Mount Dora, Florida, November 2, 2023 a mother of three was last seen by her daughter following an argument at their home, leaving behind her Apple Watch, her purse, her car, and her cards. Her husband was arrested for child pornography the following month. Police are searching a pond with a trained otter. Nobody has been charged with her murder and she has never been found.
The Lancaster Subdivision
Mount Dora is a small, picturesque city in Lake County, Florida north of Orlando, built on the shores of Lake Dora, known for its antique shops and its annual arts festivals and the particular easy charm of a small central Florida city that has maintained its character against the pressure of the region’s relentless development. The Lancaster subdivision sits off Strathmore Circle in the north part of the city a quiet residential street of the kind where people know their neighbors and where a woman not being seen for several days would eventually be noticed.
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Nicole Baldwin was a mother of three. She was known to her daughter Alisha as “very loving” and devoted to her children a description that appears in every account of this case as the thing people most want the record to reflect about who she was before she became a missing person case.
On November 1, 2023, the family celebrated Alisha’s twentieth birthday. Whatever tensions existed in the household on that evening, they were set aside for a celebration. The following day, November 2, 2023, Nicole and her daughter Alisha had an argument at the home. After the argument, Alisha last saw her mother at the house.
Nicole walked out of Alisha’s sight and She has not been seen since.
Everything Left Behind
The detail that investigators and the family returned to consistently in the early days of the investigation and that distinguished this disappearance from a voluntary departure was what Nicole left behind. Her Apple Watch sitting on a surface in the home. Her purse left at the house. Her credit and debit cards and Her car.
A woman does not leave her home voluntarily and leave everything behind. A woman who decides to go somewhere takes her phone, takes her cards, takes her keys, takes the means by which she will navigate and pay for things in the world she is going to. A woman who leaves everything behind either left in a moment of extreme crisis that prevented her from taking anything, or she was prevented from taking anything by someone else.
The Mount Dora Police Department opened the investigation initially as a missing persons case. Officers knocked on doors in the neighborhood. They collected belongings from the home. They did not, in the first weeks, announce any conclusion about what had happened. Then, twenty-six days after Nicole disappeared, something happened that reframed everything.
Brett Baldwin: December 2023
On November 28, 2023 twenty-six days after Nicole disappeared detectives with the Mount Dora Police Department executed a search warrant on the family home and seized Nicole’s husband Brett Baldwin’s iPhone. The warrant was obtained in connection with the missing person investigation. What detectives were looking for on the phone, or what they suspected might be there, was not publicly stated.
What they found was not immediately public knowledge. But in December 2023, Brett Baldwin was arrested on federal charges of possession of child sexual abuse material. The complaint from Homeland Security alleged that a Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agent had discovered that Baldwin possessed multiple videos of child pornography. Investigators said he had thousands of files.
His phone the one seized in November during the missing person investigation was a central piece of the evidence in the pornography case. In July 2025, Brett Baldwin was sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison for the child pornography conviction.
He has not been charged with anything related to Nicole’s disappearance. He has not been charged with her murder. He remains in federal prison on the pornography conviction while the investigation into what happened to his wife continues without him being formally named as a suspect in her case.
The relationship between the phone seized during the missing person investigation and the child pornography charges has not been fully explained publicly. What the timeline establishes is this: Nicole disappeared on November 2. Her husband’s phone was seized in connection with her disappearance on November 28. He was arrested for child pornography charges in December. Whether those two investigations are connected, and in what specific way, is part of what investigators have not disclosed.
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The Homicide Investigation and the Person of Interest
In January 2024, investigators executed a search warrant on the home of a volunteer named Terri Rogers, who had become involved in the search for Nicole. Rogers had not previously known Nicole personally she was a community member who had reached out to help. When a search warrant was served on her home and devices in January 2024, it generated significant public attention. The reason for the warrant’s execution was not publicly explained.
In April 2024 five months after Nicole disappeared the Mount Dora Police Department formally upgraded the case to a homicide investigation. They did not announce an arrest. They did not name a suspect. They said they believed Nicole was dead and that her disappearance was the result of foul play.
In July 2024, the department went further. They announced a reward for information and stated publicly that a person of interest had been identified. Deputy Chief Jim Deleu described the person of interest as having a “strange dynamic” within the Baldwin family. He would not elaborate and Nobody has been charged with Nicole Baldwin’s murder.
The Ponds
In April 2024, investigators searched several ponds in the Mount Dora area. Nothing was found. In 2025, a tip led investigators to a four-acre retention pond in Deltona approximately twenty-five miles from Mount Dora, off DeBary Avenue between Enterprise Road and a surrounding area. The Mount Dora Police Department coordinated with the Florida Department of Transportation, which provided pumps to drain the four-acre pond.
Draining a four-acre pond is not a small undertaking. It takes time and equipment and the kind of institutional commitment that reflects genuine belief not hope, not routine procedure, but a specific conviction on the part of investigators that what they are looking for might be at the bottom. It took six weeks to drain the pond.
When the water was gone, investigators deployed cadaver dogs on the pond floor. They laid plywood planks across the surface so the dogs could walk the entire area. The dogs alerted to two specific spots on the pond floor. The two spots were excavated. The Florida Department of Transportation dug out the substrate from the areas where the dogs had alerted. Nothing was found. No remains, no personal effects, and no evidence connected to Nicole Baldwin.
