Jade Colvin is Missing

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0:38We're looking for this missing girl. Her name is Jade Colvin. She was a sweet little ray of sunshine. She's just an angel, a doll. This is a cold case that could just sit there and no one let it. Jade went missing June 10th of 2016. At the time, she was 14 years old. But she comes off as much older. She's super cool, super smart, so interesting. This one tugged at my heartstrings. We have families, we have kids, some of us have daughters. You don't get to go home and turn off Jade Colvin. There were so many people that were involved in this. Lead detective, special agent. Deputy U.S. Marshal. I'm a detective.

1:25Everybody came together to figure out what happened to Jade. I first met her through one of my best friends, and we were inseparable from that moment. We just always had a dumb good time wherever we were. She loved doing her hair. She was really great at colors. She was very artsy, had great style. They were just like sisters. I don't think Jade had an easy life. Her mom would disappear for periods of time. She was put in foster care. Jay just really hated it. She ran away. She kind of went from state to state, place to place. It was just hard to keep up with where she was. But she always, always, always just would check in.

2:13And then one random day, just nothing ever again. Weeks went by, then it's months, then it's years. Once I was assigned this case, every trace of her was gone. When we initially adopted the case, she had been listed as a runaway. How do you know at this point, is this a runaway or is this somebody took her? We didn't know. Jade's digital footprint last landed in Decorah, Iowa. Really remote area that she did not know. She was there for several days and was never seen again. The last place Jade was living was here. Absolutely. The house was straight on this driveway. There's a lot of places to look for a young girl here.

3:05I mean, where did you even begin? It's a needle in a haystack, I said. Who are the last people that were around her? Who lived in the same house or who was at the same place? We don't know where loyalties and alliances lie at this point. We got a lot of tips. From Massachusetts to Oklahoma to Texas to Minnesota. My goal was always like, oh, we're going to find this girl. That was the hope every day. We never forgot about her and just always wondered where she was. I was afraid something bad had happened. I would have never in a million years thought it would come to this.

3:50Natalie Morales reports. Jade Colvin is missing.

3:59Why is that not going on? I myself have thought of Jade several times. There we go. When not at work. You get to do the eggs. I think of my own children. Whoa! If you went a day not knowing where one of your kids was at, very careful, you'd go crazy. Cheryl Nablo, mother of three, is a detective with the Des Moines, Iowa Police Department. She specializes in finding missing kids. Nobody wants to be living in a world where they don't know where their kid is or if their kid's safe. In 2022, Detective Nablo joined forces with Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace, Detective Chris Webker, and Special Agent John Turbitt in the search for Jade Colvin.

4:45Jade was 14 when she was reported missing in June 2016, after she ran away from a local shelter for troubled youth. We are here to locate kids who run away. The U.S. Marshals Service had adopted Jade's case as part of a statewide effort to find missing children, called Operation Homecoming. What are the challenges in finding missing children? When somebody goes missing, they want to be missing. They don't want you to know where they are. It's hard to track them down. At that point, Jade had been missing for more than five years. Where do you begin? You got to start at the beginning. You got to know who the person is, their friends, their family, their whole background.

5:32And they soon discovered Jade had a troubled childhood. Jade had a rough go of it growing up. Things weren't the easiest for her. Detective Nablo learned Jade's mother, LaDawn, had died three years after Jade went missing. So I couldn't just reach out to her and talk to her about everything that she knew about Jade. Jade's father, Kevin, had lost contact with his daughter. Both parents had struggled with substance abuse, something Special Agent John Turbitt explains had an impact on Jade. Jade Colvin grew up with, I think, a pretty dysfunctional family situation. It was difficult. She didn't hold any of it.

6:17She just accepted it for, like, what it was and dealt with it and didn't let it get to her negatively. Loved her to death. Spent every day together. Despite everything, friend Dane Lynn Greer and her mother, Jamie Koopman, described Jade as easygoing and upbeat. There was reason she could have been angry and she wasn't. Like she was very light, light and bubbly. I met her mom. Her mom was very unreliable. She kept telling me, oh, how much she loves Jade and all that. You know, and I believe she did. Don't get me wrong. But she just couldn't make the choice for stability. She couldn't overcome her own demons.

