Three months after his disappearance, an odd event added a strange wrinkle to the case.

Jason, the older brother, told police that he had spotted Nicholas trying to break into the family garage in the middle of the night — that Nicholas had seen Jason and fled.

Police searched the area but found no trace of him.

The story was strange enough to note, and the question of whether Jason had actually seen Nicholas or had fabricated the sighting for reasons of his own became one of the many unresolved threads in the case.

By the time 1994 became 1995 and then 1996, the case had gone cold.