Jade Colvin is Missing | Full Episode | Forensic Files

♪♪ -We're looking for this missing girl. Her name is Jade Colvin. -She was a sweet little ray of sunshine.
Just an angel, a doll. -This is a cold case that could just sit there and no one let it.
-Jade went missing June 10th of 2016. -At the time, she was 14-years-old. -But she comes off as much older.
She's super cool, super smart. So interesting. -This one tugged at my heartstrings.
We have families. We have kids. Some of us have daughters. You don't get to go home and turn off Jade Colvin.
-There were so many people that were involved in this. -Lead detective. -Special Agent.
-Deputy U.S. Marshal. -I'm a detective. Everybody came together to figure out what happened to Jade.
-I first met her through one of my best friends, and we were inseparable from that moment.
We just always had a dumb good time wherever we were. She loved doing her hair. She was really great at colors.
She was very artsy, had great style. -They were just like sisters. -I don't think Jade had an easy life.
-Her mom would disappear for periods of time. she was put in foster care. Jade just really hated it.
She ran away. -She kind of went from state to state, place to place. -It was just hard to keep up with where she was.
-But she always, always, always just would check in. And then one random day, just...
...nothing ever again. -Weeks went by, then it's months, then it's years. -Once I was assigned this case,
every trace of her was gone. -When we initially adopted the case, she had been listed as a runaway.
-How do you know at this point, is this a runaway or is this somebody took her? -We didn't know.
-Jade's digital footprint last landed in Decorah, Iowa. -Really remote area that she did not know.
She was there for several days and was never seen again. -The last place Jade was living was here?
-Absolutely. The house was straight on this driveway. -There's a lot of places to look for a young girl here.
I mean, where did you even begin? -"It's a needle in a haystack," I said. -Who are the last people that were around her?
Who lived in the same house or who was at the same place? We don't know where loyalties and alliances lie at this point.
-We got a lot of tips. -From Massachusetts to Oklahoma to Texas to Minnesota. -My goal was always like, "Oh, we're gonna find this girl."
-That was the hope every day. -We never forgot about her... ...and just always wondered where she was.
I was afraid something bad had happened. I would have never in a million years thought it would come to this.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Why is that not going on? -I myself have thought of Jade several times...
There we go. ...when not at work... You get to do the eggs. ...I think of my own children.
Whoa! [ Laughs ] If you went a day not knowing where one of your kids was at...
Very careful. ...you'd go crazy. -Cheryl Nablo, mother of three, is a detective with the Des Moines, Iowa Police Department.
She specializes in finding missing kids. -Nobody wants to be living in a world where they don't know where their kid is
or if their kid's safe. -In 2022, Detective Nablo joined forces with deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace,
Detective Chris Wuebker, and Special Agent Jon Turbett in the search for Jade Colvin.
Jade was 14 when she was reported missing in June 2016, after she ran away from a local shelter
for troubled youth. -We are here to locate kids who run away. -The U.S. Marshals Service had adopted Jade's case
as part of a statewide effort to find missing children called "Operation Homecoming."
What are the challenges in finding missing children? -When somebody goes missing, they want to be missing.
They don't want you to know where they are. It's hard to track them down. -At that point, Jade had been missing
for more than five years. Where do you begin? -You got to start at the beginning.
You got to know who the person is, their friends, their family, their whole background.
-And they soon discovered Jade had a troubled childhood. -Jade had a rough go of it growing up.
-Things weren't the easiest for her. -Detective Nablo learned Jade's mother, LaDawn,
had died three years after Jade went missing. -So I couldn't just reach out to her
and talk to her about everything that she knew about Jade. -Jade's father, Kevin, had lost contact with his daughter.
Both parents had struggled with substance abuse, something Special Agent John Turbett explains
had an impact on Jade. -Jade Colvin grew up with, I think, a pretty dysfunctional family situation.
It was difficult. -She didn't hold any of it. She just accepted it for, like, what it was and dealt with it
and didn't let it get to her negatively. Loved her to death. Spent every day together.
