Post Mortem | Jade Colvin is Missing

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1:09Natalie Morales:Welcome to Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green, and today we're discussing the case of 14-year-old Jade Colvin. She was reported missing in June of 2016 after she ran away from a local shelter in Iowa for troubled youth. But then her case went unsolved for years until a new team of investigators set out to find answers following leads all the way to a remote farm in Decorah, Iowa. So joining me today is 48 Hours correspondent, Natalie Morales, who reported on Jade's case. And once again, Natalie, it's always good to have you here. Thanks again for having me, Anne-Marie. Now, I should point out, this is a case about the passion and the persistence of so many investigators who really work together to try to solve this years long mystery of what happened to this missing young girl.

2:00Natalie Morales:Absolutely. I want to give everyone the quick reminder, as per usual, if you have not watched or listened to this episode, it's called Jade Colvin is Missing. Go check it out and then come back for this conversation. All right, Natalie, we learned very early on in the hour, Jade Colvin's had a tough, tough childhood. Both her mother, LaDawn, and her father, Kevin, they struggle with substance abuse. Jade is only 13 when she's placed in foster care, but she's in and out of different facilities and she runs away a lot. So when she ran away in 2016, in a way, this was part of a pattern. So I'm wondering why for Jade's family and for her friends, why they thought this was different.

2:44Well, I mean, she literally just fell off the map. You know, as you mentioned, she did frequently run away. She ran away from a shelter. She was hiding from the foster care system. Her mother, LaDawn, also tried to hide her from the system as well. She didn't want her daughter to be in foster care. She wanted her daughter to be with her. But as you mentioned, LaDawn and Jade's father both had a history of substance abuse. Kevin, the father, also had lost contact with Jade. She was officially reported missing in 2016 by the shelter when she ran away. Her reaching out to friends and family, that all stopped in March of 2017.

3:21And that's when friends and family started to think, OK, this is unusual. But it was when she would have turned 18. she would have aged out of the foster care system. And some of her family and friends, that's when they started to fear something had happened to her.

3:37Natalie Morales:So, I mean, I hate to say this, but you know, I mean, plenty of young women go missing. They disappear into the night and often those cases are not followed up on. What encouraged authorities to keep looking for Jade after so many years? Well, the investigation into her disappearance really picked up in 2020. and it was with the U.S. Marshals. They had this statewide operation called Operation Homecoming. It was an effort to find missing children. Now, Jade's case was one of 24 young adults that they were looking into. And the incredible thing is they were able to solve and find all but two of them.

4:18Unfortunately, Jade was one of them and another person who was still missing. In 2022, this team of various agencies is called in as well. And I want to give credit to the people involved. Detective Nablo is with the Des Moines PD. She joined forces with the Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace, who then called in Detective Chris Webker in Decorah, the sheriff's office there, and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation brought in Special Agent John Turbitt, all in the search of Jade Colvin. Detective Nablo, she was the one who went to Instagram and Facebook and she subpoenaed them and said, I need to get access to Jade Colvin's social media account.

5:03And that's when she discovered that Jade completely stopped communicating with anyone in March of 2017. And as you know, you have teenagers, I have teenagers. So for them not to have any kind of social media presence, very unusual. So this team, once they saw that, they said something here is wrong. As special agent John Turbitt said, if we can't find her, we want to get justice for Jade.

5:30Natalie Morales:In fact, mentioning special agent John Turbitt, I want to play a clip. He explains why Jade's case was so important to his team. We have kids. Some of us have daughters and you see your own loved ones in some of these situations. Jade's picture was hung up on my whiteboard, and I looked at it every day for a couple of years. And she was smiling, and that's how I always wanted to remember. I'm like, that's why I'm trying to find her. So you hear that passion right there with the special agent talking about how this case resonated. It really hit home to him. Yeah, you know, I totally get that. When I think about the pictures that were in the hour, I kept on thinking she looks like any kid, you know, in my own daughter's high school.

