Where Are James and Nancy Robinson?

The following is yet another case where a husband and wife disappear simultaneously, but in this instance the circumstances were particularly inexplicable, not to mention sinister.

Up until the day their lives took a sudden dark turn, we know very little about 39-year-old James Robinson and his 25-year-old wife Nancy, other than that they had been married a relatively short time and were, as far as anyone can tell, happy with each other.  When our story opens, they had spent the last seven months as caretakers for the Winter’s Creek Equestrian Ranch in Washoe Valley, Nevada, with no apparent problems on or off the job.

Winters Creek Ranch

On Saturday, March 8, 1982, a Reno family came by the ranch to rent horses for the day.  Unfortunately, the weather took a sudden turn for the worse, forcing them to cut their ride short.  James and Nancy assured them that they could come by the next day to finish their excursion, at no extra charge.  However, when the family returned the following morning, they found the ranch locked up, and seemingly deserted.  The only signs of life were the horses roaming free in the yard.  The group apparently just shrugged and left.

On the morning of Monday, March 10th, a man who had been hired to do some construction work on the ranch became concerned when he saw that the Robinson’s living quarters had a broken window and blood on the front steps, and contacted police.

When the police entered the house, it was immediately obvious that something terrible had happened.  The place was in disarray, and pools of blood were found on the floor.  Several saddles and a few pieces of jewelry were gone, but many other items of at least equal value remained.  Several guns were found inside the house, but none of them had been recently used.  Later that day, the Robinson pickup truck was found on the side of the road on Highway 50, near Lake Tahoe, with a flat tire.  More blood was found inside the truck, along with the missing saddles and jewelry, and another gun which had also not been fired.  (Oddly, tests performed on all these blood stains were reported as being “inconclusive” about the blood types.  In 2000, it was reported that the blood samples would be resubmitted for DNA testing, but I’ve been unable to find what the results may have been.)  The last known person to talk to James and Nancy was the owner of the ranch, who phoned them on the evening of March 6th to talk about a horse show they had attended that afternoon.  He stated that everything seemed perfectly normal.

Although it’s assumed that some sort of foul play was involved, to date, we still have no idea what happened to the Robinsons.  The only possible clue to their disappearance was the fact that three months before the couple vanished, the main house on the ranch burned down in what was believed to be an act of arson.  The Robinsons had agreed to take a polygraph test as part of the investigation, but they went missing before this could be done.  It was never determined who set the fire, or if it had any connection to James and Nancy’s disquieting exit.  Eighteen years after the couple vanished, Larry Canfield, the lead detective in the mystery, could only say, “Everybody loves a mystery, and this is a good one.”

Not the sort of epitaph anyone wants to leave behind.