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It’s been more than four decades since Nancy Snow’s three daughters last heard her voice.
Yet, siblings Justine, Kimberly, and Stacy Snow are still determined to find out what happened to their larger-than-life mother who worked for the Republication National Committee and disappeared just after the 1980 presidential election ended with Ronald Reagan’s win, according to the latest episode of the Dateline: Missing in America podcast.
Though the sisters — and investigators committed to finding the truth over the years — have uncovered a series of baffling clues and identified a possible “person of interest,” the case remains unsolved to this day.
“I want to know the truth,” Nancy’s daughter Justine Snow told Dateline Correspondent Josh Mankiewicz. “I will never stop looking for our mom.”
Who was Nancy Snow?
At the time of her disappearance, Nancy, a devoted mom of three, was recently divorced and rediscovering herself.
When she and her husband Bob Snow split in 1978, Nancy — who spent much of her daughters’ childhoods working for the March of Dimes and getting involved in local politics — got her own condo in downtown Carmel, California.
Then, just a year later, Nancy decided she needed a bigger change and moved to Annapolis, Maryland, where she could play a greater role in politics on a national scale.
By 1980, Nancy had begun working for the Republican National Committee and was sent to St. Louis, Missouri, where she worked for some months on Gene McNary’s unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat.
On Election Day on Nov. 4, 1980, Nancy flew home to attend a political event that night in Baltimore, but where she went from there remains unclear.
What happened to Nancy Snow?
During her travels, Nancy regularly called and wrote to her three teenage daughters, who were still in California. In letters, Nancy spoke of what she’d do after McNary’s campaign concluded, sharing that she was considering a job working as a chef on a boat or starting her own charter. But, for the time being, she was focused on her work in politics.
The sisters last spoke to their mom on Nov. 4, 1980. She told them about the political event that night and promised to call the next day, but that call never came.
As the days continued to pass without any contact from their mother, the siblings convinced their father to call Paul Collins, Nancy’s friend who had been housesitting for her while she was working on the campaign in Missouri. Nancy and Collins had dated casually.
Justine said Collins told her father that her mom had gone on a sailing trip with some friends of a friend and would be back home by Christmas. Yet, when Christmas came there was still no sign of Nancy.
Stacy, Nancy’s oldest daughter, had planned to visit Nancy and went ahead with her trip, arriving in Maryland just two days after Christmas. Collins picked her up from the airport. When she arrived at Nancy’s apartment, Stacy expected Collins to hand over the keys. Instead, Stacy said Collins kept them, telling her he was staying in Nancy’s room.
Several days later there was still no sign of Nancy so, according to Stacy, Collins suggested they drive to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he believed Nancy began her boating trip. There, Collins told Stacy he reported her mom missing to police while she spent several days walking around the city showing people Nancy’s photo.
Stacy told Mankiewicz that when they got back to Maryland, Collins informed her he’d also filed a missing persons report with the Annapolis police.
Troubling Clues
Nothing about that supposed boat trip ever sat right with Nancy’s family and as the months passed without any word from her, they couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
At Nancy’s urging, Stacy had planned to attend the University of Maryland, and to live with Nancy. “She talked me into moving out there and going to college there instead of California,” Stacy said. “Why would she just then go poof, you know?”
Stacy, then 19, abandoned that college plan and instead made arrangements to return to Maryland to collect Nancy’s belongings. Her godfather, who lived in Washington, D.C, was going to help her. As Stacy was preparing for the trip, Collins called to say there had been a flood in Nancy’s third-floor apartment and all of her mom’s belongings had been destroyed.
The timing of the call seemed suspicious to Stacy so she called the Annapolis Police and said she learned that her mother had never been reported missing to local authorities. This was alarming to Stacy, who trusted that Collins was telling her the truth. “I mean, you’re 18, you’re expecting adults to do the right thing,” she said.
Stacy went to Maryland to see what could be salvaged from her mother’s apartment. By then, Collins had filed a missing persons report — just two days before Stacy arrived.
Stacy said when she and her godfather got to Nancy’s apartment, they found nothing left inside. They learned that Collins had given some of her mom’s belongings away to friends, and tracked down one of the women, who Stacy said was wearing her mother’s nightgown when she opened the door.
“And we go upstairs and they’re eating off my mother’s plates. They’re watching TV on my mother’s TV. They’re sleeping on my mother’s bed,” Stacy recalled.
The boat trip with Captain Jay
When Collins ultimately did file a report in Annapolis in April 1981, he told police that Nancy had returned to Maryland on Nov. 4, 1980 and stayed the night at a hotel in Towson with Bobby Goodman, a TV producer with whom she had been having an affair.
Goodman, who died in 2018, later confirmed to investigators that he had spent the night with Nancy and had breakfast with her the following morning and told authorities he later saw her getting into a car with an unknown man.
Collins told police that he picked Nancy up at the hotel on Nov. 5, 1980, and drove her back to Annapolis, where he said she spent a few days. According to the missing persons report, Collins said that on Nov. 8, 1980, Nancy met a boat captain named Jay at a bar and agreed to go work for him transporting boats between Fort Lauderdale and the Caribbean.
That theory was looked into at the time, but Corporal William Noel, an Annapolis Police detective now assigned to the case, doesn’t believe that Nancy ever took a boat trip. “I believe that whatever happened to Nancy Snow happened very soon after she was picked up from that hotel in the Baltimore area,” Noel shared.
Meanwhile, authorities discovered that Collins had used Nancy’s banking account after she disappeared to write several checks. Collins told police that Nancy instructed him to pay her bills while he was acting as a house sitter.
“The issue is we have nobody to refute it because Nancy is, you know, missing and we don’t have any way to confirm with her that those things were true or not,” Noel said.
Police identify ‘person of interest’
Noel called Collins a “person of interest” in the investigation, however, there’s not enough evidence to date to tie anyone to her disappearance.
In 2005, Collins was summoned to a grand jury as part of the investigation, but he exercised his fifth amendment right to remain silent. In 2009, Collins sat for a two-hour interview with an Annapolis detective and deputy state’s attorney under a use immunity deal — meaning anything he told them could not be used against him but he could still be charged if they found other evidence to connect him to Nancy’s murder. In that interview, with his attorney present, his story changed again. Collins told the investigators he picked up Nancy from the Baltimore airport one or two days after the 1980 election — and had no recollection of picking her up from that hotel in Towson. Collins, who is now 74-years-old, has briefly spoken to other investigators over the years, but he did not respond to requests for comment from Dateline: Missing in America.
He’s never been charged with any crime in connection to Nancy’s disappearance.
Nancy was legally declared dead in 1988, and her case was changed to a homicide investigation the next year. Her daughters have tried to move on with their lives as best as they can, yet they still yearn for answers.
“I want justice to be served,” Justine said.
At the time of her disappearance, Nancy was described as being 5’6” tall and weighing 120 pounds. She had blue-gray eyes and short, dark, graying hair.
Anyone with information about her case, is urged to call Noel at the Annapolis Police Department at 410-268-9000.
