The Deck - Nicole Silvers (5 of Diamonds, Colorado)

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

Our card this week is Nicole "Nikki" Silvers, the 5 of Diamonds from Colorado. Nicole "Nikki" Silvers was last seen on April 9th, 2014 around 3 a.m. walking into a house in Longmont, Colorado where she had been temporarily living. The 16-year-old has not been seen or heard from since. If you know anything about Nikki’s whereabouts, or what happened to her, please call the Weld County, Colorado, Sheriff’s Office at 970-400-2827. To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org

Our card this week is Nicole Silvers, the five of diamonds from Colorado. Nicole, who her friends all called Nikki, was a happy, free-spirited teenager, juggling a part-time job, high school classes, and a busy social life. When one day in the spring of 2014, she vanished. We sent our reporting team to her hometown in Colorado to speak with investigators currently working her case about why her story is so unique and why the circumstances surrounding her disappearance remained so baffling. What we walked away with was a revelation law enforcement had previously not known about. A dark secret one of Nikki's family members had been keeping for years.

I'm Ashley Flowers and this is The Deck. Around 6.30 in the morning on April 10, 2014, 16-year-old Dana Stofur was just waking up to get ready for school. As she made her way down the hall and to the kitchen, Dana noticed something that made her pause. The bedroom door to her friend, Nikki's room, was wide open. Like not just a little bit cracked, completely open, which was weird considering Nikki normally kept her door closed. When Dana looked through the open door, she noticed that her friend wasn't in her bed.

Even more strange was the fact that Nikki's bed was made. Normally she never made her bed. Not seeing Nikki in her room or anywhere in the house caused Dana to ask a lot of questions in her mind. Where was she? Pajila for school early? And if it was the latter, that was definitely odd because rarely was Nikki ever up before Dana, let alone gone from the house.

Weld County, Colorado cold case detective Byron Castelon, said each minute that ticked by, Dana couldn't come up with a reason as to why Nikki was not where she should have been. But before she did anything drastic, she poked around her friend's room, and that's when she noticed something else. All her clothes are gone, her guitar is gone, her shampoos and conditioners, and I guess we're really high-end, that she really meant a lot to her.

Like all of her stuff was gone, that's mysterious. As Dana looked around the room, she not only took note of what was missing. She also noticed big items Nikki had left behind, her guitar case, and the one thing no teenager would ever be caught without. It is weird that the guitar was gone but not the case and her cell phone charger was still there. Her guitar was important to her. She took the guitar, you'd think she'd put it in the case to keep it safe.

And if she was going, she's going to grab up all her possessions, it's strange that she would forget her own charger. Now Nikki and Dana weren't related, but they did live together. The girls were both only 16 and went to the same high school. Both of them lived with Dana's mom Allison in Allison's small one story ranch house in Longmont, Colorado, a small city about an hour north of Denver. Nikki had parents and siblings of her own in the town of Firestone about 25 minutes east of Longmont, but at the time she wasn't getting along with her family, so she'd gotten permission to temporarily live with Dana and Allison.

They're having problems, you know, teenage. She didn't seem like a super delinquent problem child, but they're just not getting along with mom and dad. Nothing like real big, just kind of a underlying, not getting along a lot with dad, I think. I know she, friends said that she had some complaints about her dad being overly strict. Apparently, everyone involved with this situation

was OK with the arrangement. It kind of seemed like Nikki was following in the footsteps of her older sister Jessica, who had also grown estranged from the Silver's family. Nikki wasn't paying rent at Allison's house while she stayed there. Allison was just doing her daughter's friend a favor until Nikki could work out a living arrangement with her mom and dad, or find permanent housing elsewhere. Nikki's parents figured their teenage daughter would move back home after she realized what a lot of teens learned the hard way.

That working and going to school full-time without any parental support is really hard and it adds up fast. Nikki had been living with Dana and her mom for just a few weeks and during that time at no point had Nikki talked about moving back in with her parents. So her, and a lot of her prized possessions being gone all of a sudden, was weird. Dana figured that if Nikki had decided to go home to her family, she would have at least given her a heads up. Plus, she hadn't even heard Nikki leave the night before.

