Dateline NBC
After the Verdict: The Ongoing Search for Answers — A 'Missing in America' Panel
04 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What inspired the creation of the 'Missing in America' series?
Twelve years ago this week, we at Dateline posed a simple question on social media. Have you ever known someone who has gone missing? We did not expect that the response would be overwhelming. Since then, Dateline has covered hundreds of missing persons cases for our online digital series and for the podcast it spawned, both called Missing in America.
I need answers.
I'm her only voice. Each story is different. However, when you speak with the people involved, the parents, the siblings, the friends, you will hear some common threads, heartbreak, confusion, and often a determination that does not fade with time.
somebody somewhere knows what happened.
Missing in America began as a way to shine a light on the stories of the missing. Now four seasons in, we gathered some of the people we met along the way to find out what they have learned in an often agonizing search for answers and what advice they have for others walking the same difficult path. I'm Josh Mankiewicz, and this is After the Verdict, a series for our Dateline Premium subscribers.
I want to welcome all of you to this special panel. This is family members. This is advocates. This is a former detective.
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Chapter 2: How do families cope with the disappearance of a loved one?
So just to get everybody up to speed, Sue Quackenbush is the mother of Danielle Lopez. She disappeared last year in central New Jersey.
It was agonizing and overwhelming, tragic and unfair.
Nan Trogdon is a retired detective in Cumberland County, North Carolina, and she investigated the disappearance of a guy named Kent Jacobs.
In the perfect world, there would be a detective assigned to missing person cases.
Rachel. Rachel Barth was a close friend of a guy named Tyler Goodrich, and he disappeared from Nebraska and was subsequently found, although not alive, unfortunately, but at least there is a sort of semi-answer to that.
He was found about 1,000 yards from his house, and so that was really tough to deal with.
Colleen Nick is the mother of Morgan Nick, who disappeared from Arkansas.
It's not just that we lose someone that we love, but the world loses the potential of who that person is.
And also my friend, Raven Payment, who I met just recently at the CrimeCon. And she is an advocate from Colorado's MMIR task force. She's worked on a lot of these issues.
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Chapter 3: What common challenges do families face in missing persons cases?
But there was no technology back then. You know, at one point, someone got a fax machine hooked up so that it would fax continually so that Morgan's flyer would be faxed out. And the media was there the first night and they said very compassionately to us, like, we're going to have Morgan's face on TV first thing Saturday morning.
But, you know, that was 12 hours, more than 12 hours after she was taken. We just did not have those kind of resources that we have now.
I mean, you guys tell me whether you agree with this. Now we do have those resources, and yet it sometimes takes like, it feels like it takes an act of God to get them deployed. Nan, I don't want to make you the target for everybody who has anything to say about law enforcement, because I thought The work that we documented that you did was exceptional and heartfelt, and you're retired now.
But why do you think it is that in so many jurisdictions, when parents, for example, walk in and say, my child is missing or my adult child is missing, what they're told is, why don't we wait and see if they come back? Because they're an adult and they don't have to get in touch with you right now if they don't want to.
I think in a case like that, I agree with this 48 hours thing. That's just not right. If a person is missing and a family member comes in, I think it should be actively investigated right then. Cases grow cold typically in about 48 hours. Well, by the time you've waited 48 hours, you've lost all kinds of evidence. Another problem could be, especially in the smaller departments,
There's not enough manpower or enough hours in the day to investigate the crimes that come through. And I know some of you probably heard that.
That's one of the things that sort of we run into again and again and again, which is like, should police departments even be the vehicle for looking for missing people? Because they're not really that well set up to do that.
Right. In the perfect world, there would be a detective assigned to missing person cases. whether it's children, whether it's adults, and that could be their focus constantly.
Yeah. First of all, no police officer comes out of the academy saying, I really want to work in missing persons, right? You know, this is not the most desirable assignment within law enforcement, and that kind of is a problem because you're going to need somebody on this who's going to work pretty hard.
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Chapter 4: What role do social media and community support play in searches?
Because a lot of that, you have to have the right people to contact. And then, of course, you have to have maybe a court order to release that information. And so I felt like that bogged us down because Tyler had a cell phone, an iPhone. He had a smartwatch. And I'm like, how are we not tracking his watch? How are we not tracking this stuff? And so that was really frustrating to me.
And then I'm finding out afterwards that there is those technologies. So I wish that was something we pushed early on.
Sue, Travis, Colleen, same question. What do you wish you'd had? What do you wish you knew now? Colleen, you've got, unfortunately, 30 years to look back on. Tell me what you learned.
I mean, if we could take one thing back to 1995 that we have now, it would be all the technology and all the resources that we have.
The biggest thing for me is I wish we had the support from the police department.
You know, I do think that makes a tremendous difference in cases today.
Colleen has been searching for her daughter Morgan since Morgan vanished from Alma, Arkansas. That was in June of 1995. And while she's always had the support of her local police department, her organization, the Morgan Nick Foundation, is working to help families that have not received that same treatment.
What we have tried to make up in the interim is the advocating for families to stand in the gap, to help them be able to build that communication with law enforcement, to bridge the lack of communication that happens between Travis's family and law enforcement, to be that voice that is trusted by law enforcement and to help them see what it is the family needs.
One of the things that we do is we invite that family and that law enforcement team to our office and we bring them to the table together and we break bread. We eat a meal together and it literally breaks the barriers down and everybody talks. I was thinking about that in Travis's case.
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Chapter 5: How does law enforcement typically respond to missing persons reports?
This is a person who had hopes and dreams.
There's kind of a belief there. on the part of the public, which I've found is hard to change, which is that if that person did anything that they view as having put themselves in harm's way, it's a way to kind of write it off, right? She went out at night alone in her car. She didn't have enough gas. Like, what do you think was going to happen?
Josh, here's what that is really all about. And you guys tell me if you think I'm wrong. But it makes everybody else feel safe because they can say this person did these behaviors and that's why they're missing. That's why something terrible has happened to them. But I wouldn't do that. And my kids wouldn't do that. My family wouldn't do that. I wouldn't make those kind of choices.
So that won't happen to me.
And if I'm careful, my family and I don't really have anything to worry about.
Right. So you blame that person who's missing because it makes you feel safe. Yeah.
Victim blaming is so big. And I think, you know, like in Tyler's case... we wanted, everybody wanted somebody to blame, right? Tyler wasn't here to blame. So you wanted to blame somebody. And I think that's what's really hard is because our brains want to rationalize what happened, right? But I think that's hard is we all rationalize things and then rumors start.
And then that's when things spiral out of control. And especially now with social media, all the TikTokers and the conspiracy theorists get out there. And that definitely happened in Tyler's case. And it's really hard to stay ahead of that.
Yeah. I mean, his husband got kind of eaten alive on social media.
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