The Girl in the Music Video
Written by Yourgo Artsitas
In the quiet foothills of the Adirondacks, where even the smallest mountains cast long, lingering shadows, lies Au Sable Forks — a place where light fades fast, and some darkness is never chased away.
It’s the Spring of 1990. The snow still sparkles on the riverbanks where the East and West branches of the Au Sable converge.
Gary Nixon is sitting in his wood-paneled living room, surrounded by his wife’s quilted throw pillows, watching the evening news. Spring training for his favorite sport, baseball, has begun — a welcome reminder that the season is turning over. Snow is soon to melt and budding flowers will bring color back into a landscape that is currently shades of gray.
Gary arrived in Au Sable Forks during a period of his own transition. A Vietnam Navy veteran, he settled here decades earlier for a corporate job with AT&T. This is where he met his wife, Kathy, and where they’d raised four kids. It seems like the perfect place for a family — quiet, walkable, community-oriented. The summers are absolutely spectacular, and although the winters can be harsh, Gary finds that the townspeople make the best of them.
Tonight, there is a familiar chill in the air — but it’s not from the cold. Gary and Kathy, their daughter Lori and sons John and Joe huddle together around the television. The fourth sibling, Kari, is present only on the ink of the front page of the Press-Republican, which family friend Gene Gilbert kicks aside as he rings the doorbell to drop off a VHS tape he picked up from the local video store.
Kathy pushes the tape into the VCR.
Her heart is racing. For three years, the Nixons have been searching for Kari Lynn. She should be 19 now, wherever she is. For Kathy, hope rises and falls like the banks of the river. But tonight, it’s overflowing. The tape — a copy of the latest hit video from the New Kids On The Block — supposedly holds a clue.
Kathy presses play. Hangin’ Tough, a quintessential 80s pop track about persistence, about not giving up, about aggressive unyielding, begins to play in their living room.
The video is flashy but raw enough to match the song title. The New Kids hang out in a graffiti-riddled alley, dancing and passing around a baseball bat for air guitar solos. Quick scenes of the band performing on stage are intercut with a crowd dancing along in concert. As the heartthrobs sing, the camera pans to teenage girls in the crowd, swooning, screaming, crying.
It’s all moving fast; the shots last split seconds. But a minute and 37 seconds in, the Nixons spot a crimp-haired teenager in a white baseball hat.
“This could be Kari,” Kathy says, the breath sucking from her lungs. “This could be my little girl.”
They pause. Lori sees the girl’s locks. The frizzy hair with the bangs — just like Kari's. It’s identical.
Goosebumps roll across Lori’s arms. “It’s unreal,” she says. “This girl looks so much like her.”
It’s the first time they’ve seen Kari since a night, three years ago, when she seemingly vanished into the night. Since then, investigators have been chasing sightings across the country, always coming up empty-handed.
Kari’s 8-year-old brother John stares at the screen intensely. His ears strain. He hasn’t been able to remember his sister’s voice since the day she disappeared.
Kathy rewinds the tape and presses play again. Then she rewinds and watches once more. Then again. And again.
The hair color. The length. The shape of the girl’s face. The mouth. The chin. Even the distinct pattern of four earrings in her right ear and two in her left.
They all match Kari.
It’s the scenario they’d been hoping for — not only have they found her, but she’s alive.
Kari Nixon is a normal 1980s 16-year-old American girl. She belts out songs by Olivia Newton-John at karaoke and tries to out-turkey her three younger siblings at the bowling alley. She’s a sophomore at Au Sable Valley High School, keeping her grades up between volleyball in the Fall and stuffing her hair into a helmet for softball in the Spring. Kari’s brunette locks follow the timely trend of being frizzy and big, but not big enough to stand apart from anyone else in this town of 3,000.
Kari is a motherly figure, and a help to her mom. She packs the lunches for her younger siblings, makes sure they are dressed and that they catch the school bus in time.
“You are such a responsible older sister,” Kathy would say.
And to the littler children, Kari is the idol. Lori looks up to her beauty and grace. “I want to be just like her,” she’d say.
Au Sable Forks is a small village tucked away in Upstate New York near the Vermont border and it has been the Nixons’ home for generations. Kathy was raised on the same street — Palmer Street — where she’s now raising Kari. It’s a comfortable, safe community.
The summer of 1987 is exciting for Kari. She gets her learner’s permit in May and is reveling in her newfound independence. She can go to the mall or movies anytime she wants now. She’s gearing up to become a camp counselor too, but needs to pass a safety course first. One Monday in late June, she studies the booklet until she passes out inside of it.
Around 9 p.m. on June 22, 1987, Kari jumps up from a nap, leaving the booklet on the bed. She throws on some pink sweatpants and heads to the living room.
Kari’s father Gary is supposed to be making dinner, but he’s meeting with life insurance agents. He loses track of time. Instead, he has Lori prepare a couple of Michigans — a hot dog with beanless chili, mustard and onions — for himself and for Lori. He sits around with the kids, snacking, talking as the night drifts on.
He has a hankering for some Pepsi so Gary talks Kari into going to Thomas’ Country Store. It’s only a few blocks away.
“Get us some Pepsi and milk?”
A walk to the store after nightfall is not abnormal in Au Sable Forks. It’s a place where people feel safe. And Kari is usually up late anyway. She has a habit of keeping her little sister up with her. They play Yahtzee or Rummy all the way to 500.
“You have to finish a full game!” she teases her tired little sister. Tonight, Kari wants to drag Lori along with her to the store, but an afternoon of playing has worn her little sister out. As rain starts to drizzle outside, Kari slings on a jean jacket and leaves her house alone. It’s about 9:30 p.m. She has $20.
Kari dodges raindrops as she walks into Thomas’ Country Store. She grabs the Pepsi, milk, potato chips and some gum — the total comes out to about $3. The clerk hands over the change and Kari darts out of the market at about 9:55 p.m.
The rain is picking up. A neighborhood friend is trying to start his car. He sees Kari walking by, her grocery bag snug under her denim jacket, attempting to keep it dry. He yells out a greeting at 10:05 p.m.