[ Sighs ] -Despite everything, friend Dainlynn Greer and her mother, Jamee Koopman describe Jade as easygoing and upbeat.
-There was reasons she could have been angry and she wasn't. -Like, she was very light -- -Yeah.
-Light and bubbly. I met her mom. Her mom was very unreliable, but she kept telling me, oh,
how much she loves Jade and all that, you know, and I believe she did, don't get me wrong.
But she just couldn't... ...make the choice for stability. She couldn't overcome her own demons.
-Her mom definitely cared about her. -I think her mother loved her. The state determined at some point
that she was not able to care for her. -In September 2015, when Jade was 13, the Iowa Department of Human Services stepped in
and Deputy Justin Wallace says LaDawn lost custody. -That's when they took Jade into foster care.
-For the next nine months, Jade was in and out of different facilities and foster care,
and she often ran away. -Run away, been found, run away, been found several times.
-Jade is doing what some other kids do. She's running away from the system. She's not wanting to be placed in a stranger's home.
-When Jade was placed in foster care, LaDawn would have limited access to her and she wanted more.
-She wanted Jade to live with her. -But without legal custody, Jamee Koopman says LaDawn resorted
to trying to hide her daughter from authorities. -I think she was just trying to hide out,
to stay with her mom or to stay where her mom could visit. -Her mom tried to keep her out of the police spotlight,
just trying to hide her out different places. -And according to her aunt, Tandra Brus,
Jade became good at hiding. -She would change her hair. She would change her appearance.
-So she really knew how to run away and hide. -She did. She really did. -At that point, Jade was caught in the middle
of a mother trying to do her best, who arranged stays with friends and family, and being placed in foster care,
but often living as a runaway. -I felt so bad. I felt horrible. -Did you tell her "You can come here anytime"?
-I did. -"Call me, whatever you need." -I did. "Call me and I'll be here for you."
-She was jumping all over for a while, so it was hard to track her. -The Iowa Department of Human Services
lost track of Jade after she ran away from that shelter in June 2016. -I had hope that she was out there somewhere
and she would get ahold of somebody eventually. -And then there was nothing. -Investigators learned Jade's family and friends
spent years searching for her online. -We saw in the social media accounts that friends and family were trying to reach out to her
and continued to look for her. -Everybody's reaching out to her at her birthday saying,
"We love you, we miss you. We just want you back home." -Every year I'd go on Facebook,
"Happy birthday Jade. Please call me." We still love her. You know, anytime she wants to come home...
"It doesn't matter what kind of trouble you got yourself into." I thought she'd pop back up.
We just wanted her to know, like, we were there for her. -According to Deputy Justin Wallace,
Jade's mother, LaDawn, also posted. -She misses her and wants her to come back. -Posts like this one from September 2018.
♪♪ -There was no response to any of those. -And when Jade's mother died a year later,
there was still no response. -LaDawn passed away. She never came to the funeral.
She never showed up at the funeral. She would have been there. -Jade's family and friends still held hope
Jade would surface when she turned 18 and would be free of foster care. -I had hoped that she had run away and was laying low,
and we thought when she turned 18, when it was safe, she would get ahold of us again.
And when her 18th birthday came around and she didn't get ahold of us, we knew. We knew something was very wrong.
-As Detective Nablo and Deputy Wallace worked to find Jade, they got help from state and national organizations
that shared these missing posters on social media. -That was huge. That's when a lot of tips started coming in.
-And there would be a potential break in the investigation. A tip from a hospital worker in Minnesota.
-"We're not too far away from Iowa. There's this girl. We think maybe that's Jade."
♪♪ ♪♪ -We wanted to chase every single lead, every single tip, as far as we could.
-And when Des Moines P.D. Detective Cheryl Nablo got a tip Jade Colvin might have been in a hospital
in Red wing, Minnesota, she was hopeful. -A staff member had observed a female come into the hospital.
And the person that she was with was kind of controlling the conversation. It drew suspicion.