6:19Natalie Morales:So I totally get what investigators felt. I also thought it was really interesting that she was still, despite all of this dysfunction, really close to her mother. And this is something that the detectives kind of pick up as well. Investigators, they find new evidence. And what they find is that after Jade ran away from the shelter in 2016, they're discussing a plan LaDawn had hatched for LaDawn to bring Jade to this farm in Decorah, Iowa. It's owned by a man that she's been dating not for a very long time. His name is James Bachmerski. And this is the plan, that Jade would stay there until she's 18.

6:59Natalie Morales:At that point, she'd be free of the foster care system. LaDawn will continue to live three hours away because she's dealing with some legal issues. It is quite an elaborate plan. Yeah, I mean, LaDawn had, as you mentioned, was dating Buck Mirsky for all of four months. Buck Mirsky was virtually a stranger to Jade as well when Jade got dropped off there. But the idea was, you know, LaDawn really wanted her to be with her eventually. She didn't want her daughter in the foster care system. She didn't trust the foster care system. And everyone, I should point out who we spoke to, they all said that they believe LaDawn did this from a place of love.

7:43You know, she wasn't putting her daughter there, certainly not to endanger her. She was a mother who thought she was doing her best at the time, despite all of her demons. Unfortunately, LaDawn died three years after Jade went missing. So investigators, as they started their search, they didn't have the ability to go talk to LaDawn. Did anybody in the family call police when she went missing from the farm? Not initially, because after she disappeared from Buckmerski's farm, they believed that Jade was running away again from a situation that she didn't want to be placed in. So LaDawn goes back to Buckmerski's farm at one point and she went to investigate.

8:25She asked James Bokmirsky, you know, where's my daughter? What happened to her? And he also told her, well, she ran away. So, you know, and again, going back to the fact that LaDawn really did not trust the system. She's not going to be the one who goes to the police and raises alarm bells.

8:42Natalie Morales:Now, we did hear from Jade's aunt in the hour. Her name is Tandra. She clearly cared very deeply for her niece. I wondered about whether or not, you know, family could have intervened before she ended up in foster care. And Tandra did. She actually took Jade in and her two younger sisters for a little over a year. I believe it was when Jade was nine or ten years old. According to Jade's aunt in that year that Jade was there, she really blossomed. And at that time, Tandra, you know, she had three kids of her own. Her husband had just died. She was also putting herself through school. She even apparently moved a couple of times to be in a house so that each of the girls could have their own room.

9:28She bought them beds. She bought them new clothes. She even took them to, you know, build a bear for birthday parties. It seemed like this was the only time in her life that she had a semblance of normalcy in all those years growing up. At one point, Tandra told us that Kevin, Jade's father, did get clean. He regained custody. So she would have liked to have done more for them. But at that time, she felt, well, Kevin, her brother, seemed to have gotten his act together. And to this day, though, Tandra says she regrets she couldn't do more and that she couldn't keep them.

10:04Natalie Morales:That is tough. I mean, it sounds like she did an awful lot. All right. So then fast forward to 2022. the U.S. Marshals reach out to local law enforcement near Bokmirsky's farm for help talking to the family. And that is when Detective Chris Webker from the Winneshee County Sheriff's Office officially joins the team. James Bokmirsky is no longer living there. The house has been gutted. It's been renovated. There are new owners. They allow law enforcement to look around. Natalie, in reporting for this hour, you also went to Decorah to see what this location looked like. I thought it was really interesting because there's this kind of really wide drone shot.

10:46Natalie Morales:And immediately as I saw that shot, I thought, there's no way she ran away. Where is she going to run away to? It really gave me a sense of how remote at least it felt. And goodness knows you looked cold. It was freezing. Yes. We went there in the middle of January, I should point out. And I've done shoots in this type of weather where it is just, it's so cold. I know sometimes it gets so cold, I can't even say my own name because there's too many syllables in my name, but you can't move your mouth properly. And it looked that cold there. Oh yeah, your eyes are tearing up. You know, it was minus 14 degrees.

11:21If it had been, I believe, three degrees colder, the drone that we used would not have been able to fly. It would have been frozen in the air. Our crew wore, speaking of my eyeballs freezing, they were wearing ski goggles and ski gear so that they wouldn't freeze. and, you know, really should highlight the importance of going to these locations and seeing them in person. Because when you stand in the middle of nowhere like that, in that farm, it is beautiful. But you also know the situation that this young girl was placed in. She was completely isolated on this remote farm. It's kind of hilly.

