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When Megan Nichols mysteriously vanished on July 3, 2014, police believed it had all the hallmarks of a typical runaway case.
The 15-year-old had withdrawn $200 from her family bank accounts, left her phone behind, and wrote her mom a note explaining why she had to leave her Fairfield, Illinois, home, according to “The Note” episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
“Mom, I love you so much but I will never be able to be truly happy here,” the letter read. “I’m sorry that this has to happen. Please don’t look for me because you will waste a lifetime looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found.”
But questions swirled around the disappearance for years, until a grisly discovery in a field not far from town confirmed that Megan had met a much more sinister end — and that it had been at the hands of someone hiding in plain sight all along.
Who was Megan Nichols?
Megan was a bubbly, warm, energetic teen who loved music and singing, according to Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
She had always shared a close bond with her mom, Kathy Jo Hutchcraft.
“I was a young mom and I was 19 years old when she was born and while I wouldn’t recommend that for everybody, I did enjoy the fact that we had a closeness and I think part of that was because of that,” Hutchcraft shared.
When did Megan Nichols disappear?
On the evening of July 3, 2014, Megan tagged along as her mom helped a friend settle into a new place.
According to Hutchcraft, Megan was “acting silly” and being her typical self until the teen told her mom at around 9 p.m. that she had a stomach ache. Hutchcraft dropped her off at home to get some rest and then returned to the friend’s place for a few more hours. She got back home sometime around 11:30 p.m. and that’s when she realized that Megan was not in her bed or anywhere else in the house.
In a panic, Hutchcraft and her mother rushed to the sheriff’s department, where they reported Megan missing.
“I just said, I need to talk to an officer, my daughter was missing,” Hutchcraft told Dateline correspondent Andrea Canning. “And I was in tears, upset. I explained to him, you know, my daughter is missing and I need to find my daughter.”
The deputy told her not to worry and assured her that teens go off on their own all the time, and usually show up a short time later. Hutchcraft rushed home and called her daughter’s friends, but none had heard from her. While searching her daughter’s room, Hutchcraft found Megan’s phone left behind under her blankets. It had been wiped and given a factory reset.
A note is found
Hutchcraft and her mom went downstairs to pray and that’s when her mom noticed an envelope in the TV room that Megan had left behind.
“It said, ‘Mom, I love you but I’m never going to be happy here. Don’t come looking for me because why spend a lifetime looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found,’” Hutchcraft recalled.
Who was Brodey Murbarger?
Although Hutchcraft and daughter Megan had shared a close bond, the relationship had been strained ever since Megan began dating Brodey Murbarger, a fellow high school student two years her senior.
“He was hot, like he was an attractive guy,” Megan’s friend Holden August recalled. “He was funny, he was smarter than a majority of the people in the room at all times and he had like cut, blond hair. It was one of those things you could understand why someone would fall for Brodey.”
The two had a dramatic start to their relationship after bonding at their school’s homecoming dance. Although Murbarger was there with his girlfriend and Megan had a date of her own, the two connected on the dance floor and they opted to ditch their dates as his girlfriend cried in the bleachers.
“It’s very intense high school drama,” August recalled.
The dramatic start wasn’t the only challenge to the relationship. Hutchcraft had a rule that her daughter couldn’t date until she was 16 years old.
Within a few months, Murbarger was back with his girlfriend, but he was still in contact with Megan, somehow convincing both teens they were his priority.
Murbarger had lost his mom just a few months earlier and Hutchcraft believed he was using that fact to win sympathy from the girls. When it came time for prom, Murbarger asked the other girl to the event, telling Megan it was only because he believed it’s what his mom would have wanted.
Megan Nichols’ mom tells daughter to cease contact with Brodey Murbarger
When Hutchcraft caught wind of the drama, she insisted Megan be “done” with Murbarger, instructing her daughter to stop all contact with him.
Murbarger was enraged at this and showed up at Hutchcraft’s house to confront her.
“He said, ‘Look, you are way too controlling, you’re concerning me and I think you need to be on medication,’” Hutchcraft recalled. “That’s what Brodey was telling me.”
Murbarger eventually agreed to leave the house, but not before making it clear that he didn’t plan to back off.
Then in July of 2014, Megan disappeared.
Police catch Brodey Murbarger lying
Murbarger’s home was one of the first places Hutchcraft looked after her daughter disappeared. Hutchcraft and her mom drove to the house around 7:30 a.m. on July 4, 2014 and found Murbarger in the driveway washing his car.
He insisted he had nothing to do with the teen’s disappearance and told the pair that Megan had wanted to move to Oklahoma to live with her biological father — a man she had just reconnected with the year before.
But authorities were quickly able to rule out that possibility. They brought Murbarger in for questioning and caught him in several lies. Although he claimed he’d never had a sexual relationship with Megan, text messages revealed the two had been intimate and showed that Murbarger had talked about running away with Megan.
“They were making a plan,” then-Fairfield Police Chief Keith Colclasure told Dateline.
Megan Nichols’ body is found
But police still believed that Megan had chosen to run away on her own, and for years, the case went cold — until a man out searching for firewood spotted a human skull in a field just outside town. The remains were determined to belong to Megan. Because the body had been buried, authorities concluded it was a homicide.
In interviews with the Illinois State Police, Murbarger insisted that he’d been at his girlfriend’s house on the night that Megan disappeared. Although he initially said he’d gone out that night to look for Megan after her mom started blowing up his phone, he later claimed it was really to focus authorities’ attention on him to give Megan time to make an escape.
While analyzing his vehicle, authorities found a suspicious dark spot in the trunk of his car, but initial tests showed it wasn’t blood.
By the time the FBI was eventually brought in to help with the case, Murbarger was studying geology at the University of Southern Indiana.
Brodey Murbarger’s vehicle tests positive for Megan Nichols’ blood
FBI Agent Ray Hart decided to conduct a more thorough analysis of the vehicle Murbarger was driving at the time and this time, lab tests showed that the dark spot in the trunk was Megan’s blood. When they pulled back the trunk’s lining, luminol tests indicated even more blood in the vehicle.
Murbarger’s close friend and college roommate Kyle Ellis had always been a staunch supporter of his friend, but after being confronted with the DNA evidence by the FBI, he agreed to wear a wire during two different conversations with his friend.
Although Murbarger never admitted to the killing, in one conversation he theorized that someone with “anger issues found out about something” and “strangled her.”
It was a telling statement because authorities had never made public the fact that forensic experts believed that Megan died from strangulation or suffocation.
Brodey Murbarger charged with Megan Nichols’ murder
Murbarger was arrested on charges of first-degree murder in Megan’s death in October of 2020 and went on trial two years later.
Prosecutors believed Murbarger killed Megan on July 3, 2014 after a fight broke out between the two about plans to run away together.
“She had gone to the ATM, she was packed, she was ready to go, so when Brodey ends up backing out, you can see how she would overreact, be upset and be emotional,” Michael Falagario, then an Assistant Attorney General for the Illinois AG’s Office, told Dateline. “It had come to a point where he completely lost control and reacted aggressively.”
It took a jury just two hours to convict Murbarger of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 50 years behind bars.
Hutchcraft is now trying to find her place in this world without her daughter, but is committed to honoring Megan’s memory.
“She touched a lot of people and not only in her life but her story has touched a lot of people since then,” Hutchcraft said.
