Pod Insights Park Predators The Picnic About this episode When a 4-year-old girl vanishes from a family picnic in a popular Montana recreation space, authorities stop at nothing to try and find her. Then, years into the investigation, law enforcement gets the break they’ve been waiting for. Someone takes credit for the abduction.
Transcript 6,481 words · 10 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect...
0:04 Speaker 01 Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.
0:06 Speaker 00 Using smart AI cameras, live US-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Don't just record a break-in, stop it from ever happening. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 70% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime.
0:23 Speaker 02 30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
0:30 Speaker 03 Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Diambra. And the story I'm going to tell you about today is a mystery that has confounded law enforcement for more than 40 years. And it's a case that online sleuths have been obsessing over, I feel like, for as long as the internet has been around. It's a missing persons case from the early 1980s that has quite a few twists and turns. You can almost hear the GOAT of true crime himself, Robert Stack, narrating the details. And speaking of Robert, Unsolved Mysteries way back in the day did a segment about this case. It's one of the sources I used for this episode. But forget TV programs, news clippings, and anniversary specials for just a second,
1:11 Speaker 03 and rewind with me all the way back to late June 1983 in Helena Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana. Because understanding where this story takes place, I think, is critical to hopefully one day figuring out what happened. According to the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service's website, the national forest is divided into two parts by the Continental Divide and spans 2.8 million acres across north-central Montana. According to the National Forest Foundation's website, the forest was only known as Helena National Forest in 1983. In 2015, it merged with the Lewis and Clark National Forest and is now called Helena Lewis and Clark National Forest.
1:55 Speaker 03 From 1880 until 1940, there was a massive mining boom in the mountainous regions of the forest. And that activity, unfortunately, left a lot of inactive mines and abandoned shafts behind. Those ruins still remain in places today and pose a serious risk to visitors because some of them are unstable and contain large volumes of heavy metal mining waste. The area gets the latter part of its name from the renowned military explorers Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark, who ventured into what was in 1804, a vast western territory in the United States known as the Louisiana Purchase. Lewis and Clark's journey encompassed nearly 8,000 miles from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean and back.
2:39 Speaker 03 During their trailblazing, they faced many challenges, unforeseen obstacles, and mortal threats. And the same could be said about the investigation into the disappearance of Nyleen Marshall, a four-year-old girl who vanished from the forest in seemingly the blink of an eye while at a family outing. The journey her family members and law enforcement embarked on to try and find her led them on an up-and-down search as exhausting and draining as climbing the rugged mountains of the national forest itself. This is Park Predators.
3:53 Speaker 03 On the afternoon of Saturday, June 25, 1983, a group of families who were all part of a ham radio club were hanging out near Mopin Creek in the Elkhorn Mountains of Helena National Forest. While the adults were enjoying themselves around the picnic area, a handful of their young children were playing and catching frogs near some beaver dams along the waterway. Among the parents in the group were Kim and Nancy Marshall, who had a four-year-old daughter named Nyleen. Kim, who was actually Nyleen's stepfather, was a member of the Capital City Radio Group, which was the organization putting on the picnic. The family was from the nearby town of Clancy, Montana, which is about 25 minutes away from the Moplin Creek Recreation Area. For those of you listening
4:37 Speaker 03 who may be familiar with this part of Montana but want a better sense of where this gathering was in relation to a larger city, it's about 35 minutes southeast of Helena. Anyway, around 4:00 PM, Kim and Nancy realized they hadn't seen Nyleen in a while. The source material isn't super-specific on how the next sequence of events unfolded, but rather quickly it became clear that all of the other children in the group were accounted for, except Nyleen. She was nowhere to be found. Emily Thompson's coverage of this case for morbidology stated that in addition to Nyleen, Kim and Nancy also had two other young children, a six-year-old son and a 22-month-old daughter, who I have to assume were on this trip too, or if not, being babysat by someone
5:21 Speaker 03 or in the company of other relatives. Some source material stated that Nyleen reportedly walked away from Kim and Nancy, maybe without permission or something. But other articles I found indicated that she was allowed to go play with the group of kids by the creek, but because she was younger, she just sort of fell behind. But either way, what's undisputed is that she was not within eyesight of her mom and stepdad for a period of time. Not long after realizing she was missing, Nancy and Kim contacted the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, and eventually other agencies like the FBI got involved to help look for Nyleen. She was described as white with blue eyes, brown hair, and weighed roughly 28 pounds. She had a chip in her upper right front tooth
6:05 Speaker 03 and a small mole above her right eye. She also had noticeable dimples on each cheek, which, if you look at a picture of her, which is on the blog post for this episode, you'll see exactly what I mean. Her precious face is just the epitome of a sweet little girl.