Around 10:10 p.m., another neighbor returns home from a bingo game. Palmer Street is barren. Kari is gone.
Back at home, the Nixons fade into sleep on the living room couches. Gary wakes up at around 1 a.m. and stumbles to the fridge for his Pepsi or milk. When he doesn’t see either, he heads to Kari’s bedroom to make sure she made it back. He sees a silhouette of Kari’s body, comfortable in bed. He quietly slips into the room and reaches down to the bed. He feels what he thinks is Kari’s foot. Relieved, he heads back to sleep.
The next morning, at 7 a.m., Kathy walks into Kari’s room. Sunrise floods the room with light and Kathy can see clearly that Kari’s bed is actually empty. As she rips open the sheets, all she sees is the safety booklet.
Richard Sypek’s day is still getting started when he finds out about the biggest case of his life. He had just arrived at the station and is filling up his car when senior investigator Fred Wright comes outside.
“Hey, Rich, when you gas up, come on down to the village,” Wright says.
Sypek’s antenna goes up. Square-faced with a greying Caesar cut and a subtle underbite, Sypek is inching towards his mid-40s and just starting his twentieth year as a cop. It seems like an innocuous request, but Sypek knows better than to think a senior investigator would leave the station for anything that didn’t cross a certain threshold of severity.
“What’s going on?” Sypek asks.
“A 16-year-old girl went to the store last night and she never came home,” Wright answers.
To this day, Sypek remembers the gravity in his boss’s voice.
“I got a bad feeling about this one.”
The facts of the case, as they know them, merit the concern.
“I had a daughter her age,” Sypek says. “She was the same age as Kari. That 16-year-old girl walking down the street could have been my 16-year-old Denise walking down the street.”
At the Nixon house, Kathy is frantically calling all of Kari’s friends and relatives, and the panic in Kathy starts to make Lori nervous and sick to her stomach.
“Is this really happening?” Lori wonders.
Gary snaps into investigative mode, using the tools he learned in the Navy and in Vietnam. He replays her route to the store over and over again — both in his head and walking the route himself — tirelessly trying to uncover something no one is noticing. He calls up friends, who start the hunt on foot, with Kathy back at home near the phone for any updates. The townspeople can’t fathom that an abduction could happen in their safe, comfortable town. They implore Gary to at least consider that Kari might have left on her own.
“Everybody’s telling me she ran away, everybody’s trying to convince me of that,” Gary tells the Plattsburgh Press-Republican through his signature handlebar mustache.
“No way.”
Gary’s refusal matches Sypek’s intuition. It makes no sense that a young girl would just run away in pink sweatpants with no luggage. There are letters she sent friends of how she pines to live in more tropical climates of Florida, Hawaii or California. She does write that she wants to move when she turns 18. But that doesn’t square with the actual facts of the case. Why would she buy the groceries? Why would she ask her parents for such a small amount of money?
These questions vex Sypek, and police snap into action, throwing massive resources into finding Kari. They search land and sky. Volunteers come over from the Air Force base and fire department. Mounted patrol horses scour the undrivable, woody terrains near the Nixons’ house in seven-hour shifts. Bug-eyed helicopters hover around the forest in a 50-mile radius from the Nixon home. Flyers make it as far south as Schenectady — over 130 miles away.
Kari’s missing poster Source: Inside Edition
The dead ends torment Gary. He refuses to ignore even the smallest leads — even ones that police don’t find credible. He finds himself in a car with a few friends, driving South, chasing a sighting that turns out to be nothing.
“It gave him something to do,” Lori remembers. “He felt hopeless and lost. Like he just needed to get my sister back and to make our family whole again.“
“He felt he failed his family,” Kathy tells a national television show that comes to town. “He came home on the second day and just sobbed. Sobbed. And he said, ‘Kathy, I can’t fix this.’ ”
By the winter of 1987, it begins to feel like every stone has been turned. All leads have dried up or hit a dead end.
But in November, the New York State Police get a letter in the mail from an anonymous writer in Flint, Michigan.
“Look for Kari Lynn Nixon in the Eutawville, South Carolina area.”
The lead might sound weak — vague at best — but something about it catches Sypek’s attention. He sends the note out for handwriting analysis and prints flyers, asking the small Eutawville police force — just 10 officers in total — to post Kari’s missing person poster all over town.
It doesn’t take long.
Just a few days later, a middle-aged woman with dirty blond hair sees one of the flyers and makes the call. Her name is Shirley Kannepel, and from the moment she starts talking, she seems eager — almost too eager — to come across as credible. She tells Sypek she spoke with Kari the previous summer at a season-ending party at the local campground, just a few months after Kari disappeared. The timing lines up. And the fact that Kannepel is a woman strengthens Sypek’s hunch.
“I had it analyzed,” Sypek recalls. “It came back as likely being written by a woman.”
He gets the green light to follow the lead himself. Soon, he’s behind the wheel of his cruiser, heading nearly 1,000 miles south to the quiet town of Eutawville, hoping the trail hasn’t gone cold.
Meanwhile, the Nixons are angling to get the television show Unsolved Mysteries down to South Carolina.
It’s a new investigative crime show on NBC that’s focused on open cases that seem solvable. The show has a “missing persons” segment, which is a perfect fit to feature Kari’s story.
Host Robert Stack narrates in his signature austere and deadpan voice as the eerie piano theme trickles in from the background.
“One rainy night in upstate New York, 16-year-old Kari Lynn Nixon ran an errand to a nearby store. Only 200 yards from her front door, she mysteriously vanished.”
Robert Stack showing the anonymous South Carolina lead Source: Unsolved Mysteries
At the end of the segment, the show — which already has decent nationwide ratings — prompts viewers to contact the show or investigators if they have any information on the case. It’s a long shot, but not a bad one to bet on. Especially since the show follows police down to South Carolina.
“I just actually believe 100% that she is still alive,” Russell L. Parker, the Eutawville police chief, tells the show from his patrol car.