Then came the otter.
The Otter
In June 2026, Mount Dora Police deployed a trained otter to assist in the search of the Deltona pond. The otter a specific animal trained for water searches, capable of detecting underwater scents that other methods cannot reach was brought in because of the cadaver dog alerts on the pond floor. If the dogs had detected something, and if that something was biological, the otter might be able to confirm or further locate it.
Cadaver dogs alert to the presence of human decomposition scent. When a body has been in water for a significant period, what remains on the pond floor may be residual scent absorbed into the sediment rather than any physical remains. The otter is trained to work with exactly this kind of underwater evidence.
The deployment of a trained otter in a missing person search is not unprecedented, but it is unusual enough to generate its own news cycle. It represents a search methodology at the furthest reaches of available technique a law enforcement agency that has searched the pond through draining and excavation and cadaver dog deployment, and that is still not finished, bringing in an additional specialist tool because the question the pond might be holding has not been answered.
Whether the otter’s search produced a result has not been fully reported in publicly available sources as of this writing.
Deputy Chief Deleu
Jim Deleu, Deputy Chief of the Mount Dora Police Department, has been the public face of the investigation since its earliest stages. His statements over the course of nearly three years provide a kind of record of where the investigation has been.
In June 2026, addressing reporters gathered around the draining Deltona pond: “The ultimate goal is the resolution of her location and her whereabouts.”
In a statement issued the same period: “We cannot leave any stone unturned.”
At an earlier stage of the investigation: “Ideally, we would like to find Nicole. That’s our ultimate goal. However, if there are items of evidentiary value, that would be very beneficial because it could potentially link her to this location.”
On the question of whether the investigation has gone cold: the department has consistently denied this. “We do not consider the investigation a cold case,” Deleu has said.
The agencies involved in the investigation read like a task force assembled for a case of significant complexity: the Mount Dora Police Department, the FBI, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the State Attorney’s Office, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, and the Florida Department of Transportation. Six agencies collaborating on the disappearance of a woman from a small central Florida city.
The involvement of the FBI and FDLE in what might otherwise be a local missing person case suggests that investigators have developed information that extends beyond what a local department could manage alone. What that information is what the “strange dynamic” within the family looks like in specific terms, who the person of interest is, what the connection between the missing person investigation and the child pornography case actually is remains behind a wall of active investigation that has not opened in nearly three years.
Alisha
Nicole’s daughter Alisha Baldwin was twenty years old when her mother disappeared having just turned twenty the day before. The argument on November 2 was the last time she saw her.
She has spoken publicly about her mother with the specific combination of love and loss that belongs to people who were present at the edge of a disappearance people who saw the person last, who carry the weight of that last sighting and everything it might mean.
“She’s very loving,” Alisha told reporters. “She’s very devoted to her children. She’s always focused on her children.” That devotion is what makes the abandonment of every belonging in the house so dissonant. A devoted mother does not leave her Apple Watch and her purse and her car and her cards. She does not leave the infrastructure of her daily life behind and walk away. She either walked away in a moment of crisis so acute that the ordinary tools of daily life felt irrelevant, or she was taken in a way that prevented her from taking anything.
What Is Known, What Isn’t
What is known: Nicole Baldwin was last seen on November 2, 2023, by her daughter Alisha following an argument at their home on Strathmore Circle in Mount Dora, Florida. She left behind her Apple Watch, her purse, her car, and her cards. Her husband Brett Baldwin’s phone was seized in connection with the missing person investigation twenty-six days after she disappeared. He was subsequently arrested for possession of child sexual abuse material and sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison. The case was upgraded to a homicide investigation in April 2024. A person of interest was identified and described as having a “strange dynamic” within the family. Multiple pond searches have produced no remains.
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What is not known: Where Nicole is and who killed her and why. Whether the person of interest will ever be charged. What the connection is between the child pornography case and the missing person investigation. What the cadaver dog alerts on the Deltona pond floor actually detected or what the otter found.
The reward for information stands. The tip line is 352-735-7130. The case is officially not cold.
“Earlier this year, detectives told Channel 9 they believe Baldwin is dead,” a June 2026 report stated. They believe she is dead. They believe it was foul play. They do not know where she is.
The Birthday
November 1, 2023. Alisha’s twentieth birthday. The family gathered. Nicole was present. Whatever was wrong in the household that year whatever had been building, whatever shape the “strange dynamic” that police describe had taken it was set aside for one evening.
The following morning, there was an argument.
Then Nicole walked out of her daughter’s sight.
The birthday is the last ordinary day in this case’s record the last day when everything was as it was supposed to be, before everything became what it became. A mother celebrating her daughter’s birthday, and then an argument, and then gone.
Her daughter has been living with what that means for nearly three years.
Nicole Baldwin has not been found.
Nicole Baldwin was last seen on November 2, 2023, at her home in the Lancaster subdivision off Strathmore Circle in Mount Dora, Florida. She is a mother of three. She left behind her Apple Watch, purse, car, and cards. The case is classified as a homicide investigation. No arrest has been made in connection with her disappearance.
If you have information: Mount Dora Police Department — (352) 735-7130.
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