Girl Vanished at a Baseball Game. 29 Years Later, Police Found Her Hair in a Dead Man’s Truck 

Girl Vanished at a Baseball Game. 29 Years Later, Police Found Her Hair in a Dead Man’s Truck 

Inside a parked truck, investigators find a roll of duct tape, a folded tarp, a coil of rope, a machete, and on the seat, a stain of dried blood. The man who owned this truck was already in custody when they found it. They had him. They had the truck. They had everything inside it. And then, they let him go. It would take 29 years and a single strand of hair too small to see without a microscope to find out exactly what had been sitting inside that truck the whole time.

Six weeks before any of that, in a small town in Western Arkansas, a 6-year-old girl climbed down from a set of bleachers to go catch fireflies with her friends. She never made it back to her mother. This is the story of what happened to Morgan Nick, and of a truck no one looked at the right way for almost three decades.

On the morning of June 9th, 1995, outside a laundromat in Alma, Arkansas, a man tried to pull a little girl away from her mother. The mother grabbed her daughter back before he could get her into a car. He drove off. No one called the police. No one wrote it down. It would be years before anyone connected it to anything.

That evening, a few miles away, Colleen Nick was getting her daughter, Morgan, ready for a little league baseball game. Morgan was 6 years old, the oldest of three. Her younger brother and sister, Logan and Tarin, were staying the night at their grandmother’s house, so it would just be Colleen and Morgan. Morgan was shy, quiet around people she didn’t know well.

She didn’t like running outside in the heat, didn’t like getting sweaty, and had quit a youth track program for exactly that reason. She liked staying inside. She liked coloring and videos and her cat, a kitten she’d picked out herself from a shelter and named Emily. She wanted to be a circus performer when she grew up.

And a doctor. The game started late, close to 9:00 in the evening, and it ran long. Colleen and Morgan sat together in the bleachers. Morgan stayed close to her mother most of the night. Even when other kids came by asking her to play. Then, near the end of the game, two children came up to the bleachers. A boy named Ty, 10 years old, and a girl named Jessica, eight.

They asked Morgan if she wanted to come catch fireflies with them in the parking lot. Morgan turned and asked her mother. Colleen said no at first. It was getting late. It was dark. But other parents nearby told her not to worry. They said the lot was fenced in, the kids had been playing there all night, that it was safe.

Colleen had heard before, more than once, that she was too protective. So, she gave in. Morgan threw her arms around her mother’s neck, kissed her on the cheek, and climbed down out of the bleachers. She ran off toward the parking lot with Ty and Jessica, just a short distance away, still within sight. Colleen checked on the three of them a few times as they played.

Then, the game ended. The team they’d come to watch walked off the field, and for a few minutes, Colleen’s attention went to them. Her back half turned to the lot. When she looked again, Ty and and were walking back toward the bleachers. Morgan wasn’t with them. Colleen asked where Morgan was. The kids told her Morgan had stayed behind for a second, emptying sand out of her shoe by the car.

Colleen could see her own car from where she stood. Morgan wasn’t there. She checked inside it. Nothing. She started moving faster, looking under cars, between them, calling her daughter’s name. Other parents joined in. Someone with a phone called the police. Officers arrived within about 6 minutes. One of the first on scene, a sergeant named Harris, could tell almost immediately that this wasn’t a child who had simply wandered off.

Investigators spoke with Ty and Jessica separately. Both of them described the same thing. While they’d been playing near the parking lot, a man had been standing by a truck nearby, watching them. He didn’t say much. He just watched. When the game ended, and it was time to head back, Morgan had stopped near the back of his truck to empty her shoe.

Ty and Jessica walked on ahead, assuming she was right behind them. She never caught up. The children described the man as white, with a rough beard, no shirt, wearing shorts. They described his truck as red, with a white camper shell on the back. Jessica, only eight, was specific about the shape of it. She said it looked boxy, square, more like an old Chevy than anything else.

By the next morning, June 10th, police had a sketch built from the children’s descriptions, and it was already going out to every news outlet in the state. Among the material investigators collected was a home video filmed earlier that same day by a parent at the same ball field. In the background of the footage, almost incidental, sat a red pickup truck with a white camper shell.

No one at the game could say who it belonged to. Within days, Morgan’s disappearance was the biggest story in Arkansas. Flyers went up on every storefront in Alma. Billboards, bumper stickers. A command center was set up to manage the flood of calls coming in. The state police and the FBI joined the local department, and the case went national, landing on America’s Most Wanted within the first week.

Investigators worked from what they had, a sketch and a vehicle description. Based on one adult witness, the search narrowed toward Ford trucks. Jessica, the 8-year-old who’d been standing closest to the truck, had described something different. She’d said it looked square, more like an old Chevy. That part didn’t get followed very far.

