It was the coldest of cases, a 26 year old parental abduction. Now it's apparently solved and a family is left to deal with the consequences, legal and otherwise.. It began Tuesday when a 31 year old woman walked into the Washoe County District Courthouse seeking a marriage license. She apparently had no idea she was setting off a chain of events that would reveal shocking details about her early childhood and put her mother behind bars before the day was out.
Eva Marie Fiedler wanted to legally change her name to Melissa Reed before her marriage. A routine background check revealed she was actually a missing person and endangered person, last seen with her mother, Nancy Marie Fiedler in Somerville, New Jersey in 1984. According to a statement from the Somerset County Prosecutors office, her mother, Nancy Marie Fiedler, who did not have legal custody at the time, fled with her then 6 year old daughter during a recess in a court hearing.
An investigation led sheriff's deputies to Incline Village and an apartment on the 800 block of Tahoe Boulevard where a 57 year old woman identifying herself as Debbie Reed answered the door.
"Initially she denied any knowledge of the individual who did the abduction in 84," says Washoe Sheriff's Captain Dave Nikoley, "but she finally admitted who she was and was subsequently arrested."
Fiedler and her daughter had apparently been living in Incline Village under the assumed names for more than 20 years while New Jersey authorities searched for them.
Over the years investigators apparently followed a number of leads, but they said they were unsuccessful because Fiedler had been able to obtain a number of different identities for her and her daughter.
The young girl's picture and a computer generated age progression image are still to be found on missing children's websites. Nancy Fiedler now sits in the Washoe County Jail awaiting extradition to New Jersey.
The pair apparently lived for decades in plain sight. Their past came as a surprise to Incline Village and, Nikoley says, to Eva Marie herself. "We believe that she did not know that she had been a missing person all these years."