For 718 days, as one season gave way to the next and search after search turned up empty, Nancy Tucker remained missing.
The 76-year-old woman had vanished when the remnants of Hurricane Helene barreled through eastern Tennessee in late September 2024, turning the Nolichucky River into a torrent that swallowed the home she shared with her husband in Washington County, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.
First responders found the body of her husband, Jimmy Tucker, soon after the storm. But for nearly two years, the hunt for Nancy Tucker continued without success — until this past weekend, when a search team located remains in a section of the Cherokee National Forest known as Jackson Island.
By Monday, forensic experts at East Tennessee State University had confirmed that Tucker, the last person in the area still listed as missing, finally had been found.
“We made a promise that we would bring Ms. Tucker home,” Washington County Mayor Joe Grandy told reporters this week. “The fact that it took two years is an amazing amount of time. But we never gave up. None of us ever gave up.”
While Jackson Island had long been an area of interest, recovery efforts there faced logistical and bureaucratic challenges.
Officials said crews logged more than 400 miles on foot searching the area since February, but were not able to hunt through a landscape crammed with fallen trees, flooded cars, propane tanks and other remnants of the disaster. “It has debris piles on it that are 50 feet high and 100 feet long, scattered throughout the island,” said local EMS chief Dan Wheeley.
Because the area comprises federal land and culturally significant Native American sites, only recently did search crews get authorization to bring in the heavy equipment needed to sort through the debris.
“It took a long time for them to allow cleanup to begin,” said Grandy, who noted that the island was “the last remaining part of our 24-mile river system” in the county that hadn’t been cleared.
But once the latest operation commenced — an effort that included emergency responders, machinery operators and an archaeologist — Tucker’s remains were soon located.
The news could not have come soon enough for Tucker’s family members, who have waited nearly two years to find her remains. The couple had a son who lived with them, but he was not home the morning of the storm, authorities have said.
“Every night they went to bed, they didn’t know where a loved one was,” said James Matthews, a spokesman for the county’s emergency management agency. “There won’t be another night [like that].”
In a statement the agency provided, Tucker family spokesperson Risa Buck thanked workers who had spent thousands of hours on foot, searched with K-9 units, documented every inch of their searches and chased countless leads.
“The promise to bring Nancy home is now a reality,” Buck wrote, adding that the family “can finally begin to heal, celebrate her life and prepare to properly lay her to rest alongside her husband, Jim.”
Helene, which made landfall in Florida as a Category 4 storm and spread destruction through much of the South, was responsible for at least 250 fatalities, making it the deadliest hurricane in the United States since Katrina in 2005.
No state suffered more catastrophic damage than North Carolina, where the storm dumped feet of rain in places, triggering destructive landslides and turning once-languid streams into raging rivers that swept away nearly everything in their paths.
At least 108 people died in the state, most from flooding, and a small number of victims remains missing, despite repeated searches.
In Tucker’s case, the uncertainty that had loomed is now gone.
“We are a small community, a small county. You don’t want anybody out there wondering,” said Susan Saylor, spokeswoman for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, who described the tight-knit farming community where the Tuckers lived. “We just wanted them to have peace.”
According to a 2024 obituary for Jimmy Tucker, he and Nancy met while they were both serving in the Army and were married for 44 years. A onetime auto mechanic, he loved cars and his dogs and the Miami Dolphins.
This week, nearly two years after the storm that claimed her life, an obituary for Nancy Tucker was published. It detailed how she loved to cook for her family and to travel, including a cherished a trip she had taken to Norway with her cousins.
She is survived, it said, by her son, Jimmy Allen Tucker, and her two dogs who survived the flood, Buddy and Blue.
One day soon, it said, the family would receive well-wishers at a nearby funeral home. And then they would hold a graveside service at a national cemetery, where she would receive military honors and be laid to rest, at last, beside her husband.
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