6:22 Speaker 03 The sheriff's office wasted no time assembling a full-scale search for her, and even tag teamed with the Lewis and Clark County Search and Rescue Organization, which specialized in searching for missing people in rugged terrain. Together, the agencies dispatched hundreds of searchers and volunteers into the hillsides and woods around where Nyleen had last been seen. One man who took part in the search effort told KRTV's News Mackenzie Frost that he and other volunteers walked arms-length away from each other across huge search grids, looking for any trace of Nyleen. Unfortunately, though, teams didn't have any luck that Saturday evening. In the following days, authorities checked out old mine shafts and utilized search dogs, infrared sensors, divers, helicopters, and airplanes.
7:07 Speaker 03 But again, nothing surfaced. It was as if Nyleen had vanished into thin air. After five days of searching, things were not looking good. Temperatures in the forest had started to drop, and rain and snow had fallen on the ground. Hope that Nyleen could survive such conditions was dwindling. KRTV News reported that she'd been in a yellow t-shirt and shorts and was barefoot when she disappeared, so not exactly ideal clothing for surviving winter weather outdoors. From the start, the information law enforcement had to work with was scant. They mostly relied on what other kids who'd been playing with Nyleen remembered seeing during those last few moments she was accounted for.
7:49 Speaker 03 According to what Nancy, Nyleen's mother, told Unsolved Mysteries, two girls playing in the same area as Nyleen said they'd walked by her while she was sitting alone by the creek. As they passed her, they noticed a man in a purple-colored jogging suit step out from behind a tree and start talking to her. One of the girls said she didn't recognize the man, which to me indicates he probably wasn't part of the group of families that were hanging out together. But anyway, the girl who didn't recognize the jogger also said she'd overheard Nyleen say to him, quote, "My brother can run faster than you," end quote. Shortly after that sighting, another young girl said she'd also walked past Nyleen and the mystery man and saw him get closer to Nyleen.
8:32 Speaker 03 And if that wasn't enough eyewitness information, there was yet another kid, a six-year-old boy who'd seen Nyleen right before she disappeared. He told authorities that Nyleen had told him that the man in the jogging suit had told her, quote, "Follow the shadow," end quote.
8:49 Speaker 03 And then, that was it. Nyleen was never seen again.
8:55 Speaker 03 According to the available source material, everyone in the group of people Nyleen's family was with were folks that the Marshals knew. So, the mystery man in the jogging suit who no one could peg as a person involved in the picnic event was definitely someone law enforcement keyed in on as suspicious. Especially if they were dealing with a possible abduction scenario. There was one article I saw in the Wisconsin State Journal that reported a Forest Service road was apparently near the spot where Nyleen was last seen, which might indicate there was at least one route that a potential abductor could have gotten into the area fairly undetected. But this wasn't a detail I saw repeated in a majority of the source material. So I don't know for sure, like, how visible or close this road was to her last known location.
