Five Meetings on Valentine's Day: The Disappearance of Nancy Howry

READER DISCRETION ADVISED: This article contains detailed accounts of homicide, the disposal of human remains, and the impact of violent crime on a family including young children. It is written with full respect for the victim and sourced entirely from official court and police records.

A mother of two vanished on Valentine's Day, 2023. Her car was found abandoned beside a Florida highway. Her phone had last pinged near a gun range. When investigators found the man she had been with that afternoon, he seemed to have a very specific version of events prepared. What he had not prepared for was how completely the evidence would contradict it.

THE CHILDREN WHO NOTICED FIRST

It was Nancy's twelve-year-old daughter who insisted they report her missing.

The adults around her had been working through a list of practical explanations — her mother had done this before, not often but a few times, there had been difficult periods, she had been under unusual stress lately. They were not wrong about any of that. But the daughter knew the difference between her mother stepping back from the world for a day and her mother being gone for four days without a word, and she kept saying so until someone listened.

On Saturday, February 18th, 2023, her father Todd walked into the Indian Harbor Beach Police Department in Florida and filed a missing person's report for his forty-four-year-old ex-wife. He had the kind of measured manner of a man who was trying to stay practical in a situation where being practical was the only thing keeping him upright. He gave them the timeline. He gave them the facts. He gave them Nancy.

The last confirmed sighting of Nancy Howry was Wednesday, February 15th, 2023 — Valentine's Day. She had sent texts to her children that morning. She had not sent anything since. She had not answered calls, had not shown up for custody handoffs, had not responded to messages that showed as unread on the other end. In four days, she had not made a single traceable contact with anyone who knew her.

The daughter was right. This was different.

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE TIMELINE

Nancy Howry was forty-four years old, a mother of two children still young enough to need her every day, a woman who had been through a difficult several years and was fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously.

Her divorce from Todd had been finalised in 2019 but the financial aftermath had continued well beyond the legal end of the marriage. A court had recently ruled that she owed approximately sixty thousand dollars as part of the settlement, and she had been visibly shaken by the decision — devastated, in the account of people close to her. She was also about to lose her rental property; her landlord had declined to renew her lease, leaving her needing to find new accommodation by the end of the month. She was engaged in a separate legal dispute with a bank. Her history included a DUI conviction in 2022 and a period of probation that she was still serving.

None of this made her less worthy of being found. It made her more fragile at a moment when fragility was dangerous.

Her mother, when investigators spoke to her, described a woman who had been reaching out for comfort in the days before she disappeared — not recklessly, but desperately, in the way that people reach for connection when everything solid beneath them has started to give way. Valentine's Day, her mother noted, was the kind of day that amplified that desperation. Nancy had, according to multiple people who knew her, arranged several meetings with men she had been in contact with through dating apps. One account placed the number of meetings she had planned for that single day at five.

She was looking for someone to hold things steady for a moment. She found something else entirely.

THE CAR BY THE ROAD

On the day after the missing person's report was filed, Nancy's vehicle was found abandoned on a stretch of road in Palm Bay, Florida, parked partially off the shoulder near a wooded area. On the driver's seat, in plain sight, were her credit card and her Florida identification.

You do not leave your identification on the seat of an abandoned car because you have chosen to go somewhere. You leave it there because something happened before you had the chance to take it with you. The investigators looking at the car understood this immediately.

Her phone's last known location had been tracked to the area of a rifle and pistol club outside the city — a firing range with wooded land surrounding it. Between the abandoned car and the last phone ping, a rough geography of Nancy's final hours was beginning to take shape. It pointed in a specific direction. It pointed toward a name that had already come up in the investigation.

On the driver's seat, in plain sight, were her credit card and her Florida identification. You do not leave those things behind because you have chosen to go somewhere. You leave them because something happened before you had the chance to take them with you.

THE MAN FROM THE DATING APP

Daniel was thirty-two years old, a veteran who had completed two tours of military service and who lived with his parents in Palm Bay. He had met Nancy on a dating app approximately eighteen months before her disappearance, and by the account of people who knew both of them, the relationship had never been straightforward. Nancy had kept things casual in the way that a person keeps something casual when they are not sure they want it to become more. Daniel had wanted more. The gap between what he wanted and what she was offering had been a source of ongoing friction, and the friction had occasionally curdled into something uglier.

There was a text message from September 2022, five months before Valentine's Day, that investigators would later recover and that said everything that needed to be said about the dynamic between them. Daniel had sent it to Nancy after discovering she had been seeing other men. It read: You with her, I'm going to make you suffer. You will suffer.

In the days leading up to Valentine's Day, he had been sending Nancy explicit images from other women — images she had shared with him — as a form of provocation. He had been monitoring who she was seeing. He had been, in the language that investigators use for this pattern of behaviour, escalating.

When officers arrived at his parents' house the day after Nancy was reported missing, his mother answered the door and immediately, without being asked, mentioned that her son had PTSD from his service. She asked them to be gentle with him.

They were. They asked him where Nancy was.

He told them he had taken her to the gun range on Valentine's Day to teach her to shoot. He said things had gone wrong. He said she had tried to take his weapon. He said he had shot her.

He said it in the same measured, specific tone that characterised everything that followed — a man who had spent the days since Valentine's Day constructing a version of events and was now reciting it.

