CLANCY — It’s a parent’s nightmare—your child is missing. For the family of 4-year-old Nyleen Marshall, that nightmare started almost 43 years ago, and continues today.
It was June 25, 1983, Nancy and Kim Marshall and their children went to a ham radio gathering with others in the Elkhorn Mountains in the Clancy area. Nyleen was playing with other kids, and was last seen by beaver dams on Maupin Creek - and then she vanished.
WATCH: Still missing - where is Nyleen Marshall?
“In 1983 in Jefferson County, things like this just didn’t happen,” former Jefferson County Sheriff Craig Doolittle said.
The search started quickly, people fanned out, combing the thick woods dotted with mine shafts. At the time, Doolittle was working for a friend, logging just away from the area.
“I was aware that it had happened,” he recalled. “I was aware there were a lot of people there searching.”
But, searchers turned up nothing—no pieces of Nyleen’s clothing, no signs of an animal attack.
“I think what bothers me is the lack of any kind of evidence,” Derek VanLuchene said.
VanLuchene understands the pain of a missing family member. When he was 17, his eight-year old brother Ryan was kidnapped and murdered.
“I think every case involving a missing child sticks with me,” VanLuchene said. “Ones that I consult on or help out on, they stick with me.”
Today, VanLuchene works for the National Criminal Justice Training Center. He travels across the country and sets up child abduction response teams to help communities if a child goes missing.
Before that, from 1998 to 2010, VanLuchene was with the Montana Division of Criminal Investigation. In 1999, he was a state investigator on the Nyleen Marshall case.
“It’s pretty humbling to sit there and go through other people’s work and realize that this child has been missing a long time,” VanLuchene said. “Somewhere in that case file is probably the answer.”
There were a lot of resources put into Nyleen’s case, from the beginning with search and rescue teams, dogs and draining the swampy areas around where she was last seen, to years and decades later.
Doolittle was the Jefferson County Sheriff from 2002 to 2022, and the case did not just sit on a shelf during his tenure.
“We worked with the FBI during that, we worked with the state division of criminal investigation on tips and other things that we had got,” he said. “We went through the case file pretty regularly. I had a detective basically assigned to it with the new tips that would come in.”
From February 10, 2017:
Just a few years ago, two investigators from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) Team Adam—a group of retired law enforcement professionals—traveled to Jefferson County to review the case.
“They spent a week going through everything we had on hand,” Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Detective Capt. Chad Cross said. “They read through the entire case file, they looked at everything that had been saved and generated. They looked at the physical evidence we have to see if there were modern evidence processing techniques we could try on anything we had left over.”
So far, no new leads have come from that case review, but tips still do come in. Cross said he probably gets about 10 tips per year, even decades removed from Nyleen’s disappearance.
“It’s not closed, and we review and look at information as it comes in,” Cross said.
People go missing, but often they’re found. Cases like Nyleen’s, unsolved after nearly 43 years, are rare, but organizations like NCMEC deal with these kinds of cases regularly.
“Every missing date anniversary, every birthday that’s been missed, every holiday that’s been missed, you can imagine the emotional rollercoaster these families go through and the struggles they have just coming to grips with their child is not where they should be,” NCMEC Missing Children Division Vice President John Bischoff said.
So, where could Nyleen be?
“I haven’t really ever settled on an answer to that,” Cross said. “There’s times I think that she could still be up in the Elkhorns. Then, I’ll get a chance to look at something or review something or get another bit of that and I’m like, well, maybe she was abducted.”
It has been decades, but the answers—and Nyleen—could still be out there.
“We’re an organization built on hope,” Bischoff said. “We’ve seen kids come home after long periods of time.”
Finding those answers would mean closure for Nylons family, for those close to the case, and beyond.
“It affected the community quite extensively, you know this could happen in my backyard,” Doolittle said. “They all had a part in that and wanted to help in any way they could.”
Any information is still helpful, and Cross encourages tipsters to be as specific as possible and leave contact information so he can follow up.
If you know anything, you can contact Cross at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office at 406-225-4075, or via email at ccross@jeffersoncounty-mt.gov.
To find resources and information about missing children in your area, visit the NCMEC website.
