Still Missing: Morgan Nick Abduction Closer to Being Solved

FEBRUARY 28, 2023- June 9, 1995 was a typical Friday for Colleen Nick and her family in Ozark, Arkansas. Colleen ran a licensed in-home daycare, and the kids were picked up by their parents around 5 p.m.

Colleen made grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner, and then it was bath time for her children; six-year-old Morgan, four-year-old Logan, and 22-month-old Taryn. 

Friends invited Colleen to watch their kids' Little League baseball game in Alma, which was about a 30-minute drive from Ozark. Colleen dropped off her two youngest children at their grandmother's house.

She and Morgan headed to the Alma ballpark. 

 Woffard Field was near downtown Alma, about a block or so from the Alma police department. An interior chain link fence surrounded the game field and an outer chain link fence encircled the bleachers overlooking the first and third lines.

There weren't any concession stands or bathrooms.

lots, and the game field all evening. Tye, 10, and Jessica, 8, had asked Morgan several times to go play, but Morgan was somewhat shy and quiet, and wanted to stay with her mother.

Morgan kept untying her mother's shoes as a joke. Colleen played along by acting surprised when she noticed the laces were undone. 

Toward the end of the baseball game, Tye and Jennifer returned to ask Morgan to chase fireflies with them. This time, Morgan wanted to go, but Collen said no, telling her daughter it was too dark and too late. 

But then Colleen though about how she'd been told by friends and family that she was too overprotective. Children needed space and independence, right? Her friends reassured her that the area was safe. After all, kids had been playing around this field forever, and nothing bad had ever happened. 

The baseball game was nearly over, and the parking areas were visible from the bleachers. 

"Morgan really wanted to go chase those fireflies," said Colleen Nick in the Hulu documentary Still Missing Morgan. So, Colleen changed her mind and told Morgan she could go. Colleen added, "She was so happy. She flung her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek."

It was the last time Colleen would see her six-year-old daughter. 

Morgan Nick was a white, six-year-old girl with long blonde hair and blue eyes. She was approximately four feet tall and weighed 55 pounds. On June 9, 1995, she wore a greenish-blue Girl Scout tee shirt, blue denim shorts, and white tennis shoes. 

Colleen later said that she could see the kids running around the field and parking lots and visually checked on them three or four times. 

When the baseball game ended, Colleen was momentarily distracted by the players exiting the field. The kids who had invited Morgan to chase fireflies returned, but Morgan wasn't with them. 

Tye and Jessica said they'd played in a sandpile near the parking area on the hill while Morgan sat down next to Colleen's car to empty the sand out of her tennis shoes. Tye said he waited for Morgan and, as she finished tying her shoelaces, he headed down to the ballpark. 

Why hadn't she followed Tye back to the bleachers?

It had only been two or three minutes since the 10-year-old boy saw Morgan. 

Colleen though that her daughter might be waiting by the car. But dread filled her as she hurried to the parking lot. Something wasn't right. When Colleen reached her Nissan, she searched around the vehicle and inside of it. 

Morgan wasn't there.

One of the coaches noticed her distress, and when he learned her six-year-old daughter was missing, he called 911. 

Colleen and the other parents immediately started searching for Morgan. When the police arrived, they organized a grid search, struggling through mud and muck. Flashlights pierced the darkness as searchers called out for Morgan. 

At this point, the police thought the little girl was just lost in an unfamiliar area. 

But they were wrong. 

The day after Morgan's disappearance, Tye and Jennifer helped police put together a composite sketch of the man using an Identi-Kit. 

Colleen and John Nick divorced in 1994. The night their oldest daughter disappeared, Colleen called her ex-husband to tell him Morgan was missing. 

Colleen Nick became the most visible advocate for Morgan in the days and months after her daughter's abduction. Former Police Chief White maintained that Morgan's father, John Nick, did everything that was ever asked of him. He was cooperative at all times, but he didn't do media interviews.

John said it was because he was told by a reporter that no one wants to hear from the father."