“Numerous townspeople” have said they’ve seen Kari, he says, but the one lead that is sticking is Kannepel.
Kannepel had worked for four and a half years in a program where she’d occasionally encounter runaways. Through her experience, she picked up on things, like kids who were being evasive or reluctant to answer questions. Kannepel remembers Kari acting that way.
Kannepel is adamant she saw Kari at the camp with a redhead the previous summer. She manages to explain the scene well enough for a reenactment on the Unsolved Mysteries, with Lori — Kari’s younger sister — playing Kari in the scene.
“Oh, my god, you're gonna be on TV!” Lori’s childhood friends squeal. “What are you gonna do?”
But to Lori, it’s an obligation.
“It's not really what I wanted to do,” she recalls, years later. “It's not like being on TV, it was just something that we had to do to try to get her name out there.”
Sypek also decides to approach Kannepel with a more unconventional tactic to help conjure up old memories that remain foggy, and they film that for the show, too.
“I have had success with hypnotism as a witness enhancement tool,” he explains. “With armed robberies or something of that nature, there are details that come out under hypnosis that were not previously brought up in a normal interview and record. It's something that's kind of secreted in their brain that remains hidden, but upon hypnosis, it goes deeper.”
Sypek finds a professor from the University of South Carolina who usually teaches surgery, but also does hypnosis for the state police. He brings Kannepel into a dim room. Unsolved Mysteries depicts the entire thing.
Kannapel getting hypnotized Source: Unsolved Mysteries
“What I want you to do, Shirley, is relax your body as much as possible but concentrate on the sound of my voice,” the hypnotist says. “You should be feeling very warm, secure and relaxed.”
Kannepel’s eyes start to get heavy.
“Shirley, I want you to go back to the day you saw the young girl you talked about before.”
“It was a hot day,” Kannapel begins. “A little redheaded girl comes up and asks me to meet a new friend of hers, Kari Nixon.”
“Can you describe her to me?”
“She’s got long, brown hair. I said, ‘Kari Lynn Nixon, that's a pretty name,’ ” Kannepel says, her eyes still fluttering, her head arched backward.
When Kathy and Lori arrive in South Carolina to tape the episode, they meet Kannepel and are immediately skeptical. She seems to be living out of her car. And Kathy finds it suspect that, in her story, Kari introduces herself as Kari Lynn, when she never used her middle name.
She and Lori exchange looks.
“She just ended up being somebody that you just didn't believe,” Lori says.
But Sypek is determined to run down all potential leads. So his next move seems clear: find that local redhead girl and follow her to Kari. The campsite owner and a local sheriff deputy lead the way to the family who reserved the campsite. It’s getting dark in the backwoods of South Carolina, and Sypek is trekking through brush. But he’s hopeful as they make their way, that it will pay off. A woman answers the door and immediately Sypek feels dejected. She has jet-black hair. A redheaded daughter feels unlikely.
Still, Sypek asks to see her daughters. She ushers them in, and one by one, each daughter appears with her full head of matching black locks. But then, a redhead emerges. “She’s adopted,” the mom explains.
“That's the girl I want to talk to,” Sypek says eagerly.
The little girl, with her curly red hair and face dotted with freckles, tells Sypek that she met an older girl that day and hung out with her for a few hours. Each descriptor that Sypek gives, the little girl affirms. There’s only one problem.
“Do you remember this little girl’s name?” Sypek asks.
The little girl shakes her head.
Sypek reaches into his pocket and pulls out a photograph of Kari.
“Do you recognize this girl?” Sypek asks.
The little girl, again, shakes her head.
Sypek had traveled over 1,000 miles. Maybe the girl is just being shy. He tries again.
“You’re sure you don’t recognize this girl?”
The girl nods. She’s sure.
“It was inconclusive,” Sypek says. “That's how that one ended.”
A dead end in the backwoods. It feels like everything is now riding on Unsolved Mysteries. The show airs on May 10, 1989, with 26.1 million people tuning in.
Kathy pleads, “I just need to know she’s not hurt.”
And at one point, the concern in Kannepel’s eyes burn through her huge, round eyeglasses as she stares directly into the camera, appealing directly to Kari.
“I’m 100% convinced I have met you Kari and if I had any message at all to give to you, it would be just call home, call your mom and dad let them know you’re alive, you don’t have to go home, just call and let them know you’re alive.”
Kari appears on the screen. She’s smiling in all white garb as the sun beams across her face, looking both angelic and innocent.
“Today, Kari Lynn Nixon would be almost 18 years old,” Stack says in his deep, solemn voice.
The audience sees a yearbook-style professional photo of Kari looking like the prototypical small-town teenage girl. The camera slowly zooms in on her cheery smile.
“At the time of her disappearance two years ago, she was five-feet-three inches tall and weighed 105 pounds. Her eyes are blue and her hair is brown,” Stack continues.
“She was known to wear two earrings on her left ear and four on her right.”
The show does what it’s supposed to do. The day after it airs, Sypek’s office floods with calls. Nearly 400 leads are generated in less than two weeks. People say they saw Kari everywhere from Tahiti to down Palmer Street. And Sypek spares nothing, calling in favors from local police across the globe to help him follow up on every clue.
“Every lead must be followed to the end to be eliminated,” he says. “No lead is going to be left to open.”
For the next 18 months, Sypek looks at 70 purported sightings, conducts more than 1,500 interviews and examines 200 unidentified bodies. Still, they have no real idea where Kari could be.
“The results of all these searches, and all the leads and everything we’ve done in the last year and a half, nothing has been found. Not one thing,” Capt Robert B Leu, a detective with the New York State Police Department later tells Unsolved Mysteries. “She’s walked off the face of the earth as far as we’re concerned.”
For Sypek, it’s frustrating. But the Nixons remain positive. Kari disappeared, but her life isn’t a 16-year hallucination.
“She existed. I gave birth to her,” Kathy tells Sypek one day as they go over the leads that have all, so far, been extinguished. “She wasn't beamed up from someplace. No, she existed. She went someplace. Somebody knows.”
