ST. LOUIS — “I was actually only 7, and it’s crazy that I remember all the details,” Melissa Daus told Dateline. “It just altered our lives.”
Melissa’s aunt, 34-year-old Nancy Brannon, disappeared in St. Louis, Missouri, at the end of November in 1986. “It happened right around Thanksgiving,” Melissa said. “So for many years, we did not celebrate Thanksgiving, even Christmas.”
Melissa told Dateline she remembers Nancy was her “cool aunt.” She wasn’t married and didn’t have children of her own. “She lived in a condo that had a pool. So she was, like, our cool aunt,” Melissa said. “We always went to her house and went swimming and had sleepovers because, again, she was just a fun aunt.”
The Brannon family grew up in the St. Louis area, and Nancy was the eldest of six children. Nancy’s only brother, Randy, is Melissa’s father. “It was Nancy and then my dad, and then there was a little bit of an age gap,” Melissa said. “I felt like they were truly the closest of all the siblings just because they had so much time together with just the two of them before the other siblings came along.”
“She was athletic. She was a very social person,” Melissa said, noting that Nancy participated in adult sport leagues in her free time.
Nancy worked at a hospital, which, at the time, was called The St. Louis Eye Hospital. “She was a very successful, independent woman,” Melissa said. “She kind of dove into her career. And at the time of her disappearance, she had a pretty high-profile position, and she was also taking business courses at the community college nearby.”
Melissa told Dateline she remembers the last time she saw her aunt. “It was the weekend before,” Melissa said. They got lunch and then went to an outlet mall. “We would go there for holiday shopping, and it was, like, an hour away. So it was, like, fun to do, like, a day trip.”
It was a girls day — just Melissa, her sister, her mom and Nancy. “I think that was the last time we saw her,” Melissa said.
“Her disappearance date is between the 24th and 25th because she was last seen at, like, 11 on the 24th,” Melissa said. “So it’s somewhere between the 24th or after midnight on the 25th.”
Melissa told Dateline that Nancy would go out to get dinner and drinks with her friends or coworkers multiple times a week.
Which is exactly what she did on the evening of Nov. 24, 1986. “Her last contact would have been at, like, 10:30/11 and then she drove home and then that was it,” Melissa said. “No one else had contact with her.”
Dateline spoke with one of Nancy’s coworkers, Pam Allen. “She worked in purchasing at the same hospital that I worked at,” Pam said. “I just remember she was very personable, very social.”
Pam told Dateline she didn’t remember the night Nancy disappeared specifically. “It was just a normal night,” Pam said. But she does remember coming to work the next day and hearing the news. “She was nowhere to be found. And that’s really all I remembered about it,” she said.
Pam told Dateline that throughout the years she’s always wondered what happened with Nancy’s case and would think of her any time a body was found in the area. “It was, like, one of the biggest shockers and things that still just every once in a while pops up into my head,” she said. “Like, ‘I wonder whatever happened to her?’ ‘Did they ever find her?’”
According to Nancy’s niece Melissa, the people who were with Nancy on that last day provided a description of what she was wearing. “She had blue jeans on, she had a white button-up shirt, she had a gold chain with a gold cross on it,” Melissa said.
Melissa described her aunt as 5’2” or 5’3” with dark, curly hair and an athletic build. Nancy did not have any tattoos or distinguishing marks, but she did have crowns on a couple of her teeth.
“So the next day -- and this is where my memory comes in -- I didn’t feel good at school. I had, like, a tummy ache or something. And they called my mom, who worked full time,” Melissa told Dateline. “And back then, cell phones didn’t exist and grandparents were always home. So my mom would leave work, come get me from school, and her plan was to drop me off at my grandparents’ and go back to work again.”
But Melissa said that when they pulled up at her grandparents’ house, there were two men in suits at the front door. She didn’t know it then, but those two men were detectives with some grave news: Nancy was missing.
