Vanished Voices, The Overlooked

On Thursday, April 16, 2015, Elizabeth “Elena” Laguna Salgado sent her sister four words: “I just left school.” Her sister wrote back, asking if she’d made it home. That message was never read. Elena was 26, a newly returned missionary, who grew up in Chiapas, Mexico, who had come to Provo, Utah, on a scholarship to learn English. She’d been in the U.S. for less than a month. She vanished from a b...

This is Part 2 of a two-part episode. If you haven't listened to Part 1, we strongly recommend going back — this story builds on itself, and the full weight of what you're about to hear depends on understanding everything that came before. This is a two part series from our sister show, Crime Clueless.  Part 2 picks up at 6:30 the next morning, when a retired KTLA news anchor spots a young woman i...

Today we are bringing you a special cross over episode from our sister show, Crime Clueless. On the evening of September 16, 2009, a 24-year-old Cal State Fullerton graduate named Mitrice Richardson walked into an upscale Malibu restaurant and immediately alarmed everyone she encountered. She told the valet she was there to avenge Michael Jackson's death. She told strangers she was from Mars. She...

On Labour Day weekend in 2020, Chelsea Poorman, a 24-year-old Cree woman from Kawacatoose First Nation, walked out of a friend’s apartment in downtown Vancouver. At 12:57 a.m. she told her sister on the phone that she’d met “a new bae.” It was the last time her family heard her voice. Chelsea walked with a limp from a 2014 accident and couldn’t go far without her leg brace. Yet in April 2022, her...

Six days before she disappeared, Hyun Jong "Cindy" Song posted a short poem to her Penn State web page. She called it "under construction." Cindy left Seoul as a teenager to build a life in America. By fall 2001 she was months from graduating, working multiple jobs, and dreaming of a career in graphic design. On Halloween night she went dancing with friends in a costume she mad...

On April 17, 2019, Prisma Denisse Peralta Reyes dropped her six-year-old son off with his babysitter and went to work, planning to pick him up at 7:30 like always. By that evening she had argued with a coworker, fought with an ex over lunch, and spent hours alone at a Dallas bar. Around 6 p.m. she slipped into her ex-boyfriend's apartment garage in Old East Dallas, confused and crying, calling eve...

On July 20, 2013, Bella Laboucan-McLean fell from the 31st-floor balcony of a downtown Toronto condo. She was 25, a Cree woman from Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation in northern Alberta, and a recent Humber College fashion graduate with plans to bring Cree art and traditions to the runway. Five other people were in the small unit that night. Her phone, purse and shoes were still inside. Police were knocki...

On December 12, 2021, 23-year-old Lauren Smith-Fields was found dead in her Bridgeport, Connecticut apartment, the morning after a first date with a man she'd matched with on Bumble. Her family wasn't notified by police — they found out from a note taped to her door, left by her landlord, that pointed them to him, not to police. What followed was weeks of uncollected evidence, a detective who hung...

In June of 2021, Lauren "El" Cho — a music teacher, baker, and tattoo artist from New Jersey — was living a new life she'd built for herself in the California high desert. Then, on an ordinary afternoon, she walked away from the bus she shared with a friend, and in the space of ten minutes, disappeared. What followed was a search that never turned up a single footprint. A friend's theory...

At 3:30 in the morning on March 9th, 2019, Aubrey Dameron told her mom she was going to meet someone. She walked out the door, down a two-football-field gravel driveway in Grove, Oklahoma, and into the dark. Her phone pinged one last time at 3:42 AM — just 100 yards from home — and then nothing. It would take six years, a Supreme Court ruling, and a family who refused to stop fighting to find out...

On August 18th, 2010, Amber Tuccaro — a 20-year-old mother from the Mikisew Cree First Nation — got into a car with a man she didn't know, on a gravel road just outside Edmonton. She was never seen alive again. What makes her case different from so many others is a single piece of evidence: a phone call, recorded almost by accident, capturing the last documented minutes of her life. Two years late...

A doorbell camera catches the last confirmed image of Nakyla Williams: 24 years old, a hairstylist with her own basement salon, getting into a loud-engine pickup truck outside her mother's Indianapolis home on the evening of November 8th, 2021. She never comes home. What follows is a case built almost entirely out of absences. It takes IMPD three weeks to issue a public alert. The last person seen...

