“A lot of cases are cut-and-dry. There’s a crime, there’s a victim,” Corporal William Noel told Dateline. “What happened to Ms. Snow is baffling on a lot of different levels.”
Corporal Noel is currently the only cold case investigator for the City of Annapolis Police Department. He has more than 40 cases he’s investigating. He keeps track of them in a spreadsheet. “It goes back to the ‘60s — of open cases,” he said. “My purview is unsolved homicides.”
And while that is typically Noel’s focus, he will sometimes also look into missing persons cases. “But they are on a rare occasion,” he said. “On an occasion such as this, if it’s a missing person with some, you know -- where foul play may be suspected, that definitely falls into something that we will look into.”
The disappearance of Nancy Snow is one of those cases.
THE SNOW SHOW
At 44 years old, Nancy Snow was a force to be reckoned with. “Nancy was involved in politics, a very well-read woman, well-traveled,” Cpl. Noel said. “Nancy had recently been divorced and she’s a mother of three.”
“She was the best mother in the world. And she loved us so much,” Justine Snow told Dateline. Justine is the middle of Nancy’s three daughters. She spoke to Dateline on behalf of her sisters, Stacy and Kimberly, who both wanted to make it known that their mother was loving, nurturing, confident, adventurous, and joyful. “Everybody loved her. She was a very popular person,” Justine said.
Nancy lived a very full life. “We adopted dogs from the local SPCA here and we would take the dogs to the beach,” Justine said. And she enjoyed spending her free time in the kitchen. “She was a fabulous cook. She loved making gourmet food, you know, from her New York Times cookbook.”
Nancy made sure to take in the world around her, and share it with her daughters. “I basically grew up in a camper in Europe,” Justine said. The girls’ father was in the Army and the family moved all over the world. “All five of us would pack into a Volkswagen camper every single summer when we lived in Germany. And we would travel to Greece, all the islands in Greece. We would travel to Spain and Portugal and Italy and France.”
Eventually, they wound up back in the U.S. in the California Bay Area, where their father’s family lived. Nancy Snow made the most of her time there. “She had the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard in my life. When she-- before we moved to Maryland, she was a DJ at KRML, which was made famous by Clint Eastwood’s movie ‘Play Misty for Me,’” Justine said. “She had her own show called ‘The Snow Show.’ She had a TV show. It was called ‘Midday’ on KMST. She had an hour-long show where she would talk about current events and, you know, music, the jazz festival, all the stuff that was happening in our area. And every Friday, she would have an SPCA person come out with a dog that they would feature, and it would be adopted by the end of the show.”
“I can’t even tell you what a big heart she had,” Justine told Dateline.
The Snow marriage did not survive, however. Following the divorce, Nancy decided to move to the East Coast. The two younger girls, Justine and Kimberly, made the move to Maryland with their mother. They didn’t stay long, though. They were unhappy at their new school. “We were both being bullied and beaten up,” Justine said. “Apparently they didn’t like people from California.” So the girls returned to California to live with their father. Nancy, meanwhile, became involved in politics and had recently moved to an apartment in downtown Annapolis.
ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
In 1980, Nancy was working for the Republican National Committee. “She was working for the RNC, but she was a die-hard Democrat,” Justine said. Nancy was headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, for a few months, working on Gene McNary’s campaign for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent, Thomas Eagleton. On Tuesday, November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter for president, and McNary lost in his bid to unseat Eagleton.
Justine spoke to her mother on the phone that night. “When we were talking, she said that she was going to get out of politics and she wasn’t happy,” she remembers. Nancy also told Justine her plans for when she got home to Annapolis. “She was going to go to this party, she said, in Baltimore.”
On November 5, 1980, the day after the election, Nancy flew back to the East Coast from Missouri.