9:40 Speaker 03 But what I do know is that none of the reporting indicates that like a suspicious vehicle was seen in the area, which is something you'd expect if a kidnapper had driven a car to the crime scene. Anyway, what's kind of interesting to me is that several days into the search, authorities made a fairly bold announcement and told reporters that they were leaning towards ruling out abduction or foul play because they believed where Nyleen vanished from was just too remote of an area for someone to kidnap her without anyone in her family's friend group noticing. On July 4th, which would have been nine days after she vanished, authorities called off the search entirely. In a statement that one of his deputies read to the press over the phone, the Sheriff of Jefferson County stated, quote, "We have continued the search
10:25 Speaker 03 as long as there has been a reasonable chance that Nyleen would be found alive. After conferring with medical authorities throughout the nation, a decision was made to wind the search down. Heavy rains and low temperatures have made the youngster's survival virtually impossible, according to the medical experts." End quote. But some folks who'd helped out in the search weren't ready to call it quits so quickly. According to an article by the Associated Press, a guy named Jack McFarlane, who was just someone who lived in a town a few hours away and volunteered to look for Nyleen, said that he just couldn't walk away from the case because he felt, deep down, that she was still out there alive somewhere. His familiarity with the Elkhorn Mountains either from
11:08 Speaker 03 before or during the search for Nyleen caused him to think that there might be enough berries and fresh water available for her to survive on, which feels like a bit of a stretch to me, but I get it. Jack just didn't want to give up. He told the Associated Press that it was difficult for him to just abandon the search and that if he quit, it was like he was letting Nyleen down. Jack spearheaded his own effort to gather local volunteers to keep searching, but unfortunately, they didn't have any success in locating Nyleen. According to Emily Thompson's coverage for morbidology in a blog called Lost and Found, at some point, authorities were able to create a composite sketch of the suspicious man who'd been seen talking to Nyleen. The blog said that a hypnotist helped pull info from
11:53 Speaker 03 the sketch out of folks who'd been near the creek the day she disappeared. But I have to also assume this image came as a result of law enforcement working with the kids who'd seen the jogging suit guy. However, I'm not 100% sure because the source material that's out there doesn't say this specifically. But what I do know is that eventually the composite sketch was distributed to the public and investigators got a few leads from it. The image reportedly led authorities to look at a man who was wanted out of state for child molestation and grand larceny, as well as a number of other guys who were wanted for anything from abduction to murder to crimes associated with child sexual abuse material. Not good stuff. One of these reported persons of interest even had a photo in his apartment of a girl who looked like Nyleen
12:38 Speaker 03 and appeared to have been beaten. But ultimately, the child in the photo was ruled out as being the missing four-year-old. And it seems like investigators also ruled out the men as suspects, despite how well they fit the profile of a potential abductor in Nyleen's case. In October, four months after she disappeared, Nyleen's picture was featured in a nationally broadcast television program alongside nine photos of other missing children from the United States. But unfortunately, it didn't drum up any new leads for investigators.
13:10 Speaker 03 Meanwhile, the rest of Nyleen's family had to move on, but they never stopped wondering what had happened to her. Her older brother often expressed to his parents that he missed Nyleen, a lot, and wished he could still play with her. Like I mentioned earlier, at the time Nyleen vanished, he was six years old, and their younger sister was only 22 months old.
13:32 Speaker 03 In October 1985, more than two years after Nyleen disappeared, a new law went into effect that required law enforcement agencies to react more quickly to reports of missing children and get information about those cases over to the US Justice Department's Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit Montana office. According to an article by Eric Williams for The Independent Record, in 1985, there were only five missing school-age kids from Montana on the national list of missing children in the entire US. After the new legislation went into effect, law enforcement investigators were required to send all reports of missing children to the federal government. State officials would then send monthly reports about the kids to all of the schools in the state.
14:15 Speaker 03 The law also required schools to get in touch with a student's parents if they were a no-show at school. Which, like, how that was not already a thing, I don't know, but I guess it was the 80s, and of course, my millennial brain thought basic procedures like this would have already been in place, but clearly, they were not. Anyway, throughout the rest of the 1980s, Nyleen's photo and information were continuously circulated in newspapers across the country and featured on milk cartons, but very few credible tips came in. Then, in June of 1990, one of Nyleen's uncles told authorities that he'd seen a composite sketch of a man and a woman who were wanted in another state for child abduction. And he believed he recognized them
14:58 Speaker 03 as two people who may have been a part of the initial search for Nyleen back in late June to early July of 1983. I imagine investigators looked into this lead, but it doesn't seem like it amounted to much, because those two folks were never named as suspects and no arrests were ever made. I don't even know if these two people were even identified or arrested for the child abduction they were alleged to have done, at least not from the available source material. Then, in late November 1990, five months after Nyleen's uncle came forward, Unsolved Mysteries aired its episode about her case, which featured interviews with Nancy, her mother, and the undersheriff of Jefferson County. And it was the new information revealed in that segment that changed everything about the case.
15:47 Speaker 00 When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect...
15:51 Speaker 01 Stop. This is Simply Safe. Police are on the way.
15:54 Speaker 00 Using smart AI cameras, live US-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Don't just record a break-in, stop it from ever happening. Plans starting around $1 a day. Right now, get 70% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplysafe.com/truecrime.
