Morgan Nick

Case background and investigation

Morgan Chana Nick was a six-year-old girl who was abducted on the night of June 9, 1995, in Alma, Arkansas, a small town in the western part of the state. She had gone with her mother, Colleen, to watch a Little League baseball game at a local ball field. Around 10:45 p.m., near the end of the game, Colleen allowed Morgan to join other children catching fireflies in the ballpark parking lot. Morgan was last seen near her mother's car, emptying sand from her shoes, and then she vanished. It was the last time her family would see her.

Other children who had been playing nearby reported seeing an unfamiliar, unsettling man near Morgan shortly before she disappeared. Witnesses also described a red Ford pickup truck with a white camper shell parked in the lot that left around the same time the little girl went missing. The abduction triggered an enormous ground and air search of the area and quickly became one of Arkansas's most prominent and heartbreaking missing-child cases, drawing national coverage.

In the years that followed, investigators pursued thousands of leads across the country without locating Morgan. In November 2021, authorities publicly named Billy Jack Lincks, a convicted child sex offender who had died in prison in 2000, as a person of interest; he had driven a red pickup truck that had been a focus of the investigation since the beginning. In the wake of Morgan's disappearance, her mother, Colleen Nick, founded the Morgan Nick Foundation to aid families of missing children, and Arkansas's Amber Alert system was named in Morgan's honor, extending her impact far beyond her own case.

In October 2024, the Alma Police Department announced a significant forensic breakthrough: new DNA evidence linked a member of the Nick family to the interior of the red truck once owned by Lincks, with officials stating that the results strongly indicated Morgan had been inside the vehicle. The findings firmly connected Lincks to the case and led police to name him an official suspect nearly 30 years after the abduction. However, because Lincks is dead, no one can be prosecuted, no remains have been recovered, and the case officially remains unsolved. Morgan's family has continued to hold out hope and to press for any information that could finally bring answers.