A wife vanished without a trace 10 months ago. How it became a homicide investigation
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Tyler McCain looked downcast when he stepped up to the microphone during a news conference seeking clues about his wife, Nikki Cheng Saelee-McCain, who has been missing for 10 months.
He stood next to Saelee-McCain’s sisters on his left and a phalanx of FBI agents and Shasta County Sheriff’s Office deputies on his right.
“Any efforts that might help bring my wife home, you know, safely, we miss you,” he said. “I don’t really know what to say. I haven’t been in the public eye and I haven’t done very well with it and I apologize to everyone, especially my children, my wife’s family, mine as well. I’m just here to support, so anything I can do, I’m going to do that.”
That was on a Monday, March 10. Then that Friday, local and federal law enforcement officers raided McCain’s house. They bagged evidence and arrested a woman who was there. It is unclear whether the woman, Christina Adams, was living at the house. She was arrested on suspicion of probation violations.
McCain, 39, has not been charged with a crime in connection with his wife’s disappearance, which the Sheriff’s Office is now investigating as a homicide. He did not respond to a request for comment through his attorney.
Although the Sheriff’s Office said there were “persons of interest” in the homicide, no identities have been released and no arrests have been made.
“Since the initial investigation, detectives have worked tirelessly to locate Nikki and to determine the events leading to her disappearance,” the office said in a statement March 14.
But since the early days after her disappearance, the suspicion and scrutiny of Saelee-McCain’s family and the Redding community in Northern California, as well as online sleuths, have been placed squarely on her husband. Details about the couple’s relationship, which had been strained for years, became public, and protesters followed McCain in the street and called for his arrest online.
Saelee-McCain’s siblings alleged in interviews that McCain is not being entirely forthcoming with them or investigators.
Days after the news conference, the sisters traveled together to McCain’s house, where he lived with Saelee-McCain. They pressed him for details.
Nikki Cheng Saelee-McCain and Tyler McCain met more than a decade ago when the two were working at the Win-River Casino outside Redding. Saelee-McCain was a cocktail waitress while McCain was a slot technician, according to her sister Chloe Saelee.
In the first years of Tyler and Nikki’s relationship, Chloe loved Tyler, whom she thought of as an older brother figure. She lived for a few months after high school with her sister and Tyler.
“Tyler was always quiet but soft-spoken,” she said. “I thought he was so cool. I thought he was such a great person. Very giving. So accepting of all of us.”
Nikki stopped working as a cocktail waitress and became a stay-at-home mom, Chloe said. The couple had four children.
The relationship between Tyler and Nikki appeared to deteriorate around that time, Chloe said. Nikki suspected Tyler of cheating on her.
But she would always return to their Happy Valley house, until the winter of 2023.
On Nov. 29, 2023, just months before Nikki went missing in May 2024, she and Tyler got into one of their biggest fights, according to a sheriff’s report and Chloe.
It was unclear how the fight began, but according to a sheriff’s report taken after an interview with Nikki in a hospital, Tyler came home that night “in a strange mood” and immediately jumped on Nikki in the bedroom. She told a sheriff’s deputy she thought he might have been using methamphetamine, though she was not sure.
Tyler dragged her around the room with a “glazed, scary look in his eyes, as if he was having some sort of mental episode,” Deputy Gerry Maul wrote.
Nikki tried to calm her husband, but he began hitting her in the face, Maul wrote. He pulled her hair, poured cold water over her and bound her arms and legs with white duct tape, according to the report.
During the assault, Nikki told the sheriff’s deputy, Tyler said he was going to kill her.
“She thought she was going to die,” the deputy wrote in the report.
The attack lasted hours and Nikki was able to escape eventually while Tyler was in the kitchen, Maul wrote.
She went to her mother’s house, then to Chloe’s, her sister said.
“She said he didn’t duct-tape her arms that well. She was eventually able to get out of it,” Chloe recalled, echoing a claim in the report.
