More than a week after authorities charged a former Decorah man with killing teenager Jade Marie Colvin in 2017, the search for her remains appears to still be ongoing.

On August 12, the Winneshiek County Sheriff’s Office announced that it had arrested 65-year-old James David Bachmurski, most recently of Swainsboro, Georgia, on charges of first-degree murder in connection with Colvin’s death.

Authorities said Colvin was killed on March 30, 2017, shortly after she moved to Bachmurski’s farm in rural Decorah. She was 15 years old at the time of her death.

While the records do not reveal the relationship between Bachmurski and Colvin, a criminal investigation revealed that the teenager was brought to his farm from Arizona by her mother in March 2017. Bachmurski would have been 58 years old at the time.

Court records do not say how she died, and authorities would not say whether her remains have been found. As of Monday, however, Colvin was listed as missing by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children – a list that currently includes 13 Iowa children – and she remains in the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation’s missing persons database.

If this is the case, prosecutors will have to prove at trial not only that Bakhmurski is the murderer, but also that Colvin is dead at all.

Such murder cases without a body are not uncommon in Iowa.

In 2016, Tait Purk was arrested for killing his partner, Cora Ann Okonski, in Tama County. Okonski disappeared in April 2000. Witnesses later said Purk admitted to choking her, throwing her to the ground and burying the body. Prosecutors were able to present evidence of previous domestic violence in the relationship.

Purk was eventually sentenced to prison for premeditated murder.

Okonski’s body was never found. She is still listed as missing in the Iowa DCI database.

In Henry County, Michael Syperda of Mount Pleasant was convicted of murder in 2018 for the disappearance of his second wife, Elizabeth. She vanished in July 2000 after leaving him, and the state was able to use evidence of past abuse during the trial, including statements that he would get rid of her and no one would find her.

In his ruling, the judge who decided the case wrote: “Any argument that Elizabeth is just waiting to be found or that she could walk in the door at any moment or call her mother at any moment is little more than pure fantasy.”

Like Okonski’s body, Elizabeth Syperda’s body was never found and she is still listed as missing by state authorities.

And last year, a jury in Howard County found a former Elma man guilty of murder, although officials could not determine a specific cause of death. Authorities allege Sayvonne Lealbert Jordan killed, dismembered and burned Jonathan Esparza, who disappeared in the fall of 2022.

In a fire pit behind Jordan’s house, investigators found bone fragments – some with chopping marks – that were positively identified as those of Esparza.

The coroner determined the cause of death to be “fatal violence,” noting that suspicious circumstances, such as attempts to conceal evidence and destroy a body, led to this conclusion.

“Based on my training and experience, it would be very unusual to dismember and burn a body after it has died of natural causes,” the medical examiner testified during Jordan’s trial.

In a similar case out of Council Bluffs, Terry Anderson was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1998 disappearance of Douglas Churchill. Investigators found a piece of skull and tissue in the Missouri River that was linked to Churchill through DNA, and witnesses testified that Anderson shot Churchill and dismembered the body.

Authorities have brought more than 550 cases of homicide without a body to trial nationwide, according to NoBodyCases.com, a website run by former Washington, D.C., assistant U.S. attorney Thomas DiBiase, who wrote a book about investigating and prosecuting such cases.

Of the cases DiBiase prosecuted through 2020, about 86 percent of the murder trials without a body ended in conviction, compared to a 70 percent conviction rate for all murder cases nationwide.

Meanwhile, the newly filed murder charge has led to a delay in a years-old weapons charge against Bakhmurski, involving a bolt-action hunting rifle that was found in his home in 2018 while he was on probation.

He was supposed to appear in court on August 13 to answer to the gun case. However, the defense attorney who had tried the case canceled, so that both of Bachmurski’s pending cases could be handled by the same lawyers – in this case, a public defender’s office.

Bachmurski remains held in the Winneshiek County Jail on $1 million cash bail.