They thought it maybe looked like Jade. So there was follow up done to get the video footage
to try to figure out who that person was. When you have a lead, you work your lead
until you either prove it's Jade or prove it's false. And ultimately, I was able to identify who that person was
and it was not Jade. -Additional tips poured in from all over the country. -You know, ranging from Massachusetts
to Oklahoma to Texas. People were definitely paying attention. -Look at that. Are those all the leads that you explored
and the different ways you went about the investigation? -Yeah, it's a lot of leads.
It felt like each tip was hope, right? Because like, she could have been out there.
-The first big break in the case came when Detective Nablo was able to figure out
where Jade had gone after she ran away from that shelter in June 2016. Detective Nablo had obtained search warrants
and got access to Jade's social media Instagram messages from March 2017, caught her attention.
-You can see where her mom is coming to get her in Arizona. -"I just talked to mom," Jade wrote to her friend Dainlynn.
♪♪ Jade wrote to another friend, ♪♪ Detective Nablo learned Jade had been staying in Arizona
for several months, and it seemed LaDawn was going to bring her back to Iowa. Detective Nablo also got access to LaDawn's accounts,
and on her Facebook there was a message mentioning the town of Decorah. -Decorah is just a small, rural Midwest Iowa town.
-As Detective Nablo combed through LaDawn's Facebook, she saw messages LaDawn had sent to Jade
and uncovered a clue. A mention of someone named "James." Investigators learned James was James Bachmurski,
a man LaDawn had been dating for several months. -LaDawn and him met online. They began a romantic relationship.
LaDawn would go and stay with him occasionally. I think one point was living with him.
-Deputy Justin Wallace found out James Bachmurski owned a farm in Decorah, Iowa, and had two sons,
Bryan -- age 19, and James Jr. -- age 21. Investigators gained access to voice messages
LaDawn had sent Jade detailing a plan for her daughter to stay at the farm while she lived three hours away,
dealing with some legal issues. -It was just a temporary, "I'm going to get right with the court
and then Jade can come live with me." -How big a lead is that? Are you thinking we've got a break in this case?
-Yeah, it was huge. I remember going over to the U.S. Marshal's office and -- and they were excited.
-The marshals reached out to local law enforcement near the Bachmurski farm for help talking to the family.
And that's when Detective Chris Wuebker from the Winneshiek County Sheriff's Office
officially joined the team. First of all, Decorah. I mean, where -- where are we?
What is this town known for? -God's country. -It is God's country. -It's in northeast Iowa, kind of way up in the top corner.
-So tell me about getting the call to first, you know, start the investigation into this young missing girl, Jade Colvin.
Who called you? -So we, uh -- we received a call from the U.S. marshals, and they reached out to us and said, "Hey,
do you guys know the Bachmurskis? Can you guys help us go and talk to them?" And so that's ultimately what we -- where we started,
the goal was to talk to them and say, "Hey, look, we're looking for this missing girl.
Her name is Jade Colvin. And your names were brought up in social media. What can you tell us about her?"
-They found Bryan Bachmurski first. According to Detective Wuebker, Bryan confirmed Jade had been at the farm.
Her mother dropped her off and left. A few days after she arrived, Bryan and Jade had lunch at this Pizza Ranch
and took several photos together. ♪♪ -So right here, this booth. -Yep. I mean, you look at this photo and you see, you know,
she has a genuine smile. -And it seems like they're, you know, sort of goofy face,
like having fun with each other. They got along. -Teenage kids and -- and everything.
And, yeah, absolutely. -Bryan told investigators he didn't know what happened to Jade.
He said the last time he saw her was two days after their lunch at Pizza Ranch around 10 p.m.,
before, he said, he worked the night shift at Walmart. Bryan claimed he texted with Jade until just after midnight,
when she suddenly stopped responding. Deputy Wallace wasn't convinced by Bryan's story.
-There were several of us thought that... ...we probably weren't getting all the information out of him.
-That included Detective Wuebker. -There's something that doesn't feel right about this
as to what's going on. -And there was something else that troubled Detective Wuebker.
-That was the last time that she ever had any -- from Facebook, from Instagram, from Snapchat.
She never had another digital footprint again. -And for a teenage girl, how unusual is that?
-[ Chuckles ] Extremely unusual. -How could Jade seemingly disappear without a trace?
