Member-only story
30 Years Missing: Where Is Lindsey Jill Nicholls?
The teenager vanished after struggling with a relocation and was never seen again.
Investigators with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have vowed never to stop looking for a teenage girl who disappeared from Vancouver Island in 1993, despite the ongoing passage of time.
Lindsey Jill Nicholls was 14 that summer and had moved to Comox from Delta on the Canadian mainland with her family the year before after her father, a Mountie, was given a transfer.
However, Lindsey was struggling with the move. She found the separation from her friends difficult and had started to argue badly with her parents, rebelling against their authority in a way anyone with teenage offspring would surely recognise.
In early 1993, Lindsey had been caught sneaking out of the house at night by her father and the pair had had an argument about it, so the young woman took drastic action the next morning.
Instead of going to school, Lindsey put her clothes and a teddy in her backpack, left a note for her mother Judy and ran away back to Delta. Judy managed to get back in touch with her daughter and begged her to come home.
Eventually, she was able to make a deal: Lindsey would come back to Comox, as long as she could live for a while at a local foster home for youngsters rather than at her own family’s residence while they worked through their issues.
Judy told reporter and true crime writer Eve Lazarus she wasn’t especially happy with the arrangement, but it was the only thing she could think of to get Lindsey back from Delta. And when Judy spoke to her daughter on the phone at the foster home in Royston after her return and heard she didn’t like it there, she thought it would only be a matter of time before Lindsey was back under the Nicholls’ roof.
“It never occurred to me that being out there now, she was in more danger because she was going to hitchhike into town,” Judy said.
On August 2nd 1993, Lindsey had made plans to meet some friends at the Comox Nautical Days Festival some 10KM away, so she left the foster home and headed east on foot, potentially planning to hitch a ride. The last sighting of her…
