She Goes by Jane: A True Crime Podcast

In December 1990, a woman accidentally drowned in the Passaic River in New Jersey. Despite these tragic circumstances, her story garners little media attention. She becomes one of the tens of thousands of individuals who are currently unidentified in the United States. Researchers call these tens of thousands of unidentified our “silent mass disaster.” This week our guest reader is award-winning a...

On March 22, 2011, employees at Dr. Promila Mehta-Paul’s medical office arrive and get ready for another busy day of patients and appointments. There’s one problem? The Doctor never arrives. Always reliable and communicative, they know it’s unlikely that she wouldn’t have called if something came up and soon they, along with Promila’s family and friends, are flooding the local police offices with...

At 3:30am, a 13-year-old Deanna Merryfield shows up at her uncle’s trailer and wakes her twin who is sleeping inside. The two talk for just a moment before Deanna, startled by her uncle waking up, bolts. This is the last confirmed time she was seen alive. Since 1990, the year she disappeared, until now, there are a few clues that she might be out there somewhere: a collect call, a police computer...

In 1952, a man comes across the burned body of a woman in Cottonwood Gulch, just outside of Black Hawk, Colorado. He returns to this site several times before reporting what he found to the sheriff’s office, a fact that will immediately cloud his actions in suspicion. Without any identifying information, she becomes known as Maria to some, or more often as the Pyre Case for the way she was murdere...

Perhaps you’ve seen the photo before. A young woman with her hands bound, tape over her mouth, laying in the back of a van with a similarly bound little boy. This photo has, for better or worse, become synonymous with the case of Tara Calico, a 19 year old young woman who disappeared while riding her bicycle in New Mexico in 1988. But beyond that photo, many don’t know much about Tara or her disap...

In 1977, a young hitchhiker accepted a ride from a man who promised to take her home. Within hours, she was dead. Investigators quickly identified her killer. But they could not identify her. For decades, the young woman became known as Precious Jane Doe, a name given in the hope that someone, somewhere, would recognize her and help return her identity. Instead, she remained unnamed for more than...

In 1968, the body of a young woman was found in rural Pennsylvania. She’d been shot to death. Months later, another young woman is found just a few miles away. Their only connection? They wore the same leather sandals. It will take nearly fifty years and an online database dedicated to missing and unidentified persons to identify who they are. But even with this development in their case, their mu...

In August 1993, a man walks into a police station and gives a statement about the disappearance of 16-year-old Sequoya Vargas. In it, he details the brutal assault and murder of the teenager, placing blame for these on his two friends. This statement of what happened to Sequoya will be just one of many that’s given over the years by the three men. They’ll be full of contradictions and blame, but o...

In 1993, 16-year-old Sequoya Vargas hitchhikes with a friend to her friend’s home. Later that evening, the man who gave them a ride asks her to go to his cousin’s house to watch movies. She never returns home. Despite this being out of character for her, the police brush aside her mother’s pleas to search for her daughter, sending her family and friends on their own quest to find out what happened...

Detective Lorie Howard was once told that the only way the case of the unidentified woman she was working on would be by the grace of god. This gave her the name Grace Doe and she was known by this for years until she was finally identified as Shauna Garber. A few weeks ago, investigators made public new information, filling in gaps in Shauna’s story including an update to her name and revealing w...

Tot Tran Harriman survived the Vietnam War. She witnessed history when she was evacuated on the last boat out of Saigon before it fell. She lived through being held in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania along with 20,000 other refugees. And made a life for herself in Maine, raising three children, starting new businesses, and helping other refugees. But in 2001, she also became one of America’s missin...

On a hot summer’s day in 1992, 63-year-old Bessie Kutnak goes to look for her missing cattle near her home in Cameron, Texas. Witnesses say she seemed disoriented and was seen asking for directions before she disappeared. When family members realized she was missing, a full-scale search of her began, but no trace of her was ever found. This week our guest reader is actress Catherine Mary Stewart....

On July 11, 2007, a 31-year-old Carma Purpura was last seen getting into the cab of a truck driver at a rest stop near Indianapolis. The next day, he’s arrested in Nashville under suspicion he’s involved in the murder of another woman. Inside his cab, investigators find Carma’s phone and credit card and so much of Carma’s blood detectives are certain Carma is no longer alive. Four years later, a s...