11:56And as you saw by that shot, it's over 200 acres. There's really nowhere to go if you're running away because the town, downtown Decorah, which is really cute and quaint. It's about eight miles from the farm. And as we were driving with Detective Webger, he said, look where we are. I mean, these are all they're all farms, farming people here. These are good salt of the earth kind of people. And if somebody saw a teenager walking alone on the side of the road there, they would certainly stop and ask if if she needed help. So right away, he knew this is not a case of Jade running away.

13:02Transcription by CastingWords

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14:41Natalie Morales:Welcome back. Before the investigators tracked down James Bokmirsky, because he's moved out of state, they find one of his sons. His name is Brian. He'd been living in Decorah at the time of Jade's disappearance. According to the detective of Webker, Brian confirmed that Jade had been at the farm, and he said that the last time that he heard from her was just a few days after she arrived when they were texting during his night shift at Walmart and she suddenly stopped responding. Why didn't Brian report Jade missing back then? Well, Brian says he did eventually follow up with his father about what happened to Jade.

15:19Buck Mirsky at the time gave him a lot of excuses, said that she might even be a cam girl somewhere. However, there's some evidence as well that Brian didn't believe his dad. I mean, Buck Mirsky did have a criminal record. As you see in The Hour in 2013, we report that he spent nearly a year behind bars after being charged with child endangerment against his own children. He pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of assault, but he did serve some time.

15:47Natalie Morales:In the hour, we learn details of this child endangerment case from court documents. Buckmerski used a metal chair hooked to a battery to shock his sons when they misbehaved. I mean, we saw your facial expression. Yeah, I mean, it was pure horror because if he's able to do that to his own kids, what is he capable of doing to a young girl who's not even his own kid? Absolutely. In 2023, investigators tracked down Buck Mirsky at his new home in Georgia. He spoke with Special Agent John Turbitt for several hours, and he indeed confirmed that he had been in a relationship with LaDawn, and Jade had stayed with him at his farm back in 2017.

16:32Natalie Morales:Now, Buck Mirsky said that the last time he saw Jade, she was getting ready to do laundry. He said he ran out to a local store and then when he came back, she had vanished. Different story than what he told his son, by the way. But then about a year and a half after Jade went missing, he sold that farm and he moved to Georgia. Right. And it was interesting because according to Special Agent John Turbitt, his decision to relocate and the timing of the move not long after Jade disappeared, that all added to their suspicions. You know, when he moved to Georgia, he also started using an alias. He was going by the name Bob Sage.

17:09So he, the agents told us, seemed to be like a guy who was trying to hide. Now, he also had some other criminal charges from Iowa, including a probation violation from 2018. So there was some indication there was extra heat on him from law enforcement. Special Agent John Turbitt, when he got there, he saw, you know, this guy clearly seems to be like he's hiding out in this new location.

17:33Natalie Morales:It certainly seemed like he left Decorah in a hurry. He pretty much abandoned a lot of his belongings at a neighbor's barn. And when the neighbor lets investigators know, hey, I still got all this stuff here, they really strike gold. They find Bakhmirsky's old cell phone and there's some shocking new evidence. Right. That phone really became the key to their investigation because on that phone, they found deleted text messages from Jade's family trying to find her, including from LaDawn, you know, desperately trying to get a hold of her daughter. They also found photos of Jade at the farm, the last photos of Jade alive, which also suggested to investigators he took a lot of photos of Jade.

18:18So they thought perhaps this showed some attraction that Buckmersky had to Jade. Now, the phone also contained, as you saw in the hour, these photos, which really became key evidence. One photo shows his very clean kitchen, which was very unusual and out of the norm, according to those who knew and saw the condition of that home. And also a bedroom photo that was taken two days after Jade disappeared. And then contrast that to a photo of the bedroom taken a couple of months later. The first photo showed a bed with a headboard. The second photo showed there was no more headboard. it looked like that mattress was new, according to investigators.