You know what?" said John in the Still Missing Morgan documentary. "I said "I don't want to talk to you assholes, either." And I'm not going to. And 24 years later, I still haven't spoken to the media."

His decision to stay out of the spotlight had unintended consequences. People began accusing him of harming his own daughter. In the documentary, he said: "It's really painful for someone to point their finger and say that's who hurt that little girl. That's who took that little girl." 

In 2020, Alma Police Chief Russell White retired, handing over the reins of the Alma Police Department to his good friend and a 20-year veteran, Jeff Pointer. 

Pointer now had the title of Police Chief, and with it, the city's most infamous cold case: the abduction of six-year-old Morgan Nick. 

Detective Brett Hartley became the Alma Police Department's lead investigator in 2019. In the Still Missing Morgan documentary, he said: "In 25 years of law enforcement here, Morgan is the only one we haven't found."

Hartley added, "I'm looking for something different. I'm looking for facts. I'm looking for details. I'm looking for specifics that I can focus on aside from composites." 

As Harley dug through Morgan's missing person case file, he came across the photo of the red truck. 

Four days after Morgan went missing, police revealed a home video that showed a red truck parked at Woffard Field. The officer reviewing the video for the media commented that the truck didn't look like a Ford, the type of vehicle reported by witnesses. He also said the supposed camper might actually be a storm door. 

In the days after Morgan went missing, a television report stated that the truck in the video was probably a Mazda and was owned by a parent who attended the ballgame. 

The problem? The details about the truck weren't true. 

"I have not found a single document at this point that tells me that truck's cleared [or] that the owner of that truck has been identified," said Detective Hartley in Still Missing Morgan documentary. 

He explained that the night Morgan disappeared, police took the information of everyone who had been at the ballfield, including the type of vehicles they drove. People were also asked about any guests they invited to see the game and got descriptions of those vehicles too. 

According to Hartley: "That truck does not exist in those records."

But the red truck with the ill-fitting camper had been seen at the ball field that night. Not only had Tye and Jessica described it, but other witnesses had seen the vehicle too. In fact, the red truck was parked next to Colleen's Nissan Stanza. 

Some witnesses said the truck was a Ford, but Jessica, who was interviewed in the Still Missing Morgan documentary, said she thought it looked more like a Chevrolet. According to her, the headlights and taillights were boxy, and so was the truck. She said her family had a Chevy and the red truck was similar in shape. 

the house and the mother saw a red truck with a white camper pulling away and driving off. The mother reported the incident to the Alma Police. 

The next run-in with the driver of the red truck was reported by a couple of teenage boys. "They were walking from the older ball field on the south side of West Main Street," said Hartley. A red truck with a white camper shell stopped next to them and the driver "got on them for being in the road." One of the boys said the truck then turned onto Walnut Street. 

Walnut Street is the road used to get to the upper parking area of Woffard Field. 

Some 10-year-old boys riding bikes and playing in the street were also told to get off the road by the driver of a red truck. 

According to Hartley, the red truck with the white camper in the photo circulated by Alma Police Department was parked on the street during a game played between 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

Then the red truck was seen in the upper parking area o Woffard Field. It disappeared, likely with Morgan inside, around 10:40 p.m.

But the truck was seen once more that June night. 

In a location Detective Hartley will not reveal, he says a group of teenagers driving near the Arkansas River noticed a red truck with a white camper. One of the teenagers reported seeing "a man holding down a little girl" in the front seat. 

Hartley did say the teenagers tried to show officers where they'd seen the suspicious vehicle, but by then the area was flooded. 

Harley believes the information is solid. 

During the filming of the Hulu documentary Still Missing Morgan, Hartley, FBI Special Agent Reuben Gay, and the K-9 unit of the Texas Game Wardens searched the location where Hartley thinks Morgan was last seen more than 27 years ago. 

The scent dogs did not detect the presence of human remains. 

In Van Buren, Arkansas, two months after Morgan's abduction, an 11-year-old girl and her brothers walk to the local Sonic Drive-In to get fries and drinks. After they made their purchase, they headed away from the restaurant.

