May 12, 2025 | By: Zoe Smolios, Journalist & PCC Volunteer

A daughter. A mother. These are just a couple of the things Wilma June Nissen was never given the chance to truly be after her 23-year-old life was cut short in 1978.

Growing up in Anaheim, California, the trials of Wilma’s life started at a young age after she and her disabled sister were forced to live with their neglectful father after their mother walked out on them.

“They were left in the, ‘care’ is a strong word, but they were left in the care of their father, who would go to work and lock the two girls in a closet,” said Nissen’s daughter, Krissi Atkinson. “He got fired, and so then they were all living in a car. I don’t know where he was during the day… and he would lock the disabled sister in the trunk, and Wilma would go have to wander the streets for food. This was a 9- or 10-year-old child. She never got to be a kid.”

After the years of neglect from her biological parents, CPS stepped in, separating Nissen and her sister as they were sent to foster families. After gaining contact with her mother’s first foster family, Atkinson says she was told that her mother lacked basic skills like reading, writing, and using a fork.

“She lacked the most basic of basic skills. She had the most abusive, neglectful, what’s supposed to be, childhood. She didn’t get that,” Atkinson said.

After being bounced around to a couple foster families, Nissen took off and got married to a man who pimped her the second she aged out of the system.

“She never had any stability,” Atkinson said. “I think she was just looking for love because she never had it.”

Wilma went on to have two children with her husband, who were taken into the system. She eventually left him and met Atkinson’s biological father, resulting in her third and final pregnancy. With her first two children being taken from her, it is believed she assumed her youngest child would also be taken, so after the birth, Nissen left the hospital. There are also rumors that there may have been someone trying to harm her, or she was afraid of another arrest after previously being arrested for prostitution. Atkinson was then adopted by her mother’s final foster family.

Atkinson would then spend her early life searching for answers on who her mother was and why she left. She says she found some paperwork while snooping in her adopted parents’ office that put a name to the mother she never met, and almost 30 years later that name would pop up in an article from Lyon County, Iowa saying that Wilma June Nissen was the name of a Jane Doe they found face down in a ditch back in 1978.

“A friend of mine’s mom, who actually found my biological dad… came over and asked what my biological mother’s name was, and I told her, and she showed me the newspaper article that they identified a Jane Doe, and it was my mom,” Atkinson recalls. “That was not an awesome moment.”

When the police found the body, they said it was believed she had been there for about three months, with the murder happening just around Atkinson’s first birthday. With injuries showing that she had fought back, the strangest detail of the murder was that her jaw was missing.

“All of her teeth were smashed out and her lower jaw was missing,” Atkinson said.

While the sheriff’s department in Lyon County will not release the cause of death, they have named two persons of interest, female escorts who went by the names “Sugar” and “Peaches’ and were known for robbing other escorts and their clients. Police do not know where Peaches is, but they do know the identity of Sugar and have brought her in multiple times for questioning.

“She’s failed three polygraph tests, but she just keeps denying having anything to do with it.”

As far as other details connected to the murder, Atkinson says they have amplified DNA from a rope that is believed to have been used to drag her mother’s body into the ditch. She is working tirelessly to get more advanced testing on the rope in hopes of finding answers on who her mother’s killer is, and she even has a meeting with Lyon County’s new sheriff.

Atkinson’s whole life has been spent searching. For her mother. For her siblings. For her mother’s killer. For answers. The thing that brings her comfort, though, is knowing that her mother would have come back if she had been given the chance, and she also says she has found so many similarities between her mother and herself, like their spontaneity.

Atkinson says, “She’s a part of me.”

Krissi Atkinson is determined to do everything in her power to find answers in her mother’s unsolved murder. Using multiple platforms to raise awareness and keep people updated. Supporters are encouraged to follow the “Help Solve My Biological Mother’s Murder Cold Case” Facebook page, @wilma_june_nissen_cold_case on Instagram, and the Wilma June Nissen Reddit page.

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If you have any information regarding the unsolved homicide of Wilma Nissen, please contact the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office at (712) 472-8300. To remain anonymous and possibly be eligible for a reward, call Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-TIPS.

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