Post Mortem | Jade Colvin is Missing

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And if it's not, it's still not worth it. Yet, stop, and I'll fanta.com. Welcome to Postmortem. I'm your host Anne Marie Green, and today we're discussing the case of 14-year-old Jade Colvin. She was reported missing in June of 2016 after she ran away from a local shelter in Iowa for troubled youth.

But then her case went unsolved for years, until a new team of investigators set out to find answers. Following leads all the way to a remote farm in Dakota, Iowa. So joining me today is 48 hours correspondent, Natalie Morales, who reported on Jade's case.

And once again, Natalie, it's always good to have you here.

Thanks again for having me, Anne Marie. Now, I should point out this is a case about the passion and the persistence of so many investigators, who really worked together to try to solve this year's long mystery of what happened to this missing young girl. Absolutely. I want to give everyone the quick reminder as per usual.

If you have not watched or listened to this episode, it's called Jade Colvin is missing. Go check it out and then come back for this conversation. All right, Natalie, we learned very early on in the hour. Jade Colvin's had a tough, tough childhood. Both her mother, LaDon, and her father, Kevin, they struggle with substance abuse.

Jade is only 13 when she's placed in foster care, but she's in and out of different facilities. And she runs away a lot. So when she ran away in 2016, in a way, this was part of a pattern.

“So I'm wondering why for Jade's family and for her friends, why they thought this was different?”

Well, I mean, she literally just fell off the map. You know, as you mentioned, she did frequently run away. She ran away from a shelter. She was hiding from the foster care system. Her mother LaDon also tried to hide her from this system as well.

She didn't want her daughter to be in foster care. She wanted her daughter to be with her, but as you mentioned, LaDon and Jade's father, both had a history of substance abuse. Kevin, the father also had lost contact with Jade. She was officially reported missing in 2016 by the shelter when she ran away.

Her reaching out to friends and family. That all stopped in March of 2017.

“And that's when friends and families started to think, OK, this is unusual.”

But it was when she would have turned 18. She would have aged out of the foster care system. And some of her family and friends, that's when they started to fear something had happened to her. So I mean, I hate to say this, but you know, I mean, plenty of young women go missing. They disappear into the night and often those cases are not followed up on what encouraged authorities to keep looking for Jade after so many years.

Well, the investigation into her disappearance really picked up in 2020. And it was with the US marshals. They had this statewide operation called Operation Homecoming. It was an effort to find missing children. Now, Jade's case was one of 24 young adults that they were looking into.

And the incredible thing is they were able to solve and find all but two of them.

Unfortunately, Jade was one of them and another person who was still missing in 2022. This team of various agencies is called in as well. And I want to give credit to the people involved detective. And I want to thank them. And I want to thank them.

And I want to thank them. And I want to thank them. And I want to thank them. And I want to thank them. and as you know, you have teenagers. I have teenagers. So for them not to have any kind of social media presence very unusual. So this team, once they saw that, they said something here is wrong. As special agent John Turbett said, if we can't find her, we want to get justice for Jade. In fact, mentioning special agent John Turbett, I want to play a clip. He explains why Jade's case was so important to his team.

So you hear that passion right there with the special agent talking about how this case resonated. It really hit home to him. Yeah, you know, I totally get that. When I think about the pictures that were in the hour, I kept on thinking, he looks like any kid, you know, in my own daughter's high school.

“So I totally get what in what investigators felt. I also thought it was really interesting that she was still despite all of this dysfunction really close to her mother.”

And this is something that the detectives kind of pick up as well. Investigators, they find new evidence. And what they find is that after Jade ran away from the shelter in 2016, they're discussing a plan LaDon had hatched for LaDon to bring Jade to this farm in Decora, Iowa.

It's owned by a man that she's been dating, not for a very long time. His name is James Buckmerski. And this is the plan that Jade would stay there until she's 18.

At that point, she'd be free of the foster care system. LaDon will continue to live three hours away because she's dealing with some legal issues. It is quite an elaborate plan.

