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Friday evening, June 9, 1995 had started out as a classic summer outing for Colleen Nick & her 6-year-old daughter, Morgan Nick. While they had been out watching a little league baseball game in Alma, Arkansas that night, Morgan ran off to play with two other kids. Only minutes later, the two children came back, but Morgan wasn’t with them.
She was there one second & gone the next. The trio had been innocently chasing fireflies together before they ran back to join the parents. Morgan stopped to empty sand from her shoes & she was never seen again.
Her case became one of the most well-known missing child cases in the country & although multiple decades have gone by, Morgan’s disappearance has continued to haunt Arkansas. Colleen Nick has never stopped fighting for answers & her daughter’s name would eventually become tied to a statewide child alert system & a foundation that’s dedicated to helping other families of missing children.
Although Morgan’s remains have yet to be found, after the passage of thirty years, investigators announced a major development; evidence from a truck connected to a longtime suspect finally gave them the strongest link they’ve ever had.
Morgan Chauntel Nick was born in Germany on September 12, 1988 to military parents, Colleen & John Nick. She was the oldest of three children with a middle brother, Logan, & a younger sister, Taryn. When Morgan was about 5-years-old, the family settled in Arkansas after Colleen & John left the military in 1993 to be closer to family.
Morgan was on the shy side, but she adored cats & bubble gum. Her mom Colleen recalls a memory of her daughter coming home in first grade with a permission slip to join the track team. When she came home after her first practice, she was angry, telling her mom that they had to run outside which made her sweaty, two things she hated. However, when she discovered Girl Scouts, it was much more her speed since she was able to work on crafts in the comfort of the indoors.
Now living in the northwestern portion of the state in Ozark, Arkansas with three young children, Colleen decided that she wanted to be home with her kids so she opened an in-home daycare center to supplement their income.
On Friday night, June 9, 1995, family friends invited Colleen out to watch their child’s little league baseball game in Alma, Arkansas, a town 25 miles west of their home. She had never gone to see one of the games before, but she figured it could be a fun girl’s night out for herself & Morgan while her two younger children stayed with their grandma.
That Friday had begun like any other; they all got up that morning & Colleen took care of her children as well as those who were enrolled in her in-home daycare. When all the children had been picked up at about 5 pm, Colleen gave her two younger kids baths before making grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.
She feels a sense of regret looking back on that night since Morgan had asked for a second sandwich, but she told her that there was no time to make it.
After dropping her younger son & daughter off with grandma, she & Morgan made the 25-minute drive to the baseball field in Alma on that warm evening. It was a casual, laid-back night & there was no hint that their lives were about to change forever.
The baseball field & facility in Alma was small with the field itself closed in with a chain-link fence. There were bleachers for spectators along the first & third base lines with two small parking areas & no bathrooms or a concession stand.
As Colleen & Morgan settled into the bleachers along the first base line, the game was late starting since there had been a lot of rain in recent days. As the evening wore on a local girl & boy, Jessica & Tye, who were 8 & 10-years-old, had been asking Morgan to play with them, but since she was on the shy side, she initially wanted to stay close to her mom. At about 10:30 pm, when the game was wrapping up, they asked if she wanted to go up on a nearby hill that overlooked the field to catch fireflies.
Since it was getting really late & the game was almost over, Colleen initially said no, but as the children persisted, she didn’t want to be an overbearing parent, so she reluctantly agreed. Kids had been playing on this hill that was about 50 yards away throughout the game & other parents assured her it was safe.
Excited to play with her new friends, Morgan gave her mom a big hug & a kiss on the cheek while Colleen reminded her to stay where she could see her. She ran off wearing her green Green Scouts shirt & that was sadly the last time Colleen ever saw her daughter.
The grassy area in question was situated near the parking area where Colleen had parked that night. There were sand hills scattered about where kids liked to play & climb around.
The game was ending at about 10:45 pm when Jessica & Tye came back to the bleachers without Morgan. Colleen asked them where she was & they explained that she stopped to sit down near a car to empty the sand from her shoes. From where she was standing, Colleen wasn’t able to see Morgan in the parking lot & as she reached her Nissan Stanza, Morgan wasn’t around or inside the car or anywhere else she could see.
As more & more parents began to filter out from the fields, leaving the parking lot nearly empty, panic truly began to set in. Since it was such a small facility with no bathrooms or a concession stand, there really wasn’t anywhere else her daughter could be. Since Morgan was a generally cautious child, Colleen knew that she wouldn’t have willingly left the baseball fields by herself.