Sypek looks at her, feeling buoyed in the weight of the moment by Kathy’s optimism.
“You’re absolutely right,” he replies. “Of course, somebody knows the answers.”
The New Kids On The Block’s ultimate stardom is entering the stratosphere when they shoot their video for their soon-to-be hit song “Hangin’ Tough.”
It’s June 5, 1989, and the band is coming off of a disappointing self-titled debut album. But now, the boy band is catching fire with its second collection, aptly titled Hangin’ Tough. It’ll end up going 8 times platinum. The lead single, Please Don’t Go Girl, finally breaks them to a national audience. Then, You Got It (The Right Stuff) takes them up another level until their third single I’ll Be Loving You (Forever) becomes their first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.
New Kids On The Block VHS cover, 1989
The album’s title track was the band’s fourth single and Hangin’ Tough needs a video shoot. Doug Nichol is tapped to direct and the production has an open casting call to fans to show up for the taping in Los Angeles.
About 7,000 hopeful kids line the streets to see the New Kids, but only a lucky 2,000 make it in. One of those is a crimped-hair, white cap-wearing brunette who looks an awful lot like Kari.
The song shoots to No. 1 in the country. Then, one day in March 1990, Kathy and Gary Nixon pop a videotape into their VCR.
“Will the mystery of Kari Nixon ever be solved?”
A young Bill O’Reilly stares into the camera from behind the desk of Inside Edition, a new-ish nightly news tabloid that is finally getting its sea legs in syndication.
“We often have to report on the terrible tragedy of missing kids, it’s almost epidemic in North America. Sixteen-year-old Kari Nixon disappeared nearly four years ago, her family is devastated. But then someone looking a lot like Kari was seen in a New Kids On The Block video.”
National media’s eye returns, giving Kari’s case the revival it desperately needs. But actually identifying the girl in the music video becomes an uphill battle because of technological limitations.
Trying to isolate the frame with the girl and then get a properly blown-up picture from a music video is still quite difficult in 1990. Taking a picture of the TV produces limited results. Investigators contact Kodak to see if they can share a still photo by unrolling the oxide-coated Mylar tape where the images are recorded and played from a VHS tape. They ask the local news channel WPTZ for help. The picture they have is so blurry, you can barely make out where the girl’s ears are attached.
Source: Unsolved Mysteries
Unsolved Mysteries comes back to do an updated segment on Kari. The show tells its network audience to contact investigators if they recognize the girl in the video. But the show also asks Jonathan and Jordan Knight — two of the New Kids — to appear on camera to raise the exposure. The brothers oblige. They speak to Kari and their fans.
“I’d just like to say to Kari that if you’re out there, the best thing to do would be to call somebody and, you know, like even if you go to your local police and just tell them your situation maybe they can help you out,” Jonathan Knight says with somber sincerity, microphone hanging from his red tee as a slew of jackets hang in the background.
His brother Jordan, in hoop earrings and a backwards black cap, stares directly into the camera and pleads.
“Or if any of you viewers out there who may have seen her at a New Kids show or just seen her on the street, if you could contact someone, you know, to let them know where she is or if she’s alright or anything, that would be a big help.”
Kathy makes another appearance, too.
For Lori, the Hanging Tough lead has one big flaw. She’s telling herself to overlook it, to keep hope alive, but she knows her sister well. Kari was never a New Kids fan. She wasn’t really even a fan of anyone other than Prince. Lori remembers her sister having a journal where she’d copy down every lyric of his music.
Still, she tells herself they have to follow it — even if it’s a stretch.
“We need to find this girl, to find out who she is, whether it’s Kari or not, just so that if it’s not we can go on to something else to try and find her,” Kathy says. “I love you Kari and I need to talk to you.”
The episode airs on November 7, 1990, and the response is just as massive as the first one, 18 months before. A deluge of calls come into Sypek’s office, but this time, Sypek doesn’t have to travel to track down his best lead.
Lynette Melancon is what New Kids fans affectionately call a Blockhead. It’s a nickname given with the highest praise.
So when she catches wind of the taping, the prospect of being in the video is too tantalizing to resist. She wakes up extra early and starts waiting in line around 5 a.m. It pays off. After a full day waiting at the front of the line, she gets a spot right in front of the New Kids as they perform. It’s ripe for loads of screen time.
When the video comes out a month later, the 13-year-old is front and center, crimped brown hair with the white New Kids hat she bought at the taping.
The day after the Unsolved Mysteries episode aired, Lynette is at work — the drive-thru at Carl’s Jr. She can tell something is strange. It’s been months since the music video aired, but all of a sudden, everyone seems to recognize her.
“I just thought they were crazy,” Lynnette recalls. “But then it kept happening when people kept saying, ‘Oh, you know, you look really familiar. I think you were on TV last night.’ ”
The next day at school, it continues.
“I saw you last night on Unsolved Mysteries! You’re the girl in the music video!”
When Lynnette gets home from school, a private investigator is waiting for her, tape in hand.
They watch the episode together. Lynnette is overwhelmed with sadness as she watches the Nixons' pleas.
“You know her parents are very interested in talking with you? Would you be interested in talking with them?” the investigator asks.
“No,” Lynette says. She’s only 13. She has no idea what it truly means to be an unfortunate doppelganger.
Source: Inside Edition
“I was really scared about it,” she later recalls. “Somebody was missing and there was a picture of me with her, and it was really kind of creepy to me. And scary.”
For the next three years, Sypek chases nothing but dead leads — an unidentified girl here and there that never ends up being Kari. He makes a promise to himself never to let a day pass where he doesn’t spend at least 30 minutes following up on something, always hearing Kathy in his head, reminding him that her daughter must be somewhere.
“I used to have a little sign on my desk, and it was a frog that had his hands around a stork's neck. The stork is trying to eat the frog and the frog’s got his hands on the stork's neck. And it says, ‘never give up.’ And anybody I talked to, I said, ‘Never give up. You missed it. It's there.’”
