The grassy meadow high up in the Elkhorn Mountains over Montana was the picture perfect setting for a summer gathering with friends.
Adults mingled around the food in the picnic area, while children played barefoot and caught frogs in the water of the shallow creek flowing through the national forest.
It was here in this remote beauty spot that four-year-old Nyleen Kay Marshall vanished without a trace on the sunny afternoon of Saturday June 25, 1983, while at the Capital City Radio Club ham radio event with her mother Nancy, stepfather Kim and siblings Nathan and Noreen.
Now, almost 42 years on footprints may hold key to how Nyleen left the park that day.
Several small children had seen the little girl talking to a man dressed in purple jogging gear by the creek. This mystery man allegedly told Nyleen three haunting words: ‘Follow the shadow.’
Just like that, the four-year-old girl from the nearby town of Clancy, Helena, disappeared into the shadows herself.
Soon her face would be plastered across milk cartons on breakfast tables in millions of homes around the country, as part of a campaign to find missing children and bring them home.
What followed next was over four decades of suspicion, chilling letters and calls claiming to be from her kidnapper, a heartbroken mom’s murder and a tip that led to the discovery of a different abducted child.
Four-year-old Nyleen Kay Marshall vanished without a trace on Saturday June 25, 1983, while at a Capital City Radio Club ham radio event in the Elkhorn Mountains of Montana
Her face was plastered across milk cartons sitting on breakfast tables in millions of homes across America
It’s a case that has stayed with Ralph DeCunzo all these years as the only time during his 30-year search and rescue career where he wasn’t able to bring the missing person home.
‘We’ve never had an encounter like this mission,’ he tells DailyMail.com.
‘It’s one of those that sticks with you because we were never able to solve it… We had lost children and lost adults for 30 years and we were able to solve all of them.’
At the time of Nyleen’s disappearance, DeCunzo worked for Lewis & Clark County Search and Rescue and was called in to help lead the search for the missing child.
The mission grew quickly with search and rescue teams being drafted in from several neighboring counties while local police dogs and specialized search dogs were sent from California to help.
DeCunzo remembers hundreds of volunteers from the Marshall family’s church also showing up to lend their services.
‘It was massive,’ he says.
‘It was the biggest mission I think that probably ever went on in Montana, at least for us.’
A huge search was launched in the Elkhorn Mountains (stock photo) to find the missing girl, with 2,800 people joining in
It wasn’t long before searchers came across a disturbing clue, DeCunzo reveals to DailyMail.com.
Two sets of footprints were found charting a path through the rugged, steep terrain.
One appeared to be adult size, the other the size of a child matching Nyleen.
When the tracks could no longer be seen, search dogs were able to pick up and follow the scent.
But what appeared to be a promising lead wound up as a dead end when the dogs reached a road and lost the scent.
This clue pointed to a harrowing theory: that Nyleen had been bundled into a car and driven away – never to be seen again.
‘[The scent] didn’t exist beyond that road. The dogs came up at a dead end… that’s a pretty good sign that she was picked up in a vehicle and driven away,’ DeCunzo says.
Despite this haunting possibility, the searchers ploughed on, in the hopes that the little girl might have simply wandered off and was lost somewhere in the mountains.
One of Nyleen’s family members spotting a composite sketch (seen above) for a man and woman wanted in connection to a different child abduction case and believing he recognized them as two people who had joined in the original search
‘It was organized chaos for a while… imagine having that many people on a mountain side going hand-in-hand, side-by-side in a line looking for clues,’ he says.
One day, DeCunzo recalls the Marshall family dog drawing the searchers’ attention to a mine shaft.
Fearing the little girl had fallen down it, the search team took the ‘bizarre and dangerous’ step of lowering a diver down the shaft to look for her.
It was empty but ‘that’s the extremes we went to’, he says.
For 10 straight days, around 2,800 people combed meticulously through the rugged forests, steep hills and flowing creeks looking for little Nyleen.
But no trace of her was ever found.
‘We didn’t really turn up a single thing,’ he says. ‘I think we did everything humanly possible to try to find her.’
