What Happened to 9-Year-Old Jillian Cutshall? The 1987 Norfolk Child Abduction Case

 

Today we’re looking at the heartbreaking disappearance of 9-year-old Jillian Dee Cutshall, who went missing on August 13th, 1987, in Norfolk, Nebraska.

Jillian was born in February of 1978. She lived with her mother, Joyce, and her brother in Grand Bend, Kansas, but that summer she was visiting her father, Roger, and her stepmother in Norfolk. They lived in the McNeely Apartments. Jillian was a bright little girl with blonde hair, blue eyes, crooked teeth, and a couple of small scars that made her features distinctive. Her family and friends called her “Jill.”

On the morning of August 13th, her father and stepmother left early for work. Jillian didn’t like being alone in the apartment, so around 6:30 a.m., she started walking just four blocks to her babysitter’s home. But she never arrived. The babysitter assumed she had stayed home, and no one realized Jillian was missing until later that afternoon, when her stepmother went to pick her up and learned she had never been there.

For three long months, there were no solid leads. Then, Jillian’s clothing, her shoes, and her keys were discovered in the Wood Duck Wildlife Refuge—about ten miles from her father’s home. The discovery deepened the mystery, but gave no clear answers.

In 1988, attention turned to a man named David C. Phelps, who lived in the same apartment building as Jillian’s father. Phelps admitted during police interviews that he had been molesting children since his teens and even described a preference for blonde girls. He commented on Jillian’s blue eyes but said she was “too old” for him. Despite these disturbing admissions, no charges were filed at the time.

Things escalated in 1989 when a private investigator hired by Jillian’s mother confronted Phelps. That same day, Phelps gave a statement to a TV crew, claiming that he and another man, Kermit Baumgartner—a known sex offender—had taken Jillian to the refuge. Phelps described her clothes in detail and said he held Jillian down while Baumgartner assaulted her, before leaving them there. Baumgartner denied everything, and Phelps later recanted, saying the confession had been coerced.

Both men left the state soon after. But Jillian’s mother refused to give up. She started a petition that pushed for a grand jury investigation. Finally, in 1991, David Phelps was indicted for abduction with intent to commit sexual assault. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Still, no one has ever been charged with Jillian’s death. Her body has never been found, and she was declared legally dead following Phelps’s conviction. Jillian’s mother, Joyce, carried the fight for answers until her own death in 2022 thirty-five years after her daughter vanished. Her obituary even noted that Jillian had “predeceased” her, a painful reminder that closure never came.

Today, Jillian would be 47 years old. Her disappearance remains one of Nebraska’s most haunting unsolved cases.

What do you think was justice truly served, or did the real story of what happened to Jillian Cutshall die with the people who knew the truth?