Dana tried to think about the last time she'd seen her friend, and she realized that she hadn't seen her at all the day before. Nikki kept a busy schedule between being a high school student and working as a cook at a pizza place in Mead, Colorado, which was just a town over, so it wasn't completely unusual for Dana and Nikki to go a day or so without seeing one another. After a few minutes of looking around Nikki's room, Dana went to ask her mom, Allison, if she'd seen Nikki at all on Wednesday, April 9th, but Allison said no. She hadn't seen Nikki at all on Wednesday, April 9th. But Allison said no.

She hadn't seen Nikki in at least two days. They both agreed that neither of them had talked to Nikki about any plans for her to move out, and how neither noticed any sounds of someone leaving during the night before. So the whole thing felt weird. But Dana and Allison decided not to panic. They figured that Nikki had just picked up some extra shifts at work and would maybe fill them in on her plans later. Allison briefly worried that maybe Nikki felt she'd overstate

her welcome, which wasn't the case. But Friday rolled around, and Nikki was a no-show at school and her job, which was especially weird, because that particular Friday, April 11th, was payday. Here's Detective Castalon again. It wasn't till the 11th was payday. Here's Detective Castellan again. It wasn't till the 11th when people started to think, this is odd, especially when she didn't show up for work, she was always good about showing up for work. So the 11th, she doesn't show up for work, I work calls and speaks with Dana and Allison Allison and that gets the ball rolling for talking to

family, mom and dad, mom and dad, I hadn't seen her. And then by the 12th they're like, okay now it's been a couple days, hasn't gone to work. She's not at the place where she's staying in Longmont. She's not at mom and dad's. So we should get law enforcement involved. And because she was 16 and I believe she had some previous runaway reports, it was treated as a runaway. Like Castellan said, after everyone talked to each other on Saturday, April 12, Nikki's mom Barbara and sister Sarah called the weld county sheriff's office to report that Nikki ran away again.

It's not clear exactly how many times Nikki had taken off from her parents' house before leading up to her moving in with Dana and Allison, but in every one of those instances, Nikki had always shown back up in a day or two after cooling off, usually at a friend's house. When the weld county sheriff's office got Barbara and Sarah's call reporting Nikki as her runaway, they sent a deputy to the family's house to ask some follow-up questions. At the time, no one in Nikki's family felt that she was in immediate danger, so there wasn't a sense of urgency quite yet. They'd been down this road before, and they just wanted to make sure that they did everything they could to keep tabs on Nikki in the event that she turned up for gotten to any trouble. There's no suspicion that any foul play had occurred.

It seemed like they thought that she was a runaway and just a private friend just wanted her report made so she could be entered in the system if she's contacted that they would know where she is and what she's safe. Deputies filed a runaway report, which meant that if law enforcement enabling towns or counties found Nikki or picked her up for something, Weld County would get notified and deputies would be able to at least tell Nikki's family that she was alive and just choosing not to come home. So things briefly went back to business as usual by the end of the day on Saturday. But by Sunday night when Nikki still hadn't shown up anywhere, Things briefly went back to business as usual by the end of the day on Saturday.

But by Sunday night when Nikki still hadn't shown up anywhere, her friends, co-workers, and family were like, okay, something is definitely wrong. After a few more days, as time goes on, it gets more unusual. Because as I said before, when she's around a way, it's not been very long. She's back. Now that she hasn't gone to work, family learns that all her possessions were gone out of the bedroom at Dana's house.

