Without a Trace—The Disappearance of 4-Year-Old Nyleen Kay Marshall

Nyleen Kay Marshall was only a few months shy of her fifth birthday when she disappeared while at a ham radio gathering with her family and others at a campground in the Elkhorn Mountains in Helena, Montana.

Nyleen’s parents, Billy and Nancy Briscoe, were divorced not long after her birth. Nancy later remarried a man named Kim Marshall and he adopted Nyleen and her older brother, Nathan. Three years later, the couple had a third daughter, Noreen. The five members of the Marshall family seemed incredibly happy in their life together.

Then the unthinkable happened. On June 25, 1983, at around 4 p.m., Nyleen was playing with other children in a meadow near the beaver dams on Maupin Creek. She grew tired and sat down by the dams, perhaps hoping to see the beavers come out, and the other kids continued to play in the water and chase frogs. When they checked on her a few minutes later, she was gone. They quickly reported that they couldn’t find her to the adults and everyone began to look for her.

Police were called to the scene. They conducted an extensive search of the campground and along the creek where Nyleen had last been seen. The police soon had help from the FBI, volunteers, and members of the Marshall’s church to help search the area, including some abandoned mine shafts nearby. They called cadaver dogs and divers for the deeper parts of the creek and nearby ponds but came up empty-handed. After ten days of searches that sometimes stretched into overnight shifts of volunteers, the weather began to turn bad, and they were forced to abandon their search.

It wasn’t initially believed that Nyleen might have been abducted as the location wasn’t in the more populated part of the park. It was remote and the only people there were the members of Kim’s ham radio club the family had joined for a picnic that day. Everyone present was questioned and dismissed as a suspect, but when police spoke with the children, several of them claimed to have seen a man in a purple jogging suit near the creek that day. Two said he had attempted to speak to them and they’d moved away, but one reported having seen Nyleen speaking to him not long before she came up missing.

Though some of the authorities researching the case believed Nyleen had merely wandered off and succumbed to the elements in a place where’d they’d not been able to find her, others continued to hold on to a belief that she was abducted and may still be out there somewhere, even today. Because she disappeared wearing no more than a t-shirt and shorts without her shoes on and no evidence was found to show she’d somehow met her fate in the area surrounding the meadow, the case was treated as an abduction.

Nyleen’s disappearance was widely reported on the news and even featured on Unsolved Mysteries and covered by Nancy Grace.

On November 7, 1985, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) received a call from a man who claimed he abducted a girl named “Kay”. Two months later, a typewritten letter was sent to police in Wisconsin by an unknown male who claimed he had picked up Nyleen and included information about her abduction that had not been released to the public.

The author of the letter claimed he had a steady investment income and worked from home. He claimed he had been able to homeschool Nyleen. He also claimed to have traveled extensively with her, even overseas. Though he acknowledged that he knew her family missed her, he said he loved her and would not be returning her. The letter was postmarked from Madison, Wisconsin.

Around this same time, an unknown caller who claimed to have written the letter began calling Child Find of America, a national missing children’s non-profit in New York. Police were able to trace the calls to several phone booths, one near a pharmacy in Edgerton, Wisconsin. In the calls and the previous letter, the man made comments that eluded to the fact that he may have sexually abused Nyleen.

In the calls and the letter, the man said he had picked up Nyleen on the road in the Elkhorn Park area between Helena and Boulder. He claimed that she was scared and crying as he held her and that he decided he’d keep her. He said he took her home with him to love her. He said he had cut her hair and that it was now short and curly. He commented on how much she’d grown, saying she was now about 45 inches tall and weighed about 50 pounds. He said that she had all four of her permanent upper and two of her lower incisors now and mentioned that she bathed and brushed her teeth every day. He mentioned that she always ate well and loved pizza.

Police have never been able to track down the letter or identify the person who wrote it. It is not even known if it is the same person who made the phone calls. Though police indicated that some of the information he provided wasn’t made public, others have suggested nothing he said was specific enough that he couldn’t have simply guessed at it and got it right.

At some point after the letters and phone calls, a witness reported seeing a girl who resembled Nyleen at a restaurant in Janesville, Wisconsin. Another man claimed to have murdered Nyleen and disposed of her body in a mine shaft near Helena. The mine shaft was searched and nothing was found. It has since been sealed off and the man admitted lying about having any part in her disappearance.

After the case aired on Unsolved Mysteries in 1990, a tip came in from a teacher who believed Nyleen was one of her students in Bellingham, Washington. Further investigation revealed that the girl was not Nyleen, but she was missing. Police were able to recover Monica Bonilla, who had been kidnapped from Burbank, California, by her non-custodial father in 1982.

In 1994, the Marshall family relocated from Montana to Japan for Kim’s work, but the following year he was transferred once again. This time to Mexico. While Kim finished up things in Japan, Nancy flew to Mexico to look at possible houses. Kim was already at the airport getting ready to fly out and meet his wife when he received a phone call that she had been found dead. She had gone out with friends the night before and said to be in good spirits.

The following day, she was discovered hanging from a shower rod with her hands tied behind her back in her Radisson Paraiso Hotel room in Mexico City. She was bruised and beaten. Her wedding ring, watch and a bottle of perfume were missing, but the valuables in her safe were untouched. It was determined that her hotel room had been kicked in.

Initially, the Mexican authorities recorded her death as a suicide, but Kim Marshall hired a private investigator who gathered enough information to force them to investigate the case further. His frustration with their lack of progress on the case led him to contact the U.S. State Department. They advised that he drop his attempts to push for a murder investigation as it would mean Mexico would hold Nancy’s body there while the case was ongoing.

Despite his wife’s death being an obvious murder, Kim dropped his attempts to have it properly investigated in order to retrieve her body for burial, refusing to “let her body rot in a Mexican morgue.” Mexico dropped their investigation and released the body to him. She was buried in Texas.

In 1997, a 19-year-old woman came into a New Orleans hospital with an unidentified man. She called herself Helena and was seeking admission for childbirth. She said that she thought her mother may have been named Nyleen and that she had grown up outside the United States, but the nurse who reported the encounter said she had no trace of an accent. Further questions about identity and medical history resulted in the couple quickly leaving the hospital.

Eventually, the couple was tracked down and the woman agreed to give a DNA sample to prove the woman wasn’t Nyleen. It was compared to a sample from Nyleen’s biological father and though no further information came out about it, we can only assume it wasn’t a match from the lack of closure in the case.

This was the last time anyone reported a sighting of someone they thought might be Nyleen Kay Marshall. There are still no substantial leads in the case. We may never really know if Nyleen was truly abducted or if she just wandered off and met a yet undiscovered fate. Either way, it is a tragedy for all who knew and loved her.