“I mean, LaDon had, as you mentioned, was dating Buckmerski for all of four months. Buckmerski was virtually a stranger to Jade as well when Jade got dropped off there.”

But the idea was, you know, LaDon really wanted her to be with her eventually. She didn't want her daughter on the foster care system. She didn't trust the foster care system. And everyone I should point out who we spoke to. They all said that they believe LaDon did this from a place of love. She wasn't putting her daughter there certainly not to endanger her. She was a mother who thought she was doing her best at the time despite all of her demons. Unfortunately, LaDon died three years after Jade went missing.

So investigators as they started their search, they didn't have the ability to go talk to LaDon.

“Did anybody in the family call police when she went missing from the farm?”

Not initially because after she disappeared from Buckmerski's farm, they believed that Jade was running away again from a situation that she didn't want to be placed in. So LaDon goes back to Buckmerski's farm at one point and she went to investigate. She asked James Buckmerski, you know, where's my daughter? What happened to her? And he also told her, oh, I've she ran away. So, you know, and again going back to the fact that LaDon really did not trust the system.

She's not going to be the one who goes to the police and raises alarm bells. Now, we did hear from Jade's aunt in the hour, her name is Tandra. She clearly cared very deeply for her niece.

I wondered about whether or not, you know, family could have intervened before she ended up in foster care. And Tandra did. She actually took Jade in and her two younger sisters for a little over a year. I believe it was when Jade was nine or ten years old. According to Jade's aunt in that year that Jade was there. She really blossomed and at that time Tandra, you know, she had three kids of her own. Her husband had just died. She was also putting herself through school. She even apparently moved a couple of times to be in a house that so that each of the girls could have their own room.

She bought them beds. She bought them new clothes. She even took them to, you know, build the bear for birthday parties seem like this was the only time in her life. But she had a semblance of normalcy in all those years growing up. At one point, Tandra told us that Kevin, Jade's father did get clean. He regained custody. So she would have liked to have done more for them. But at that time, she felt well Kevin her brother seemed to have gotten his act together. To this day, though, Tandra says she regrets she couldn't do more and that she couldn't keep them. That is tough. I mean, it sounds like she did an awful lot.

All right. So then fast forward to 2022. The U.S. Marshals reach out to local law enforcement near Buckmoreski's farm for help talking to the family. And that is when Detective Chris Webker from the Winnishy County Sheriff's Office officially joins the team. James Buckmoreski is no longer living there. The house has been gutted. It's been renovated. There are new owners. They allow law enforcement to look around. Natalie, in reporting of this hour, you also went to DeCora to just see what this location looked like. I thought it was really interesting because there's this kind of really wide drone shot. And immediately as I saw that shot, I thought there's no way she ran away. Where's she going to run away to?

Oh, yeah, your eyes are tearing up. You know, it was minus 14 degrees. If it had been I believe three degrees colder, the drone that we used would not have been able to fly. It would have been frozen in the air. Our crew were speaking of my eyeballs freezing. They were wearing ski goggles and ski gear so that they wouldn't freeze. And you know, really should highlight the importance of going to these locations and seeing them in person because when you stand.

“In the middle of nowhere like that in that farm, it is beautiful, but you also know the situation that this young girl was placed in she was completely isolated on this remote farm. It's kind of hilly and as you saw by that shot is over 200 acres.”

There is really nowhere to go if you're running away because the town downtown decor, which is really cute and quaint. It's about eight miles from the farm. And as we were driving with detective web girl, he said, look where we are. I mean, these are all they're all farms farming people here. These are good salt to the earth kind of people.

Somebody saw a teenager walking alone on the side of the road there. They would certainly stop and ask if she needed help. So right away, you know, this is not a case of Jade running away.

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Welcome back before the investigators tracked down James Buckmoreski because he's moved out of state. They find one of his sons. His name is Brian.

