DNA case goes cold

The 29-year trail to a missing woman’s fate has gone cold again, as attempts to pull DNA from human remains in Colusa County have stalled.

Bones found near Arbuckle more than a quarter century ago have failed to produce enough genetic material to be linked to Nellie Flickinger, the Colusa County Sheriff’s Department said Monday. Relatives of Flickinger had hoped the remains could unveil the fate of the Pennsylvania-raised woman, who vanished in March 1979 after telling her mother she was headed to California.

This latest setback was a bitter pill for Flickinger’s niece, who in recent years has stepped up the search for her missing aunt and publicized it on both sides of the country.

“It was like every ounce of blood had drained out of my body and I’d fallen to the floor, dead,” Joni Lapeyrouse said by telephone from her home in Pensacola, Fla. “I just totally crashed; I’ve been going after it a year and a half.”

Remains discovered in October 1982 along Interstate 5 near Hahn Road had been considered the best hope for learning what happened to Flickinger, a mother of five.

The Sheriff’s Department in March unearthed the body from the Colusa Cemetery and sent samples from a leg bone, tooth and hair clippings to the state Department of Justice laboratory in Richmond. However, the material was too old and damaged to produce usable DNA that could be matched against her relatives, according to Chief Deputy Kevin Wheeler.

Family members said the 29-year-old woman left her mother’s house in Erie, Pa., with a male visitor, possibly a serviceman, and promised to return for her children.

Nearly three decades later, Internet searches led Lapeyrouse to the unclaimed body in Colusa County, which she said caught her attention because it contained a metal plate in the right femur – an apparent link to the broken leg a teenage Flickinger suffered in a motorcycle crash.

With the local search hitting an apparent dead end, Lapeyrouse said she would try to bring private and university laboratories into the effort. Meanwhile, the lack of answers to the mystery of Flickinger’s end still stung.

“It still hurts,” she said Monday. “It still hurts to think about it.”