In Au Sable Forks, Robert Anthony Jones is just Bobby. The CPA’s kid. An athletic-built teen with a cherub face, thick black curls, and a powerful freestyle stroke that helps carry the high school swim team.
He graduates in 1982 and, after a year or two, disappears from the Adirondacks like a leaf in spring runoff, ending up in Bar Harbor, Maine — a place where the salt air burns your lungs. He takes to carpentry quickly, and by his early twenties, he’s worked his way up to foreman at Bay Design and Construction.
In 1984, he marries Theresa in Blue Hill and they drive to Nova Scotia with the windows down, day-dreaming about their future as they roll down the long rural roads. They have their first child not long after. A second follows soon. Jones hikes the woods, takes to the quiet.
But by 1986, he grows restless and moves the family back to Au Sable Forks. He wants to build a house on his father’s land, nearly 13 untouched acres. He starts over with calloused hands and big plans, raising frame after frame with a kind of quiet intensity.
In the summer of 1989, he files paperwork for High Peak Carpentry, telling everyone it’s for the freedom — to work on his own schedule, to spend more time with his kids. It makes sense. He is just a regular guy. Blue jeans. Flannel shirts. A man building something solid.
“I remember him being very mellow,” Jay Ward later told the Press-Republican. “He was a great guy.”
But behind the sun-warmed wood and tidy handshakes, Jones is changing.
It starts small — an interest in scuba diving. Then he buys gear. Not just for himself, but for his wife and kids too. Top-of-the-line stuff. Fins, tanks, full wetsuits.
Bill Scufca, who once swam alongside him in high school and now works the front desk at Ward Lumber, notices. They are both doing carpentry, but somehow Jones is living in a different league.
“I couldn’t understand how he could afford it,” Scufca tells the Press-Republican. And yet, the receipts pile up. Nearly $6,000 worth of supplies at Ward Lumber. Materials that don’t match the jobs Jones is supposedly doing.
“Somewhere, he came up with the money to pay that,” Scufca recalls.
Cracks form. High Peak Carpentry folds after just two jobs — Jones has a habit of clashing with partners. Then, in the middle of a winter night, his house burns down. The family moves in with Steve Olin, a close friend who offers them shelter. But the gesture will end in regret.
While staying at Olin’s home, Jones shoots and kills the man’s dog. He claims it is an accident. He says he’s testing out ammunition. But in a place like Au Sable Forks, where people remember what your father does for a living and who you took to prom, that kind of thing doesn’t just blow over.
People start to whisper. Still, no one imagines what will come next.
Not until 1990, when a single potted plant links him to something darker. And suddenly, Robert Anthony Jones — swimmer, carpenter, husband — isn’t just the CPA’s kid anymore.
He is a suspect.
It’s just after 2 p.m. on October 23, 1990, and police officers and state officials are pouring onto Au Sable’s Main Street as fast as the rain that’s falling around them.
Someone has just robbed KeyBank and everyone is searching for a white man of medium build in dark clothes and a bandana concealing his face.
Roadblocks in and out of Au Sable Forks are set up, with troopers — adorned in orange slickers and rain gear — stopping anyone trying to skip town. Police patrol backroads and a Life Flight helicopter begins to scour the area, dubbing in as a search chopper.
“He had a gun,” says witness Lori Deyou to the Press-Republican about 90 minutes after the incident, “I was real scared.”
Deyoe is a teacher at the Holy Name School who had dashed over to make a withdrawal before the bank was set to close at 2 p.m.
As Deyoe rushes in, she sees only one other customer, Florence Dugan, who is stopping in before checking out some children’s books at the library.
The robber snags the cash — later tallied to be around $19,000 (just over $46,000 today) — and disappears in a white car. A massive search yields no suspect, although police eventually find the car in the woods under a tree, hidden beneath some limbs.
They trace the car back to a nearby family currently on vacation. They’d given their keys to a family friend to care for their pets, get their mail. That friend is Alice Jones, Robert’s mother.
When Sypek goes to the family’s home, the back door is kicked in and there are tell-tale signs of a break-in. But what perplexes Sypek is this one potted plant by the door.
“There were steps up to the porch,” he says. “There's a large porch with chairs and a table out there. And right below the door is a flower pot. And you couldn't open the door outside with the flower pot. So the perpetrator would remove the flower pot, open the door, go on the porch, kick in the door, break the door, come back out and put the flower pot back? No, he had to go into the house with the key.”
Sypek begins to suspect Alice’s son, Robert. After all, he matches the description of the suspect and he had a key to the house. But Alice refutes that.
“I had the key and I never let it out of my sight. In fact, I actually took the key with me and I went in to take a shower,” she tells him as he questions her.
“You took the key to the neighbor's house in your shower with you?” he asks, disbelieving. She insists.
Sypek later recalls, “Yeah, that kind of turned me.”
Sypek manages to get Robert Jones to come in for a polygraph. Polygraph tests are typically not admissible in court proceedings, but they do help guide investigators and help prove or eliminate suspects from suspicion.
Jones sits down. The polygraph administrator slips the monitor through Jones’ fingers. There’s one to measure heart rate and one to measure sweat.
He starts with a control sample — an ace of diamonds from a card deck. This is meant to give a baseline for what an honest answer looks like on the graph. But Jones knows this. He knows he can use this to sabotage the test. The polygrapher protests.
Jones stands and begins to shout.
‘You're calling me a liar? Because I'm not taking this test. You're going to call me a liar?”
Sypek is watching. “What does that tell you?” he asks himself.
In the years since the New Kids lead dried up, the Nixons have struggled. Sypek reaches out once or so a week, but he can tell from their voices that only tiny flickers of hope remain.
Gary pours himself into sports. He starts a youth basketball tournament in Kari’s honor, raising money for the National Center For Missing And Exploited Children. And whenever he can, he plays fast-pitch softball, taking his kids along with him to tournaments. He tries to stay positive and live life. Kathy, however, prefers to isolate. Every so often, he can convince her to come to a baseball game, but all she can see are the families around her, happy and whole.
