A grisly discovery has been made in a California cold case involving a teacher who disappeared in 1987.
On August 3, 1987, a man from Trinity County named Nikolas Medin came home from work to find that his wife, 48-year-old Kay Adams, was missing. Her purse, glasses, and car were still at the residence, but she was nowhere to be found, according to SFGATE.
When investigators spoke to Adams’ boss, they said she was in good spirits and good health when they had last spoken.
Adams’ disappearance resulted in a massive volunteer effort to locate her in the difficult terrain near the couple’s home in the Trinity Mountains, but no trace of her was found.
In November of the same year, someone sent the sheriff’s department in neighboring Humboldt County a disturbing package. It contained an anonymous letter and some of Adams’ skeletal remains.
The letter told investigators where they could find more of Adams’ remains, which investigators used to locate them near a road approximately 45 miles from her home. The remains were positively identified as Adams’ through dental records, but no cause of death could be determined, and the discovery led to no arrests.
In February 1993, a skull was found approximately 100 miles away from where Adams’ remains were found. A man walking his dog stumbled onto the skull on a beach at Trinidad Head. Police at the time took a DNA profile but could not match it to anyone in the Combined DNA Index System.
That skull, thanks to advances in DNA technology and the work of Othram DNA analysts, has now been identified as Adams’.
Othram used a DNA sample from Adams’ daughter to confirm the match, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.
“It is unclear how the majority of her remains were found 45 miles from her home or how her skull was found almost 100 miles away,” the DNA analysis group said in a statement.
Adams’ husband, Medin, died in 2018 and police do not consider him a suspect in her death.
Despite the discovery, police are still no closer to an arrest. They have asked that anyone with information regarding Adams’ disappearance and death to call the Humboldt County investigator Mike Fridley at 707-441-3024.
