COLUMN ONE - The police chief, the showgirl and the dividing line - When she faces drug charges, he loses his job. The couple's scandal kicks up a storm of politics in a pair of towns on the Utah-Nevada border.
WENDOVER, UTAH — Sylvia, for whatever reason, needed another pair of shoes. So, on a late Wednesday night in mid-August, police chief Vaughn Tripp headed across town in his red Chevy pickup, hauling high heels to the club where his wife performed as an exotic dancer, stage name "Ecstasy."
Vaughn Tripp was 50 years old, bald on top, with a reddish mustache and square build. A Wendover native and self-described "proud grandparent," he had been raised Mormon and, while no longer making it to services every Sunday, he remained a teetotaler.
"I don't smoke cigarettes, I don't drink alcohol and I don't do drugs. Never have," he declared, not long after he'd been battered by the tabloid whirlwind created when his wife was arrested on narcotics charges.
Sylvia was a 39-year-old German immigrant with wispy blond hair and a slender figure. For years she had battled an addiction to pain pills, a habit she claimed had taken root in the aftermath of a car wreck. Teardrop tattoos ran down her right cheek.
The Tripps had been married 16 years. It was the second time around for both of them. Each brought one child to the union. Throughout, Vaughn's friends and relatives were ambivalent at best about the match.
"My son has a problem picking wives," said Tripp's 78-year-old mother, Gertrude, the town's unofficial historian and a City Council member. "But he always kept his troubles to himself."
This was a few days after certain troubles created by Sylvia had become known, not just to Vaughn's family, but far beyond Wendover, putting even greater strains on the unlikely marriage of the police chief and the exotic dancer.
In a sense, the trouble began one night about six years earlier. A dancer missed her shift at Southern Xposure, a storefront "cabaret" in a strip mall just across the 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 to be made swinging from a stripper's pole in pasties and G-string than pouring beer for oglers 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.' "
Shopping money. Gambling money. Certainly not the kind of money her $21-an-hour police chief husband could routinely throw her way.
Vaughn was not pleased. In time, though, he seemed to make a sort of peace with Sylvia's second act as a Southern Xposure "showgirl," reasoning: "She's got her life, and I have got my life."
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