On March 24, 1998, Danielle Nusbaum said she felt her heart stop. “I saw a little light on my answering machine,” Danielle recalled. “I listened to the message saying Stacey hadn’t been at work yesterday and that she hadn’t been at work that day either.”
Stacey is Danielle’s younger sister. They lived just two miles apart in Columbus, Ohio.
“I ran over to her apartment,” Danielle said. “Her apartment door was open a little bit. Her refrigerator was open and there was pizza on the counter, there was milk on the counter.”
Danielle knew something was wrong. “I call the — the police right away,” Danielle continued. “That night was crazy.”
It was the night she found out her sister, 24-year-old Stacey Colbert, had vanished.
Danielle and Stacey were raised in Charleston, Illinois. “It’s a very small town,” Danielle told Dateline. “You went to the park, you went to the movies, you went to the mall -- there wasn’t really a lot of things outside of that.”
But the sisters, who were only two and a half years apart, had each other. Danielle told Dateline they were as close as can be. “We went to the same high school together, same elementary school together,” she said. “She was more of a sports girl — into tennis and things like that. I was more into theatre and show choir.”
In 1991, Danielle went off to college at Ohio State University. Attending the school, Danielle said, was a family tradition. “My dad went, my uncle went,” she said. “My dad took us on a tour of it when I was 14. I was like, ‘Yep, that’s where I’m going. I love it.’”
A couple of years later, Stacey joined her sister at Ohio State. “We would have coffee together. We would either have Highlander Grogg or the Nutty Irishman coffee at one of the coffee shops on campus,” Danielle recalled. “I was really glad when she came to college.”
Danielle wasn’t the only one glad to have Stacey there. Her sorority sisters Ashley Knott and Paula Shoup were happy to have Stacey around, too.
“She always has a big, beautiful smile,” Ashley Knott told Dateline. “She was always, always, happy, you know -- a go-getter.”
Ashley and Stacey rushed the Alpha Delta Pi sorority at Ohio State. “She joined about a month after I did and since we were both kind of, you know, newer, we hung out,” Ashley said. “She lived in the sorority house for two years, as did I, so we lived on the same floor for several years.”
Paula Shoup said she met Stacey at a fraternity party. “She was adorable,” Paula recalled. “She liked to dance, and I liked to dance, and we both loved cheesy ‘80s music.”
Stacey majored in marketing while attending Ohio State. “She just was a little powerhouse,” Paula said. “She landed a killer internship when the Olympics were in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1996. She got this internship with McDonald’s and that was huge. And then right after she graduated from college, she got a job as a marketing assistant.”
By 1998, Stacey had graduated and was settling into adulthood. She was working at her new job at American Electric Power, and living in her own apartment. “She loved her job,” Stacey’s sister, Danielle, told Dateline. “Everything was good in her life.”
And everything seemed to be going great for Stacey -- until March 22, 1998.
According to an incident report provided to Dateline by the Columbus Police Department, at 4 a.m. on March 22, neighbors directly above Stacey’s apartment heard screaming coming from below them. The neighbors told detectives that they “couldn’t go back to sleep” and that it sounded like “someone was in trouble.” Later that day, around 2 p.m., the neighbors went to check on Stacey. The incident report said that the neighbor knocked on Stacey’s door but “got no answer.” The neighbor also found Stacey’s cat outside the apartment, the report states.
Danielle told Dateline she tried calling her sister the next day, March 23. The 70th Academy Awards had just aired, and Danielle said she was excited to discuss the show with Stacey. “The last movie we saw together was Titanic. We disagreed about what the meaning behind the ending was,” she said. That year, Titanic was up for 11 awards. “I was calling leaving a bunch of Oscar-related messages on the voicemail.”
Stacey never called her sister back.
Danielle said that initially, she wasn’t alarmed. “She had talked about traveling for work,” she recalled. “I thought, she must be traveling.”
But when Stacey’s job called Danielle the next day, she realized that wasn’t the reason Stacey hadn’t called her back. “I just could not fathom any possibility where she wouldn’t show up for work,” Danielle said. “She was probably one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met.”
Danielle rushed to her sister’s apartment. “I called my parents and I said I was going over to her apartment,” Danielle told Dateline. “Her car was there, her purse was there, her money was there, all of her credit cards were there.”
But Stacey was nowhere to be found. Danielle called 911.
The Columbus Police Department arrived at Stacey’s apartment and got to work immediately. “They went through her apartment. They asked me all sorts of questions. And then, like a couple of hours later, teams from, like, you know, rape and homicide came,” Danielle told Dateline. “Even though I know that it takes 24 hours for them to take action, I feel like they took action on the initial reporting.”
Dateline spoke with Sergeant Jeff Bessinger with the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office. His office is now handling Stacey’s case. He commended the Columbus Police Department for the way they handled Stacey’s investigation from the start. “They did a great job at preserving evidence, handling it correctly from the get-go,” he said. “Right off the bat, they handled this like a crime scene.”
According to the incident report, detectives surveyed the scene at Stacey’s apartment. Along with all of her belongings, they found a box of mostly uneaten breadsticks on the counter. The receipt with the box, according to the report, was dated March 21, 1998, at 5:58 p.m.