According to Deputy Wallace, LaDawn thought it was unusual, too, and she went to the farm to confront James.
-We were able to interview one of the friends who said she drove LaDawn out to the farm in Decorah.
The friend stayed in the car while LaDawn went inside the house to talk to James Bachmurski.
-LaDawn's friend told the marshals James claimed Jade ran away. Suspecting there was more to the story,
Chris Wuebker called Special Agent Jon Turbett from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation
and asked him for help. -Chris laid out what we knew, what the marshals had been able to unearth.
And as I'm sitting there listening, I said... ..."It's very likely that Jade is no longer alive
and we actually need to start treating this as a homicide investigation." ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪
-So this here is the farm? -Yep. So this is the -- where Bachmurskis lived. -Having established Jade was at this farm
in Decorah, Iowa, in March of 2017, Detective Chris Wuebker hoped new leads could be developed
to solve the mystery of what happened to her. -This farm really is at the end of the road here.
-It is the house at the end of the road. -House at the end of the road. -You can see how secluded it is.
-This is a young girl who has a history of running away. When you get out here, is it possible she --
do you think she could have run away? -Our evidence showed that she didn't. -And if you were to run away from here,
I mean, there is just farmland and empty space. -I mean, direction, uh -- you're not from here, I bet you --
which way were we facing right now? I mean, she's not going to know where she's at.
-When investigators first visited the farm in 2022, James Bachmurski no longer lived here,
and the house had been gutted and renovated. But the new owners let them look around.
-We tried to find anything we could in the area and ultimately we didn't. -You have this farm where we know Jade is last seen,
so we draw a box around the farm and we say, "Who's living in the farm? Who are the guests at the farm?"
Certainly the owner of the property, the one who's having contact with LaDawn and Jade
is James Bachmurski Senior. And then you have these two sons, James Jr. and Bryan.
-Having already talked to Bryan, Detectives were eager to reach James Jr. Turns out he had an alibi.
He wasn't living in the area at the time and was never at the farm with Jade, so that left James Bachmurski Senior
to be interviewed. -We had known from that initial contact with the kids that Bachmurski had moved away and he was in Georgia.
-Special Agent Jon Turbett made the trip. -We located the house and it was out in the middle of nowhere.
-What's the mindset going into an interview and first interaction with somebody like him?
-I think despite what a lot of people think, I am really trying to take off the -- the police hat
and a lot of the -- the things that come with that. And I need to sit down with James
and I need to be Jon and he needs to be James. And can we have a good conversation
about this young lady that he clearly had out on his property and has never been seen?
-When Jon Turbett knocked on the door, James Bachmurski agreed to talk. These are excerpts of the audio interview.
-I think one of the first things out of his mouth, if not the first, was... I've knocked on doors a lot in my career,
and that would be on the you know -- that would be an outlier for -- for opening remarks.
You're like, okay, is he thinking of something that, you know, I'm not? I'm making it clear, I'm talking about Jade,
and he continues. -Okay, I have that clip. I'm going to play for you. It's interesting, he said,
"I don't want to implicate my kids." -Yes. -But in so doing, is he implicating his kids?
-Well, it -- it seemed like it. So he immediately is talking about someone being implicated,
which says in my mind he thinks a crime was committed. Now it's a question of, "Was it me? Was it my boys?"
-James Bachmurski confirmed he was in a relationship with LaDawn, and that she brought Jade to his farm
to hide her and keep her from being put in foster care. -He admits that there's a plan to bring Jade back,
you know, to Iowa. He's saying this woman was trying to reunite with her daughter and get to a new life.
-Did he say, when, in that interview he last saw Jade? -Yeah. Norby's, which is, like, a Farm and Fleet store.
And the next thing I know, she'd vanished out of thin air. -James Bachmurski talked for several hours that day,
but after the interview, Jon Turbett and Chris Wuebker were still no closer to finding out what happened to Jade.
They wondered if there were any additional clues to be discovered back at the farm.
-When he got back, we came up with the plan of, what else can we find? And that's when we came across a neighbor that said,
"Hey, by the way, I have this barn, uh, that James Bachmurski property is left in.