So now they're like, oh, maybe she moved away, but then it's strange that she had a paycheck. Friday was payday, so if she was going to like move to California, you'd think she would have stuck around till Friday and get her last paycheck. Another cause for alarm was the fact that between Tuesday, April 8th and Friday, April 11th, friends and family had been trying to text and call Nikki's cell, but it kept going straight to voicemail. When their calls were still going straight to voicemail on Sunday night, Dana Allison and

the Silver's family started to really worry. Her parents reached back out to the Sheriff's office, and that's when the case went from being a team runaway report to an actual missing person's investigation. That meant detective started asking questions. The biggest one being, when was the last time anyone saw Nikki? The first two people authorities turned to for answers were Dana and Allison, and what they told investigators shifted the focus of the investigation in a whole new direction. When police sat down and interviewed Dana, she told them that the last time she saw

Nikki was around midnight on Tuesday, April 8, the day before she disappeared. Dana told police that Nikki was sitting in someone's car in their driveway. Dana's mom, Allison, told the authorities the same thing. Only she had woke up around 2am to get a glass of water and happened to just glance out front and saw Nikki sitting in someone's passenger seat. Allison described the car as an older, boxy looking olds mobile. Neither of them knew whose car it was, and they hadn't been able to see who'd been in the driver's seat. This information forced investigators to consider a different scenario. Maybe Nikki didn't just run away.

Maybe she had been taken by someone that she thought she could trust. They had seen that car out front, but it was a mystery who owned this car. So, you know, that was looked at, like maybe that person abducted her, because they saw Nikki in the car, but they didn't know who was in the driver's seat. As detectives question more and more people in Nikki's close circle of

friends, including her parents, Barbara and Kevin, they learned more valuable information. On Tuesday, April 8, the last day anyone saw her, Nikki went to work at Pizza Plus in Mead. At the time, Nikki's car had broken down so she'd been bumming rides from people to get two and from school and work. Her friends weren't sure where Nikki's broken down car was. She didn't have the money to fix it at the time, and she managed to get around without it. Sometimes she would get rides from friends, but a lot of time she resorted to hitchhiking,

ignoring warnings from friends and family about the dangers of a teenage girl getting into cars with strangers. Police learned from one of Nikki's co-workers named Jesse that he'd driven her home to Allison and Dana's house after work on Tuesday evening, but it wasn't his car that was spotted again at midnight and 2 a.m. Allison and Dana said that after their last sighting of Nikki, they never heard her come inside, but to be fair, they would have been asleep. The next day, Wednesday, April 9th, Dana and Allison said that they had not seen Nikki

at all, but they didn't think anything of it at the time. The only person who was supposed to see Nikki on the 9th was her cousin, Michelle. Michelle told investigators that she had made lunch plans with Nikki that day, and that Nikki didn't show up. Michelle said she texted Nikki around noon, asking her if she needed a ride, but Nikki never responded. At the time, Michelle just brushed it off as her cousin flaking. It wasn't until the next morning on the 10th that Dana noticed Nikki's room was cleared out. After conducting these interviews with Dana, Alice and Michelle, police were starting to get an idea of Nikki's last movements and what the teen's life was like. Most

importantly, her habits and her general lifestyle while living outside of her parents' house. Friend said that she smoked marijuana every once in a while, but she wasn't really getting in trouble. Too much she wasn't really a big drinker. You know, all her friends said that she was pretty bright, free spirit, used to describe her musician. She played the guitar. So to describe her. Musician, she played the guitar.

She liked music. She was a loyal friend. She made friends fairly easy. She had close friends. To detectives, Nikki sounded like a normal teenage girl. And part of a lot of teenage girls' lives is some kind of relationship or boyfriend. Police wanted to know if Nikki had a boyfriend that they could interview.

Nikki's mom, Barbara, told detectives that her daughter had had a relationship with a guy a few years older than her, named Patrick. She had a boyfriend at the time who had... they were kind of on a break because he was had moved to Mississippi where he was from. And so he was there, but that happened like February. He went out there in February.

That's another thing that she had talked about was going to Mississippi. A lot of people speculated, oh, maybe she packed up and was gonna try to Mississippi or something. Detectives wasted no time in contacting Nicky's maybe ex-boyfriend Patrick and Mrs. Cippy. They connected with him over the phone, and he was shocked to learn that Nicky was even missing. He confirmed that he was hundreds of miles away from Colorado and had been for a few months.

