Nellie Florence Flickinger was 29 when she was last seen in Erie, Pennsylvania, around March 1979 after returning from Arizona, where she had reportedly gone to escape marital problems. She told her mother and five young children she was leaving for California with a new boyfriend, promising to come back for the children, and then disappeared; the man’s name was unknown to the family, described only as a white male possibly in the military. Her life had been transient before this disappearance; she sometimes traveled through the western United States and occasionally left her children with relatives.

Nellie had distinctive injuries from a 1960s motorcycle accident: numerous scars from skin grafts, plates or screws in one leg that made it smaller than the other, and a gap between her upper front teeth. No missing persons report was filed until 2007 because she had appeared to leave voluntarily. A possible lead arose that year when a niece noticed similarities to an unidentified woman found in Colusa County, California, in 1982; the exhumed remains had a steel plate in the leg, but DNA in 2008 could not produce a conclusive match. The case remains open.

If anyone knew Nellie, the man she left with, or saw her after March 1979, please share what is known.