In 2018 he was -- left in a real hurry and left all his stuff behind." And so we're like, "Oh, really?"
And so we went there and found this dusty old phone in a box. ♪♪ -It was James Bachmurski's cell phone.
This was a real find. -I mean, if you're looking for a smoking gun, you're getting a cell phone instead.
-This was something that... ...was unbelievable to come across. -On the phone, they found these photos of Jade at the farm.
There's this one with her mother, LaDawn, when she dropped her off and left. And this one, from the day after Bryan and Jade
had lunch at Pizza Ranch, of them at a bonfire. -There was a number of photos with them at that bonfire,
roasting hot dogs and stuff like that. ♪♪ -They're the last known photos of Jade.
On Bachmurski's phone, there were also text messages Jade had sent, including the ones Bryan had mentioned
when he said he worked the night shift at Walmart. The same night Jade was last heard from.
-Those last text conversations were monumental in my opinion. -So let's go through these a little bit.
Here it is, Jade reaching out to him around after -- a little after midnight. -It says, "Hey Bryan, it's Jade."
And I always love this because, uh, you know, the typical teenager saying, "Jadeee" you know.
-She's just checking in with him. "Is it going okay? Tired yet?" -Yeah. Just, you know, just the typical conversation.
-And she's like, "If you want to call on your hour break we still can if you want."
So they're planning for his break, like, within -- -Yep. Ultimately planning to talk again that night on March 30th.
-And then he's like, "Well, I guess just text me when you can." This is 2:00 already, 2:03.
He's on his break. -Yep. And fully expecting that Jade's going to be texting and doesn't get anything.
-Those text messages, along with Bryan's time sheets from Walmart, helped confirm his story and cleared him.
-We're able to corroborate things he's telling us. We kind of took him off of the table.
-As Chris Wuebker and Jon Turbett continued to search through information from Bachmurski's phone,
they say they made an important discovery... ...several deleted messages. -Those were mostly family
that was reaching out to find Jade to talk to Jade. -Including messages from LaDawn,
who sounds desperate to reach her daughter. -He's selectively removing what we would consider evidence
or -- or helpful information. -Suspicious behavior then? -I would think so. -But it would be two seemingly random photos
found on Bachmurski's cell phone that changed the course of the investigation. One of his kitchen and one of his bedroom,
taken just two days after Jade had that last text exchange with Bryan. -Describe for me what you see here.
This is from the time frame of April 1st, 2017. -So this is a -- a picture of the Bachmurski kitchen.
This is a very unique picture where everything is cleaned up. Everything is organized.
There's no garbage laying around, it's clean. -Was it a crime scene? -And as we talk to people, Bryan included,
he talks about the condition of this house when he had lived there and been there.
He does not say that they were good housekeepers. I mean, it was -- it was not good.
So to see pictures like this, this is way out of what law enforcement knew. This is way out of description.
-And in another photo on the phone taken two months later on June 5th, 2017, of Bryan and James Jr. in that same bedroom.
Investigators say it appeared the bed was new, that the bed in the earlier photo
had been removed and replaced. -The mattress is smaller, there's no headboard anymore,
and you can see the condition of the room is back to messy. -You're thinking, you know, "Evidence has been cleaned up."
We are now looking at all of these pieces. ♪♪ And it seems undeniable. It is time to tell him that case facts show us
that you were involved in the death of Jade Colvin. ♪♪ ♪♪ -The more time we spend in this investigation,
the case facts just continued to all point in one direction and at one person. -And that one person was James Bachmurski.
-James Bachmurski Senior. -More than two years into the investigation to find Jade Colvin.
Special Agent Jon Turbett believes he knows what happened to her. -I thought James Bachmurski had killed
and disposed of Jade's body. -Now he needed to prove his theory. Armed with the photos from the cell phone,
he went back to Georgia. -The second interview is going to be different than the first.
I actually open with "Hi James, I'm Jon from Iowa. Do you remember me?" And he's like, "No." And I'm like, Okay."
So that would -- obviously something would be really wrong if a human being could not remember that.
