 2008 1:04 am

    Hi Ghost Writer, I am personally writing to you because of this article on Paige Birgfeld. I am a Private Investigator and Fugitive Recovery Agent here in Grand Junction. I know Frank Birgfeld personally from helping with the search last year for Paige. Frank called me a couple of weeks ago and asked if he could come by my home to talk. Of course I said, yes. When he arrived we sat down and had a lenghty conversation about Paiges dissapearance and he asked for my help on the case. How could I turn him down? I grew to know and like he and his wife on a personal basis and even met Paiges 3 adorable children last year. Paiges daughter thanked me for helping search for her mom, I was in tears for that little girl! They are truly the nicest people and yet ,heartbroken people. Anyone would be, with a daughter missing and possibly dead. I am addressing you because I need your help with something that interest me in the comments here.

    Would you please write me when you can and we will talk. I have vowed to Frank Birgfeld to continue this investigation until we find what we are looking for and finally solve the case for the sake of her family! GJ need not think that the Detectives with the Mesa County Sheriffs Department are the only ones working on this case, I have been in this business over 10 years and have a lot of resources that I am hoping will help. Thank you for your time and interest in the case….Angel Huntress

  11. DiNozzo on August 31st, 2008 1:21 am

    hi , I hope they find her safe, but i am reading the case a bit , i am getting into the details , but as i am thousands of miles aways from the USA. I would like to give some suggetions on the way of tracking her . And people who judge her should know that , she was living a double life , for a reason , to keep her family safe. She put herself on the on the line . Angel Huntress , i would like yo know your e-mail id ,so that i can help.

    DiNozzo

  12. liz on September 8th, 2008 12:17 am

    Angel Huntress:

    I too would like info in order to help find Paige. I had contact with her personally prior to her disappearance and keep checking online to see if anything has been discovered since my last online visit of her being found.

    Thanks so much;

    Liz

  13. OMG on June 16th, 2009 7:23 pm

    plz look closer to ex-member with odd spelling-even if old and woman look again
    then u will know real life-and who pays the bills-and beyond question-Dr?-play-dhs-the key is the children-so sad-sorry too close to help more

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