Police asked him if Nicky was there with him, and he said no. They also asked him if Nicky had mentioned coming to see him, and he said no. They also asked him if Nikki had mentioned coming to see him and he said not recently. Patrick told investigators that he'd moved to Mississippi in early 2014 because his grandpa got sick. He said Nikki had broken up with him after his move because she didn't want to do long distance. Patrick was 18, so not much older than Nikki, but he'd already graduated high school. Patrick said that he and Nikki had texted briefly during the first few days of April and that everything seemed fine with her. But they hadn't spoken after April 8. He told detectives that he'd let them and her family know if she contacted him again.

And in fact, he was so concerned for her that he dropped everything he was doing in Mississippi and went back to Colorado to help Nikki's family search for her. As detectives were continuing their investigation, Nikki's family members started to hit the streets with flyers trying to spread the word about her disappearance. Nikki's mom Barbara also spent time trying to think of anything that might help police. Anyone they could talk to, anywhere Nikki might have gone, one other place popped up in her mind.

She mentioned to authorities that Nikki had a friend named Shandra, who lived in Colorado Springs, which is like two hours south of Longmont. According to Barbara, before Nikki had left home to live with Dana and Allison, she tossed around the idea of moving there. So maybe Nikki had hitched her ride down there without letting anyone know? But according to Detective Castelon, that lead never went anywhere. know, but according to Detective Castelon, that lead never went anywhere. She had talked with the friend in Colorado Springs and seemed to be considering moving down there,

but nothing really was set in stone. And she didn't, Nikki had never told her what her, you know, any plans of running away or going anywhere. She didn't have any information on anybody that had it out for her, that wanted to harm her, anything like that. Like all the friends are like, this is crazy mystery, there's no idea what could have happened to her because she never talked about anything that would give any clue as to why she would disappear and then she seemed happy and content. Within the first week of the investigation, right around when police learned Nikki's cousin Michelle had texted her on April 9th and didn't get a response, they got a search warrant

for her phone records. Investigators were hoping Nikki's phone calls or text logs might clue them in on her last location or conversations. The records confirmed that the text from Michelle asking where Nikki was had been received by Nikki's phone on April 9th at 1227pm. That message was the last text Nikki received before her phone either died or was turned off. The rest of the records were unhelpful. Turned out to be turned off. So wherever that phone entered up, it was turned off fairly quickly. No calls were, they got phone records, so no calls were made from it or anything.

To it or from it. Shortly after that, like, April 9. So that didn't produce any leads. The contents of all of the other text messages authorities could see, Nikki's phone had received or sent prior to April 9 seemed normal. None of the messages indicated that she was making plans to leave her life in Longmont. Police also checked Nikki's bank statements to see if there had been any activity in her account.

Even though she was just 16, Nikki had her own account. But Detective Castelon said that when police looked, they found that there was only a few hundred dollars in it. And no one had taken anything out of the account recently either. So if Nikki had decided to just abandon her life and start fresh on her own, she had very little cash to survive. And again, what cash she had, she didn't even take. And those financial records were important because remember, Nikki had that paycheck waiting

for her at Pizza Plus. It was for $265. So if police weren't already convinced that she had not just run away, this information made them pretty sure that wasn't the case. They were slowly leaning more and more toward the theory that she had been abducted. But there were also issues with that line of thinking. Most notably, the tidy bedroom she'd left behind at Allison's house. If you're going to abduct somebody, you're not going to typically break into their house

and have them pack their stuff. That's a mystery that I can unravel. It's strange that if somebody forced her to leave, that's just very, I don't know, you know, with two people sleeping in the house, they're going to say, pack up all your stuff or a doctor and then go in and take her stuff. That's strange. Even though police couldn't reconcile everything they'd learned about Nikki's disappearance with the evidence in front of them, the sheriff's office decided to put out a press release anyway. They sent out a missing person's poster for Nikki to local media outlets and asked anyone

who'd seen her to please call them. The poster depicted what Nikki looked like at the time that she went missing, with her hair cut short and dyed bright red, though naturally she had light brown hair, rosy cheeks, and blue eyes. The news of her case and her picture hit Colorado media publications pretty quickly after the poster's release. By April 20, 11 days after anyone had last heard from her, tips started to come in from across the state. One man in Boulder told Welled County Detectives that he'd seen Nikki hanging out with some people in a homeless camp a week after she'd been reported missing.