With hopes gone, the search was called off after day 10 – with Nyleen nowhere to be found.
Nyleen’s mom Nancy in a 1990 episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Nancy was found murdered in Mexico City in 1995
Given the size of the search, his 30 years’ experience on the job and the sudden loss of the scent at the road, DeCunzo believes there can only be one conclusion: Nyleen was abducted.
‘If she was there, I think we would have found her. That’s the bottom line,’ he says.
‘I believe we would have found her if she was there, and so what’s the alternative?’
The search in the mountains may have come to an end, but the twists in the case were only just beginning.
It was two years after Nyleen’s disappearance when a string of disturbing phone calls and letters started coming in to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Child Find of America.
Their sender was a man claiming he had Nyleen and was raising her as his own child named Kay.
‘She is a sweet little girl and it is because of how much I have grown to love her that I realize how much her family must miss her,’ one of the letters read.
‘I love her and I have her. I just can’t let her go.’
Four decades after her disappearance, Nyleen’s whereabouts remain a mystery – with many leads falling flat
In the letters, the perpetrator claimed he was providing for her with his good investment income – but also detailed sexual abuse.
The FBI traced some of the calls and letters to Madison, Wisconsin, before they suddenly stopped.
To this day, it is unclear if they were authentic or a hoax – and the identity of the sender remains a mystery.
Other leads also sprung up over the years with one of Nyleen’s family members spotting a composite sketch for a man and woman wanted in connection to a different child abduction case and believing he recognized them as two people who had joined in the original search.
Then came the confessions of child sex offender Richard James Wilson who once claimed he killed Nyleen.
Investigators took him up to the mountains to show the spot where he claimed he left her remains.
The search was fruitless and Wilson – who suffered from mental illness – recanted his statements soon after. He was never charged.
And then, in another bizarre twist, a 1990 Unsolved Mysteries episode on the case led to a tip about a girl resembling Nyleen – only for police to find she was a different missing girl, Monica Bonilla, who had been abducted by her own father years earlier.
Former sheriff Craig Doolittle sent cadaver dogs up to the area years later – but they found nothing
While this led to a happy reunion for one family, for Nyleen’s, more tragedy struck.
In 1995 – 12 years after her daughter’s disappearance – Nancy was found murdered in a hotel room in Mexico City, going to her grave never learning the truth about what happened to her child.
As years passed, tips and information continued to pour in.
Craig Doolittle joined the Jefferson County Sheriff Office in 1995 and became the sheriff in 2003, leading the department for two decades.
‘There’s always – at least in my experience as sheriff – been information coming in,’ the former sheriff tells DailyMail.com. ‘It’s been kind of constant.’
Under his watch, the department explored all new tips about the case and also went back through the cold case files for any possible leads, he says.
‘We got other agencies involved… we sent cadaver dogs up there [around 15 years ago and]… dug up some of the ground as we wanted the dogs to sniff around,’ he says.
‘We sent mine experts up there as there’s some old mine shafts in part of the area where she was last seen – so we did some more exploring up there.’
But, despite the efforts continuing over the years, Doolittle says they never found any strong leads.
‘Nothing ever came from it,’ he says. ‘Nothing during my time there panned out to have any merit to it.’
Age progression photos of Nyleen Kay Marshall: Left aged 33 and right aged 43
When asked what he believes happened to Nyleen, the former sheriff says he is no longer sure.
‘It really could go in a lot of different directions… maybe it was [someone she knew], maybe it was someone nobody knows about [who took her], maybe she’s still up there somewhere and was never found. It could be any number of scenarios,’ he says.
‘After everything that I’ve looked at and all the stuff we did, I honestly don’t know.’
Whatever happened to Nyleen, it’s clear the little girl’s disappearance continues to haunt the local community in Montana to this day.
But Doolittle isn’t sure they will ever get the answers it’s looking for.
‘I used to think everything would be solved one time or the other,’ Doolittle says.
‘But it’s been a long time, I don’t know if it will be.’