-He tells you that he's drunk. He can't seem to remember things. Did you believe him?
-I didn't, if you recall in that first interview, his level of detail was fantastic.
And then we get back and it's like he doesn't know me for starters, he can't place LaDawn or Jade.
And that all seems remarkably unbelievable. -Turbett pressed on and he asked Bachmurski
about those photos from his phone. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -"Guarantee you there isn't." What are you thinking when you hear that?
-Well, I mean, as you listen to that clip, he says, "Well, you must think I've, you know, "hidden evidence or destroyed evidence."
And I'm like, well, it's getting hard for me to reach any other conclusion at that point.
-According to Turbett, Bachmurski had an explanation for why he took those photos.
-He floats the idea of, "Hey, I was going to sell or lease the property," but I don't think that was ever proven to be the case.
♪♪ ♪♪ -I'm pleading with him to just talk about the truth, and he's admitting the truth is good,
but we're not quite having a truthful conversation. At that point, it is time to tell him
that based on everything, the case facts show us that you were involved in the death of Jade Colvin.
And it's a very important moment. -All right, let's listen to -- you're saying that to him.
♪♪ ♪♪ -I think James Bachmurski just wanted to know, had we somehow pieced this all together.
♪♪ ♪♪ -"I'd go to the grave before I'd talk about this." -Yes. -Did you take that as a confession?
-That's about as close as you could probably get. At the end of that interview, any doubt I had,
if there was any, had been removed. -You've got the right guy? -We've got the right guy.
-In August 2024, James Bachmurski was charged with murder in the second degree. -My heart just dropped.
-Eight years after Jade was reported missing, her friends and family, including her aunt Tandra Brus,
finally learned the teenager they cared so much about was never coming back. -You just don't want to believe it.
It hurt me so bad. -That she's gone? -Yeah. That she's gone. -Assistant Iowa Attorney General Scott Brown
felt the evidence against James Bachmurski was strong. -Jade was at James Bachmurski's residence.
He was the last person to have seen Jade alive. -He had those cell phone photos of James Bachmurski's clean kitchen and bedroom,
and the deleted messages from Jade's family. -Communications like where LaDawn is looking for Jade.
-And he had James Bachmurski's own words. -Why would you make that statement if you had nothing to do with Jade Colvin's death?
-But what Scott didn't have was Jade's body. -Jade Colvin has never been recovered.
Her body was never found. Usually there is a body. So a jury would look at that and say, "Okay,
obviously a crime has been committed, but here we have to prove that a crime was committed,
that Jade is missing and that she didn't leave on her own." -And with the case about to go on trial,
would it be enough to convince a jury of Bachmurski's guilt? -How do we make that not only make sense,
but make sense beyond a reasonable doubt? Is it enough? Certainly that was a concern here.
♪♪ ♪♪ -For more than three years, Deputy U.S. Marshal Justin Wallace says a dedicated and passionate group
worked tirelessly to try and find out what happened to Jade. -There were so many people that were involved in this.
All of us put in a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of effort. -That team included Detective Cheryl Nablo,
Detective Chris Wuebker, and Special Agent Jon Turbett. -There was never a doubt that we had the right person.
-The murder trial against James Bachmurski, now grey-haired, began in August 2025.
Prosecutor Scott Brown explains how Bachmurski's actions after he claimed Jade had run away
pointed to his guilt. -Why isn't he calling law enforcement? "Hey, there was this girl that was staying at my place
and now people can't find her." Why wouldn't he do that? -The defense argued there was no evidence
Jade Colvin was dead or that James Bachmurski had killed her. "There was no DNA," they said.
"No murder weapon and no damning Google searches." But there was Jade's history of running away.
Brown says that's irrelevant. -She did have a history of running away, but she always resurfaced.
She always stayed on her cell phone. Why would she stop using her cell phone? That was a big hurdle for them.
-Special Agent Jon Turbett and Detective Chris Wuebker say throughout the week long trial,
Bachmurski, who did not testify, showed little emotion. -He seemed emotionally detached.
-He just tried to stay stoic. -And there was information the jury wouldn't hear.
