| Notes |
- U.S., School Yearbooks
Name Nikki Trollinger
Estimated Age 16
Birth Year abt 1968
Yearbook Date 1984
School Magnolia High School
School Location Anaheim, California, USA
GARDEN GROVE - For more than 20 years Margaret Stewart knew there was a possibility that her missing daughter might be dead.
But she never gave up hope that Nikki Ann Trollinger, a troubled runaway who dropped out of sight in 1985 when she was 16, would walk through the front door of her Garden Grove home.
Stewart, now 60, said she stayed in the same house for 23 years - until recently - so that Nikki could find her if she chose to do so.
She gave media interviews asking for help in finding her daughter. She took out ads.
Her two brothers - both in law enforcement - used their skills to look for Nikki in vain for more than two decades.
But there were no reports, no sightings, no evidence that Nikki existed past September 1985.
And then last year, at the suggestion of detectives from the Garden Grove Police Department, Stewart volunteered a cheek DNA swab for use in a national database.
Last month, Stewart got a phone call from the Riverside County Coroner's Office.
It was bad news.
The decomposing body of Nikki Ann Trollinger was found in an orange grove on Sept. 28, 1985 - three weeks after she was last seen alive.
She had been a "Jane Doe," which is police slang for an unidentified body, for nearly 25 years - until her DNA was matched with Stewart's genetic characteristics in the national database.
While Stewart was looking for her daughter, Riverside detectives were looking to identify their Jane Doe.
Stewart said she cried when she heard the news. "I am still crying," Stewart said this week in a phone interview from her home in Oregon.
"There is some small relief now that I know where she is at and that she is not suffering," Stewart said "But it is sad because now I have to grieve for her again."
Nikki Ann Trollinger was a runaway at age 12, and later became a ward of the court system. She was 16 and hanging with an unsavory crowd just before she disappeared, Stewart said, but she also managed to occasionally send messages to her worried mom that she OK.
Stewart drove buses for Orange County Transportation Authority in the 1980s, and she would often hear from other drivers that Nikki had been on another bus and wanted the driver to tell her mom, "I love you."
But Nikki "dropped off the face of the earth," just after Labor Day weekend in 1985, Stewart said.
"I kept doing things to find her, but there was never a word, no activity on her social security, nothing," Stewart said.
While she never gave up hope, Stewart said that after so many years had gone by, she had to face the possibility that her daughter was dead.
She did everything she could think of to find her daughter, but a few years ago, she and her husband Gary moved to rural Oregon to go on with the rest of their lives.
"I just kind of had to give it (the search) over to God," she said.
Meanwhile, Riverside detectives were trying to identify the body in the orange grove.
The body had been dragged to its location and had been there for some time before it was discovered, according to reports. It was so badly decomposed that the coroner could not determine a case of death.
Riverside Det. Mike Medici said this week that the case was originally listed as an unsolved homicide in 1985, but detectives at the time were thwarted in the investigation because they did not know identity of victim.
With the identity established now, the investigation into Trollinger's death has been re-opened.
"It gives me a place to start," Medici said.
No one knows for certain why authorities could not match up a missing persons report in Garden Grove in 1985 with the unidentified body in Riverside.
There may have been a misunderstanding in 1985 when Stewart tried to file a missing persons report, in part because her daughter had been a runaway and a ward of the court. The requirements for filing a missing person claim were different in 1985 than they are now.
An investigation was initiated in 1992 after Stewart asked if there was any news of her daughter, but by then the trail was cold.
And there was no such thing as DNA comparisons back then, Jordan added.
In the interview this week, Stewart said she hopes that laws are passed that require agencies to take and preserve DNA samples of all children who are made wards of the court, to make identifications easier in the future.
For now, Stewart said she has another task to do first.
The grieving mother said she intends to place a proper headstone on the grave, with her daughter's name engraved: Nikki Ann Trollinger.
Contact the writer: lwelborn@ocregister.com, or 714-834-3784
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1969 - 1985 (15 years)