7:05Her mom definitely cared about her. I think her mother loved her. The state determined at some point that she was not able to care for her. In September 2015, when Jade was 13, the Iowa Department of Human Services stepped in. And Deputy Justin Wallace says LaDawn lost custody. That's when they took Jade into foster care. For the next nine months, Jade was in and out of different facilities and foster care. And she often ran away. Runaway, been found. Runaway, been found several times. Jade is doing what some other kids do. She's running away from the system. She's not wanting to be placed in a stranger's home.

7:47When Jade was placed in foster care, LaDawn would have limited access to her. And she wanted more. She wanted Jade to live with her. But without legal custody, Jamie Koopman says LaDawn resorted to trying to hide her daughter from authorities. I think she was just trying to hide out to stay with her mom or to stay where her mom could visit. Her mom tried to keep her out of the police spotlight, just trying to hide her out different places. And according to her aunt, Tandra Bruce, Jade became good at hiding. She would change her hair. She would change her appearance. So she really knew how to run away and hide.

8:30She did. She really did. At that point, Jade was caught in the middle of a mother trying to do her best, who arranged stays with friends and family, and being placed in foster care, but often living as a runaway. I felt so bad. I felt horrible. Did you tell her, you can come here anytime? I did. Call me, whatever you need. I did. Call me and I'll be here for you. She was jumping all over for a while, so it was hard to track her. The Iowa Department of Human Services lost track of Jade after she ran away from that shelter in June 2016. I had hoped that she was out there somewhere and she would get a hold of somebody eventually.

9:15And then there is nothing. Investigators learned Jade's family and friends spent years searching for her online. We saw in social media accounts that friends and family were trying to reach out to her and continue to look for her. Everybody is reaching out to her at her birthday saying, we love you, we miss you, we just want you back home. Every year I'd go on Facebook, happy birthday, Jade, please call me. We still love her. Anytime she wants to come home, it doesn't matter what kind of trouble you got yourself into. I thought she'd pop back up. We just wanted her to know we were there for her.

9:56According to Deputy Justin Wallace, Jade's mother, LaDawn, also posted. She misses her and wants her to come back. Posts like this one from September 2018. It's hurting all of us so much. Please call someone, Jade. I'm seriously physically dying of a broken heart. There was no response to any of those. And when Jade's mother died a year later, there was still no response. LaDawn passed away. She never came to the funeral. She never showed up at the funeral. She would have been there. Jade's family and friends still held hope Jade would surface when she turned 18 and would be free of foster care.

10:38I had hoped she had run away and was laying low, and we thought when she turned 18, when it was safe, she would get a hold of us again. And when her 18th birthday came around and she didn't get a hold of us, we knew. We knew something was very wrong. As Detective Nablo and Deputy Wallace worked to find Jade, they got help from state and national organizations that shared these missing posters on social media. That was huge. That's when a lot of tips started coming in. And there would be a potential break in the investigation, a tip from a hospital worker in Minnesota. We're not too far away from Iowa.

11:20There's this girl. We think maybe that's Jade.

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12:29We wanted to chase every single lead, every single tip as far as we could. And when Des Moines PD Detective Cheryl Nablo got a tip Jade Colvin might have been in a hospital in Red Wing, Minnesota, she was hopeful. A staff member had observed a female come into the hospital, and the person that she was with was kind of controlling the conversation. It drew suspicion. They thought it maybe looked like Jade. So there was follow-up done to get the video footage to try to figure out who that person was. When you have a lead, you work your lead until you either prove it's Jade or prove it's false. And ultimately, I was able to identify who that person was.

13:15And it was not Jade. Additional tips poured in from all over the country. You know, ranging from Massachusetts to Oklahoma to Texas, people were definitely paying attention. Look at that. Are those all the leads that you explored and the different ways you went about the investigation? Yeah, it's a lot of leads. It felt like each tip was hope, right? because like she could have been out there. The first big break in the case came when Detective Nablo was able to figure out where Jade had gone after she ran away from that shelter in June 2016. Detective Nablo had obtained search warrants and got access to Jade's social media.

14:00Instagram messages from March 2017 caught her attention. You can see where her mom is coming to get her in Arizona. I just talked to mom, Jade wrote to her friend Dane Lynn. She's coming next week. I'm in Arizona right now, Jade wrote to another friend. I should be back in Iowa today or tomorrow. Detective Nablo learned Jade had been staying in Arizona for several months, and it seemed LaDawn was going to bring her back to Iowa. Detective Nablo also got access to LaDawn's accounts, and on her Facebook, there was a message mentioning the town of Decorah. Decorah is just a small, rural, Midwest Iowa town.