“We can place her at BWI airport,” David Cordle, retired chief investigator for the Anne Arundel County State Attorney’s Office, told Dateline. “We got her coming back on an airplane and we can, you know, place her on the plane, exiting the plane.” Cordle says they also know Nancy was picked up at the airport.
Cordle began working for the state attorney’s office in 1980. “Ironically, Nancy disappeared on the day I started my career,” he said. The office established a cold case unit later that decade. “We took all the cold case homicides from Annapolis police, split them up among four detectives,” Cordle said. “Nancy Snow was one of the ones that I had ended up with.”
Cordle worked on Nancy’s case for decades. He retired in 2013, but says Nancy’s case is one he cannot forget.
Looking at the files, Cordle remembers immediately thinking something was off about Nancy’s disappearance. “There’s no way that a woman is going to drop off the face of the earth without ever contacting her daughters,” he said.
And that’s exactly why the family knew something was wrong.
“My mother called us almost every day, almost every single day,” daughter Justine said. “When she was on the road, you know, we would all get postcards -- all three of us.”
When they spoke on election day, Nancy expressed to her daughter how exhausted she was. “She couldn’t wait to get back to Annapolis,” Justine said. So the family became concerned when they didn’t hear from Nancy following her return to Maryland the next day. “The first red flag was when she didn’t call when she got home from St. Louis,” Justine said, remembering their last phone call. “She said, ‘I love you, I miss you, and I’ll call you as soon as I get home,’” Justine recalled. “That never happened.”
A MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE
According to Corporal Noel of the Annapolis Police Department, witnesses saw Nancy on the evening of November 5, 1980, at the party she told her daughter she’d be attending in Baltimore. The following morning, Nancy had breakfast with a man at a hotel. Justine says the man was someone she met while working in St. Louis. “She was pretty charmed by him,” Justine said.
Corporal Noel said the man who had breakfast with Nancy told investigators he saw her getting into a car with another man, whom the corporal referred to as Nancy’s house sitter. Noel described the nature of Nancy’s relationship with the house sitter as hazy. “At a minimum, [he] did watch Nancy’s home for her when she would travel,” he said. Justine describes the relationship with the house sitter as a casual dating situation.
“The two left, and that was the last time anybody had seen her,” Cpl. Noel noted. “There’s some reports that they were supposed to go to Connecticut. That part is not well known.”
Justine says the Connecticut plan makes no sense to her. “When you break it down, she calls me, she says, ‘I’m exhausted. I’m so tired. I can’t wait to go back and spend time in my new apartment.’ She actually said those words to me,” Justine said. Nancy had moved into the apartment right before she left for St. Louis for those few months, so she hadn’t really had an opportunity to enjoy her new space yet. “Why would they suddenly change plans and go to Connecticut? What does that have to do with anything? She’s never even been to Connecticut in her whole life.”
Communication from Nancy stopped after that. “Obviously this raises a red flag to her family,” Cpl. Noel said. “They realize something can’t be right because this -- it was out of character for Nancy not to even write or call back to her daughters.”
Justine’s concern rose exponentially on November 23, 1980. It was her 16th birthday. “That was the days when you had one phone in the house and it was stuck to the wall,” she said. “I just literally sat there in the living room the entire day waiting to hear from my mom.”
The call never came. “And that’s when I knew she was dead, that something horrible had happened to her,” Justine said.
Corporal Noel told Dateline there are conflicting accounts of possible sightings of the days following Nancy’s disappearance. “It was believed that she had come back to the Annapolis area. There were a couple of local bars that Nancy was known to frequent,” he explained. “Detectives at the time spoke to different people in those bars. They knew who she was. Some claim to have seen her in the area,” around November 8, which was just a few days after Nancy was seen leaving that Baltimore hotel with the house sitter.
Authorities were never able to substantiate those sightings at the bar.
“There are so many different versions of what may have happened,” Corporal Noel said.
WHAT HAPPENED TO NANCY SNOW?