19:02So it appeared to the investigators that it looked like if there was a scene there, it might have been cleaned. Now, we should mention that the cell phone also helped investigators clear Brian, the son, because they found those text messages that Jade was having with Brian as he worked that night shift at Walmart. So it checked out with his story. Something that I kept on thinking of was, OK, if she's been killed, she's got to be somewhere on this farm.

19:36Natalie Morales:But it's huge. Were investigators able to search the farm? How do you go about searching a property that large? Well, as Detective Chris Webker from the Winneshek County Sheriff's Office said, it was really like looking for a needle in a haystack. They searched the 200 plus acres. They used cadaver dogs. They didn't find any human bones or DNA, but I will say they did find a pile of bones. They were animal, I should say, not human. The dog did not signal on any human scent there. Bob Mirsky, though, we should point out, according to Chris Webger, he was a skilled hunter. I asked Webger what struck him about those animal bones, since it's not unusual to hunt in Iowa.

20:23Natalie Morales:He was an avid outdoorsman that knew how to handle himself and how to harvest animals and then discard them. And being able to handle and kill animals like that. Yeah. You think the same could be said for humans, just being able to discard people? He definitely had the knowledge of where he lived and how to do things that way, yes. That gives you the creeps just hearing that and knowing the possibilities when you see a property of that size, what he might have been able to do. Mm hmm. So even though investigators have not found Jade's body, they do have some damning new evidence from Buckmerski's phone.

21:05Natalie Morales:Special Agent John Turbitt went back down to Georgia to interview Buckmerski again. But this time, Buckmerski's demeanor is completely different. He claimed to be drunk and that he couldn't remember any details. But Special Agent Turbitt pressed him about Jade. And I want you to listen to a clip of what Buckmerski said to him. I'd go to the grave before I tell the truth about this. Yes. I'd rather go to the grave than tell what happened here in this case. Yeah, Turbitt said this was as close to a confession as you could get because Buckmerski is saying there is so much here you are never going to know and I'm never going to tell you.

21:48Yeah.

21:49Natalie Morales:Well, clearly investigators and prosecutors believe they have enough by August of 2024. James Buckmerski is charged with Jade Colvin's murder. His trial began about a year later. And I have to say, it seemed to me like the prosecution had a real challenge. I didn't think this case was particularly strong, even though there's a lot of evidence. There's no blood. There's no murder weapon. There's no body. Yeah, and the no body being the big part of that. This case was purely circumstantial, you know, but Bachmerski, by his own words, admitting Jade was at his residence under his care right before she disappears.

22:31that cell phone evidence that they had was key. I mean, those deleted messages along with those photos that seemed to show the before and after Jay disappeared. He replaced that bed. He cleaned that kitchen. He took pictures of it. Bach-Mirsky, however, explained he was cleaning and doing all of this because he was planning to sell the farm, which he eventually did. But most incriminating were those words you just heard, you know, his own words. I'd go to the grave before I tell the truth. But here's the thing. If I was the defense, I would just say, well, you don't even have any proof that she's dead.

23:09And that was that was a big part of the defense's argument. They tried to say there's no evidence she's dead. They said she had a history of running away. You know, in fact, they even hired their own investigator who said there were unconfirmed sightings of her. It is hard to combat the fact, though, that Jade was at Buckmersky's residence under his care and then poof, she just disappears. Nobody ever heard from her again.

23:37Natalie Morales:Well, the prosecution did their job. The jury found Buckmersky guilty of murder in the second degree. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison. So he's 67 years old. So that's essentially a life sentence for him at the time. In the hour, Jade's aunt, Tandra, said that the sentence was a relief. Do we know how the rest of Jade's family felt about this? Well, Tandra, and I think you could see that in the interview, she struggles. I mean, she really wants to be able to find Jade's body, give her a proper funeral. The whole family hopes that someone watching the show or listening to this with any information will come forward.

24:16You know, I think that's what they're all looking for is some sense of closure. if there is such a thing. All of the investigators that we spoke with, though, said this is still not done for them. It is still an open missing persons case with the Des Moines PD until they find Jade's body.