Kauai authorities are conducting a murder investigation after remains found last year were identified as those of a woman who vanished 34 years ago from her Hanalei home.
The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory determined earlier this month that the partial skeletal remains were those of Nancy Ellen Baugh, the Kauai County’s Office of the Prosecuting Attorney announced Thursday in a news release. DNA testing was used to make positive identification.
Baugh, 20, disappeared in June 1979 after her boyfriend, Paul "Sonny" Featherman, was fatally shot in the face at the couple’s home in Hanalei.
An investigation of his death is continuing, the county said.
Authorities believe Baugh had been kidnapped and possibly murdered, but her remains were not found until March 2012 near Waioli Stream, the prosecutor’s office said.
A Kauai police missing-persons investigator told the Garden Island in 2000 that Baugh’s case was one of three that stood out over the years because of its circumstances.
Baugh and Featherman moved to Kauai in 1977 from Cocoa Beach, Fla., because they wanted to live on a tropical island, the Garden Island reported.
Baugh’s family members from New Jersey prodded political leaders in that state to contact Hawaii’s congressional members and Kauai officials to ask police to continue to pursue the case in 1998. More detectives were put on the case, but no new evidence turned up, the newspaper reported.
Prosecuting Attorney Justin Kollar and Kauai Police Chief Darryl Perry credit the Cold Case Task Force, Ke ‘Ahi Pio‘ole, for reviving the case.
The task force, made up of police and members of the prosecuting attorney’s office, is assigned to investigating unsolved murders.
Anyone with information on the slaying of either Baugh or Featherman is asked to call acting Lt. Bryson Ponce at 241-1681.