She begins to look at everyone in town suspiciously.
“You’re doubting your next-door neighbor. You’re doubting somebody who lives up the street. Maybe it was him. Maybe it was her? Does somebody know where she is and they’re not telling me?” Kathy wonders in an interview with a true crime show. “It’s a small community. How come nobody knows anything?”
On top of that, people are whispering, and some of what they say is hurtful. Some wonder if Kari got pregnant. Or worse, that she was hiding from her family despite their pleas.
“Well, everybody knows she ran away,” a local boy tells Lori. “Everybody knows she did.”
Lori is blindsided.
“I was totally unaware that people were thinking this,” She recalls. “I thought everyone was on our page that something bad happened to her and somebody took her.”
Kathy and Gary try not to talk about what happened in front of the kids. They try to go on as if their missing sister was still there — a ghost in the shadows with no resolution. They put presents for Kari under the Christmas tree. They celebrate her birthday. And Kathy writes Kari a note each week, asking her how she’s feeling, sending her well-wishes. She hopes somehow the sentiments reach her daughter, wherever she is.
“It would make me feel better,” Kathy says at the time.
Sypek trudges through leads every day, tackling them one by one.
“We're talking 450 or 500 leads. It may be quiet, but every day I'm working,” Sypek says. “Every day, I would try to eliminate or handle one or two of the leads.”
One day, a tip from a nurse in Georgia piques his interest.
The tipster works at an elderly care home, helping her aging patients with anything they may struggle with. Some have bad eyes, so she reads them their mail.
And one day, she’s sitting next to a patient with a personal letter unfolded, her eyes scanning the contents. She gets to a passage that makes her forehead wrinkle.
“....somebody came home with a young girl, and she's a runaway from upstate New York and she's living here at the house with us.”
The nurse had seen Kari’s episode of Unsolved Mysteries and she knows this is a big deal. She hesitates, because she isn’t supposed to be telling anyone about the private mail she’s reading, but decides to call Sypek anyway.
“Here's what it is,” she explains over the phone. “I can't tell you my name. I will tell you this, all I know is the letter was from B. Jones.”
Sypek hangs up and dials the local police department. They know of three “B. Jones” and head out to knock on each of their doors.
The first two go nowhere. But when they arrive at the third, there is a young woman in the background.
“Is there a young runaway girl from New York in there?” the police ask.
“Yes,” B. Jones replies. “She’s from Schenectady.”
Right state, wrong town.
“She was a runaway, but she wasn't mine,” Sypek recalls. “That's where the years went. The years went on with leads like that.”
It’s the day before Thanksgiving 1992, and a car pulls up to the drive-in at the Key Bank in Plattsburgh, New York, just before noon, trying to evade the foot traffic during the lunch hour.
"I drove up to the window, but the teller, who was about three feet from the counter, didn't come over to me," a witness later tells the Press-Republican. "She looked very pale, very stressed out, like she might be having a heart attack. I looked around to see if anyone else was noticing her, and I noticed everyone's attention was focused on the center of the bank."
The customer shifts his attention there, too.
“And I saw the guy. He was wearing a ski mask and a gray sweatshirt and pointing a pistol."
Terrified, the customer scurries across the parking lot and barges into a bowling alley. The staff is eating lunch. The man screams for them to call 911.
"We didn't know if we had a heart attack on our hands or a wreck or what," Bob Munson, who worked at the bowling alley, says. “He was really shaking; I had to dial the number for him."
By the time the phone hits his ear, the robbery is over. The suspect has made off with $47,000 and is headed north on foot. A manhunt begins. The state police set up roadblocks around the North Country Shopping Center, crushing local businesses' crucial pre-Thanksgiving rush in the process. The target is a small white car with a large, metallic antenna.
The robber has a few accomplices and a multi-step escape plan. His first getaway driver gets him to his second getaway driver, waiting in a GMC Suburban across town with his two kids, Anthony and Caitlin, waiting in the back.
But the police find a similar white car through the DMV and track it to its owner. It was registered just eight days prior to Theresa M. Jones.
Robert Jones’s wife.
Sypek has learned from the past not to lean on the Jones family for information. This time, he goes after an acquaintance whom he suspects might know something. Kevin E. Stevens had come into town to work with Jones on some construction gigs when the robbery happened. When Sypek hears that Stevens is headed back to Maine within the week, he realizes that this is his chance.
He just has to grab him before he sails away.
If two people have a secret, it can only be kept a secret if one of them is dead.
The Ben Franklin proverb is ringing in Sypek’s head on repeat as he travels to the Lake Champlain ferry slip.
It’s early on a Thursday morning. Sypek bounces around the dock and questions folks, hoping someone will have an idea of when a guy named Kevin E. Stevens might show up.
Sypek has done his homework. He knows that Stevens and Jones have history with each other. They are pals, but in mischief. They met at a church in Maine years before. Now, Steven comes down to do carpentry work with Jones. He was there when Jones killed Olin’s dog. Being a carpenter might be his main job, but Sypek keeps hearing whispers that Stevens has a side hustle: getaway driver.
Sypek sits at the ferry slip in his gassed-up cruiser, scanning every automobile for “Maine” embossed in red on its license plate.
He’s been doing this for days now, with no luck, but the winds are about to shift. That afternoon, Stevens drives up to the ferry slip and Sypek intercepts him. He puts him in the back seat of his cruiser and almost immediately realizes that, not only has he likely solved these bank heists, he might have something much, much more consequential.
“If I talk to you, he’ll kill me,” Stevens said.
“Who?”
“Robby.”
“He said, ‘I’ve killed before and if you ever talk about this, I’ll kill you.’ ”
I’ve killed before.
“Stevens was scared to death of Robby,” Sypek later recalls. “And I knew I had him then.”
“He rolled over.”
As it turns out — and as is often the case — there is one thing that terrifies Stevens more than Robby. Hard time. So he agrees to show Sypek where they hid the 9mm Ruger and the white Nissan. He tells Sypek about how they changed vehicles, how Robby’s wife picked them up in a Suburban with their two kids waiting in the back seat.
