Saga of chief, stripper wife spurs questions

WENDOVER — Sylvia Tripp needed another pair of shoes. So, on a Wednesday night in mid-August, Wendover Police Chief Vaughn Tripp, 50, headed across town to the club where his 39-year-old wife performed as an exotic dancer.

Vaughn had been raised as a Mormon, and while no longer attending services every Sunday, remained a teetotaler. Sylvia was a German immigrant with blond hair and a slender figure. She battled an addiction to pain pills in the aftermath of a car wreck. The Tripps had been married 16 years. Each brought one child to the union. Vaughn's friends and relatives were ambivalent about the match.

"My son has a problem picking wives," said Tripp's mother, Gertrude, 78, the town's unofficial historian and a City Council member. "But he always kept his troubles to himself."

The trouble began six years earlier.

A dancer missed her shift at Southern Xposure, a "cabaret" located in a strip mall just across the Utah state line in West Wendover, Nev.

Co-workers coaxed Sylvia, who was working behind the bar, to step in.

Sylvia quickly discovered there was more money to be made swinging from a stripper's pole in pasties and G-string than pouring beer at the bar.

"I didn't know what I was doing, but at the end of the night it was like, 'Wow. This is really good money,"' she said.

Vaughn was not pleased, but he made peace with Sylvia's new job, reasoning: "She's got her life, and I have got my life."

But as he pulled into the parking lot at Southern Xposure with his wife's shoes, Tripp could see something was amiss.

Several West Wendover police officers, along with state narcotics officers, were near the entrance. Tripp rolled up to Ron Supp, chief of the West Wendover Police Department and his Nevada-side counterpart.

"Should I not be here?" asked Tripp.

"I wouldn't be," Supp replied, "if I were you."

Wendover, Utah, celebrating its centennial in 2007, is located where Utah bumps into Nevada. What is striking is the disparity created by the border — represented by a white stripe painted across Wendover Boulevard.

On the Utah side, Wendover is a struggling town of 1,000 people. Blight coexists with the occasional well-kept residence and the brick edifice of the Wendover Ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.