Sergeant Harris was the first officer on the scene as he’d only been about a mile away when he got the call about a missing child. Officers initially hoped they were dealing with a miscommunication situation where someone else may have taken Morgan home with them, but very quickly, they realized this wasn’t the case.
Parents as well as community members gathered with law enforcement to help with the search, but they were sadly unable to find Morgan. Evidence from the area was collected that included cigarette butts & bottles while officers canvassed the neighborhood, going door-to-door to ask area residents if they’d seen or heard anything suspicious. The media was alerted while fliers were posted to bring attention to Morgan’s case in hopes that someone might see her.
Jessica & Tye had been the last to have seen Morgan & they told officers that while they were playing together in sand piles on the hill, a man had been interacting with them. He was smoking by his red truck with a white camper top.
A composite sketch was made based on their description of the man who ranged in age from 23-38. He was about 6’0” with a medium-to-solid build & weighed about 180#. He had black or salt-and-pepper hair, a mustache & a one-inch beard. He wore cut-off jean shorts & either no shirt or one that was open, exposing a hairy chest. They described his accent as a hillbilly-type.
The older red truck had dull red paint & was believed to be a Ford pickup truck that had a white camper shell that was too short for the truck bed & may have had potential damage on the right rear side. The windows of the shell were covered in curtains & may have had an Arkansas license plate.
According to Jessica & Tye, as they prepared to run back to their parents, Morgan stopped to empty the sand from her shoes so Tye stayed back with her. As she finished tying them, he ran ahead which was the last time Morgan has ever been seen.
Investigators spoke with anyone who had been at the game that night, asking for witness accounts as well as photos or videos they may have taken. As footage from home movies were reviewed, one truck in particular became a focus that matched what Jessica & Tye had described. It was red with a camper shell & may have been involved in Morgan’s disappearance. The images were enhanced, but they were unable to identify the truck or its owner.
Based on conversations with those at the fields that night, the man in the red truck had no relation to any child or family member in attendance. Investigators believe that Morgan was not coerced to go with him, but rather, it had been a grab & go situation that happened extremely quickly & didn’t alert anyone at the fields.
The state police as well as the FBI became involved in the case & for six weeks, Colleen stayed at a volunteer fire station next to the Alma Police Department so she was close to Morgan’s last known location as well as to the investigation.
Investigators learned that within about ten minutes of when Morgan was abducted, a group of teens at an undisclosed location near the river saw a red truck drive in that matched the one involved in the case. One teen believes that the driver was a man who wore silver framed glasses & may have been holding a young child down inside. After hearing the news of Morgan’s abduction, they contacted investigators to provide a description.
Because there was a flash flood at this location by the river that night, had Morgan been murdered & discarded in here, her body may have sadly washed away.
As information regarding the man & the red truck with a white camper shell was released to the media, various witnesses around town came forward to say that they had seen someone matching this description earlier that Friday.
The best witness account came from a teenage girl who had been walking along the street when a man driving a matching truck pulled over in front of her & backed up to where she was. He asked her if she wanted a ride into downtown Alma, but even after she declined the offer & walked away, the man continued to sit there. He eventually drove off, but she felt highly uncomfortable.
He wore silver framed glasses, a blue work shirt, pants & old black shoes. He had a medium build, a mustache & a beard.
For weeks, extensive searches were conducted, but there was no sight of Morgan. Weeks sadly turned into years & they were no closer to finding her or the man in question.
Colleen described having a missing child as the worst terror a parent can ever experience. Initially, it felt as if she was living in a terrible nightmare as it didn’t feel real that her daughter could be there one second & gone the next.
When Morgan went missing, Colleen had been a shy mother, but after living through the most horrific time of her life, she transformed into an unstoppable activist for missing children across the country, never giving up hope that they would someday bring her daughter home.
In the months after her daughter vanished, Colleen successfully lobbied the media to turn Morgan’s case into a national news story. During this time, she realized that she wasn’t alone in her grief as phone calls from parents who had seen Morgan’s story began coming in. These parents were also missing their own children & they wanted to be there for Colleen to help in any way that they could.
Colleen gradually became involved in the bigger picture of missing children in terms of where to turn & what resources are available in the wake of terror at losing a child to abduction.
In 1996, one year after Morgan disappeared, Colleen established the Morgan Nick Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to helping families of missing children. It’s her goal to prevent other families from going through what she’s gone through. The foundation focuses on intervention, education & legislation regarding missing children. They’ve given presentations that have involved thousands of children about cyber safety, sex trafficking & stranger danger.
That same year, Arkansas’s missing child alert system was named in honor of Morgan.