He also confirms that this isn’t the only robbery Jones got away with. The two did a string of jobs, with a close call up in Maine during the winter months.
Stevens tells Sypek their modus operandi. Jones enters the bank with a satchel and a gun and demands the cash while Stevens waits outside in the getaway car. They typically speed off before perimeters go up. But this last time in Maine, the roads are icy and their tires are slipping. They get a slow start and they can see a single cop car in the rearview mirror. Stevens begins weaving, right, left, right again. Sharp left turn, sharp right turn. Nothing can shake their tail. If anything, the officer seems to be gaining.
“When you get down the road here, stop the car,” Jones tells Stevens. “I’ll take care of this cop.”
Stevens sees a snow bank and fishtails behind it. Jones peers back at the cop, but his cruiser is no longer getting closer. The tires are spinning in the snow. He’s spun out.
“Saved the cop’s life,” Sypek remembers. “Undoubtedly.”
The whole job ends up being a waste. When Jones opens his satchel, tracking powder explodes like a grenade, in his face, on the cash, all over the car. The loot is tainted. He has only one option. He rolls down the window and tosses it into the snow, bills billowing out into the powder.
The close call doesn’t sit well with Stevens. He tells Jones he thinks they should quit.
“Maybe you can stop, but I can’t stop, because I’ve already committed the ultimate crime,” Jones tells him.
Jones studies heists before he starts his spree of robbing Key Bank branches.
He checks out library books on past robberies, what went wrong, what worked. He reads books on forensic science, and when he finds out that a string of clothing on a teller’s counter was all it took for one guy to get identified, he stops touching anything unnecessary during the heists. His studies help him evade capture for nearly six years. When investigators descend on the Jones’ home on the morning of March 26, 1993, Theresa and Robert are arrested without issue.
It doesn’t take long for Jones to eventually work out a plea bargain. In September, he pleads guilty to robbing a total of four banks, the two in New York and two in Maine, spanning from 1987 to 1993. In total, Jones stole $82,549. He also admits to transporting 19 shotguns and rifles to New York from a 1992 burglary in Maine, just a few weeks before the Plattsburgh robbery.
On December 29, he’s sentenced to 15 years and one month, the maximum under federal guidelines. From the bench, Judge Thomas J. McAvoy tells Jones he decided on the maximum when he learned that his kids were in the getaway car.
Theresa Jones and Kevin E. Stevens — both charged as accomplices — are set to get their own sentencing the following month.
Jones realizes that if his wife gets prison time too, his kids could end up with both parents in prison. So he tells his lawyer that he wants to make a confession, to use an Ace he’s had up his sleeve for nearly seven years.
Sypek is up in Springfield, Mass., when the call comes in. Jones’s attorney puts the deal in very simple terms: You work with Jones on Theresa, and he’ll give you Kari Nixon.
The rain is picking up.
The clerk hands Kari change and she darts out of the market at about 9:55 p.m., June 22, 1987.
Down the street, Jones is sitting in his car, seething after a late-night beer run. His thoughts are racing. He suspects that Theresa is cheating on him, and his rage is building, uncontrollable. He stares out the window at the Thomas’ County Store door.
“He just wanted to find a girl, and maybe in his mind, pay his wife back,” Sypek later recalls.
Jones watches as Kari leaves.
A neighborhood friend is trying to start his car. Kari walks by, her grocery bag with Pepsi and milk snug under her denim jacket. The neighbor yells out a greeting at 10:05 p.m.
Jones watches from afar, waiting for her to turn onto a side street. He creeps up beside her, just a few hundred feet from her home.
“Sweetie, I’m lost,” he says. “Can you help me with some directions?”
As soon as she stops, he pulls up his gun and motions for her to get into the car.
“Once you get in the car and they close the door, they have to kill you,” Sypek later says. “Once that car door slammed, [it] was the lid of her car casket.”
Jones speeds off with Kari pleading.
“Let me go, let me go! My mom and dad are waiting for me!”
He drives about 10 miles to his parents’ home in Jay, New York, where he forces her, at gunpoint, to a cabin on the property.
Jones rapes Kari. Afterwards, he promises to take her home, but instead leads her deeper into the woods. Kari stops.
“We’re going the wrong way,” Kari says.
Jones turns around and strangles her. Eventually, he takes out his gun and shoots her twice in the chest. She dies begging for her life.
Jones marches about 400 yards into the woods and finds a workable plot of land where he can bury Kari’s body. He spends the next few hours digging under the cover of darkness. But he’s running out of time. As the sun begins to peek over the Adirondacks, he knows he has to stop. He runs back inside, slumping into his old bedroom at his parents’ home, pretending to be asleep. When the hustle of morning activity dies down, he goes back out with a shovel and a pick and finishes the grave.
If Jones had been caught in Maine during the snowstorm heist, it’s likely that Kari might never have been found.
Jones, somehow, behind bars, finds a massive amount of leverage in his situation, but only because of how consequential the Nixon case was to Empire State authorities. The state of New York has exhausted nearly unquantifiable resources in the previous six years trying to find Kari. And now, with one plea deal in a robbery case, they can finally bring her home.
“After six years, almost seven years, that was the biggest thing,” Sypek says. “You just really, really wanted to find (her).”
They cut the deal. Not only will Theresa avoid prison time, but Jones will get 18 years to life for Kari’s murder and the sentences will run concurrent to the bank robbery time. After an additional three years for her kidnapping and rape, Jones can seek parole.
It’s a pretty lenient punishment, and the Nixons have no problem saying so.
“He’s a rotten son of a bitch,” Gary Nixon tells the Press-Republican. “Anybody who fools with kids should be hung.”
“They found a way to take what he did to Kari and use it to their advantage,” Kathy says at Jones’s sentencing, speaking as much to the community as she is to the court.
“How many times was the child and the subsequent family and community raped?” she continues, her voice shaking. “First by Robert Anthony Jones and then by the justice system.”