16:11 Speaker 02 30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplysafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
16:18 Speaker 04 My name's Jack Wagner, host of Other World, a podcast featuring real people who experience something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained. I have no idea how I got there.
16:27 Speaker 05 I don't think I've ever seen anything that looks like this. It felt like Electric Star's on fire.
16:32 Speaker 04 I started Other World to take a grounded approach to the paranormal, help people tell their own stories, and encourage more to come forward. I certainly don't have the answers, but maybe one day we will. Join me as we explore our world's greatest mysteries. Listen to Other World now for free wherever you get your podcasts.
16:53 Speaker 03 According to what investigators told Unsolved Mysteries and an article in The Independent Record, on November 27, 1985, two and a half years after Nyleen disappeared, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had gotten a phone call from a man who said he'd abducted Nyleen. Two months later, in January 1986, the same guy reportedly sent a typewritten letter to the Child Find of America Organization claiming the same thing. According to what Jefferson County's undersheriff told Unsolved Mysteries, the man expressed that he was taking good care of Nyleen. However, he also alluded to sexually abusing her.
17:33 Speaker 03 The letter read in part, quote, "I picked Kay up on the road in the Elkhorn Park area between Helena and Boulder. She was crying and frightened, and as I held her, she was shaking, and I decided that I would keep her and love her. I took her home with me," he continued on. "She is a sweet little girl, and it is because how much I have grown to love her that I realize how much her family must miss her. But she has adjusted and seems happy. She trusts me and isn't afraid. We play a lot, and she laughs when we clown around. She smiles and acts coy when I tease her. She giggles when we snuggle and hugs me sometimes for no apparent reason. I love her, and I have her. I just can't
18:18 Speaker 03 let her go." End quote. Robert Stack reported for Unsolved Mysteries that the man who said he'd taken Nyleen referred to her by her middle name, Kay, instead of Nyleen, which makes sense with why in the letter, the suspect used the name Kay instead of Nyleen when talking about the girl he'd picked up on the side of the road. Anyway, the initial call to Nick Mc and the letter to the Child Find of America organization were followed by several more phone calls to authorities and Nyleen's parents, as well as additional letters. Investigators presumed that all of the writings and calls were coming from the same mystery man, but they just didn't know who the heck he was. At the time, the FBI was able to trace his calls and letters to post offices in Madison,
19:02 Speaker 03 Wisconsin, and a phone booth inside a pharmacy in the town of Edgerton. But Nancy Marshall told Unsolved Mysteries that as soon as the feds zeroed in on specific locations in those cities, the calls and letters abruptly ceased. An article by Denise Sanders for the Wisconsin State Journal reported that the FBI knew for sure that the last phone call made from a telephone booth in the Madison area occurred on May 9, 1986. A month later, in June 1986, the last letter postmarked from Madison was sent out, but another one never followed.
19:36 Speaker 03 The FBI also clarified to Denise Sanders that at least three letters had been mailed directly to Nyleen's mother and stepfather. So, just doing the math here because I know it's confusing, I think that makes at least six letters total that the alleged suspect sent out: three to the Child Find of America organization and three to Nyleen's parents. There might have also been more or less, but it's hard to tell from the source material. And then if you tally up the phone calls, there was at least one to Nick Mick and two others, so three total, maybe more? Again, there's not a ton of clarity on this, but I think the point is, whoever this guy was, if in fact the caller and the letter writer were the same person, he was definitely reaching out a lot.
20:20 Speaker 03 Which, to me, if it was just some sick person pulling a hoax, that's a pretty elaborate hoax to carry on with for such a long period of time. Plus, the level of detail in the letters that were mailed makes me wonder if this guy may have actually had Nyleen and truly was taunting her family and police to torment them. For example, the anonymous man claimed in one of his letters that his parents and younger sister had all died in a car accident when his sister was nine years old, which to me is pretty specific information that could have given away his true identity, but yet it was vague enough to keep investigators in the dark. He also talked about how he lived off an investment income, homeschooled Nyleen, and worked from home, which again is fairly specific information, but who knows?