One scenario detectives explored that came from interviews conducted with witnesses and the people in Nancy’s circle involved an ocean getaway. “There was one prevalent one that Nancy had -- while here in Annapolis -- had spoken to a local boat captain and there was thought that she had spoken to this gentleman for the purpose of joining him on his vessel,” Cpl. Noel said. The supposed plan was to go somewhere in the Caribbean and then return to Annapolis.
Justine told Dateline the story was that her mother had gone to a local bar where she met a “Captain J.” She is unsure if it was Captain J or Captain Jay. “We don’t know anything about this guy,” she said. “If he even exists, the police never found Captain J.”
Justine says the house sitter’s story was that Nancy came home in the middle of the night and started packing for the excursion. “He said that she was gonna go with this Captain J and his crew and get on a boat in Florida — Fort Lauderdale,” Justine said. “And crew this boat to the Bahamas and then come back.”
But something that stands out as odd to Justine about that story is that her mother’s passport was actually expired at the time. “She had a safe deposit box. She had her expired passport in there. She also --. Inside it, was an application for a new one,” she said. “How did she go to the Bahamas without a passport in the middle of the night? You have to have one.”
Corporal Noel says detectives at the time followed up on the Captain J story. “Went as far as to assemble, effectively, a roster of captains in the area at the time and interviewed them,” he said. “We’ve gotten work records, sailing records, of anybody that may have taken a path similar to what we believed folks told us that Nancy may have gone.”
Authorities found no record of Nancy on a boat to the Caribbean. “It was very frustrating because officers and detectives were trying to turn over every stone and nothing would give us an exact location where Nancy went,” Corporal Noel said.
“We could have gone in 20, 30 different directions, you know, with different theories and things like that,” retired investigator David Cordle told Dateline. “It was a very frustrating case, very, very quickly.”
Justine Snow says she doesn’t believe her mother would have changed her plans on a whim, especially without notifying her family. “My mother was so obsessed with safety,” she said. “She made us take self-defense classes.” She also doesn’t believe her mother would take off with a stranger, either. “Nothing makes sense at all. Nothing,” she said.
THE EARLY DAYS
In the months following Nancy’s disappearance, detectives looked into her finances. “Officers did subpoenas for her bank records,” Corporal Noel told Dateline. And that’s when they found canceled checks written against Nancy’s account.
When authorities interviewed the house sitter, he told them he was continuing to look after Nancy’s home and financial affairs. “According to him, he was under Nancy’s orders to continue to care for her home, her belongings. According to him, he had permission to be the effective executor of her finances to pay bills while she was gone,” Corporal Noel said. “He was allowed, for his efforts, to take a small stipend for himself. Those numbers never seem to be in excess of what someone would deem fair for, you know, looking after their home and taking care of their affairs.”
According to Justine, after her mother disappeared, the house sitter also began getting rid of some of Nancy’s belongings. “She had really nice taste in clothes, and he was giving away [her] clothing,” she said. Both Corporal Noel and retired cold case investigator David Cordle confirmed the house sitter had given away some of Nancy’s things. Cordle says one of those things was Nancy’s car -- a turquoise VW Beetle. “I was able to locate the car years later, and we actually found it abandoned and overgrown with weeds and all that kind of stuff,” he said.
“You have his word versus hers. We can’t confirm hers because no one knows where she is, but detectives were never able to not confirm that what he said was true,” Cpl. Noel said. “So they did not pursue him for any criminal charges.”
Corporal Noel says he keeps track of the house sitter to this day. “I would classify him as a witness and a person of interest, given that he is the last known person to see her alive,” he said.
Early on, investigators also looked at Nancy’s ex-husband in California. “There was nothing that indicated that he had any -- that he had any role in her disappearance,” Cpl. Noel said. “He was pretty -- pretty quickly ruled out as having any possible role.”
