Morgan Nick

On the evening of Friday, June 9, 1995, a six-year-old girl named Morgan Nick went with her mother to a Little League baseball game in Alma, a small town in western Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border.

It was a warm summer night. The ballfield was lit up. Families sat in the bleachers, cheering for their kids. Morgan, who was in the first grade, got bored with the game after a while and asked if she could go catch fireflies with some other children near the parking lot, a short distance from the bleachers. Her mother, Colleen Nick, said yes. She could see the children from where she was sitting.

A little before eleven o’clock, the game ended. The other children came back to their parents. They said Morgan had stopped at her mother’s car in the parking lot to empty sand out of her shoes.

When Colleen went to the car, Morgan was gone.

The Man in the Red Truck

The other children told police that they had seen a man in the parking lot, near Morgan, watching them. Some of them described him as having a beard, and said he had been lingering near the children. A witness said they saw a red pickup truck with a white camper shell leaving the area around that time.

Police issued an alert immediately. The town of Alma was sealed off. Roadblocks went up. Hundreds of people searched the area. The FBI was called in.

Morgan was never found.

A Mother’s Fight

Colleen Nick never stopped searching for her daughter.

In the years after Morgan’s disappearance, she became one of the most prominent advocates for missing children in the United States. She founded the Morgan Nick Foundation to support families of missing children. She worked with lawmakers and law enforcement. And she helped create Arkansas’s version of the AMBER Alert system, the emergency broadcast system that alerts the public when a child has been abducted. In Arkansas, it’s called the Morgan Nick Amber Alert.

Over the years, thousands of tips came in. Police investigated sightings across the country. Morgan’s face appeared on posters, on milk cartons, on websites and in age-progressed images showing what she might look like as she grew older.

Billy Jack Lincks

Early in the investigation, police had identified a person of interest: a man named Billy Jack Lincks, who lived in the area and owned a red truck matching the witnesses’ description. He was questioned in 1995 and denied knowing anything about Morgan’s disappearance.

A few months after Morgan disappeared, Lincks was arrested for trying to lure an eleven-year-old girl into his truck in another town. He was convicted and sent to prison, where he died in 2000.

Decades later, in 2019, the Alma Police Department reopened the investigation with fresh eyes. In 2020, investigators tracked down the red truck that Lincks had owned in 1995. It had changed hands several times over the years. With the current owner’s permission, they searched it and collected hair and other trace evidence from inside.

In 2021, the FBI publicly identified Lincks as a person of interest in Morgan’s disappearance, and asked anyone who had known him to come forward.

In 2023, investigators sent the hair from the truck to a private laboratory specializing in DNA from rootless hair. In 2024, police announced the result: the hair was a genetic match to Morgan’s family. None of her relatives had ever known Lincks or ridden in a truck like his. Investigators said the evidence strongly indicated that Morgan had been inside that truck.

Still Missing

The DNA results gave investigators the strongest evidence in nearly three decades of what likely happened to Morgan on that June night. But it didn’t answer the most important question: where is she now?

Lincks died more than twenty years ago. Investigators have continued to interview people who knew him, and to search for clues about where he might have taken her.

Colleen Nick has said that she still hopes to find Morgan and bring her home.