Another woman in the nearby town of John's Town called in to report a sighting of Nikki at a fast food drive-through. One report said that Nikki had been spotted at a liquor store in Longmont. Another said she'd been walking toward a park in town. These leads were pursued, either by sending detectives to investigate them or by reviewing surveillance videos, but they all amounted to dead ends.

In the meantime, police turned to her school to learn more about her, and counselors at Mead High School where Nikki was a sophomore said that she maintained decent grades and excelled in her classes. The only nugget of interesting information that police got from interviewing some of her teachers was that one of them said they'd sign Nikki up for a program where she could get some clothing donations and things like that. The teacher told investigators they've made the effort for Nikki to receive that charity because they felt like she could have used it.

We don't know a ton about Nikki's home life before she went to live with Dana, but Detective Castelon said the Silver's family was middle class and able to provide for their kids, so it's interesting that a teacher would view Nikki as needing charity. There were no reports of abuse or domestic violence at home, just a little bit of information about Nikki not getting along with her parents to the point that she decided to move out. Beyond that, there was no indication that things were extremely rough with Nikki's upbringing, or that the silvers did not have the means to provide for her. Detective Castelon said in the first few days of the investigation, Nikki's parents seemed, quote, appropriately concerned about their missing daughter. There

were no signs that Barbara and Kevin Silvers didn't care about Nikki. There were definitely signs that their relationship with her was strained, but something that I find interesting is that even though police knew Nikki didn't get along with her dad, Kevin, detectives in 2014 never actually brought him in for a formal sit-down interview. He didn't have any idea of where she might have gone. He didn't really talk about the issues that he had with her. That was learned from friends. She didn't, I mean, she didn't get along with mom and that war dad, but more so with dad too.

I wish I knew more about Nikki's relationship with her parents and why it was so bad that she didn't wanna live under their roof. But Detective Castellan said it seemed more like just normal teenage stuff. Her just not wanting to follow their rules. Especially, you know, she had a lot of, according to friends, she had a lot of complaints about dad just always needing around and making her do chores and stuff that she didn't want to do.

Months passed without any other sightings of Nikki. In 2014, turn into 2015. The one-year anniversary of her disappearance came and went and little changed in the case. During that time, there was no activity noted in her bank account or on her cell or social media. The only tips that were still coming in were repeats that had already been investigated. Then, in September 2016, a different law enforcement agency, the Longmont Police Department, came across Nicky's broken-down car, just a few miles away from where she was last seen. On September 7, 2016, a Longmont police officer was on patrol when he noticed a car that

had been abandoned at 19th Avenue and Logan Street in the city of Longmont. According to the Longmont Police Department, it was near a house known for drug sales. Because of the location, the officer had been keeping an eye on the car for a few days. When the car didn't move after a few days, the officer was just like, okay, that's enough, and he went up to the front door and asked the tenants about it. The people living at the house said that the car had been broken down for a long time, and they weren't even sure who it was. That's when police ran the plates and saw that it belonged to Nicole Silvers. In the officer's report, he wrote, quote, a missing person is associated with the plate. End quote.

But for whatever reason, the Longmont Police Department did not notify the Weld County Sheriff's Office, which was the investigating agency in charge of Nikki's case. The car just sat in the impound lot at the City Police Department until an entire year later. That's when, in September 2017, a detective at the Weld County Sheriff's Office randomly did a database search for the car and saw that it had been recovered a year before. According to the Towing Company's records, there was nothing of evidentiary value found inside the car. But I'm sure detectives with Weld County would have liked to make that determination

for themselves when it was found rather than a year later. Now ultimately, after this year, they too weren't able to get anything valuable from it. But again, is that because there was nothing to begin with, or that evidence was lost or destroyed over time? It was a question that just frustrated the investigators, and ultimately, the car didn't provide any clues as to where she was. Weld County authorities questioned the men who lived at the house where the car had been left, but when they showed them a photo of Nikki, none of them recognized her or thought she'd ever been there.