Kanika Powell did everything right. She refused to open her door to a stranger claiming to be with the FBI. She called the Bureau directly to check his story. She called the police. She emailed her friends and family, warning them, days before it happened. When two more strangers showed up at her door posing as delivery men, she refused them too, and confirmed with the carriers that no packages we...

For decades, the domestic violence movement has operated on a familiar script: abuser is bad, survivor should leave, and the system's job is to punish after the fact. Liz Ortenburger, CEO of SafeNest — Nevada's largest domestic and sexual violence nonprofit, serving Clark County since 1977 — has spent the last ten years challenging that script from the inside. In this conversation, Liz walks us th...

In the early hours of June 15, 2021, Ella Mae Begay's daughter called 911 to report a break-in at her own home. No one came. Minutes later, she watched her mother's truck pull out of the driveway — a truck Ella Mae, a cautious woman who never drove after dark, would never have taken out herself. By the time officers finally responded to a second call, Ella Mae was gone. Her truck has never been fo...

In December 2021, a Florida woman heading to visit her sister never arrives. Days later, her car turns up with a wallet, phone, sandals, shopping list, and lunch bag at a state park. And then, a brief, grainy piece of hiker footage becomes the last confirmed trace of her, ever. Is this is because there was no effort to dust for fingerprints or get into her cell phone? Maybe.  In this episode, we t...

Jasmine Moody was 19, an honor-roll freshman with plans to become a nurse, when she flew from  Texas to Michigan to spend Thanksgiving with a woman she'd met online.  On the night before she was scheduled to fly home, an argument broke out — and Jasmine walked out of the house into a windchill near zero, without her coat, her phone, her ID, or her purse. She has never been seen again. More than te...

This episode contains significant updates from three cases Vanished Voices has covered. Anna Marie Scott from Nevada, Phylicia Barnes from North Carolina and Baltimore, and Sara Nicole Graham from North Carolina. You can find links to the coverage on the updates here . Every morning, Shantieya Smith slung her seven-year-old daughter's backpack over her shoulder and walked her to school. Family cal...

Ricarda Tillman-Lockett was 22 years old, a mother, and an enrolled member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. She had left an abusive marriage, moved into a shelter, and made a plan to start over. On February 19th, 2007, she left work in Memphis, got into her estranged husband's car, and vanished. Her purse, her wallet, and her cell phone were left behind. Her son was waiting at the babysitter's....

On the evening of April 15, 2004, fifteen-year-old Silene "Erica" Eaddy walked away from her home on Fountain Lake Road in Columbia, South Carolina. Her neighbor called out to her. She didn't stop. Two days later, firefighters responding to a brush fire in lower Richland County found her body in the brush off Pincushion Road. She had been savagely beaten. And the medical examiner would d...

In June of 2012, fourteen-year-old Brittany Robinson kissed her mother goodbye, said "Love you, mom. See you later," and left for a weekend visit with the father she barely knew. She never came home. What followed was a decade of silence, a father who fled across state lines under an alias, a custodial interference charge that put him behind bars for just four years, and finally — in 202...

On the day before Thanksgiving 2020, Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis was walking down a road she knew well, on land her people had called home for centuries. She sent a text that said she was almost to the church. She never arrived. Mary was 39 years old, a member of the Tulalip Tribes of Washington State, and a woman who had already survived more than most people will ever face — a childhood fractured b...

Her family made dozens of calls. They sent emails to tribal leaders. They found her covered in blood in her own apartment. They did everything they were supposed to do. And none of it was enough. In January 2020, Ashlea Aldrich — a 29-year-old member of the Omaha Tribe and mother of two — was found in a cornfield on the reservation in Macy, Nebraska. The official story says she wandered off and di...

On the morning of June 23, 2021, 24-year-old geologist Daniel Robinson left his worksite near a remote well in Buckeye, Arizona, and was never seen again. Three weeks later, his Jeep Renegade was found overturned in a desert ravine — with his clothes, phone, wallet, and keys scattered nearby. But Daniel was gone. What investigators found only deepened the mystery. All airbags had deployed. More th...

In August 2021, Bessie Marie Walker — a 27-year-old Western Mono mother of three — vanished from the Big Sandy Rancheria in Auberry, California. For eighteen days, the Fresno County Sheriff's Office chased tips across the county. They searched a dozen locations. They logged nearly a thousand hours. They never found her. Her family did. Twenty-five yards from her mother's front door. Her cause of d...