A Wine Glass Left on the Table: The Disappearance of Nancy Kareen Moyer

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

December 1, 2019

Nancy Kareen Moyer was thirty six years old in March 2009, living in Tenino, Washington, a small town in Thurston County. A native of nearby Olympia, Nancy had studied accounting at Washington State University and worked as a financial analyst for the Washington State Department of Ecology in Lacey. She stood between four foot eleven and five feet tall, weighed between a hundred five and a hundred twenty pounds, with dark brown hair and brown eyes, pierced ears and navel, a scar on her right knee, and several tattoos, including an armband decorated with stars, hearts, and flowers, a butterfly on her lower back, and a hibiscus flower. She had two daughters from her marriage to Bill Moyer, a marriage that had ended in divorce in 2007, and by 2009 she was raising her girls on her own while building a career in Olympia's state government workforce.

On the afternoon of March 6, 2009, Nancy left work around 5:15, driving a coworker home before heading back toward Tenino herself. A store receipt later confirmed she made a purchase around 6:45 that evening at a location just five minutes from her home. Between nine and 9:30 that night, a police officer happened to see her at her own residence, carrying shopping bags in from her car, alone. That sighting became the last confirmed observation of Nancy Moyer alive.

An Open Door and an Unfinished Glass of Wine

Two days later, on March 8, Bill Moyer arrived at Nancy's home to drop off their daughters and found the front door standing open. Inside, nothing suggested Nancy had planned to go anywhere. The television and the lights were still on. A glass of wine sat on the coffee table, only partially finished, alongside a second, empty cup, small details suggesting she had been sitting there with someone, or expecting someone, when whatever happened to her occurred. Her purse, her keys, her wallet, her identification, and her car were all still inside the house, exactly the kind of scene that told investigators immediately that Nancy had not simply chosen to walk away from her own life. There was no sign of forced entry anywhere on the property, and nothing to suggest a violent struggle had taken place, only the unsettling, total absence of the woman who had clearly still been in that house not long before.

Extensive searches conducted in the days and weeks that followed turned up nothing. Nancy's disappearance became one of Thurston County's most closely watched cold cases, a woman who had, by every indication, vanished from the middle of her own living room without a trace.

A Meat Salesman Down the Road

Investigators pursued several leads over the years that followed, one of the more unusual involving a man named Bernard K. Howell III, who lived less than a mile from Nancy's home and had, at the time she vanished, been going door to door selling meat throughout the neighborhood. Investigators learned that the same brand of meat Howell had been selling was later found sitting in Nancy's own freezer, and one of Nancy's daughters, Sam, identified Howell after being shown a photo montage, telling investigators he was the man who had made the delivery. Howell himself denied ever knowing Nancy or having anything to do with her disappearance. In August 2010, roughly a year and a half after Nancy vanished, Howell was arrested in Tenino after deputies discovered a homicide victim in his vehicle, an entirely separate case that nonetheless brought fresh scrutiny back onto whether he might also be connected to Nancy's disappearance. Detectives acknowledged there were simply too many coincidences surrounding Howell not to investigate him closely, but ultimately found no concrete evidence tying him to Nancy's case, and he was never charged in connection with it.

A Phone Call After Ten Years

The case's most dramatic turn came a decade later, in July 2019, when a man named Eric Lee Roberts, a former coworker and neighbor of Nancy's, called 911 himself. According to the call, Roberts told the dispatcher he wanted to confess to a murder, and when asked which one, said he had killed Nancy Moyer ten years earlier and was simply tired of carrying it. In the interview that followed, Roberts told detectives that he and Nancy had been engaged in what he described as rough sex at his own house, and that he had accidentally strangled her to death with a scarf during the encounter.

Roberts went further than simply describing what he claimed had happened. He led a detective out to his own property and pointed toward a large concrete fire pit he had built, telling the detective that he did not want to incriminate himself any further, but that if he had needed to get rid of a body on his own property, that fire pit was exactly where he would have done it. Deputies obtained a search warrant and brought in an excavator to dig through wooded areas of Roberts's property based on his statements. The search, including examination of the fire pit and his basement, produced nothing. No remains, no physical evidence connecting him definitively to Nancy's death was ever recovered.

The following day, Roberts recanted his entire confession, telling investigators he did not know why he had said what he said or why he had specifically pointed detectives toward his own fire pit as a place he might have disposed of a body. He was held at the Thurston County Jail on investigation of second degree murder before eventually being released without any charges ever being filed against him. Roberts has continued to maintain his innocence in the years since.

Still Missing, Still Unresolved

Nancy Kareen Moyer's case remains open with the Thurston County Sheriff's Office, an unsolved disappearance now stretching well over fifteen years, complicated rather than clarified by the strange, unresolved confession Eric Roberts gave and then took back. Investigators have never been able to determine with certainty whether Roberts's original 911 call reflected a genuine, if later retracted, admission of guilt, or something else entirely, a false confession born from some other pressure or confusion that happened to point, with eerie specificity, toward a fire pit on his own property that ultimately yielded nothing at all.

Nancy would be approaching her mid fifties today had she lived. Her daughters grew up without her, raised by their father in the aftermath of a disappearance that has never produced a body, a conviction, or a fully satisfying explanation, only an open door, an unfinished glass of wine, and, a decade later, a phone call that promised answers and then, just as quickly, took them away again.

Anyone with information about Nancy Kareen Moyer's disappearance is asked to contact the Thurston County Sheriff's Office at 360-786-5279.

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