A 21-year-old South Carolina woman went missing without a trace on Oct. 10, 2020, when she was 19, and now, her family is making a renewed call for answers.
Jorden Nebling was last seen in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. Nebling and her sister were close, and when her sister hadn’t heard from Nebling for weeks, she contacted their stepmother, Mary Tucker, for help.
“So, I said, ‘Well, you need to tell your biological mom … report her missing,'” Tucker recalled. Nebling had been staying with her biological mother at the time, who apparently thought that Nebling had just “run off and would come back” and did not immediately report her missing, Tucker explained.
“I said, ‘Well, that’s not acceptable. She needs to be reported missing, so I’ll report her missing,'” the girls’ stepmother explained. Tucker reported Nebling missing on Nov. 8, 2020.
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Nebling didn’t have a perfect track record as a teenager, which is why some people have dismissed her disappearance, but she was on her way to becoming a responsible adult just before she vanished.
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“At the point [when] she went missing, she had just got a job, and she just took a drug test, and she was not doing drugs, and she was so happy,” Tucker said.
She and Nebling had been texting back and forth the week Nebling went missing, because Tucker had been planning to pick up Nebling to attend her little brother’s birthday party. Nebling hadn’t been allowed at Tucker’s house when she had been “using,” but because she was clean and had a job lined up, she was looking forward to going to her stepmother’s house to celebrate her little brother’s birthday.
“She was so happy.… She was so excited to start that job,” Tucker said. “She was so charismatic.… She didn’t have enemies. Like, she might get in little fights with somebody, but the next week, they would be friends again. People couldn’t stay mad at her. And everybody wanted to be her friend.”
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The day before she went missing, on Oct. 9, 2020, Nebling and “a guy” she had been seeing borrowed a car to drive from Travelers Rest to see friends in Cowpens. The man she was with left Cowpens with a friend while Nebling stayed behind and drove herself back to Travelers Rest the next day.
As she drove home on Oct. 10, the borrowed car broke down in front of a house near the Old Whitehouse Road Extension in Travelers Rest, according to Tucker.
A person living in that house where her car broke down reported speaking with Nebling, who said someone was coming to pick up the car. The witness then saw someone pick up Nebling that afternoon.
Investigators later determined that Nebling had contacted her ex-boyfriend, who lived in Travelers Rest, to come pick her up. Her ex told investigators that he and Nebling had gotten in a fight after he had driven her to his place, at which point she had left, and no one has heard from her since.
“In my heart, I think he did something to her. He had a history of being abusive.… And police have searched his property. I know that they dug up a concrete pad in the driveway that he had recently put down close to when she went missing. And I know that the police focused a lot on talking to him. But unfortunately, Travelers — this is a very, very remote area,” Tucker said, adding that the down has a lot of “undeveloped” land where anybody could hide signs of a crime.
Her ex has not been charged with any crimes in connection to Nebling’s disappearance.
Nebling is 5 ft., 5 in. tall and weighs 110 lbs. She has blonde hair, blue eyes and a tattoo on her left forearm that reads, “Live free.”
John Walsh, co-founder of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and host of “In Pursuit with John Walsh” on Investigation Discovery and Discovery+, discussed Nebling’s disappearance in an Oct. 19 episode of “In Pursuit.”
Investigators are asking anyone with information about the missing woman to contact 864-271-5210 or Crime Stoppers of Greenville at 23-CRIME.