Authorities also considered whether Nancy’s work in politics may have had something to do with her disappearance. “There was no indication that someone wanted to do anything to her or had any -- had any gripes with her. We just didn’t see that,” Cpl. Noel said. “We didn’t have any indication that there were conflicts that she encountered by virtue of her work.”
No suspects have ever been named in the case.
As the years passed, tips came in less and less frequently and, over time, dried up entirely.
Eventually, the family had Nancy declared legally dead.
“I’ve literally been looking for her my whole life and trying to get this case solved,” Justine told Dateline. “That’s all I want in life, is to get this case solved.”
FOUR DECADES, NO ANSWERS
Prior to his retirement in 2013, David Cordle brought three cadaver dogs in to search the basement of Nancy’s building. “There was some suspicious thought about, uh, some construction that had taken place after she had gone missing, you know, in the basement of the home,” he said. “That turned out to -- to be kind of a dead end.”
They also looked at unidentified remains that could possibly be a match for Nancy. “We searched so many, so many recovered bodies,” Cordle said. Nancy had unique dental work, which helped eliminate cases quickly. She had a diastema -- a gap in her front teeth -- and almost all of her molars were missing except the one on her lower right side, which had a silver filling.
Nancy’s daughter Justine told Dateline she has spent years doing her own research, using the DoeNetwork website, which is an international center for unidentified and missing persons, to look for possible Jane Doe matches to her mother. She also got Nancy’s case listed on the DoeNetwork website. “Every chance I got, I was on my computer looking at dead bodies and Jane Does,” Justine said. “Comparing the stats and the dates. And, you know, I -- I went from Georgia, Connecticut, Maryland, you name it.” When she found something she deemed a possible match, she would call the authorities and ask them to run her DNA, which is in CODIS, against that Jane Doe’s. “I would say, ‘Hey, I found one. This might -- this might be my mom. Can you run this DNA? Can you run it through the system?’” Each time, she allowed herself to hope the answer was within reach. “And each one came back as a no. Uh, no match,” she said.
Corporal Noel says that, to this day, any bodies that turn up are compared to the familial DNA, which his department has on file just in case. “Unfortunately to date, nothing’s been a match,” he said.
Corporal Noel believes something bad must have happened to Nancy, due to her prior history of always being in contact with her daughters. “The fact that that went from a pretty regular occurrence to absolutely not at all… I can’t help but feel like something foul, you know, is at play,” he said. He is still hopeful that, even after 44 years, someone who knows something about Nancy’s disappearance comes forward.
“The case is still alive and it’s still active. And we intend to investigate this till we find something where we can deliver to the family some type of resolution,” Cpl. Noel stressed. To that end, the Annapolis Police Department urges anyone who may have been in the Baltimore or Annapolis areas at the beginning of November 1980 to think back to that time and see if they can remember anything. “I would urge anybody that knew Nancy or knew someone associated with her, have a conversation with each other, talk about that time and have a quick reminisce about her,” Cpl. Noel said. “And I think they’d be surprised what comes out of those conversations that maybe they didn’t remember at the time.”
“If they had a parent or a grandparent that was in politics that may have known Nancy, you know, or friends of her. Check in with them,” Cpl. Noel appealed. “Talk about this and see if there’s anything that may have seemed -- not even out of place, but, you know, ‘Maybe I did see Nancy here,’ or ‘Maybe I did hear her talk about taking this trip or doing this thing.’ Call us. And if I already know it, I’ll just check it down, but I will never not listen.”
Eleven years into retirement, David Cordle continues to think of Nancy’s case. “I just never give up hope and I don’t want the family to give up hope,” he said. And while he knows there really is no such thing as closure in a case like this, “It would be nice at this point to know what happened.”
“You never get over it. Never, never, ever,” Nancy’s daughter Justine said. “All I want is to get her remains back, if that’s possible, so we can say goodbye properly.”
If you have any information about the disappearance of Nancy Snow, please call the Annapolis Police Department at 410-268-9000 and ask for Corporal William Noel.
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