James Bachmurski had a criminal history, including a prior charge for harassment,
and in 2013, Bachmurski spent nearly a year behind bars after being charged with child endangerment
against his own children. And took a plea to a lesser offense of assault. Deputy Justin Wallace described some of the violence
as alleged in court documents. -He had a metal chair with a battery hooked up to it,
and when the boys misbehaved, he put him in the chair, which essentially shocked them.
-Oh, my gosh. I mean, when you hear that, are you already thinking the worst of what he could have done to Jade?
-It definitely does creep to the forefront of your mind. -Deputy Wallace believes LaDawn didn't know about
his history of violence. -She probably did not have any idea of who he truly was.
-That's something Jamee Koopman believes as well. -I know LaDawn would not have taken Jade somewhere
that she thought this of all things would happen. -As for a motive for why Bachmurski
would kill Jade Colvin? -There was some evidence that we had that he was attracted to Jade.
He took all those photos of her. -When the jury began deliberations, Scott Brown was confident in the case he presented.
-Within several hours. We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of murder in the second degree.
-James Bachmurski was sentenced to 50 years in prison. Considering he's 67 years old,
it is essentially a life sentence. Jade's aunt, Tandra Brus, was relieved. -And when you heard the verdict, what did you think?
-I thought finally justice is being done. -I was super grateful that the family was able
to get that outcome in the case. It makes it all worth it. This was about justice for Jade.
-Looking back on it, it kind of seems pretty amazing how it came together. -Everybody just kept their head down and kept going.
-I think it gives a lot of people hope that there are people who are as passionate and committed
as the team that went into trying to find out what happened to Jade Colvin. -Yeah, this was very special for us.
But -- but there are a lot of police officers out there doing the exact same thing.
-But everyone involved believes the case is not over yet. -My hope is to get Jade someday.
This isn't one that's gonna stop for for me. We all agree that we're going to continue to see
if we can find out where she is and bring her home to them. -Just because James was charged and convicted
doesn't mean that she still doesn't deserve to be found. -I want to bring her home.
I want to have a proper burial for her. I want somebody out there, they know something to please come forward.
-Until then, those who loved Jade continue to struggle with their grief. -I have pictures, and you know,
I just want to think of her as when she was happy. -I talk about her. I don't let people forget about her.
She didn't... ...deserve any of this. And I never want anybody to think that she did anything wrong,
or that it was in any way her fault. -I... [ Sniffles ] ...I just wanted more people to know about her,
that she existed and she was a person. She got everything she didn't deserve in life.
She deserved the entire world. And... ...she would have made the world a better place every day
that she would have been here. ♪♪ ♪♪

Photos discovered on an old cellphone help solve the disappearance of a 14-year-old girl. "48 Hours correspondent Natalie Morales reports. This episode aired on April 18, 2026. Watch more full episodes of "48 Hours" on Pluto TV.

True crime. Real justice. "48 Hours" investigates the most intriguing crime and justice cases that touch on all areas of the human experience including greed and passion. "48 Hours," which premiered in 1988, has developed a rich history of original reporting and impact journalism that has helped exonerate wrongly convicted people, caused cold cases to be reopened and solved, and along the way changed lives.

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Brief Summary

The episode covers the investigation into missing girl Jade Colvin, leading to the arrest of James Bachmurski for her murder.

Key points

The Search for Jade Colvin. Detective Nablo and her team work tirelessly to find missing girl Jade Colvin.
A Troubled Childhood. Jade's difficult upbringing and her mother's struggles are revealed.
A Break in the Case. Detectives uncover a significant lead regarding Jade's whereabouts.
James Bachmurski Charged with Murder. In August 2024, James Bachmurski was charged with second-degree murder in connection to Jade Colvin's disappearance.
Trial Against Bachmurski Begins. The murder trial against James Bachmurski began in August 2025, with strong evidence presented by the prosecution.
Justice for Jade. Jade's family finally felt justice was served after Bachmurski was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Episode quotes

You don't get to go home and turn off Jade Colvin.

58:44WatchApr 24, 2026

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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