“That morning, a neighbor of [Nancy’s] saw her car and the door was open and then saw her purse and saw her keys and notified the condo manager and then notified the police,” Melissa told Dateline. “And we kind of showed up at my grandparents’ house the same time as they were finding out what was going on.”
“Her purse was found-- it was like 10 feet from her car and it almost looked like it had been thrown,” Melissa said. “Nothing was taken out of her purse. There was $27 in cash. There were five credit cards. There was a checkbook. She wasn’t robbed.”
“I think her purse and car were noticed very early — at, like, 6 a.m.,” Melissa said.
Melissa said her grandfather and the detectives immediately headed to Nancy’s condo in Shrewsbury, which is a suburb of St. Louis. “He had a key to her condo, so he was going to let them in,” Melissa said.
But according to Melissa, nothing inside the condo was missing or in disarray. “When my grandfather went into her apartment, her bed was still made. So they determined that she never slept there,” Melissa told Dateline.
When asked if it was unusual for Nancy to disappear, Melissa replied, “God, yes. Very unlikely. And especially with the holidays.”
She said Nancy would never have missed Thanksgiving with her family. “We always went to [those] grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving. It was just a big thing,” Melissa said.
And on Thanksgiving of 1986, Melissa remembers that instead of spending the day gathered around the table with their loved ones, they spent the day searching for Aunt Nancy. “I remember walking around Thanksgiving morning handing out flyers. We were putting flyers on telephone poles,” Melissa told Dateline. “I think we were just in this mindset of ‘all hands on,’ like, ‘Everyone needs to be a part of the search efforts.’”
But the days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. And months quickly turned into years with no answers.
“One of the detectives made the comment, ‘It’s like she just vanished into thin air,’” Melissa told Dateline.
“Every anniversary, the news -- the local news was really good about putting her story out there again,” Melissa said. But the stories were never super detailed. “I’ve had people say, ‘What’s her name?’ And they look her up and they’re like, ‘Outside of what she’s wearing and what she drove and a really brief description of what they found, there’s nothing else.’”
Melissa told Dateline she wishes the coverage included what one witness saw the night Nancy vanished. “Right next door to her apartment complex was a restaurant,” Melissa explained. “They interviewed the owners and things like that, and I think it was a bartender that was on duty that night said she didn’t hear anything.” But, according to Melissa, the bartender reported that she did see something. “She even gave a very good description of a car. There was a car parked back then, running, lights on. It was a Ford. She thinks, I don’t know why, it gave the year 1974 -- that just seems so random to me. But she said it was sitting there in the parking lot of the apartment complex, like it was waiting for someone, and that was it.”
Melissa told Dateline she doesn’t know if this tip about seeing a 1974 Ford is important or not.
“I know it was late, but (Nancy) would have screamed and she would have fought,” Melissa said. “I feel like she would have done more to leave a mess, leave a scene for us.” This is why, at this point, the Brannon family believes Nancy was not taken by a stranger. “We still believe to this day, someone knew her. She was taken by someone who knew her and didn’t want her to be found.”
Melissa also told Dateline the family does not think Nancy is out there alive somewhere. “We all believe the same. We all believe she’s not alive. We believe she was probably murdered that same night,” Melissa said. “But it’s just insane that 37 years, we’ve got nothing.”
Melissa believes that if Nancy disappeared today, things would be different. “If she would have gone missing today under the same circumstances, she would have been found or they would have had a suspect in a day,” she said. “I feel like, just, with cameras and cell phones and GPS and all kinds of stuff like that. But in 1986, nothing existed.”
Melissa told Dateline that she only recently became more involved with her aunt’s case. “Back in 2019, at Thanksgiving, when my aunt handed me the case files, she made the comment, she said, ‘This case is solvable. It’s going to be solved in your lifetime, and I need to give it to you now,’” she said. “And I said, ‘Why do you feel like this is solvable?’ She goes, ‘Because she was actually having an affair with a married man.’”