Tips poured in faster than they could be checked. People who owned red trucks anywhere near Alma found themselves pulled over, questioned, apologized to. On June 24th, 2 weeks into the search, a man in Stuttgart, Arkansas, almost 200 miles away, called in to report that he’d seen a girl matching Morgan’s description.

Colleen and her family were flown out. They waited, hoping to be the first faces Morgan saw. It wasn’t her. The man, Albert Harvey, later admitted he’d made it up because he wanted attention. He was charged with interfering with government operations and filing a false police report. For Colleen, it was the first of many false hopes that would define the years ahead.

It would not be the last. Two months after Morgan disappeared, on August 29th, 1995, an 11-year-old girl was walking with her younger brothers near a Sonic restaurant in Van Buren, about 8 miles from where Morgan was last seen. A man pulled up next to them in a red pickup truck. He’d been drinking. He started talking to the girl, offered her brothers money to leave them alone, and when they were gone, offered the girl money, too, to come back to his house with him.

She told him no. He pushed. She told him she’d call the police. He dropped a cigarette and asked her to pick it up. Instead, she ran, screaming, back to her brothers. The man sped off, lost control, and crashed into a utility pole on his way out. A witness across the street had seen the whole thing and got part of his license plate.

It took police a day to trace it. The truck belonged to a man named Billy Jack Links, 70 years old, a World War II veteran who’d spent years working in Dallas before moving back to Van Buren in the late 1970s. Officers found him at home. His truck damaged at the front, right where it would be if it had hit a pole.

They arrested him. A neighbor, interviewed during that investigation, told police something else. He said he believed Links’s truck had a white camper shell on it up until about 2 months earlier. By the time of the arrest, the camper was gone. Two months earlier was June. Investigators got a warrant and searched the truck specifically in connection with Morgan’s case.

Inside, they found duct tape, a tarp, rope, a machete, hair fibers on the seat and floorboard, and blood on part of the seat itself. In 1995, DNA testing in Arkansas was still new. There wasn’t a reliable way yet to pull useful information from a blood sample that small, or from hair without a root attached. The blood was logged and set aside in case the technology ever caught up.

Two days after his arrest, on August the 31st, investigators sat Links down and asked him directly about Morgan Nick. He said he didn’t know anything about it. He was given a polygraph test. He passed it. Investigators believed him. The truck was returned to him. Links was convicted the following year of trying to solicit a child in the Van Buren incident and sentenced to 6 years in prison.

But in Morgan’s case, he was cleared. The file moved on to other names. Colleen has said she learned what it actually meant to have a missing child standing on the sidewalk outside the police department in the weeks after Morgan disappeared. There was no system built for what was happening to her family. She had to make her own flyers, field her own calls from reporters, keep functioning while not knowing day after day whether her daughter was alive.

A year after Morgan disappeared, Colleen started the Morgan Nick Foundation built around child safety education and support for other families going through the same thing. She became a national advocate working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She traveled to Washington where a presidential order was eventually signed requiring photos of missing children to be displayed in federal buildings.

In March of 2000, a man named Charles Ray Vines was arrested after being caught assaulting his own daughter. DNA tied him to two unsolved murders and an attempted murder, all within 20 miles of where Morgan disappeared. In exchange for avoiding the death penalty, Vines agreed to confess to his crimes and answer questions about several open cases, including Morgan’s.

He confessed to assaulting an elderly woman in Fort Smith. He denied knowing anything about Morgan Nick. For a while, some believed the case might finally be behind them. Colleen didn’t. Even if Vines was guilty of everything else, nothing tied him to her daughter. The leads kept coming in. The answer didn’t. Then, on August 5th, 2000, while serving his sentence for the Van Buren incident, Billy Jack Links died in prison.

He was 75 years old. No one in Alma realized at the time what had just been lost. By 2012, during a remodel at the police department, an entire room was set aside just to hold Morgan’s case file. By 2019, that room held thousands of documents. And Russell White, who had been chief since before Morgan disappeared, had retired.

Jeff Pointer, who joined the force as a dispatcher back in 1998, took over as chief. That same year, a detective named Brett Hartley decided to go back to the very beginning of the case. Not to chase a new tip. To reread everything that had already been written down years earlier by people who hadn’t known yet what mattered and what didn’t.

Hartley started mapping out every reported sighting of a red truck from June 9th, 1995. A teenage girl who’d been approached by a truck downtown. Two young children were frightened by one in their front yard. Teenagers near the river who thought they’d seen a man holding a child down in the front seat of a truck in the minutes right after Morgan went missing.

Investigators had gone back to find that exact spot the next day. But heavy rain had flooded the area before they could. Laid out together, the sightings traced a single path converging on the ball field all within the same short window of time. Hartley also pulled the old license plate numbers collected back in 1995.