He'd been living in decor at the time of Jade's disappearance. According to detective a web girl, Brian confirmed that Jade had been at the farm. And he said that the last time that he heard from her was a few days after she arrived when they were texting during his night shift at Walmart and she suddenly stopped responding. He didn't Brian report Jade, missing back then. Well, Brian says he did eventually follow up with his father about what happened to Jade.

Buckmoreski at the time gave him a lot of excuses said that she might even be a cam girl somewhere.

However, there's some evidence as well that Brian didn't believe his dad. I mean, Buckmoreski did have a criminal record. As you see in the hour in 2013, we report that he spent nearly a year behind bars after being charged with child endangerment against his own children. He pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of assault, but he did serve some time. In the hour, we learn details of the child endangerment case from court documents. Buckmoreski used a metal chair, hooked to a battery to shock his sons when they misbehaved.

I mean, we saw your facial expression. Yeah, I mean, it was pure horror because if he's able to do that to his own kids.

“What is he capable of doing to a young girl who's not even his own kid?”

Absolutely. In 2023 investigators tracked down Buckmoreski at his new home in Georgia. He spoke with special agent John Turbett for several hours and he indeed confirmed that he had been in a relationship with Le Dawn and Jade had stayed with him at his farm back in 2017. Now, Buckmoreski said that the last time he saw Jade, she was getting ready to do laundry. He said he ran out to a local store and then when he came back, she had vanished. Different story than what he told us son, by the way, but then about a year and a half after Jade went missing, he sold that farm and he moved to Georgia.

Right, and it was interesting because according to special agent John Turbett, his decision to relocate and the timing of the move. Not long after Jade disappeared, that all added to their suspicions, you know, when he moved to Georgia, he also started using an alias. He was going by the name Bob Sage. So he, the agents told us, seemed to be like a guy who was trying to hide. Now, he also had some other criminal charges from Iowa, including a probation violation from 2018. So there was some indication there was extra heat on him from law enforcement, especially agent John Turbett. When he got there, he saw, you know, this guy clearly seems to be like he's hiding out in this new location.

And when the neighbor less investigators know, hey, I still got all this stuff here. They really strike gold.

They find Buckmerski's old cell phone and there's some shocking new evidence.

“Right, that phone really became the key to their investigation because on that phone, they found deleted text messages from Jade's family,”

trying to find her, including from La Don, you know, desperately trying to get a hold of her daughter. They also found photos of Jade at the farm, the last photos of Jade alive, which also suggested to investigators. He took a lot of photos of Jade. So they thought perhaps this showed some attraction that Buckmerski had to Jade. Now the phone also contained, as you saw in the hour, these photos, which really became key evidence. One photo shows his very clean kitchen, which was very unusual and out of the norm.

According to those who knew and saw the condition of that home and also a bedroom photo that was taken two days after Jade disappeared.

And then contrast that to a photo of the bedroom taken a couple of months later, the first photo showed a bed with a headboard, the second photo showed there was no more headboard.

It looked like that mattress was new according to investigators. So it appeared to the investigators that it looked like if there was a scene there, it might have been cleaned. So we should mention that the cell phone also helped investigators clear Brian the sun because they found those text messages that Jade was was having with Brian as he worked that night shift at Walmart. So it checked out with his story.

“Something that I kept on thinking of was okay.”

If she's been killed, she's got to be somewhere on this farm. But it's huge. We're investigators able to search the farm. How do you go about searching a property that large was detected Chris Webgar from the Wynnesheet County Sheriff's Office. You know, said it was really like looking for a needle and a haystack. They searched the 200 plus acres. They used cadaver dogs.

They didn't find any human bones or DNA, but I will say they did find a pile of bones. They were animal. I should say not human. The dog did not signal on any human scent there. Bob Mursky, though, we should point out to according to Chris Webgar. He was a skilled hunter. I asked Webgar what struck him about those animal bones.

Since it's not unusual to hunt in Iowa. He was an avid outdoorsman that knew how to handle himself and how to harvest animals and then discard them. And being able to handle and kill animals like that. Yeah.