“And when you read the case file, what’s crazy is, they list his name, and they don’t list his last name. It just says: dot, dot, dot,” Melissa told Dateline. She said she never found out that man’s identity.
“I think that’s been our biggest fear this whole time, is: It’s one of those cases where I do believe it’s solvable, but there’s just such a lack of evidence,” Melissa told Dateline.
“We’re a Catholic family. We’re pretty religious. And I just pray all the time that maybe whoever did this, on their deathbed, they’re going to tell us,” Melissa said. “At this point, we’re not looking for punishment. I always tell people, to not have closure to something is --. You have no idea how awful it is. I mean, dealing with a death is just terrible, but when, you know... I feel like you can, at some point in your life, come to peace. We’ve never been able to do that.”
Eventually, the family did hold a memorial for Nancy. “At some point we had a judge sign off to say that she was no longer alive and we were able to have a memorial service for her,” Melissa told Dateline. “I want to say that was maybe, like, 15 years after her disappearance. We finally did that.”
She said she went to the police about 15 or 20 years ago and asked for an update on her aunt’s case. “I remember going to Shrewsbury, the police department, and speaking to a detective and just saying, ‘It’s been a while since you guys have looked at this. Have you thought about handing this off to fresh new eyes?’” Melissa remembered. “And I remember her saying, ‘Melissa, the case file is so small, there’s not much here.’” Melissa said they essentially told her that until some new information came in, there was not much they could do.
However, they did do one thing, according to Melissa. “They took my dad’s DNA to keep on file just in case anything had ever come up,” she said.
Dateline reached out to the Shrewsbury Police Department and spoke briefly with Captain Brent Goewert, who confirmed that Nancy was last seen in “the early morning hours on November 25, ‘86” and that someone who lived in Nancy’s apartment complex called the police when they found her car. “Her car was in the parking lot and her purse was found in the parking lot by another resident,” Capt. Goewert said. According to the captain, the responding officer “walked around with the father through the apartment, and then they looked through the car and nothing looked out of place.”
Captain Goewert told Dateline he wasn’t able to provide much more information on the investigation into Nancy’s disappearance, as he has not worked directly on her case. He did confirm that the case is still an open and active investigation. “She hasn’t been located, so she’s entered as a missing person,” he said. “The DNA of her family have been entered into the system. So if that was ever cross-referenced,” it could provide a match. “I think that her dental records were entered into the system. So if there was anyone ever found without any identification and they had to go back to dental records, that’s also all in the system.”
Captain Goewert said that his colleagues who worked on Nancy’s case were currently unavailable to speak, but that he would pass along our inquiry to them.
“My aunt was [34] at the time she disappeared. It’s been 37 years,” niece Melissa Daus told Dateline. She’s worried that with so much time having passed, witnesses and the person responsible for Nancy’s disappearance may no longer be around. “I do feel like we’re running out of time on this,” she said. “I don’t know if detectives have ever gone back to interview witnesses 10, 15, 20 years later,” Melissa said. “Maybe when they were interviewed in the first week, maybe they did know something or think something, but was afraid to say it because no one wants to blame someone if it’s not true.”
At this point, all the Brannon family really wants is closure. “I think over the years, especially my dad, who -- he’s almost 70 -- he’s thinking, ‘I don’t have much longer to live. I’m not going to live to see whoever did this suffer. I’d like to live long enough to know what happened,’” Melissa said.
“In my eyes, she was the person you wanted to be when you grow up,” Melissa remembered of her “cool aunt,” Nancy. “She was so successful. She was so independent. She was just that girl everybody strived to be.”
After Nancy disappeared, there was a $5,000 reward available for information leading to her location. “That was probably all the money my grandparents had,” Melissa said. The reward was increased to $25,000 by the five-year anniversary of her disappearance. “It’s never increased from there,” Melissa said. “But my dad would do anything. He would add anything to it to get some information.”
If you have information about Nancy Brannon’s disappearance, please contact the Shrewsbury Police Department at 314-647-5656.
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