14:46As Detective Nablo combed through LaDawn's Facebook, she saw messages LaDawn had sent to Jade and uncovered a clue, a mention of someone named James. Investigators learned James was James Bachmerski, a man Ladawn had been dating for several months. Ladawn and him met online. He began a romantic relationship. Ladawn would go and stay with him occasionally. I think at one point he was living with him. Deputy Justin Wallace found out James Buckmerski owned a farm in Decorah, Iowa, and had two sons, Brian, age 19, and James Jr., age 21. Investigators gained access to voice messages LaDawn had sent Jade detailing a plan for her daughter to stay at the farm while she lived three hours away, dealing with some legal issues.

15:43You're going to live here until you are probably 18 and able to get out of the system if I don't already have you out of the system. And you'll have a good life, baby. It's what I want. I love you. It was just a temporary, I'm going to get right with the court and then Jay can come live with me. How big a lead is that? Or are you thinking we've got a break in this case? Yeah, it was huge. I remember going over to the U.S. Marshals office and they were excited. The marshals reached out to local law enforcement near the Buckmerski farm for help talking to the family. And that's when Detective Chris Webger from the Winnisheek County Sheriff's Office officially joined the team.

16:27First of all, Decorah, I mean, where are we? What is this town known for? God's country. It is God's country. It's in northeast Iowa, kind of way up in the top corner. So tell me about getting the call to first, you know, start the investigation into this young missing girl, Jade Colvin. Who called you? So we received a call from the U.S. Marshals, and they reached out to us and said, Hey, do you guys know the Bachmerskies? Can you guys help us go and talk to them? And so that's ultimately where we started. The goal was to talk to them and say, Hey, look, we're looking for this missing girl. Her name is Jade Colvin, and your names were brought up in social media.

17:10What can you tell us about her?" They found Brian Bachmerski first. According to Detective Webker, Brian confirmed Jade had been at the farm. Her mother dropped her off and left. A few days after she arrived, Brian and Jade had lunch at this pizza ranch and took several photos together.

17:38So right here, this booth? Yep. I mean, you look at this photo, and you see, you know, she has a genuine smile. And it seems like they're, you know, sort of goofy face, like having fun with each other. They got along. Teenage kids and everything, and yeah, absolutely. Brian told investigators he didn't know what happened to Jade. He said the last time he saw her was two days after their lunch at Pizza Ranch, around 10 p.m., before he said he worked the night shift at Walmart. Brian claimed he texted with Jade until just after midnight, when she suddenly stopped responding. Deputy Wallace wasn't convinced by Brian's story.

18:25There were several of us thought that we probably weren't getting all the information out of them. That included Detective Webger. There's something that doesn't feel right about this as to what's going on. And there was something else that troubled Detective Webger. That was the last time that she ever had any from Facebook, from Instagram, from Snapchat. She never had another digital footprint again. And for a teenage girl, how unusual is that? Extremely unusual. How could Jade seemingly disappear without a trace? According to Deputy Wallace, LaDawn thought it was unusual, too, and she went to the farm to confront James.

19:07We were able to interview one of the friends who said she drove LaDawn out to the farm in Decorah. The friend stayed in the car while LaDawn went inside the house to talk to James Bachmerski. LaDawn's friend told the marshals James claimed Jade ran away. Suspecting there was more to the story, Chris Webker called Special Agent John Turbitt from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation and asked him for help. Chris laid out what we knew, what the Marshals had been able to unearth. And as I'm sitting there listening, I said, it's very likely that Jade is no longer alive and we actually need to start treating this as a homicide investigation.

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21:11So this here is the farm. Yep. So this is where Bachmerskies lived. Having established Jade was at this farm in Decorah, Iowa in March of 2017, Detective Chris Webger hoped new leads could be developed to solve the mystery of what happened to her. This farm really is at the end of the road here. It is the house at the end of the road. House at the end of the road. You can see how secluded it is. This is a young girl who has a history of running away. When you get out here, is it possible? Do you think she could have run away? Our evidence showed that she didn't. And if you were to run away from here, I mean, there's just farmland and empty space.

