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Girl's disappearance in Decorah could be a no-body murder case
Officials haven’t said how the teen died — or whether they’ve found her body
More than a week after authorities accused a former Decorah man of killing teenager Jade Marie Colvin in 2017, the search for her remains apparently still is ongoing.
On Aug. 12, the Winneshiek County Sheriff’s Office announced it had arrested James David Bachmurski, 65, most recently of Swainsboro, Ga., on a second-degree murder charge in Colvin’s death.
Authorities alleged Colvin was killed March 30, 2017, shortly after she went to live at Bachmurski’s farm in rural Decorah. She would have been 15 at the time of her death.
While records don’t shed light on the relationship between Bachmurski and Colvin, a criminal investigation determined the teen was brought to his farm from Arizona by her mother in March 2017. Bachmurski would have been 58 at the time.
Court records don’t indicate how she died, and officials declined to say if her remains have been located. But as of Monday, Colvin was listed as missing by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — a list currently featuring 13 children from Iowa — and she still is on a missing person’s database maintained by the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.
If that is the case, prosecutors at trial will have to not only prove that Bachmurski is the killer, but that Colvin is dead to begin with.
Such murder cases without a body aren’t unheard of in Iowa.
In 2016, Tait Purk was arrested on a charge of killing his live-in girlfriend, Cora Ann Okonski, in Tama County. Okonski disappeared in April 2000. Witnesses later said Purk admitted to choking and slamming her to the floor and burying the body. Prosecutors were able to introduce evidence of prior domestic violence in the relationship.
Purk was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to prison.
Okonski’s body was never recovered. She still is listed as missing on the Iowa DCI database.
In Henry County, Michael Syperda of Mount Pleasant was convicted of murder in 2018 for the disappearance of his estranged second wife, Elizabeth. She disappeared in July 2000 after leaving him, and the state was able to use evidence of prior abuse during the bench trial, including statements that he would get rid of her and nobody would find her.
In the verdict, the judge who decided the case wrote, “Any argument that Elizabeth is just waiting to be found or may come walking through the door at any moment or may make a call to her mother at any moment is little more than fantasy.”
Like Okonski, Elizabeth Syperda’s body has never been found and she still is listed as missing with state authorities.
And last year, a Howard County jury found a former Elma man guilty of murder despite the fact officials weren’t able to pinpoint a specific cause of death. Authorities allege Sayvonne Lealbert Jordan killed, dismembered and burned Jonathan Esparza, who disappeared in fall 2022.
Investigators found bone fragments — some with chop marks — that were positively identified as Esparza’s in a burn pit behind Jordan’s home.
The medical examiner ruled the manner of death as “homicidal violence,” noting that suspicious circumstances like attempts to hide evidence and destroy a body pointed to that conclusion.
“Based on my training and experience, it would be very unusual for a body to be dismembered and burned after having died of natural cause,” the medical examiner testified during Jordan's trial.
In a similar case out of Council Bluffs, Terry Anderson was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1998 disappearance of Douglas Churchill. Investigators found a piece of skull and tissue linked to Churchill through DNA in the Missouri River, and witnesses said Anderson had shot Churchill and cut up the body.
Nationwide, authorities have gone to trial on more than 550 “no body” homicide cases, according to NoBodyCases.com, a website maintained by former Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas DiBiase of Washington, D.C., who wrote a book on investigating and prosecuting such cases.
Of the cases DiBiase tracked through 2020, about 86 percent of the no-body murder trials resulted in convictions, compared with a 70 percent conviction rate for all murder cases nationwide.
Meanwhile, the newly filed murder charge has meant a delay in a years-old firearm charge Bachmurski is facing, which stems from a bolt-action hunting rifle found at his home in 2018 while he was on probation.
He had been scheduled to go before a judge for an Aug. 13 hearing in the weapons case. But the defense attorney handling that case backed out, so both of Bachmurski’s pending cases could be handled by the same lawyers — in this instance, a public defenders office.
Bachmurski remains held in the Winneshiek County Jail on a $1 million cash-only bail.
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