On Valentine’s Day in 1991, a young woman is seen hitchhiking along US 1 in the Florida Keys. The next morning, a pair of windsurfers find her body in a densely wooded area. She’d been beaten to death before being strangled with her own bikini top. For years this young woman was known only as Valentine Doe, named for the last day she was seen alive. But investigators never give up on her case, uti...

In 2001, the Green River Killer was finally caught, ending one of the most horrific eras in the Pacific Northwest and ending a decades long investigation dedicated to identifying this mnan. Convicted of 49 murders, this man confessed to even more, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. It would take over twenty more years to identify three of his young victims with the most rec...

When he spoke of what happened to his daughter Shelley, Ed Sikes said, “It was a crash course in good and evil.” In 1986, when Shelley was 19, she was working as a waitress at a popular restaurant in Galveston. The night she disappeared, she left work and headed to her boyfriend’s house, but Shelley never made it there. Based on eyewitness accounts and, eventually, the confessions of her killers,...

McDonald County, Missouri. In 1990, a woman and her husband find the remains of a woman near an abandoned house. She’s been bound, her hands and legs tied behind her back. With no identification on her, and no one coming forward to claim her, she becomes one of America’s unidentified women and is given the name Grace Doe, because it will be only through the Grace of God that her identity will be r...

Cleveland, 1934. A man collecting firewood along the shores of Lake Erie is startled to find the partial remains of a woman. Though investigators are able to determine that she was brutally murdered, they are unable to identify the woman, naming her the Lady of the Lake instead. What they didn’t know yet was that the next four years the Cleveland area would be terrorized by a man they called the C...

In 1969, 21-year-old Linda Peogeot and her daughter, Lori Mae, leave a department store with all the supplies they need to celebrate the little girl’s third birthday party happening the next day. And there, in the parking lot, they’re abducted by a man in broad daylight with witnesses just feet away. This abduction spurs a nationwide manhunt as investigators race to get Linda and Lori Mae back to...

In southern Texas, there’s a strip of highway that runs between Houston and Galveston. From the 1970s until today, it’s a place where many women and girls have gone missing or were murdered. Most of these crimes are unsolved and this area has become known as the Texas Killing Fields. But nestled along Interstate 45 in League City, Texas, is a 25 acre field where this name originated. There, betwee...

Dorothy Arnold, a young socialite, vanished without a trace in 1910. Born into wealth and privilege, Dorothy's life seemed idyllic, but her family didn’t support her aspirations to become a writer nor her budding romance with a man named George Griscom Jr., both of which she kept hidden from her family. With her disappearance, a tangled web of theories emerges, including rumors of elopement, a cla...

When 30-year-old Pah Pow leaves her apartment, the only witness is her young son who says she left with a man he recognized but whose name he didn’t know. Her family thought she was with family, her family thought she was with friends. This mistake meant nearly a week passed before anyone realized Pah was missing. An immigrant from Thailand, Pah lived with her husband and children in Aberdeen, Sou...

Keiosha Felix is just fifteen years old when she disappears from Duson, Louisiana. Out on a weekend pass from a facility for pregnant and parenting teens, she’s set to visit her paternal aunt on the weekend of April 28-29th, 2012. On April 30th, she’s reported missing. Her paternal aunt and cousin said she left the night before with someone they didn’t see. Later, her cousin will say that she hear...

“Got married. Leaving town. Will not be back. Don’t worry. Babe.” That’s what the telegram read that Beverly Sharpman’s parents received the night of September 11, 1947. But, according to her mother, there was one problem: Beverly wasn’t seeing anyone at the time. This, and the unanswered questions surrounding her disappearance send one mother on a decades long quest to find her daughter. This wee...

In Ohio, a black woman’s body is found beneath a bridge and labeled Victim #8. In New York, a black woman found dead inside a storage tote will become known as Peaches for the heart shaped peach tattoo on her breast. And in Georgia, a black woman’s bones are found in the underbrush by a man walking his dog. Like many women of color who came before and after them, their stories fade from news cover...