Betty and Clarence "Sonny" Baugh visited their daughter, Nancy, in Hanalei for two months just prior to her apparent abduction on the early morning of June 2, 1979, and the killing of her boyfriend, Paul Featherman.
The 20-year-old told her parents she was frightened by a couple of men in their small Kauai North Shore community, and the young couple talked about moving back to Cocoa Beach, Fla., a few months later.
"Nancy would not walk around town by herself," said her brother, Steve Baugh, in a telephone interview Friday from his New Jersey residence. "When my mother was there, Nancy would get nervous and upset. My mom would say, ‘What’s wrong?’ She goes, ‘Well these people always stare at me, and sometimes I think they’re following me and I get nervous and scared.’"
Sometime in the early morning hours of June 2, 1979, Featherman reportedly came out of a bathroom and was shot in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun, said Baugh, who pieced together the story from the news media, information from police and tips from people on Kauai.
Nancy was wrapped in a blanket and carried screaming from the home. Neighbors heard the screams, but no one reported seeing any vehicles, Baugh said.
Featherman’s co-workers at the Hanalei Bay Resort were concerned when he didn’t show up for work, and one of them found the 27-year-old dead in his apartment.
Although numerous tips came in, and police said they had leads and some suspects, nothing ever materialized, Steve Baugh said. Featherman’s family offered a $10,000 reward. Decades passed.
The first major break in this 34-year-old cold case came when heavy rain exposed human remains in March 2012. A passer-by found them near the mouth of Waioli Stream in Hanalei and called police.
The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory determined the remains were those of a Caucasian female.
The prosecutor’s investigator notified the family in April 2013, requesting their DNA. Baugh said their mother and brother Robin, 59, in Florida provided their own DNA samples, which helped positively identify the remains as his sister’s.
Baugh, 57, and his mother, 85, got the news Aug. 29 that Nancy had been positively identified. "We were hoping and hoping just to have some kind of closure," he said. "We were very, very sad, but relieved she wasn’t suffering anymore."
Nancy Baugh’s father, who phoned Kauai police many times daily for news about the case after the disappearance, died in 2003, never learning her fate.
Steve Baugh said authorities think she was killed and buried there shortly after she was abducted, "not like she was held for years."
Betty Baugh wants to know whether the remains can show what caused the death of her youngest child and only daughter. The family plans to have her remains cremated and hold a service for her.
Kauai County Prosecutor Justin Kollar and Kauai Police Chief Darryl Perry credited their agencies’ joint Cold Case Task Force, Ke Ahi Pioole, for revitalizing the case.
Kollar said over the years, records, memories and evidence deteriorate, but the cold-case unit has been able to reconstruct and locate the majority of the reports and have gotten in touch with investigators who were on the case at the time.
Robbery does not appear to be a motive, authorities said. Baugh said $800 in cash was found in the top drawer of a dresser.
Steve Baugh, who was 23 at the time his sister disappeared, described her as a down-to-earth, fun-loving girl who loved the water and plants, "a real nature type of girl."
She met Featherman in Cocoa Beach. He wanted to move to a tropical island and raise plants and orchids, and the two hopped on a plane to the Garden Island a year or two before the murders.
He was a cook and she was a waitress, and he planned to attend college to pursue horticulture, Baugh said.
Anyone with information on the case is asked to call acting Lt. Bryson Ponce with the Kauai police at 241-1681 or email coldcase@kauai.gov.