The case went cold after that, with another year passing and no new leads. Then, in 2018, two different people happened to suggest the same theory that gave detectives a whole new angle to investigate. Maybe Nikki was still alive, but had just run off to join a communal living society or be part of a commune. The first person to suggest this was someone Nikki used to work with.

Somebody had mentioned that since Nikki was such a free spirit, like music and it was kind of a hippie chick, but maybe she would have gone off and joined this group called the rainbow people. Not long after that loose lead came in, another relative of Nikki suggested the same thing to police. And even sent a photo that she saw online of the backside of a woman who'd been photographed at a rainbow people gathering. They thought it could be Nikki.

The woman in the photo has blondish dreadlocks that are gathered in the back, and she's wearing a black tank top with a sweater tied around her waist. She's got gloves on and is holding some sort of metal bucket. The reason Nikki's relatives thought that the girl in the photo was Nikki was because of one of Nikki's ears.

It had a slight deformity. According to investigators, it isn't super noticeable, but one earlobe is slightly smaller than the other. Detective Castelon sent us the photo, but he prefaced it by saying he has no way of confirming the woman in the photo is Nikki. You can see that photo on our website and on our Instagram. But honestly, if you zoom in on the photo,

it's too blurry to even really see this kind of detail. Detective Castelon said even after looking into it, the woman could be anyone. Anyway, the rainbow people, also known as the Rainbow Family, are a group of people who meet for summer gatherings on forest-service land throughout the US for annual campouts. It's not a cult because the family doesn't have a leader or anyone that they worship, and they aren't associated with politics or any specific religion. According to their unofficial website, they celebrate peace and love, and they gather to pray for more of that in the world. Detective Castelon confirmed for our team that the rainbow people were in Northern Colorado in the spring of 2014. They don't have any organization to them.

They're just a group of people and high-searched, you know, regional news stories for anything around that time. And there had been a stabbing up by red feathers where the rainbow people were having a, they're in campment. It's like an encampment and festival concert and stuff. But I was a guy, stabbed another guy. Yeah, nothing coming up about any missing teenage girls. As a theory, it made sense because most of her friends, when I talked to them about that possibility of her joining them, they were all like, oh yeah, she would love that. But she never talked about it and made plans for it.

Now, Detective Castelon has never ruled out the possibility of Nikki having run off with the Rainbow family, but he's also had no luck finding her in the group. It wasn't until 2019 when Detective Castelon officially took over Nikki's case, and with his fresh set of eyes brought a big break in the case. For the first time ever, he was able to identify and track down the owner of the mysterious that Dana and Allison had seen Nikki sitting in. It turns out when Nikki went missing in 2014, her older sister, Jessica, who was estranged from the family, was battling a heroin addiction. And Jessica had a 1988 old mobile. Not only that, when Castelon interviewed Jessica, he learned that she was with her sister the night that Nikki vanished. She said they went to Wendy's and had a late dinner and then just did a

lot of catching up because they hadn't seen each other in a long time. The drugs were getting in the way of Jessica's life, which is why they hadn't seen each other in a while, so I think it was during a moment of sobriety that she wanted to spend some time with Nikki. In 2020, by the time Jessica had her first formal sit-down interview with the Weld County Sheriff's Office, she revealed to Detective Castalon that she was sober. She went on to explain that the night Nikki vanished, she and her sister had been chatting

for hours in Allison and Dana's driveway. Jessica said they talked about life and boys and future plans. Around 3am, Jessica said Nikki went into Dana's house and then she left. Now this bit of information was a massive breakthrough in the case because for five years no one knew whose car Nikki had been sitting in. And not only that, Detective Castellan now had a brand new witness who could tighten up the timeline leading up to Nikki's disappearance. The other really important thing that Jessica was able to clarify for investigators was why

Nikki's car had been found, broken down down at the suspected drug house in Longmont. Jessica said she had been the one to borrow it in late March or early April of 2014. And when it had stopped being able to start, she'd just abandoned it there. So those pieces of information did bring a little bit of clarity to the case because they filled in some gaps. But nothing Jessica said pointed directly to any clues as to what happened to Nikki after she went back inside Dana and Allison's house on April 9, 2014 around 3am. Jessica told Detective Castellon that her conversations with Nikki that night were normal.