Colleen has traveled around the country to be with parents who are grieving their own child’s abduction. On June 25, 2001, she went to Avondale, Arizona to be with Olivia Castaneda, whose 3-month-old daughter, Jacqueline, was abducted in her infant carrier on May 6, 2001.
Olivia had gone to a swap meet to meet her mom late that morning with her 2-year-old daughter & 3-month-old Jacqueline, who had been strapped into her infant carrier. Before they went into the shops, she needed to use the restroom so they stopped off at a portable bathroom. Realizing they all couldn’t fit inside, she made the split-second decision to set Jacqueline’s carrier just outside the port-a-potty while she went in with her 2-year-old. When they came out about a minute later, Jacqueline & her infant carrier were gone.
Olivia rushed inside, hoping that her mother had taken the baby, but when she reached her booth, she realized that wasn’t the case. After police were called out & a search was conducted, another vendor recalled a woman acting suspiciously. The woman had walked up to her booth & began stroking her infant daughter’s cheek who had also been strapped in her infant carrier as Jacqueline had been, saying, what a beautiful baby. Something about her seemed off so she paid attention to the woman, but sadly, authorities weren’t able to find her.
Despite the passage of 25 years, Jacqueline has never been found.
Jacqueline is a Hispanic female with black hair & brown eyes with a heart-shaped birthmark on her upper right arm. Investigators believe that it’s very possible that Jacqueline, who would now be a 25-year-old woman, is completely unaware that she’s been raised by the person who abducted her.
Colleen wanted to be there to console Olivia in person. Although she blames herself for her daughter’s abduction, Olivia was comforted by the fact that she isn’t alone in her suffering. It was a blessing to connect with another mother who, as tragic as it is, can relate to her own pain.
Through her advocacy, Colleen has realized that the greatest need a family has is to be able to look someone in the eye & know that there are other people who have not given up hope, to know that they will survive & get through this & that hopefully one day their child will come home.
As the years went by, police continued to follow-up on hundreds of tips regarding Morgan’s possible whereabouts. In 2020, 25 years after she vanished, her investigation was reopened. The team focused on the day that Morgan was taken, June 9, 1995 & the witness statements that had come in about the man they had seen in the red truck with a white camper top.
As they touched back with these witnesses, they spoke with a man who indicated that he’d shared this information before, but he knew of a specific person that might have been responsible for Morgan’s abduction. When they pulled the file, they realized that the suspect in question, Billy Jack Lincks, had been involved in an attempted abduction in Van Buren, Arkansas 2 ½ months after Morgan vanished in August 1995 leading to an arrest for sexual solicitation of a child.
As investigators began reviewing the details of this particular case, now in 2020, they learned that at about 6:45 pm on August 29, 1995, an 11-year-old girl walked to a Sonic fast food restaurant with her three brothers & a friend. They were in Van Buren which is less than a ten minute drive southwest of Alma where Morgan had been abducted.
A white man in a red pickup truck pulled up & asked the young girl if she wanted to talk money. He handed each boy a dollar & told them to leave. When the girl was alone with the man on the corner of Fifth & Webster Streets, he tried to lure her into his 1986 red Chevrolet truck, offering her money in return for sexual favors. Understandably terrified, the girl bravely told him that she was going to call the police.
Lincks dropped his cigarette out of the truck window & asked her to come pick it up, no doubt, preparing to abduct her. The girl screamed & ran toward her brothers, telling them to call the police. When Lincks tried to flee in his truck, he struck a wooden light pole.
After police responded to the scene, the girl described the man as white with a black & gray beard, sandy brown hair with saggy cheeks. He wore a red baseball hat & a brown uniform-type shirt.
When the story aired on the news, a man contacted police who had been at a bank across the street from where this happened when he noticed a man in a red truck talking to a group of kids the day before. Feeling unsettled by what he saw, he jotted down the man’s license plate number which is how investigators identified 70-year-old Billy Jack Lincks.
When investigators had spoken with Jessica & Tye immediately after Morgan’s abduction, the 8 & 10-year-olds had described Morgan’s potential abductor as a man ranging in age from 23-38 which clearly varied greatly from this man, who was 70-years-old. However, children often struggle to identify the true age of adults around them.
After obtaining a search warrant for his home & truck, they found the hat & the wallet that matched what the young girl had described seeing him with. There was also damage to his red pickup truck & paint found on the wooden light post that was a match to his truck which proved he had been the person involved.
When he was interviewed on his arrest the next day, he claimed that because he’d been drinking heavily, although he remembered offering the children money & hitting something when he drove away, he couldn’t remember what he’d spoken to the 11-year-old girl about.