She was hospitalized and reported the incident to the Sheriff’s Office, after which Tyler was arrested and charged with corporal injury to a spouse, false imprisonment, criminal threats and assault.
Nikki continued to live with her sister and started divorce proceedings as the case worked its way through the courts, Chloe said. A restraining order was put in place, and the couple did not talk for months, Chloe said.
“The first few months she stayed strong. There were moments when Tyler asked her to come back, said he would change. She would stay at his house, but she would come back after and stay at mine or my mom’s house,” Chloe said.
Around March 2024, she started to stay more at her and Tyler’s house on Olinda Road, Chloe said.
Then, on May 18, Nikki disappeared.
She had been texting with Chloe all day after an emergency in Tyler’s family. The next morning, Chloe texted her sister about the emergency — no response. A little later, Chloe asked about Nikki’s daughter’s soccer uniform — no response. The messages sent to Nikki’s iPhone were appearing in green on Chloe’s phone, meaning that her iPhone was either off or out of service.
The next day, Chloe said, Tyler texted her.
“Have you spoken to Nikki? I think she’s missing.”
A few days passed before Chloe and the family became truly worried. Four days after she was last heard from, the family reported her missing.
Time passed and Nikki’s 2002 Chevrolet Avalanche truck was found, but Nikki was not.
Her disappearance had almost immediate effects on the domestic violence case against Tyler. All the charges against him were dropped.
“Her presence at this point in time is necessary to move forward with the case,” the Shasta County district attorney’s office said when it dropped the charges in July. “As previously stated in Court, the DA’s office has exhausted all avenues to prove the case at this time without her. The DA’s office reserves all rights to refile this case in the future.”
Saelee-McCain’s disappearance is not the first Redding missing persons case to bring the small city into the national conversation. In 2016, a woman named Sherri Papini disappeared. She was missing for 22 days before returning home bruised and emaciated, claiming she had been kidnapped by two Latinas. But years after she returned to Redding, federal prosecutors charged Papini with making up the whole story. She eventually pleaded guilty in the case.
Saelee-McCain’s case now has the city of 90,000 on edge.
Everywhere you go in the city and county are reminders of Saelee-McCain’s disappearance. People talk about the case at cafes and see it on bumper stickers that say “#JusticeForNikkiCheng. They even see her face plastered on billboards over Interstate 5.
“It would be hard to not know about this case up here,” said Shawn Schwaller, a professor in the history department at Chico State and a journalist writing for the local outlet A News Cafe, which has covered the case. “It’s kind of become a sort of cultural touchstone.”
Whether on Facebook groups dedicated to investigating the case or out on physical searches, local residents are coming together over Saelee-McCain’s disappearance, Schwaller said.
“What’s interesting with Nikki’s case is folks on different sides of the political spectrum are uniting. People are united in searching for Nikki,” he said.
Absent from the search parties has been McCain, who has been bombarded by protesters at court and at his home over his wife’s disappearance — even though he has not been charged in relation to the disappearance.
In video recorded at a court hearing for a separate case McCain is involved in, protesters confront him and his mother outside the courthouse as he walks to his car.
“No justice, no peace, while Tyler’s on the streets,” the protesters yell while recording McCain. “Where’s she at Tyler? Where’s Nikki?”
“What did you guys do with her?” another woman asks.
Four days after the news conference that McCain spoke at, there were two major updates in Saelee-McCain’s case.
Neighbors woke the morning of March 14 to federal and local law enforcement raiding the house where the couple lived — the one where he allegedly attacked her in 2023, according to the sheriff’s report. FBI agents bagged and took evidence from the house.
Then, law enforcement made another big announcement.
“Based on evidence gathered, information learned from interviews and the fact that none of Nikki’s family members have heard from Nikki since May 18th, 2024, detectives have determined Nikki is a victim of Homicide,” the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.
The news confirmed what many had already suspected. But the mystery of what happened remained.