Letters flood the newspaper from community members irate about the deal Jones was allowed to cut.
“I mean, everybody was pissed for lack of a better word – very angry — that he had the power,” Lori says. “We felt that it was unfair. But after knowing what he did to her, we didn't want her on his property. We wanted her where she belonged.“
Sypek learns that, over the years, while he is criss-crossing the country, tracking down every possible clue, Jones is periodically making the pilgrimage back to Kari’s grave, assuring himself it remains undisturbed.
When Jones returns for the final time, it’s with Sypek.
He identifies the spot — roughly 400 yards into the woods underneath around two feet of snow — and Sypek handcuffs him to a nearby tree. He watches them in silence, except to say that her head was in a certain spot and her feet were facing another.
Sypek digs himself.
Eventually, his shovel hits something solid. The ditch reaches the skeletal remains of a human. It is hard to tell who it is, except for one clear identifier.
“She was in pink sweatpants,” Sypek recalls.
The Nixons sit quietly in their living room, a heavy mix of anxiety and dread hanging over them. They've chosen not to go to the burial site — the thought of seeing her remains is simply too overwhelming.
Gary is lying on his back on the carpet floor with one arm behind his head, a position he frequently finds himself in when he’s trying to find comfort. Lori, who is now away at college, gets word to make the commute back home.
All they can do now is wait for confirmation they aren’t sure they are ready to hear.
A police cruiser pulls into the driveway, and the officer inside hurries toward the front door.
Detective Sypek lowers his head as he approaches, his steps slow and burdened. At the door, he meets the family’s tear-filled eyes. He looks up, emotion thick in his voice.
“We found her. We have her. We’re bringing her home,” Sypek says.
The family collapses into each other’s arms, overcome. Tears flow — quiet at first, then steady — as the weight of seven years of fear and uncertainty crashes down. Their worst nightmare has been confirmed.
“It was like losing her all over again,” Kathy explains.
For the Nixons, there are finally some answers. For Kari’s younger brother John, now 15, recovering her remains brings her memory vividly back to life. As the news sinks in, his mind floods with memories of his sister — and for the first time in seven years, he can almost hear her voice again.
“Our gut always told us that she wasn't out there anywhere,” Lori says. “Something happened to her and it happened that night. And it was just devastating too. As much as you wanted to know, then you know and you're like, okay was this better than what it was two days ago? To find out what actually happened is then another nightmare that starts and then that nightmare of specifics and knowing is now stuck with you for the rest of your life.”
Kari is laid to rest in her final, proper place on February 1, 1994.
The Au Sable Valley district schools take the day off. Businesses around town shutter for the day, too. Nearly 1,000 well-wishers squeeze into the pews and aisles at Holy Name Church for services. Among them, the parents of both Theresa and Robert Jones.
Kari is in a light blue casket, a color that had become the community’s symbol for her disappearance and the search to find her. Doors all over Au Sable Forks adorned light blue-colored bows in her honor.
“This has lifted me up so much,” Kathy says in her eulogy. “I feel a sense of euphoria, almost. There is so much off my shoulders now.”
The funeral procession is routed through town, driving in front of the Nixon’s home so that Kari can symbolically return to Palmer Street.
“She’s home now where she belongs,” Kathy tells the Press-Republican.
The deal that brought Kari Nixon home was a sentence for her family as much as it was for Robert Jones. For 18 years, he sat in prison, but once he became eligible for parole, their nightmare began to replay. Over and over. Just like that tape they once rewound a dozen times, searching for Kari.
Every two years, Kathy and Lori Nixon are forced to return to the cold, fluorescent-lit hearing rooms of the New York State Parole Board and plead that the man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered Kari remain behind bars. It doesn’t matter that Kari’s bones were pulled from the ground wearing the same pink sweatpants she disappeared in. The man who took her freedom still gets his chance at his own.
And while it may be Jones who stands before the board, it’s Kathy and Lori who feel the weight of the judgment. Can they cry hard enough? Speak clearly enough? Hurt visibly enough to convince them? At Jones’s sentencing, Kathy vowed to keep him locked away, backed by a community that had carried the family through grief. “I make a promise to everybody in the community,” she said that day, “the day he does, he won’t get far.” Applause broke out in the courtroom.
Thirty-one years later, Kathy has kept that promise. She and her daughter never miss the dreaded day when they have to sit before the board — not just on behalf of Kari, but for John, the loving little brother who named his own daughter Kari Lynn before dying of ALS in 2008. For Gary, who left town after the case broke him and died in 2011. For an entire family, and town, that has never been the same.
They live in a cycle of forced remembrance, of pain put on display for a panel of strangers, simply to keep a known killer from walking free. Kathy rallies letter writers. Supporters flood a Facebook group with thousands of members. In 2018, when Jones tried to appeal his first parole denial, panic set in, and relief followed only when it failed.
It’s a system that demands performance from the grieving. That drags families back to the edge of the pit just to make sure the person who pushed them in doesn’t climb out. And the most galling part? He has never once said he’s sorry. “Our main thing right now is to make sure that he stays in prison,” Lori says. “What I want the community to know is that, to this day, that man has never written us an apology letter and never said he's sorry for what he did.”
This is the final indignity. The part we never talk about. The part where the justice system, long after it has done its job, quietly keeps hurting the people it was meant to protect.
This year, Kathy and Lori will do it again.
Not because they want to.
Because they have to.
Yourgo Artsitas is a journalist, comedian and filmmaker. Yourgo has written for USA TODAY, SLAM Magazine, The Portland Tribune and The Salt Lake Tribune among others. He's also a correspondent for Peabody-nominated podcast "Pablo Torre Finds Out." In 2014, he was named one of the best sports columnists in the country by the Associated Press Sports Editors. As a filmmaker, his films have screened at Hot Docs, DOC NYC, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Cinequest Film Festival, Comic-Con, Austin Film Festival, Sidewalk Film Festival and Montclair Film Festival among others. He also served on the grand jury for the 2025 American Documentary and Animation Film Festival.
