Justice 30 years in the making: man charged in Morgan Violi's kidnapping and murder

After decades of staying silent, Morgan's mother and two sisters reached out to me to open up about the day Morgan was taken, the decades of grief that followed, and their determination to find justice.

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The screech of tires. A maroon van speeding away. A seven-year-old girl gone.

For three decades, those sounds and images have echoed through the Bowling Green community, marking one of Kentucky's most haunting unsolved cases. This July will mark 30 years since Morgan Jade Violi was kidnapped from her apartment complex parking lot in broad daylight- snatched away in seconds while playing outside on what should have been an ordinary summer afternoon.

Now, there are finally answers.

The break in the case

At a press conference on February 27, 2026, U.S. Attorney Kyle G. Bumgarner announced that Robert Scott Froberg had been charged with Morgan's kidnapping and death.

"Morgan Violi's family never gave up on her, and neither did the Bowling Green community or its law enforcement community," Bumgarner said. "For years, this community has feared that Morgan's abductor lived silently among us and that one of our kids could be next. Investigators in the FBI and the Bowling Green Police Department have worked tirelessly to bring justice for Morgan. They applied new technology, reexamined old evidence, and never stopped searching for the truth."

According to the federal complaint, the breakthrough came through recent advancements in forensic DNA testing. A hair found in the abandoned maroon van- the same van that 10-year-old Nikki Britt had waved at minutes before her sister was taken- was tested by the FBI laboratory and returned an association with Froberg.

At the time of the match, Froberg was already serving a lengthy sentence in the Alabama Department of Corrections.

Investigators pieced together Froberg's movements in the summer of 1996. He had escaped from jail in April of that year, traveled to Pennsylvania where he was arrested, and then escaped again. He made his way to Dayton, Ohio, where he stole a maroon Chevrolet van approximately half a mile from his parents' house. From there, he traveled south on I-65.

He exited in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He spotted Morgan playing at her apartment complex. He took her.

According to the complaint, Froberg was recently interviewed by law enforcement and confessed to driving Morgan into Tennessee and strangling her.

For the family who waited nearly 30 years- and for the community that never forgot Morgan- the news is the answer to prayers they'd nearly given up on.

After decades of staying silent, Morgan's mother and two sisters reached out to me to open up about the day Morgan was taken, the decades of grief that followed, and their determination to find justice.

The day everything changed

July 24, 1996, started like any other day at the Colony Apartments. Stacey Pulliam had just returned home from court, exhausted from work and an early morning custody hearing regarding Morgan. She told her older daughters, Nikki and Heather, that they could go outside to play. But she asked seven-year-old Morgan to stay inside with her while she rested on the couch. They were watching "Pocahontas."

"I did tell Heather and Nikki that they could go outside to play, and I wanted Morgan to stay inside," Stacey recalls. But Morgan, like most seven-year-olds, was drawn to the summer afternoon and the sounds of other children playing.

Nikki Britt, who was 10 at the time, and her sister Heather Coleman, then 11, were behind one of the apartment buildings in a wooded area the neighborhood kids called "Thistle Haven." They were cleaning up trash with friends, just being kids on a hot July day.

At one point, Nikki and another girl rode their bikes back to get water in a milk jug. That's when they passed him- the man in the van.

"We actually rode past the guy in the van. He drove past us," Nikki remembers. "He waved. So we waved, you know, because we're polite little kids."

The van door was open, and something about what Nikki saw inside stuck with her- details that would later prove crucial. "Instead of it being rows of seats, it was like the back wall and the side walls had kind of this couch-looking thing, and then like a table in the middle," she says. "It had some sort of material on it that would remind me of my grandparents' couch or something, a tweed-ish type of material."

She went inside briefly. Morgan asked if she could go outside. Nikki said no. Their mom had said no. But somehow, Morgan ended up outside anyway.

"I think Destiny may have talked her into coming outside," Nikki says, referring to a five-year-old neighbor who was playing with Morgan. "She was a bit rebellious."

Minutes later, everything changed. Heather heard it first- Morgan's scream.