McCormick (17:27)

Look around. You can find cars like these on autotrader. New cars, used cars, electric cars, maybe even flying cars. Okay, no flying cars. But as soon as they get invented, they'll be on autotrader. Just you wait. Autotrader.

Comcast Business (17:49)

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. The letter read in part, 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 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 NCMEC 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, 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. 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 Mik 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. 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? 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, 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. 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 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 U.S. 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 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 Rapatoni 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'd 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. Monica told the Los Angeles Times that she was thrilled to go home and meet her new sibling back in Montana. Investigators working on Nylene's case were disappointed the lead hadn't led them to Nylene. 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 Sosik for the Independent Record, In August of 1991, eight years after Nyleen disappeared, a 42 year old man named Richard James Wilson confessed 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 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 Sossek for the Independent Record, authorities explored a mine shaft 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. 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 Nylene should have been. But the girl couldn't tell the hospital staff anything about herself. 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 felt 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. 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. After that, things went quiet. Once again, the case got colder and colder until 2002. That's when investigators over 1,000 miles away from Montana in Madison, Wisconsin, decided they needed to take a closer look at things.

Delia D'Ambra (29:43)

For over 130 years, McCormick has helped you make mom's lasagna to keep her secret recipe alive, take over taco night no matter how chaotic your day is, Conquer the bake sale, even if you get to it last minute. And craft the perfect Sunday brunch when it's not even Sunday. Because with McCormick by your side, it's gonna be great.

Comcast Business (30:19)

19 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 in 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 Nylene 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 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. 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 is 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 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 Nylene, or Nylene's six year old brother, who'd also come from Nancy's previous relationship. 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, explained 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 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 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 US 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 Mickey 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 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 reinterved at length the people who were with Nylene 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. 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, but just 5, 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 K. 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. Park Predators is an Audio Chuck 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. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve.