Some people are referred to as the “glue” that holds everything together.
Well, 21-year-old Wendy Abrams-Nishikai was more like the duct tape. “You know, like, they say, ‘Duct tape fixes everything?’” Maria Recht said. “Well, that was Wendy. Wendy could figure out a fix for everything.”
Maria and Wendy were fast friends. “We met when we were about 12-13, we went to the same junior high school,” Maria said. “Wendy had a very vibrant personality.” According to Maria, she and Wendy were both adopted, both had older brothers, and both were raised in Berkeley, California. “There were a lot of connections with us.” They eventually got matching tattoos.
Maria says Wendy even came to live with her family for a bit when they were teens. “She spent most all her time over at my house anyway, so she decided — we decided — it was a good thing to move in,” she told Dateline. “She had a lot of good friends, a lot of people that cared about her, but she was not afraid to go off by herself. She was not afraid to kind of go against the trend.”
When Wendy was 19, she gave birth to a daughter. A few months later, they moved to the Hayward, California, area — about half an hour from Berkeley. She later married her high school boyfriend. “She really was meant to be a mom,” Maria said. “[Her daughter] was her, just, heart and soul.”
Which is why it was so unnerving when Wendy vanished on Halloween night 1989.
“The daughter was only a year and a half, I think, so it wasn’t like she’s trick-or-treating age,” Maria said. “She would have never, ever left [her].” Wendy’s daughter was actually about 2 and a half years old at the time.
Maria told Dateline she remembers asking a million questions when she found out Wendy was missing. “‘What happened to her? Where is she? This is not like her,’” Maria recalled. “We talked all the time, every week, you know, several days a week.” Wendy’s disappearance made no sense to Maria.
It also made no sense to some of Wendy’s other friends. Dateline spoke with a handful of those friends, who echoed what Maria had said: “She would have never ever, ever left her daughter — period.” One friend described being haunted by Wendy’s disappearance for 35 years.
“There was many, many rumors that came about,” Maria said. “Berkeley’s a small town. And there were — a lot of hearsay, a lot of stories. Who knows what was true, what wasn’t true.”
And while each person we talked to shared stories they had heard over the last three decades about Wendy’s disappearance, one friend stated plainly, “I just want the truth to come out.”
Wendy was reported missing by her mother to the Berkeley Police Department. Dateline spoke with Sgt. Andres Bejarano of the Berkeley PD Homicide Unit about the case. Bejarano wasn’t part of the original investigation but read the case files beforehand. “I can tell you that there were extensive interviews with family, friends, other people who were at the residence that day,” he said. Based on what he read, Bejarano says there was speculation that foul play was involved in Wendy’s disappearance. “But the unfortunate reality and — which is the case with a lot of missing persons cases — is that speculation is one thing, facts is another,” he said. “They aren’t criminal investigations until we have facts that support that.”
“We didn’t have any relevant information that suggests that this was nothing more than a voluntarily missing person,” Sgt. Bejarano said, about the investigation in 1989. “The detectives did take it serious at that time and put a ton of work into the case.”
On February 10, 1990, the remains of a woman were found in Placer County, a more than two-hour drive from Berkeley. “Her remains were found off what’s called Yankee Jims Road, which is in Colfax,” Placer County Sheriff’s Office Communication Manager Elise Soviar told Dateline. “They investigated to try to figure out who it could be at the time and there wasn’t anyone who matched up with the remains.” The remains became known as “Jane Colfax Doe.”
Soviar says DNA from the unidentified remains had been tested in the past, without success. Jane Colfax Doe would remain unknown for decades.
Meanwhile, the Berkeley Police Department continued to work Wendy’s case. “It was never closed,” Sgt. Bejarano said. At one point, they tracked down a man in Los Angeles who Wendy had reconnected with not long before her disappearance. “We had investigators actually go down to Los Angeles and speak to the male who she supposedly had gone down there to visit. He was interviewed multiple times,” Bejarano said. “The male in Los Angeles was cooperative and essentially that investigation led to nothing.”
“Our investigators, I think it was a couple years down the road, actually went and searched Wendy’s residence and had cadaver dogs search under the basement,” Bejarano said. “There had been some information received that perhaps she had been buried in the basement or put down there temporarily.” But they didn’t find anything of note. “There was no indication on our end that there was ever any kind of disturbance.”
“Throughout the ‘90s, based on what I saw, there was at least four different agencies that reached out because they had -- they had Jane Does that had been recovered in their jurisdictions,” Bejarano said. “And they said, ‘Hey, we’re looking at Jane Does. We see this in the missing person system. Could this be your person?’” But the results were either inconclusive or not Wendy.
In 2023, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office created a cold case investigative team, which focuses on “utilizing advancements in technology and forensic genealogy,” according to a Facebook post.
According to Maria, in October 2024, Wendy’s brother connected her with investigators in Placer County working on the Jane Colfax Doe case. She says she isn’t sure why investigators thought there might be a connection to Wendy, but thinks it may have been that both women were very small. Maria described Wendy as only about 5’ and 100 lbs., soaking wet. Apparently, the investigators wanted her to look at the Jane Doe’s jewelry to see if she recognized any of it. She did not. But she did tell them about Wendy’s tattoos, including the one that matched her own. “I texted [the investigator] my tattoo and I told her where Wendy’s were. And it matched — it matched exactly,” Maria said.
The lab soon successfully identified a likely next of kin for Jane Colfax Doe, “linking the remains to a relative of a woman reported missing in 1989 from Berkeley, CA,” the Placer County Sheriff’s Office Facebook post states. The team then worked to obtain “additional DNA samples from family members for further comparison.”
In January 2025, “the remains were officially identified as Wendy Abrams-Nishikai,” according to the post. Sergeant Bejarano says that’s when the Berkeley Police Department closed Wendy’s missing persons case.
In February, Wendy’s brother, Dale, told NBC affiliate KCRA that “it’s like my first time in 35 years to be able to begin to grieve.”
Now that Wendy has been identified, the next step is to find out what happened to her that long ago Halloween. “It does remain under investigation,” Soviar said. “Once you know the person, then you can start figuring out who’s associated with them to try and identify potential suspects or what may have potentially happened.” Soviar says that since the identification, PCSO officials have spoken with family and friends in Wendy’s circle, but haven’t yet found any information that has led them to an arrest.
The communications manager would not share any more details, so as not to jeopardize the ongoing investigation. However, “We’re optimistic that we’ll be able to solve it and hopefully bring that full closure to her surviving family members after, really, 36 years,” Soviar said.
Friend Maria Recht is hopeful, too. “My hope is that this is resolved because, gosh, Wendy — not that anybody ever deserves it — but she was such a kind person,” she said. “My heart just breaks just for her that she wasn’t able to live her life.”
But Maria has one request. If you know what happened to Wendy: “Just say what happened. It’s been so long,” she pleaded. “Somebody please say what happened.”
Soviar also asks that anyone with information, no matter how small, comes forward. “It could be the thing that leads us to the right answer,” she said.
If you have information about Wendy’s case, you can send in a tip at [email protected] or call the investigations tip line at 530-889-7830.
If you have a story to share with Dateline, please submit it here.
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include comment from the Berkeley Police Department.
