Christmas Mysteries 7: Missing Child

People disappearing.... People causing other people to disappear.... None would beat this story because till today, no body knows her whereabouts, no body is even sure if she is dead or hopefully, alive.

It is more shocking to know that this story is about a two year old girl who was found to have been missing only after twenty years. What we know is that something dreadful had happened to her because the only people who would have told of her whereabout chose to die rather than to speak the truth. Possibly the killed her.

The Disappearance Of Nikole Betterson

Jarrett Betterson and Susan Klingel lived in Dearborn, Michigan with their two-year-old daughter, Nikole. It was Labor Day weekend 1977 in September of that year, and Jarrett was at the wheel when the car he was riding in with his girlfriend, Susan, and their young daughter, Nikole, went out of control and rolled several times before coming to a stop.

Susan Klingel was thrown from the vehicle and killed. Jarrett and Nikole were not seriously injured.

Marijuana was found in the car, and police wanted to charge Jarrett with vehicular homicide. But the investigation was sloppy, and charges were never brought.

Soon Jarrett Jarrett became involved with a woman named Barbara, his new girlfriend. Around Christmas time, Jarrett and Barbara surprised Susan’s family by announcing they were moving out with Nikole, the two had plans to take Nikole with them and start a new life out West. The couple did not give the Klingels their exact destination and told conflicting stories to friends about where they were going. He told some friends they were headed toward Las Vegas. Someone else said they were on their way to California.

“I’ll be a good mother to Nikole. She’ll be well taken care of,” Barbara promised Susan’s parents just before leaving Dearborn around Christmastime 1977.

The Klingels were already at odds with Jarrett Betterson, who hadn’t exactly been welcomed into the family. Jarrett was bitter, thinking that the family rejected him because he was black. They thought that he had lured their daughter into a lifestyle of drug use. Jarrett and Barbara weren’t heard from again for 20 years, and Nikole was never seen again.

Almost 20 years later, the Klingels tried to contact their granddaughter, Nikole, so they finally hired a private investigator to determine Nikole’s whereabouts. He tracked down Jarrett and Barbara, who were living in Las Vegas, but there was no trace of Nikole. Records were searched, but no evidence was found that she ever made it with her father to their new home.

Until Nikole turned 18, Social Security Administration kept sending her the monthly survivor benefit that goes to children whose parents have died. Jarrett faithfully picked the check up each month at a local post office still she was nowhere to be found. There was no paper trail for her after she left Michigan in 1977. It was as though Nikole Betterson, sometime in early 1978, had simply ceased to exist.

The police soon got involved and Rosgen, the detective figured he had but one chance. He would go to Jarrett Betterson and pretend he knew all about his daughter. Tell him he would be brought before a grand jury if he didn’t talk, where more questions would be asked. Then lure him in with a promise of leniency if he did. By now, it was early November 1997. It was time to talk to Jarrett Betterson.

The detective was bluffing, but Jarrett Betterson didn’t know it. In the apartment was a motorized wheelchair Jarrett was forced to use because of injuries from a bus accident. A bathroom full of pills indicated that Barbara also had severe medical problems.

“I know what happened to your daughter, it will be easier on you if you tell us the whole story.”

Jarrett was shaken. He promised to get back to the detective in a week or so and shut the door to the modest apartment, trembling as he sank back into his motorized wheelchair.

Jarrett acknowledged as much when he called the detective four days later and said he had no other option but to cooperate. But he needed time. Jarrett promised to tell them the whole story about what happened to Nikole.

"Give me a few weeks," Jarrett said, "and I’ll set up a meeting with Nikole."

Ten days later, Jarrett called again, asking for more time.

Thanksgiving passed before Rosgen called the Betterson home to see what was taking Jarrett so long. There was no answer. Faced with what they thought was a jail sentence for Jarrett, he and Barbara had chosen death.

Shortly before Christmas, on the 20th anniversary of Nikole’s disappearance, Jarrett shot his wife to death and then turned the gun on himself. At first, homicide detectives treated the deaths of the 49-year-old man and his 50-year-old wife as a murder-suicide. Declining health may have prompted the man to shoot his wife and turn the gun on himself.

Jarrett had shot Barbara twice in the heart with a .22-caliber rifle while she lay on a water bed, clutching a Bible and a cross. He then made the bed and placed a red rose on her chest. Jarrett then went into the adjoining bedroom, covered himself with a blanket and fired a bullet through his brain.

Before she died, Barbara mailed a letter to the Klingels apologizing for everything she had done, but did not provide any details about what happened to Nikole.

The handwritten letter was as polite as it was chilling. When Joni Betterson retrieved it from the mailbox at her Georgia home, it was the first she had heard from her son and daughter-in-law in more than 20 years.

“By the time you get this we should be dead,” Barbara Betterson wrote. “Jarrett is about to go to jail and I don’t want to live without him. I’m sorry about living apart from our family. I’m sorry about so many things. We’ve had a sad and difficult life.”

“We had hoped our troubles would never touch our families so we kept to ourselves. We’ve tried to follow God. Now it’s about time for him to judge us.”

In death, Jarrett and Barbara did nothing to answer them. The only hint came in Barbara’s final letter to Jarrett’s mother.

“Go to your Bibles to see peace,” she wrote, “and please forgive us for all the wounds we have put in your hearts with our tragic and youthful blunders.”

Inside the envelope was a money order for $900 that Jarrett and Barbara Betterson had managed to scrape together to pay for their cremation. Barbara Betterson asked that their ashes be placed in the same urn.

It wasn’t until three weeks later that the bodies were discovered by the apartment manager. On the front door were several eviction notices for nonpayment of rent.

When their decomposing bodies were found a few days before last Christmas--Barbara clutching a Bible and a wilted red rose--there was no suicide note in the apartment. Just an apologetic note on the refrigerator to their apartment manager asking him to “forgive us for having to deal with the mess we left.”

No mention was made of a daughter.

Nikole could be alive somewhere, police say. She could have been sold for drugs or given away somewhere between Michigan and Las Vegas. She could have grown up with another family, another name, never knowing her past. Police fear, though, that Nikole’s fate may never be known.

Truly a mystery, and maybe her fate would never be known. A sad Christmas for the family. Kinda makes me doubt the "accident" that killed Susan in the first place.....