THE STORY HE TOLD

The account Daniel gave investigators was detailed in its specifics and careful in its framing. He described taking Nancy to a private compound outside the city — a wooded property where he sometimes trained. He described showing her shooting fundamentals, standing close to her, making himself vulnerable in the way that an instructor makes himself vulnerable. He described what he called an ambush — a sudden movement on her part, explosive and without warning, in which she attempted to seize his weapon.

He used the word ruthlessly to describe how she fought. He said she was unresponsive to the word stop. He said she hated him. He attributed her hatred to his refusal to give her power over him. He described a physical confrontation of considerable intensity, involving biting and spitting, against which he said he ultimately had no choice.

He shot her once, he said. In the head.

The investigators listened to this account with the patience of people who had already seen the search history.

At 3:30 in the morning on the day Nancy died, Daniel had searched for videos of murders, executions, and a woman dying of stab wounds. In the days following her death, he had searched for information about missing persons cases in Palm Bay, the effects of significant blood loss, and buckshot wounds on humans. He had searched to find out what it means when vultures gather — five days after Nancy died, because vultures had found her body in the woods where he had left her.

A man who shot someone in self-defence does not search for those things afterward. A man who had planned, or at minimum rehearsed the possibility, does.

WHAT HE DID AFTERWARD

Nancy's body was not where Daniel had left it when he returned to the compound. He had left her exposed in the woods and the wildlife had found her. When he went back, he gathered what remained, buried it, and then — in a decision that tells you everything about how he understood what he had done — dug it up again to burn it.

He used lighter fluid. He burned her remains along with her phone and her keys. He put the ashes and bone fragments in a bucket. He carried the bucket to a canal and cleaned it in the water.

Agents watching him from a surveillance position saw him carry the bucket to the bank. They saw the drag marks in the soft earth at the water's edge. A human remains detection dog alerted to decomposition near the bed of his truck and in the water of the canal.

In the wooded area of the compound, crime scene investigators found scattered remains. They found part of a human skull bearing what appeared to be a gunshot wound. They found fractures consistent with blunt impact. They found a finger with a pink fingernail, which was taken for fingerprint analysis.

The fingerprint confirmed it was Nancy.

He burned her remains with lighter fluid along with her phone and her keys. He put the ashes in a bucket and carried it to a canal. He was cleaning the bucket when the agents watching him moved in.

THE INTERROGATION

The interview that followed Daniel's arrest is a document that investigators and prosecutors would later describe as one of the most revealing they had encountered — not because he confessed cleanly, but because of how precisely he had calibrated what he chose to say and what he refused to say.

He had constructed the self-defence narrative around the specific fact of her attempt to take his weapon, which placed him legally in a category of threat response that might — in a different set of circumstances, with a different victim — have been arguable. What he had not fully accounted for was the physical reality of the situation: a trained, two-tour veteran, 205 pounds, against a forty-four-year-old mother of two who was by multiple accounts not physically imposing. The investigators said it plainly: there was not a version of this where that confrontation ends in the only available response being lethal force.

He did not have an answer for that. He stopped answering questions.

What he said a few days later, in a recorded video call from his cell to a friend, was not a calculated statement. It was an unguarded one, the kind that people make when the weight of maintaining a constructed narrative for a moment lifts. He was talking about his military training. He said: being in infantry, yeah, we got to train to kill. I mean, that's just that, man.

He appeared, in that moment, to have forgotten why he was where he was.

THE VERDICT

Daniel was convicted of second-degree murder with a firearm, abuse of a dead body, and altering or destroying evidence. For the murder charge, he was sentenced to life in prison. For each of the remaining charges, twenty-two years, to run concurrently with the life sentence.

In December 2025, he filed an appeal.

Nancy's mother had spent the days between her daughter's disappearance and the confirmation of her death calling investigators, suggesting names, building theories, insisting on explanations that were more comfortable than the one that turned out to be true. When officers came to her door to tell her what they had found, she asked for a moment to process it. She said she had hoped for a better outcome. She said she had not expected this.

Nobody who loved Nancy expected this. The twelve-year-old who had insisted they file the missing person's report, who had been right that something was wrong, was twelve years old when she learned that being right had not been enough to change what happened.

Nancy Howry was forty-four years old. She had two children who needed her. She was having a difficult season of her life in the way that people have difficult seasons — not because of any flaw in her character but because life had stacked several hard things in the same narrow window, and she had been trying to manage them the way people do, imperfectly and with hope. She went to a gun range on Valentine's Day with a man she knew and had reason to be cautious of, and she did not come back.

She deserved more ordinary days. She deserved to see her children grow up. She deserved to find her way through the difficult season to whatever came after it.

Her daughter knew something was wrong before anyone else did. She was right. She will carry that knowledge for the rest of her life, and she will carry her mother with it.

That is what this case is, underneath the evidence and the search history and the sentencing. A mother. Two children. And the specific, irreversible cost of a man who decided that what he wanted mattered more than her life.

• Sources & Further Reading: This account is based entirely on official police records, court filings, and documented evidence from the Nancy Howry homicide investigation and the subsequent trial of Daniel Sterns in Brevard County, Florida. The conviction and sentencing are documented in Florida state court records. Daniel Sterns filed an appeal in December 2025, the outcome of which had not been determined at the time of publication. The account of the investigation draws on documented police body camera footage, recorded interrogation transcripts, and digital evidence logs entered into the court record. This article is written in full respect for Nancy Howry and her family.