![]() He never said what he’d done with her body, but the state’s attorney gave the green light to move forward. ![]() In August 2000, that inmate told authorities that Steve said he came home from work in the middle of the night and strangled Nancy. Detectives discovered Steve told a fellow inmate that he killed his wife. Then, four years after Nancy went missing, a jailhouse conversation turned the case around. ![]() He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 months in the Howard County Detention Center. On February 4, 1997, he was arrested on sexual child abuse charges. Steve Riggins’ sexual relationship with a teenager was another story. “Given the fact that we did not have a body, they thought it was in the best interest of the state to wait and try to obtain additional physical evidence before they brought criminal charges,” Charles Jacobs, retired homicide lieutenant with the Howard County Police Department, explained to producers. Still, detectives were convinced by witness statements and circumstantial evidence that Nancy had met with foul play. On August 11, police wired up a close family friend, John Thomas, in the hope that he’d catch Steve in a confession. However, Steve avoided the topic and the plan fizzled. The plan was that she’d meet with Steve and get him to talk about what happened to his wife. Searches turned up no clues or leads.ĭetectives decided to put a body wire on the babysitter. ![]() They also learned Steve had talked about killing his wife and had asked coworkers about handguns and how to dispose of a dead body.Ībout a week after Nancy's disappearance, detectives were able to get a warrant to search the Riggins' home and look at the vehicles. They determined that he could have left his job and returned home without raising awareness at work. While the sitter passed hers, Steve showed signs of being deceptive. Steve and the babysitter were both persons of interest and brought in for further questioning. He even gave the girl Nancy’s engagement ring. Suspicions intensified when investigators learned Steve asked the babysitter to move in with him four days after his wife went missing. “It became less and less of a missing person case, and more and more of a potential homicide case,” Greg Marshall, retired homicide detective with the Howard County Police Department, told producers. When the girl told Steve about her encounter with Nancy, he told her, “Don’t worry about it,” and said that he’d “take care of it.” The Riggins' babysitter told investigators that on June 30, Nancy had confronted her and threatened to tell her mother. Nancy was planning to divorce her husband because of the cheating, co-workers said, reported the Washington Post in 1997. The relationship began when the sitter was just 14, according to “In Ice Cold Blood.” Three days into their investigation, detectives learned that Nancy found out that Steve was having an affair with the couple’s 18-year-old babysitter. But the fact that young Amanda had been left alone made Nancy’s disappearance suspicious to detectives, reported the Washington Post in 1997. Steve also told authorities they were having relationship issues, the fallout of his extramarital affair. Riggins informed officers that he found Nancy's "wedding rings on the master bedroom dresser,” investigators told “In Ice Cold Blood,” an Oxygen show hosted by Ice-T. She was nowhere to be found, but their 5-year-old daughter, Amanda, was alone in her bedroom. He said he waited 48 hours before calling because he thought that was mandatory in Maryland, and claimed that when he came home, her minivan was in the driveway and the door was unlocked. Employed at a waste-water treatment plant where he worked the overnight shift, he told them his wife wasn’t home when he arrived from his job on the morning of July 2. Stephen Riggins, her husband, called authorities on July 3. Nancy Riggins, 37, appeared to have a storybook life: a 10-year-marriage, a young daughter, a good job she liked in a local supermarket, and a home in the postcard-pretty town of Elkridge, Maryland.īut looks can be deceiving, and on July 1, 1996, Nancy vanished.
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