Detectives spoke to the person who delivered the breadstick to Stacey’s home that evening. According to Sgt. Bessinger, he was one of the last people to see Stacey alive. “He doesn’t report seeing anything weird. He doesn’t report seeing anyone with her,” he said. “He was just a young kid delivering pizzas.”
The delivery driver wasn’t the only person detectives interviewed. “There were a lot of interviews, there was a lot of people looked at — neighbors, coworkers, friends, boyfriend, ex-boyfriends, roommates, ex-roommates,” he told Dateline. “Everybody was considered a suspect.”
Danielle told Dateline she doesn’t know who would have wanted to hurt her sister. “I don’t know anyone who didn’t, you know, care about her,” she said. “I can’t think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt her. She was a light.”
Although the community was on edge following Stacey’s disappearance -- her sorority sister, Paula, told Dateline the threat of safety was the last thing on anybody’s mind. “We were so focused on her and hoping that she would be located, there wasn’t a lot of time to think of personal safety,” she said.
The search for Stacey, and who may have hurt her, was on.
“I want to say over 5,000 kids in sororities and fraternities showed up,” Danielle said of a vigil held for her sister. “We had some [state] representatives show up there.”
Sorority sister Ashley Knott told Dateline that everyone came together to search for Stacey. “We would be out in the middle of the night putting up flyers,” she said. “We weren’t really sleeping.”
Stacey’s employer, American Electric Power, was helping search as well. “[American Electric Power] was printing off the flyers. They were printing thousands of them a day trying to find her,” Paula Shoup recalled. She said they even held onto Stacey’s job for months following her disappearance — hopeful that she would return. “They were so helpful,” she said.
But Stacey never returned.
“I waited for that call,” Danielle told Dateline. “Like, ‘Is she gonna be alive? Is she dead?’”
Six years later, on November 27, 2004, Danielle got that call.
“A body had been found in the area, although they thought it was older. I still really got a bad feeling when I heard it announced on the radio,” Danielle remembered. “I got a call at work that a match had been made between her and the remains that were found in Delaware.”
Sergeant Bessinger told Dateline that a hunter looking for a lost dog found Stacey’s remains on State Route 257 North in Delaware County -- about 40 minutes away from her apartment.
Due to the condition of Stacey’s remains, the coroner was unable to determine her cause of death. “We don’t have certain things to look at, like flesh,” Sgt. Bessinger said. “It was just bones at this point.”
Stacey’s case was officially handed over to the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office from the Columbus Police Department after her body was discovered in Delaware County.
“I got involved with it early on as a deputy, as far as being on the scene,” Sgt. Bessinger told Dateline. “Several years later, when I made detective, I was assigned to the [cold] case unit and Stacey’s case was one of them.”
Bessinger said that since his office has taken over the investigation, they have examined and re-examined a slew of evidence. “There was some things that were found later on in the search by the Columbus Police Department,” he said. “We do have [it] in our possession at this point, that’s still being examined by the crime lab. Every year on, the DNA technology gets better.”
The sergeant said he believes he knows who may have killed Stacey, but added he just doesn’t have all of the evidence needed to make an arrest — yet. “I need to be able to convince 12 people that this person did it,” he said. “But I need more to charge them. That’s the hardest part is knowing somebody is responsible [and] not being able to do anything about it.”
He has vowed not to give up. “I’m gonna get him. I promise you, I’m gonna get him,” Bessinger said. “He’s a monster, and this isn’t something you do once.”
Danielle told Dateline that she believes Sgt. Bessinger will help solve her sister’s case. “He’s still working through and he -- he keeps it alive,” she said.
Authorities and family are not the only ones still pushing for answers. “My friend Paula and I were having lunch -- we both had kind of a feeling of, like, Stacey calling us,” sorority sister, Ashley Knott said. “We just felt like it’s maybe time to start doing something again.”
Last year, Ashley and Paula decided to start a Facebook group called “Finishing Stacey’s Fight” as a way invite the public to push for justice in Stacey’s case. “I couldn’t have asked her to have a better group of women in her life,” sister Danielle Nusbaum said of Stacey’s sorority sisters.
Stacey and Danielle’s father, Larry, died in 2007. Their mother, Ronna, now lives in Arizona. “It’s very hard being in a place where something tragic has happened to your kids,” Danielle told Dateline.
But Danielle said she herself just can’t leave Ohio — not yet anyway. “It’s really hard to leave a place that -- where things are unresolved,” she said, adding that it would also be hard to leave the Columbus community. “They are incredibly loving and incredibly supportive when you’re going through some really bad things.”
Stacey’s memory will always live on in the community, family, and friends who loved her. The same ones still fighting for justice in her case.
“Usually on her birthday, there’s a memorial at the fountain of women at Ohio State,” Danielle told Dateline. “I’ll have a cup of Highlander Grogg coffee and I’ll raise it in her honor.”
Anyone with information on Stacey’s murder is asked to call the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office at 740-833-2892 or email Sgt. Bessinger at jbessinger@co.delaware.oh.us or finishingstaceysfight@gmail.com.