“I think the same could be said for humans and does being able to discard people.”

He definitely had the knowledge of where he lived and how to do things that way, yes. That gives you the creeps just hearing that and knowing the possibilities when you see a property of that size. What he might have been able to do. So even though investigators have not found Jade's body, they do have some damning new evidence from Buckmersky's phone. Special agent John Turbett went back down to Georgia to interview Buckmersky again.

But this time, Buckmersky's demeanor is completely different. He claimed to be drunk and that he could remember any details. But special agent Turbett pressed him about Jade and I want you to listen to a clip of what Buckmersky said to him. I'd go to grade before I tell the truth. Come out this, yes.

I'd rather go to the grade than tell what happened here in this case. Yeah, Turbett said this was as close to a confession as you could get because Buckmersky is saying,

"There is so much here you are never going to know and I'm never going to tell you."

Well, clearly investigators and prosecutors believe they have enough by August of 2024. James Buckmersky is charged with Jade Colvin's murder. His trial began about a year later. And I have to say, it seemed to me like the prosecution had a real challenge. I didn't think this case was particularly strong even though there's a lot of evidence.

There's no blood. There's no wet murder weapon. There's nobody down the nobody being the big part of that. This case was purely circumstantial. But Buckmersky, by his own words, admitting Jade was at his residence under his care right before she disappears. That cell phone evidence that they had was key.

He replaced that bed. He cleaned that kitchen.

He took pictures of it. Buckmersky, however, explained he was cleaning and doing all of this because he was planning to sell the farm which he eventually did. But most incriminating were those words you just heard, you know, his own words. I'd go to the grave before I tell the truth.

“But here's the thing, if I was the defense.”

I would just say, well, you don't even have any proof that she's dead. And that was a big part of the defense's argument. They tried to say, there's no evidence. She's dead. They said she had a history of running away. You know, in fact, they even hired their own investigator who said there were unconfirmed sightings of her. It is hard to combat the fact, though, that Jade was at Buckmersky's residence under his care and then poof.

She just disappears. Nobody ever heard from her again. Well, the prosecution did their job. The jury found Buckmersky guilty of murder.

And in the second degree, he was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

So he's 67 years old. So that's essentially life sentence for him at the time. In the hour, Jade's Aunt Tandra said that the sentence was a relief. Do we know how the rest of Jade's family felt about this? Well, Tandra, and I think you could see that in the interview, she struggles. I mean, she really wants to be able to find Jade's body, give her a proper funeral.

The whole family hopes that someone watching the show were listening to this. Who's any information will come forward.

“You know, I think that's what they're all looking for.”

Some sense of closure if there is such a thing. Yeah. All of the investigators that we spoke with those said, this is still not done for them. It is still an open missing person's case with the Des Moines PD until they find Jade's body. I totally get that still so many loose ends.

You really do want to know what happened to her. Before you could really have peace, I can get it. So listen, Ellie, I want to ask you about something that you would actually mentioned at the top of the podcast. In addition to Jade, there was another missing child that U.S. marshals were not able to locate. This is part of this operation homecoming.

What do we know about that last case? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, really important because again, we use this as an opportunity to call out anybody who may know something. Frederick Workman is the name of of the young man. He was reported missing from Des Moines in August of 2013 when he was about 15 years old.

A lot of work has been done on his case. However, that case remains open as well. So again, if anybody has any information, they can contact the U.S. marshals office at 515-400-814-0 or they can submit a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I know there's going to be all kinds of people as soon as they hear this podcast.

They're going to be getting online and looking this case up and hopefully hopefully it'll make a difference. Natalie, once again, another really, really fascinating hour. And at least, you know, Jade's family got some closure. It would be really, really nice if they could find out the rest of the story.

“But what happened to this young woman who had, I mean, so much potential, so many possibilities, right?”

And it's just so tragic that she really never got to find out who she was in life.

Yeah, so true. Thanks again, Natalie. Thank you, Anne Marie. And she all of you out there. If you like this episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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