Suspect Joel Hollendorfers Ex-Wife Helped Cops Solve Kara Nichols Case

Two years after Joel Hollendorfer allegedly strangled aspiring model and escort Kara Nichols in Colorado, he confessed the crime to his wife and told her he buried the body on his parents’ farm, newly released court documents say.

Kristina Hollendorfer kept that secret for eight years—until investigators dusted off the cold-case file, tracked her down to Virginia, and knocked on her door.

Now known as Kristina Palmer, she told detectives about the night in 2014 when her then-husband asked her to go for a ride in his new truck and unburdened himself.

“She related Joel told her he hired an escort and during sex in her car he accidentally strangled her until she died,” police said in an affidavit for an arrest warrant for Hollendorfer.

“Joel then transported her to his parents’ property where he buried her in an old horse grave with plastic bags and lime. Kristina had no knowledge of Joel ever moving the body.”

She also told detectives that Hollendorfer said he had told his parents what he did and that he believed it had driven his father to his grave.

Armed with Kristina’s statement, police obtained a search warrant for the Hollendorfer property in Colorado Springs and zeroed in on a spot where his mother said her favorite horse, Milo, was buried.

Three feet down, they found a garbage bag, a human hand, and more remains. Hollendorfer, 46, was arrested days later on charges of second-degree murder and tampering with physical evidence—ending a decade-old mystery.

The affidavit lays out how close police came to solving that mystery years earlier—if only they had dug harder.

After Nichols’ father reported the 19-year-old missing in October 2012, police learned she had been working as an escort and had placed an ad for a “sexy new blonde in town” on a classified ad website.

In 2013, investigators obtained records for the cellphone number that Nichols had listed and found a series of eight contacts with one number just before she went missing.

Police called and left a message, and Joel Hollendorfer called back. His story was that he had been looking for an escort that night—he told police he was into drugs and sex workers back then—and spoke with Nichols but did not meet her.

Evidence suggested otherwise. Detectives used mobile phone pings to figure out where Nichols had been the night she talked to Hollendorfer, and the trail led close to his family’s property.

By now it was October 2014, and cadaver dogs were brought to the property and ground penetrating radar was used to determine spots that had been disturbed. According to the affidavit, Hollendorfer’s mother, Betty, walked around the property with investigators and pointed out the places where she said horses had been buried over three decades.

For reasons that are not explained in the affidavit, none of it was excavated.

Instead, police went to a nearby property that Betty said her son had access to, where the cadaver dogs zeroed in on what looked like the site of a shallow grave. “However, there were no human remains recovered,” the document says.

It’s not clear if police believe Nichols was originally buried in that spot and later moved to the horse grave.

There was someone who could have told them—Kristina—but according to the affidavit, she never returned detectives’ calls.

Nichols’ family has long maintained that the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department botched the initial investigation; the sheriff was run out of office amid allegations of misconduct in 2014.

“When my daughter went missing, the department was in what appears to be complete disarray,” Julia Nichols told The Denver Channel in 2016. “It leads us to think very little was done in her case, even though they gave lip service to working hard to solve my daughter’s disappearance.”

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