21:05 Speaker 03 Maybe everything he claimed was made up and just a bunch of lies meant to throw off investigators. It was hard for law enforcement to know. The sheriff of Jefferson County explained to reporters that he even wondered if the person behind the anonymous letters and phone calls was legit. However, he couldn't let his own doubt stop his department from considering every possibility. But something that did apparently give credence to the letter writer was the fact that he reportedly included details about Nyleen's case that had not been publicized. None of the source material goes into detail about what exactly those details were, but apparently he claimed to know enough that authorities felt there was some legitimacy to his claims of having taken her. According to the Unsolved Mysteries episode that I mentioned earlier,
21:50 Speaker 03 the man who wrote the letter said he'd traveled frequently with Nyleen all across the country, to Canada, to Puerto Rico, and to Europe. So, who knows, maybe some of the reported sightings that Tipster's contacted authorities about were in fact credible. I mean, think about it. If Nyleen was really abducted by a stranger and then taken to a bunch of different states and countries as she grew older, then the sheriff's office getting a bunch of calls from people all over the country claiming they spotted her might have been legit. If she was constantly being moved around, then a lot of people would have likely seen her. Even more puzzling, the letter writer never asked for a ransom. In his messages to her family, he expressed that he was raising Nyleen as his own and had no plans to return her.
22:35 Speaker 03 One FBI agent told Denise Sanders that it was possible the kidnapper's motive was never about money. It could have been that he just wanted a kid of his own, and so he decided to steal someone else's. And honestly, if there is any credibility to the letters, I can kind of see the point that the FBI agent was making. For example, if you go back to that one sentence from the letter to the Child Find of America organization that stated, quote, "I realize how much her family must miss her, but I love her and I have her, I just can't let her go," end quote. That seems like a clear indication that the suspect was extremely possessive over her. After the Unsolved Mysteries episode aired in November 1990, at least 10 folks called
23:19 Speaker 03 into the sheriff's office within an hour of it being broadcast to report that they'd either seen Nyleen or wanted more photos of her so they could be on the lookout. What the producers of the TV program didn't know was that somewhere on the other side of the screen, a schoolteacher near Point Roberts Island, Washington, which sits along the US-Canada border, had seen Nyleen's picture and thought they recognized her. This teacher contacted the show, and within days, authorities located a 13-year-old girl on the remote island who looked a lot like Nyleen. But remember, this is late 1990 when this is happening, so Nyleen would have been about 12 years old at the time, aged more than seven years at this point. Unfortunately, law enforcement quickly learned that the 13-year-old girl from Point
24:03 Speaker 03 Roberts Island was Monica Bonilla, a girl from the Los Angeles area who'd been missing since September 1982. According to a piece by Linda Rappatoni for the Los Angeles Times and an article by Lisa Meister for the Independent Record, Monica's father had kidnapped her from her mother's house in California when she was just five years old. Growing up, he told her that her mother had died, and he started calling her by a different name. So for most of her life, Monica seemingly had no idea she was listed as a missing child. When all this came to a head, authorities arrested Monica's father for kidnapping and reunited her with her mother in California, who by that point had remarried and had another kid.
24:44 Speaker 03 Monica told the Los Angeles Times that she was thrilled to go home and meet her new sibling. Back in Montana, investigators working on Nyleen's case were disappointed the lead hadn't led them to Nyleen. But they were at least glad to know that Monica had been found and her mother's search for her was over. The Jefferson County Sheriff's Office and the FBI continued to follow up on hundreds of tips about Nyleen that were generated thanks to the Unsolved Mysteries segment. But several more months passed by before they got their next good lead. According to an article by Grant Sausick for the Independent Record, in August of 1991, eight years after Nyleen disappeared, a 42-year-old man named Richard James Wilson confessed
25:25 Speaker 03 to killing her, as well as another woman from the Great Falls, Montana area. Richard had been convicted of sexually assaulting a minor in 1984, so I imagine he checked a lot of boxes for authorities as far as suspects go. However, there was some concern that his so-called confession was not legit. He was reported to have a history of mental illness, and according to the sheriff's office, he'd begun to walk back some of his initial statements after coming forward. So investigators just weren't sure he was telling the truth when he claimed to have killed Nyleen and the other victim from Great Falls. Still, the sheriff's office investigated Richard's claims and even sent out search crews to excavate remote sites in Jefferson County and nearby Lewis and Clark
26:08 Speaker 03 County that he claimed he took Nyleen and his other victim to. Authorities were looking for evidence of human remains, and according to another article by Grant Sausick for the Independent Record, "Authorities explored a mineshaft near where Nyleen vanished and found some bones, but they appeared to belong to animals." To be extra sure, investigators sent off the bones for testing, but I couldn't find in the source material what the results of those tests were. All I know is that based on the coverage, they clearly did not belong to Nyleen because her case remains unsolved. Investigators also searched for remains associated with the other victim Richard claimed to have killed, but it doesn't seem like authorities located any evidence to support that story either.
