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Venita Gale Holzman, age 22, went missing from Las Vegas, Nevada sometime in 1963.
Very little is known about Venita. She was married in Fresno, California, to 22 year old Zel Holzman in January 1957 at the young age of 16. She told a reporter that she and Zel had dated for a year and a half at the time of her marriage.
Interestingly, Zel and Venita seem to have had a rushed mission to secure a marriage license during Zel’s lunch hour. The little snippet in the newspaper says that Zel told the courthouse staff that they needed to hurry up and prepare it because he had parked in a ten minute parking zone and had to get back to his job installing telephone lines.
After just two months, Venita and Zel separated and she filed for divorce in August 1957, citing extreme cruelty. Venita requested medical care and support for their unborn child. The divorce was granted in April 1959.
I’m unsure when and where her child was born or where Venita was for the next several years. All I’ve been able to find is a brief mention of her in an article about a small fire that had started from a furnace at 507 14th Street in Modesto, California. She apparently was staying there with her mother in June 1957.
By 1963, Venita was in Las Vegas, and was last seen leaving her job at the Flamingo Hotel on Las Vegas Boulevard. The Flamingo was still owned by the mob at that time, and it was a popular hangout for the Rat Pack. So it’s likely that Venita bumped elbows with Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. Wayne Newton also got his start as a headliner at the Flamingo in 1963, the same year Venita went missing. She has never been seen again and it’s not known whether she had custody of her child.
Venita’s former husband had been married previously; also ending in divorce on the grounds of cruelty in July 1956. If what Venita stated about having dated Zel for a year and a half was correct, he was still married for a year of that time. He married again in 1959.
This is about all that is known, and some aspects of her case are making me wonder if she simply met someone else and decided to start a new life, like Mary Jane Croft Vangilder, Mary Belle Henley and Audrey Backeberg.
Venita’s maiden name is Bowers. She was born in 1940 in Texas and was working as a waitress at the time of her marriage to Zel Holzman.
Sources:
NamUs
Websleuths
Ancestry
Newspapers.com
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