CBS revisits Jade Colvin disappearance as investigators rebuild her trail

Jade Colvin vanished at 14, and the search for her did not stop when the early leads dried up. CBS’s 48 Hours returned to the Iowa teen’s disappearance by centering the investigators who kept rebuilding her trail, piece by piece, long after Jade was first reported missing on June 10, 2016, after running away from a local shelter for troubled youth.

By the time Des Moines detective Cheryl Nablo joined Justin Wallace, Chris Wuebker and Jon Turbett in 2022, the case had already stretched across years and jurisdictions. The U.S. Marshals Service had folded Jade’s disappearance into Operation Homecoming, the federal and state effort aimed at finding missing children in Iowa, and the investigators approached it like a classic missing-child puzzle: start with Jade herself, then map her habits, relationships and movements until the gaps narrow.

That search was complicated by Jade’s unstable background. Investigators said her parents struggled with substance abuse, and later lost contact with her or died, leaving no easy family network to lean on. But the case eventually pointed toward a rural farm outside Decorah, where verified court records say Jade had just returned from living in Arizona and was staying briefly with James David Bachmurski, who was in a relationship with Jade’s mother, LaDawn.

The timeline later sharpened around March 29, 2017. Court filings say Jade was last seen at Walmart in Decorah in Bachmurski’s presence, and she stopped responding to texts and social media early on March 30, 2017. Prosecutors later said Jade’s own phone had no service, so she used Bachmurski’s phone to communicate, a small but crucial detail that helped investigators reconstruct what happened next.

Those digital traces became the turning point. Photos and messages recovered from Bachmurski’s old phone helped investigators piece together the teen’s movements and connect the disappearance to the farm. The case eventually turned into a no-body homicide prosecution, a rare and difficult path for investigators who never recovered Jade’s remains.

The legal arc followed later. Bachmurski was charged with murder in August 2024, a Winneshiek County jury found him guilty of second-degree murder on September 2, 2025, and he was sentenced in October 2025 to 50 years in prison, with at least 35 years to serve before parole eligibility. For the investigators who kept pressing, the outcome reflected years of work that did not stop at one dead end.

CBS also broadened the human picture around Jade, including interviews with her aunt Tandra Brus, friend Dainlynn Greer and Dainlynn’s mother, Jamee Koopman. Nablo said she thought about Jade often, and that emotional pull ran through the case: a 14-year-old girl, a broken family circle, a rural farm, and a trail rebuilt from scraps until the search finally reached a verdict, even if Jade’s body never came home.