26:51 Speaker 03 Eventually, Richard was released from custody because investigators couldn't charge him with a crime. They'd found no solid proof connecting him to Nyleen's case, or his other alleged victim's murder. The next lead that drummed up interest, at least for a short time, came in 1998, when a hospital nurse in New Orleans watched a rerun of the Unsolved Mysteries episode that had previously aired covering Nyleen's case. This nurse thought that Nyleen might have been a young woman who'd been admitted to the hospital she worked at two years earlier, in like 1996. According to the source material, the nurse remembered the girl because at the time, the patient was in her late teens, so right about the age Nyleen should have been. But the girl couldn't tell the hospital staff anything about herself.
27:36 Speaker 03 She'd only referred to herself by the name Helena, and claimed that her mother's name was Nyleen. When the nurses asked her about her upbringing, she claimed she'd been raised in a foreign country, but the staff noticed she didn't have an accent, so that fell off to them. To make things even stranger, an unidentified man had brought the pregnant girl in to have a baby, but when the nurses started asking questions about who they were and their medical histories, the pair had abruptly left the hospital. In 1998, when the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office learned all this information about the mystery couple, they got kind of excited. Investigators were eventually able to connect with the folks in New Orleans and track the mystery girl to Oklahoma City.
28:17 Speaker 03 She agreed to have her blood drawn and compared to Nyleen's birth father, but the results came back and definitively concluded that she was not Nyleen.
28:27 Speaker 03 After that, things went quiet once again. The case got colder and colder, until 2002. That's when investigators over a thousand miles away from Montana, in Madison, Wisconsin, decided they needed to take a closer look at things.
28:47 Speaker 00 When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect...
28:51 Speaker 01 Stop, this is Simply Safe. Police are on the way.
28:54 Speaker 00 Using smart AI cameras, live US-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Don't just record a break-in, stop it from ever happening. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 70% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplysafe.com/truecrime.
29:10 Speaker 02 30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplysafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
29:18 Speaker 04 My name's Jack Wagner, host of Other World, a podcast featuring real people who experience something paranormal, supernatural, or unexplained. I have no idea how I got there.
29:26 Speaker 05 I don't think I've ever seen anything that looks like this. It felt like electric stars on fire.
29:31 Speaker 04 I started Other World to take a grounded approach to the paranormal, help people tell their own stories, and encourage more to come forward. I certainly don't have the answers, but maybe one day we will. Join me as we explore our world's greatest mysteries. Listen to Other World now for free wherever you get your podcasts.
29:53 Speaker 03 Nineteen years after Nyleen disappeared from Montana, detectives with the Dane County Sheriff's Office in Wisconsin started digging into her case from their end of things. If you'll remember, in 1986, the FBI had successfully been able to trace a lot of those anonymous calls and letters that went to Nyleen's parents and missing children's organizations to Edgerton and Madison, Wisconsin. Well, because so much time had gone by and authorities hadn't learned much new information, Dane County detectives told WISC-TV that they suspected the reason for that was because Nyleen might have been living in their community all along, but she just didn't know her true identity. They surmised that she'd probably been given a new name or been called Kay most of her life.
30:39 Speaker 03 Because it was 2002 at that point, Nyleen would have been 23 years old. And thanks to advances in technology, a new computer-generated, age-progressed photo of her was created to give people an idea of what she would look like after so many years. Authorities encouraged Dane County residents to study that image and think of anyone they may have known growing up who resembled Nyleen's appearance. Behind the scenes, investigators also distributed confidential information about the case to area dentists and physicians, hoping that one of them may have had Nyleen—or Kay, as she might have been called—as a patient. An article in the Billings Gazette stated that, at the time, Nancy and Kim Marshall were no longer living in the U.S.