21:59I mean, direction. You're not from here. I bet you, which way were we facing right now? I mean, she's not going to know where she's at. When investigators first visited the farm in 2022, James Bachmerski no longer lived here, and the house had been gutted and renovated. But the new owners let them look around. We tried to find anything we could in the area, and ultimately we didn't. You have this farm where we know Jade is last seen, so we draw a box around the farm and we say, who's living in the farm, who are the guests at the farm, to certainly the owner of the property, the one who's having contact with LaDawn and Jade, is James Bachmersky Sr.

22:42And then you have these two sons, James Jr. and Brian. Having already talked to Brian, detectives were eager to reach James Jr. Turns out he had an alibi. He wasn't living in the area at the time and was never at the farm with Jade. So that left James Bachmersky Sr. to be interviewed. We had known from that initial contact with the kids that Bachmerski had moved away and he was in Georgia. Special Agent John Turbitt made the trip. We located the house and it was out in the middle of nowhere. What's the mindset going into an interview and first interaction with somebody like him? I think despite what a lot of people think, I am really trying to take off the police hat and a lot of the things that come with that.

23:35And I need to sit down with James and I need to be John and he needs to be James. And can we have a good conversation about this young lady that he clearly had out on his property and has never been seen? When John Turbitt knocked on the door, James Bachmerski agreed to talk. These are excerpts of the audio interview. I think one of the first things out of his mouth, if not the first, was... A number of years ago, something happened in Iowa, and it's affected my life forever. I've knocked on doors a lot in my career, and that would be on the, you know, that would be an outlier for opening remarks.

24:10You're like, okay, is he thinking of something that, you know, I'm not? I'm making it clear I'm talking about Jade. And he continues. Okay, I have that clip. I'm going to play for you. Do you know what I think? What? We got to find answers. Yeah, I agree with that. All I want to do is to go to my grave, to know that my kids had nothing to do with what was going on. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what they do. It's interesting. He said, I don't want to implicate my kids. Yes. But in so doing, is he implicating his kids? Well, it seemed like it. So he immediately is talking about someone being implicated, which says, in my mind, he thinks a crime was committed.

24:48Now it's a question of, was it me? Was it my boys? James Bach-Mursky confirmed he was in a relationship with LaDawn and that she brought Jade to his farm to hide her and keep her from being put in foster care. You know what I thought was going to happen? What? To be honest, I thought we were going to be a family. He admits that there's a plan to bring Jade back, you know, to Iowa. He's saying this woman was trying to reunite with her daughter and get to a new life. Did he say when in that interview he last saw Jade? Yeah. To my knowledge, she was getting ready to do a bunch of laundry, and I had to go to Norby's for something.

25:27Norby's, which is like a farm and fleet store, and the next thing I know, she'd vanished out of thin air. James Bachmerski talked for several hours that day, but after the interview, John Turbin and Chris Webger were still no closer to finding out what happened to Jade. They wondered if there were any additional clues to be discovered back at the farm. When he got back, we came up with the plan of what else can we find? And that's when we came across a neighbor that said, hey, by the way, I have this barn that James Spock-Mirsky property is left in. In 2018, he was left in a real hurry and left all of his stuff behind.

26:11And so we're there and found this dusty old phone in a box.

26:22It was James Bachmerski's cell phone. This was a real find. I mean, if you're looking for a smoking gun, you're getting a cell phone instead. This was something that was unbelievable to come across. On the phone, they found these photos of Jade at the farm. There's this one with her mother, LaDawn, when she dropped her off and left. And this one from the day after Brian and Jade had lunch at Pizza Ranch of them at a bonfire. There was a number of photos with them at that bonfire roasting hot dogs and stuff like that.

26:59They're the last known photos of Jade. On Bachmersky's phone, there were also text messages Jade had sent, including the ones Brian had mentioned when he said he worked the night shift at Walmart. the same night Jade was last heard from. Those last text conversations were monumental, in my opinion. So let's go through these a little bit. Here it is, Jade reaching out to him around a little after midnight. It says, hey, Brian, it's Jade. And I always love this because, you know, the typical teenager saying, Jade, you know. She's just checking in with him. Is it going okay? Tired yet? Yeah, just, you know, just the typical conversation.