Since Alma was less than 10 minutes away from Van Buren & Morgan had been abducted 2 ½ months earlier, Van Buren police officers notified the FBI & state police. Although Lincks owned a red 1986 Chevy pickup truck that slightly matched the truck seen associated with Morgan’s case, there was no camper shell attached & Lincks denied any knowledge of her abduction.
Lincks’ neighbor believed that he did previously have a camper shell on his truck, but he hadn’t seen it in about two months which would have been in June 1995, the very month that Morgan was abducted.
He passed a polygraph test in relation to Morgan’s abduction. When his truck was sent to the crime lab, a cutting was taken from the bench seat where human blood was found. Hair & fibers were also found inside but because DNA testing was still in its infancy, technicians weren’t able to extract enough usable DNA from the evidence to establish a conclusive match & the case against him in relation to Morgan was dropped.
Moving forward to March 1996, Lincks was found guilty of sexual solicitation in relation to the 11-year-old girl he attempted to abduct & was sentenced to six years in prison. He died in prison at 75-years-old in 2000.
According to court documents, three years earlier in 1992, Lincks was charged with raping his granddaughter, a child under 14, over the course of nine months between March 1992 until his arrest in December 1992. One month later in January 1993, he pleaded not guilty to the rape charge, but he eventually agreed to a no-contest plea (accepting punishment, not admitting to fault) to a lesser charge of first-degree sexual abuse. At the time this was a Class C felony, a charge that no longer exists in Arkansas, that carried a punishment of 3-10 years in prison.
Shockingly, the judge ordered Lincks to serve no jail time. He was ordered to complete a counseling program at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Fayetville & pay a $500 fine along with $130 in court fees.
Now in 2020, none of the evidence that had been collected from Lincks’ truck in 1995, including the human blood, hair or fibers found inside, could be located. After his arrest in August 1995, his red truck was impounded & recently auctioned. Investigators were thankfully able to track down the current owner who still had the truck which was then sent to an out-of-state lab in 2020.
The FBI’s Evidence Response Team examined the truck in July 2020 & collected several vacuum canisters that contained various bits of evidence, including hair that was found under what was believed to be the truck’s original floor cover. Three years later, in 2023, Alma detectives sent the evidence to Othram Laboratory in Texas for analysis.
On September 27, 2024, the lab report came back & revealed that hair found in his truck matched the DNA of Colleen Nick or someone related to her. Since Lincks was unknown to the Nick family, there is no reasonable explanation as to why their DNA would be in the truck which strongly indicates that Morgan Nick had been inside his truck.
Law enforcement also found blue-green cotton fibers in various parts of the interior of the truck that FBI technicians were able to match on a microscopic level to a Girl Scout shirt of the same type that Morgan was wearing when she vanished.
On October 1, 2024, 29 years after Morgan’s abduction & 24 years after Bill Jack Lincks’ death, the Alma police announced him as their top suspect in the Morgan Nick case.
Although multiple digs on private land & structures associated with Lincks have occurred, Morgan’s remains have yet to be found. Authorities also revisited the area along the river where witnesses saw a man in a red truck who was possibly holding a child down on the night of Morgan’s abduction.
Because flood stages reached as high as 32 feet in this location in the days after her abduction, the river was running more rapidly & potentially swept Morgan’s body away with it.
Colleen is enraged that her daughter’s abductor & murderer will never have to stand & face justice on earth for what he did to Morgan. Although Lincks may have taken her life & stole her from her family, her memory & her voice outlasted his life & that love continues to shine. Today, it’s Colleen’s wish that she be able to bring her daughter home to her final resting place.
31 years have passed since Morgan was taken; she would be 37-years-old today had she not crossed paths with a monster hiding in plain sight. A man, who, instead of seeing three young children innocently playing, had seen opportunity. Despite the passage of so many years, Arkansas has not forgotten Morgan Nick & the Arkansas State Capitol is lit up in pink in her honor.
References:
- Unsolved Mysteries Wiki: Jacqueline Vasquez
- Unsolved Mysteries Wiki: Morgan Nick
- 5 News: A look into the criminal history of Billy Jack Lincks, the main suspect in the Morgan Nick case
- K8 News: Hair found in suspect’s truck linked to Morgan Nick’s disappearance
- 4029 News: DNA from hair links Billy Jack Lincks to 1995 disappearance of Morgan Nick
- Find a Grave: Morgan Chauntel Nick
- ABC 7: 30 years without Morgan: the case still rattling Colleen Nick’s world
- Hulu: Still Missing Morgan
- Arkansas Advocate: New DNA evidence strongly links suspect to Morgan Nick’s 1995 disappearance, Arkansas police say