An older man in a truck pulled up next to the kids and gave the boys a couple of dollars to leave so he could talk to the girl alone. 

The brothers wouldn't leave their sister, but that didn't stop the man from having what Detective Hartley called "an indecent conversation" with the girl. After talking about sexual acts that included sex toys, he offered the girl money to go home with him. Terrified, she told him no and said she was calling the police. The children ran back to Sonic. The man took-off and crashed into a light pole. 

But he didn't stick around. He drove away. However, a witness across the street had noticed the man's interaction with the kids and wrote down the license plate number. 

Van Buren police officer Kevin Johnson, who retired from law enforcement in 1999, and his team tracked the license plate number to a red truck owned by Billy jack Lincks. 

A preponderance of evidence at Lincks' house, along with damager to the front of his red truck, convinced them that he was the man who tried to abduct the girl. 

They arrested him for the sexual solicitation of a child. 

they pursued digging up that area, Lincks passed a polygraph about Morgan's kidnapping. Investigators backed off. 

But now, two-and-a-half decades later, Detective Harley and the FBI returned to Lincks' property and dug up that 10-inch concrete slab and three feet of dirt underneath it. 

They hit rock. And there was nothing in that 8 x 8 area except dirt, tree roots, and disappointment. 

Since Lincks' attempt to abduct a young girl was only eight weeks after Morgan disappeared and both cases had detailed witness reports of a suspicious red truck, the FBI and Arkansas State Police joined the team investigating Lincks. 

Van Buren was about a 10-minute drive to Alma. 

And there was one curious witness statement in the Van Buren case: Up until a couple months before, Lincks' truck had a camper shell. 

Lincks' truck was processed at his house on September 1, 1995. And it was brough in for a second, more detailed processing on September 5, 1995. Several evidentiary items were collected by crime scene investigators, including a cut-out of the truck seat where a drop of human blood was located. 

More than two decades after the red truck was processed, the evidence collected in 1995 cannot be  located. The only thing that remains is the documentation. 

Lincks' truck was impounded and remained in police custody for decades. 

Then it was sold at auction. 

Investigators tracked the VIN of Lincks' truck to the new owner, who lived about 30 miles away from Alma, Arkansas. The truck was intact. FBI special agents went to pick it up. But first, the Evidence Response Team (ERT) gathered evidence on-site. 

FBI Special Agent Reuben Gay noticed markings on the truck that indicated a camper shell had probably been attached. The truck was also a Chevrolet- with a boxy body and square lights, just like Jessica had described. 

The FBI ERT took the truck apart piece by piece and examined every centimeter looking for evidence connecting the Chevy truck to Morgan. Among all the trace evidence recovered was a spot of blood, a single blonde hair, and fibers. 

The evidence was sent to Quantico for analysis. No DNA could be retrieved from the blood or the hair. At a microscopic level, the hair couldn't be conclusively linked to Morgan. 

That left the fibers. 

Fibers were recovered from the driver's side seat, mat, carpet, metal pieces in the carpet, padding, and bracket. The results from Quantico revealed that the blue-green cotton fibers "exhibit the same microscopic and optical properties," as the known sample, the Girl Scout tee shirt. 

The lab report also concluded that "due to the variability in manufacturing, dying, and consumer use, one would not expect to encounter a fiber selected at random to be consistent with a particular item."

What does this mean? 

According to the FBI, it means that it is highly unlikely that those fivers would match any random material. It's as close as law enforcement will get to officially saying that the fibers found in Lincks' truck came from the same type of shirt Morgan was wearing the last night she was seen alive. 

And it means that law enforcement can narrow their focus to one suspect: Billy Jack Lincks. 

In Still Missing Morgan, Colleen Nick said: "I think the part that bothers me the most is that the perpetrator is deceased. At the end of the day that means that there is no justice... No one has to stand and face us for what they did. 

Billy Jack Lincks was convicted of sexual solicitation of a child in 1995 and sentenced to six years in prison. He died on Saturday, August 5, 2000, while still serving his time.