At the time, none of them had returned a match. He ran them again through a national database that hadn’t existed in the 1990s. This time, some of them returned hits. He went looking for the physical evidence taken from Lynx’s truck back in 1995. The duct tape, the rope, the machete, the blood sample set aside all those years ago for testing that never came.

None of it could be found. 24 years had passed. The chain of custody on items from a case that had never resulted in a charge simply hadn’t held. The truck itself was the one thing that hadn’t disappeared. It had been sold more than once over the years. Hartley tracked down its current owner who had no connection to Lynx at all and who who to let investigators search it.

It turned out to be a red 1986 Chevrolet Scottsdale, not a Ford. In July of 2020, the FBI’s evidence response team examined the truck. They vacuumed every surface they could reach, collecting whatever trace material had survived 25 years and several owners. Underneath the truck’s original floor cover, they found a single strand of blonde hair.

It had no root attached, which made it harder to test. The first attempt, not long after, came back inconclusive. There simply wasn’t enough genetic material to draw a conclusion either way. Not long after, Hartley retired. A detective named Shawn Taylor, who joined the department in 2016 and moved into investigations the same year Pointer became chief, took over the case.

Around the same time, Colleen came across an article about a lab in Texas called Authrum. They had developed a way to build full genetic profiles from evidence too degraded for older methods, even hair with no root at all. She called Taylor and told him to read it. He agreed to try. In December of 2023, the evidence was sent to Authrum’s lab in The Woodlands, Texas.

By then, the work Colleen had spent decades building was already changing outcomes for other families. In 2019, she’d helped launch a statewide rapid response program for child abduction cases. That next January, when a 6-year-old boy went missing in Sherwood, Arkansas, after his parents were found murdered in their home, that program was activated immediately.

He was found within 2 hours. For Morgan, the answer was still 10 months away. On September 27th, 2024, Authram’s laboratory sent its report to Detective Taylor. The hair recovered from Lynks’s truck, they found, shared a first-degree relationship with a DNA sample Colleen Nick had submitted years earlier. In plain terms, the hair could only have belonged to Colleen herself, one of her siblings, or one of her children.

Investigators spent the next few days re-interviewing every member of the Nick family. None of them had ever met Billy Jack Lynks. None of them had ever been inside his truck. By elimination, there was only one explanation left. On October 1st, 2024, Alma’s police chief, Jeff Pointer, stood in front of reporters and said, for the first time, what investigators had suspected for 29 years.

The physical evidence, he said, strongly indicated that Morgan Nick had been inside that truck. Billy Jack Lynks was named, for the first time, as the suspect in her abduction. In the days after, reporters digging through old court records found something that had never been part of the original 1995 investigation into Morgan’s case.

In 1992, 3 years before Morgan disappeared, Lynks had been investigated for sexually abusing a child under the age of 14 over a period of months. He pleaded to a reduced charge. He served no time in prison. A fine and a court-ordered counseling program were the extent of it. He had done this before, and the system had let him walk away from it once already.

At the podium that October morning, Colleen Nick spoke last. “He stole Morgan from me.” she said. “He stole her from her dad. He stole her from Logan and Taren.” She paused before she finished. “But he didn’t see that he could never win because our love for Morgan, her memory, and her voice outlasted his life.

” There was no trial. There never would be. Billy Jack Lincks had been dead for 24 years by the time his name was finally said out loud in connection with Morgan’s case. He was never charged, never questioned again, never made to answer for what the evidence in his truck appears to show. Chief Pointer was direct about what was still unknown.

How exactly Morgan was taken from that parking lot. What happened after she was inside the truck. Whether Lincks acted alone or whether someone else knew and said nothing for almost 30 years. And the question that mattered most was the one Pointer said out loud at that podium. The one nobody could get answer. Where is Morgan now? Her body has never been found.

Colleen Nick has said more than once over the years that roughly 2% of children abducted by a stranger and missing more than 2 years are eventually found alive. It’s a small number. It’s not zero. For a long time, that was the number she held on to. She has said the DNA results didn’t end her fight. They changed what she’s fighting for now.

For three decades, she searched hoping to bring her daughter home alive. Now, she says, she wants to bring her home to rest, wherever she is. The Morgan Nick Foundation, started a year after the abduction, has since worked with more than a thousand missing person cases a year, and has taught personal safety to tens of thousands of children across Arkansas.

The rapid response program Colleen helped build in 2019 has been credited with bringing other children home within hours, not decades. Morgan loved fireflies. It’s the reason she left her mother’s side that night. Colleen has said the guilt of that decision has never fully left her. Colleen has said fireflies have become a symbol for her family now.

A small light that keeps showing up in the dark. Somewhere in Arkansas, the file on Morgan Nick is still open. Detectives are still making calls. Colleen is still waiting for the day someone tells her the truth, the rest of it. The part Billy Jack links took to his grave. Until then, the question is the same one Pointer asked publicly on October 1st, 2024.

It remains unanswered. Where is Morgan now?