31:22 Speaker 03 They'd moved to Japan by 1994, but still occasionally kept in touch with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office about their daughter's unsolved case. Unfortunately, despite law enforcement's renewed efforts in 2002, they were never able to determine whether Nyleen had been taken by someone or just gotten lost. The sheriff of Jefferson County had previously told the Missoulian, quote, "No clothes, no body, no bones. There was also nothing in the way of positive evidence to say she was abducted," end quote. According to the Charlie Project, at one point, authorities considered the possibility that Nyleen's stepfather, Kim, might have been involved in what happened to her. But there was no evidence discovered that proved that theory, and honestly, I couldn't
32:04 Speaker 03 find much in the way of credible research material that went into detail about that part of the story. Brian Myers reported for The Grunge that Kim was eventually cleared as a suspect, but I have no idea how. Other sources talked a little bit about how Nyleen's birth father, Bill Briscoe, was never a part of her life, and he and Nancy divorced shortly after she was born. But there was nothing that reported on if there were any issues between Bill, Kim, Nancy, and Nyleen—or Nyleen's six-year-old brother, who'd also come from Nancy's previous relationship.
32:36 Speaker 03 In a bizarre twist, Nancy herself ended up becoming a murder victim in July 1995. Articles by Carolyn Farley and Leslie McCartney for The Independent Record, as well as that blog I mentioned earlier called "Lost and Found," explain that she was found sexually assaulted, beaten, and strangled in a hotel bedroom in Mexico City, Mexico. The source material reported that the reason Nancy was even in Mexico in the first place was because the marshals were planning to move there from Japan for Kim's job. She'd gone ahead of them to scout out places to live. Mexican authorities initially ruled her death as a suicide. However, Kim really pushed back on that conclusion. He hired a private investigator to do more digging and discovered that Nancy's hotel
33:19 Speaker 03 door had been kicked in, her hands had been tied behind her back, and a bottle of perfume, a wristwatch, and her wedding ring were all missing. Initially, Kim had to agree with the suicide ruling to get his wife's body back to the U.S. for burial. But as Leslie McCartney reported, Nancy's manner of death was eventually relabeled to "undetermined" or "under investigation." To date, though, it doesn't appear that law enforcement in Mexico has ever resolved it. Nancy's sister, Miki, told The Independent Record that she never believed Nancy died by suicide. She said that she would have never left her two other children by choice. As truly wild as the circumstances of Nancy's death are, it doesn't appear that whatever
34:01 Speaker 03 happened to her has been formally connected in any way to Nyleen's missing person case. In 2017, the sheriff of Jefferson County told KXLH News Helena that investigators from his department had re-interviewed at length the people who were with Nyleen and her parents on the day she disappeared, but nothing new has been uncovered. He also said that deputies have been back out to the Elkhorn Mountains over the years to excavate sites of interest, do runs with cadaver dogs, and conduct additional searches for body parts or remains. But they've never found anything they can definitively link to Nyleen's case. He outright said he thought Nyleen was probably dead, which I'm inclined to agree with, simply because of how much time has passed and the fact that there's been no sign of her.
34:47 Speaker 03 In that interview Nancy did with Unsolved Mysteries before she died, she said that everywhere she went, she always searched for her missing daughter. She said, quote, "I still look for her. I always will. Every time I'm at an airport, every time I'm at a resort, every time I'm at an amusement park. Sure, I look like I'm having a good time, but I'm looking for my child every minute that I'm out." End quote. I've heard that same thing echoed by other families I've worked with in my career who have a missing kid or loved one. They constantly find themselves looking into the faces of total strangers, wondering, "What if? What if that's my child? What if that's them,
35:28 Speaker 03 but just five, 10, 20 years older than I remember them?" I can't imagine how exhausting and heartbreaking that must be. The only thing I can hope for is that somewhere, somehow, Nancy and Nyleen have been reunited. Maybe they're finally both at rest. If you know anything about the disappearance of Nyleen Kay Marshall from 1983, or grew up with a young woman who went by the name Kay, who would be about 46 years old today, please contact the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office in Montana, or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Information for both of those entities is on the blog post for this episode and in the show notes.
36:14 Speaker 03 Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, @parkpredators.
36:31 Speaker 03 So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?
36:39 Speaker 06 One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.
36:59 Speaker 07 It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.
37:06 Speaker 06 Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived. Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.
37:17 Speaker 08 That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.
37:22 Speaker 09 I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?
37:27 Speaker 06 I'm Ava Kaufman. "The Journey" is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.
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