The deaths of Melanie Andress-Tobiasson & Connie Land: Mystery of moms who fought sex trafficking cover up
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA: Two mothers reportedly committed suicide within five months of each other after spending years fighting the Las Vegas Metro Police Department for allegedly covering up an unsolved double homicide linked to underage sex trafficking. One of the mothers was a former Las Vegas judge.
Judge Melanie Andress-Tobiasson, 55, who resigned a year ago over an ethics probe, ended her life on January 20 at her $2 million Vegas mansion. She died from a gunshot wound, according to the Clark County coroner’s office. Just months before, Andress-Tobiasson’s friend Connie Land, 53, also shot herself to death on August 10, 2022, at her Vegas home after a six-year battle for justice for her daughter Sydney Land, 21, who was reportedly murdered along with her boyfriend Nehemiah “Neo” Kauffman, 19, in October 2016. The double homicides remain unsolved to date.
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Andress-Tobiasson began tipping law enforcement off a year before the murders to what she alleged was an underage sex trafficking operation in a bid to protect her own teenage daughter and others, according to the New York Post. Judicial officials, however, claimed she overstepped her authority when she began focusing on the murders of Sydney and Kauffman. The judge believed Shane "Suga" Valentine, a man who allegedly tried to lure his own daughter into prostitution, was responsible for the deaths of Sydney and Kauffman.
Valentine has reportedly been a person of interest in the murders twice but has never been charged in the case. Speaking to the Baltimore Post-Examiner, Andress-Tobiasson said she once went to Valentine's house and kicked the door in. In December 2019, she testified before the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline that she indirectly threatened Valentine because she wasn't getting help from the cops.
It's unclear why Andress-Tobiasson and Connie chose to end their lives. “I can’t tell you how many times Melanie told me, ‘If I wind up dead, remember I wasn’t suicidal,'” local blogger Dana Gentry, who knew Andress-Tobiasson, told the New York Post. Gentry added, “She was being followed, all sorts of things. She was unusual in the sense that she was willing to stand up for the truth even though she knew it might ruin her career.”
It's worth noting that the judge's downward spiral began in 2015 when her daughter, Sarah, then 16, began working at a clothing store, Top Notch. She told her mother about strippers and pimps at the outlet, which was shut down a year later after a murder in front of the establishment and after owner, Marlon Brown, was arrested and sentenced to 45 years for shooting his ex-girlfriend.
Andress-Tobiasson and Connie's shared concerns
Andress-Tobiasson told Las Vegas authorities that Top Notch was allegedly "a hub for sex trafficking and was an unlicensed, underage nightclub." She also said she was "terrified" of Valentine, who used to hang out near the store. “The first time I took the information to the police, I wasn’t so concerned because I figured within a week, the place would be shut down,” Andress-Tobiasson said in a 2019 interview.
She added, “I subsequently learned that not only did the police know about this place when I first started giving them information, they knew about a lot of places like this, and they were kind of untouchable.” The former judge and Connie reportedly became friends over their shared concerns of the local police deliberately ignoring local pimps and underage trafficking. They also believed Valentine was left off the hook in the murder of Connie's daughter because he was possibly an informant.
“Connie Land was a powerhouse and she was relentless in the pursuit of who killed her daughter right up until the time she committed suicide,” Doug Poppa, a former police detective turned investigative journalist said. He added, “I talked to her a few hours before she killed herself. She seemed fine. It was devastating.” Poppa said Andress-Tobiasson befriended Connie to help her solve her daughter's murder.
However, the former judge later demanded she turn over private conversations between her and the Las Vegas Metro detective, who was in charge of the investigation. The two women had a falling out eventually. Andress-Tobiasson approached the FBI after Las Vegas police allegedly ignored her claims, but ended up being probed by Nevada’s Judicial Discipline Commission for nearly two years before she stepped down from the bench in 2021.
Police and judges' families sexually blackmailed
The mysterious deaths of the two mothers have drawn attention to the number of middle-class young women in Las Vegas, who are being targeted by men they considered their boyfriends but turned out to be pimps, some of whom were often violent. The unsuspecting women are reportedly often pimped out for up to $10,000 a night but receive just a fraction of the sum from the traffickers.
Sources revealed that some of the young women who were the daughters of judges and police officers may have been recruited "for a type of sexual blackmail." Gentry insisted, “These were efforts to compromise judges and cops by pimping out their daughters." Furthermore, the suicides also raised questions about alleged ties between the Las Vegas police and pimps on the strip.