It’s been more than four decades since Nancy Snow’s three daughters last heard her voice.

Despite the passage of time, siblings Justine, Kimberly, and Stacy Snow remain determined to uncover the truth about their charismatic mother who vanished shortly after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential election victory. She was employed by the Republican National Committee, and her mysterious disappearance was highlighted in the recent Dateline: Missing in America podcast episode.

Over the years, both the sisters and devoted investigators have unearthed a variety of perplexing clues and identified a potential “person of interest,” yet the case has never been solved.

“I want to know the truth,” Nancy’s daughter Justine Snow told Dateline Correspondent Josh Mankiewicz. “I will never stop looking for our mom.”

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.