She said Nikki had not mentioned any plans to move out of Dana's house and didn't mention any plans to leave Longmont. Jessica also told the detective that Nikki was not struggling with substance use issues like she was back then. She knew her sister to be a good student and a pretty responsible teenager. She said Nikki only partied socially and they were never together when Jessica was using. Also I know what you're thinking. Why didn't Jessica come forward with this information years earlier when it may have actually been more useful? Well, Detective Castelon said she was in a bad place back then, and she said that's why

she hadn't wanted to cooperate with police. She was battling substance use issues alongside her boyfriend at the time, who actually ended up later dying from an overdose. Jessica claimed that her ongoing struggle with substance use in 2014 made her memories fuzzy, and her entire attitude toward her sister's situation apathetic. It wasn't till five years after her sister's disappearance that she got clean and felt ready to talk to Detective Castelon. After learning everything he could from Jessica, Castelon re-interviewed everyone involved in the original case. Nikki's parents, her ex-boyfriend

Patrick, her friends, co-workers, Dana and Allison. He spent hours talking to each of them to be sure their statements hadn't changed and to make sure that he had all the information. Everyone reiterated what they'd originally said. And despite so much time passing, no one had heard from or seen Nikki. Detective Castellan came away from those interviews feeling conflicted about the evidence. He doesn't believe, based on what he knows from the people who loved her, that Nikki was capable of harming herself. She never had any previous suicide attempts, so that was ruled out. And for him, the evidence just didn't add to make a big deal,

maybe you don't want to say goodbye to your friends and family because it'll be too sad. So you're just going to move and you'll call them later. Well, you get your last paycheck. A stranger abduction is a theory that Castelon is not super sold on entirely. Considering, Nikki appeared to have packed up her things and left, but her tidy room doesn't rule out

abduction completely. Detective Castelon believes in his gut that something bad happened to Nikki and that she likely went with someone willingly before things turned deadly. I think she was probably with somebody that she somewhat trusted enough to get her stuff out of the house into that vehicle with this person. And then, yeah, she just forgot her guitar case and charger, and then probably thought, okay, well, I'll just go back for that.

But now, this person has done something to me. In the fall of 2020, Detective Castelonga assistance from a local dive team. And they searched a lake at Lumiller Park in Longmont. There hadn't been a tip connected to the park, but that lake is just a stone throw away from Dana and Allison's house. The search was just an effort the investigators felt like they needed to take in order to rule out a theory that maybe Nikki accidentally drowned in that lake or something. The search took almost six hours, but they didn't find any human remains. In order to keep the investigation active, Detective Castelon does weekly online checks for

anything associated with the case or the case evidence. He looks for her guitar to see if it's been pond anywhere. He doesn't have a serial number, but he knows the make and model. Nothing has come of that yet, but he still checks all the time. He also has Nikki's dental records and her DNA from a hairbrush she left at her parents' house, so he does weekly searches in databases for unidentified remains around the country, for young women that match her build and profile. In November 2021, a young woman's remains were discovered in California, so Detective

Castelon did a DNA test against that, but it turned out not to be Nikki. Nikki's disappearance continues to baffle her friends, family members, and investigators. The fact that she was last seen with her sister and her sister said that she saw Nikki go back inside the house that night and that Dana and Allison never heard her come in or leave or anything, it's all left so many questions unanswered. How does someone go missing from inside a small one-story house while people are home. It's a major mystery. It's so bizarre that, you know, during that short time frame, you would disappear like that. There are a lot of people out there who miss Nikki Silver's.

The spunky, free-spirited teenager brought a lot of joy to people in her life, and her absence is still felt. She would have turned 25 last week. Nikki is described as 5 foot 8 inches tall and weighed 135 pounds when she went missing 8 years ago. If you know anything about Nikki's whereabouts or what happened to her, please call the Weld County Colorado Sheriff's Office at 970-40-2827. The Deck is an audio-truck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis to learn more about the Deck, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?