The Missing

The moment when a child enters adulthood is a tricky time for every parent. Do you get involved when they make mistakes, or in a bid for independence, do you let them figure it out themselves? For Anthea Langelaan, this question was one she grappled with endlessly. Every time she reached out a helping hand to her son, Cian, who lived in a small village in Donegal, Ireland, he would refuse all offe...

Living in a big city can make you feel small. It’s easy to feel isolated - despite being surrounded by millions of people - to lose sense of community and, perhaps, your self. Community was very important to Svetlozar Yotov, who lived in Angel, in central London. To the 30 year old aspiring culinary entrepreneur, his personal relationships were the most valuable things in his life. You could see i...

THE MISSING IS BACK. We're thrilled to announce the new series of The Missing is complete, and the first episode will be available on Wednesday February 14th. We have eight more episodes - eight more unsolved long-term missing cases which need your help. And - for the first time - we're adding something different. We've integrated the podcast with Missing People's Urgent Appeals, meaning that if t...

We're just a week away from the brand new series of The Missing. While we wait - why not check out another show, from the same team. Smoking Gun tells the story of the extraordinary ways in which forensic science has solved crimes. It's hosted by Tracy Alexander - Britain's best known forensic scientist - and the first episode is out now. If you enjoy it - there's 30 more episodes available to bin...

Imagine you’re working at a fairground. All around you, ferris wheels are rotating, bumper cars are colliding at top speed and the air is full of the sound of raucous laughter and the smell of deep fried food. What a place to be when whilst casually scrolling through your phone you spot a message from someone. Someone who knows your brother. Someone who is getting in touch to tell you that your br...

Isabella Skelton was many things to many people but first and foremost, to her daughter Lynda, she was a Mum. The void she left in the lives of those who loved her has remained, ever since the day she vanished back in 1969, when she left her home on Lidiard Street in Crumpsall, Manchester and was never seen again. Strangely, Isabella wasn’t reported missing to the authorities at the time of her di...

It's hard to ever truly know what's going on in someone’s head. Most of us are fighting private battles, the details of which we don’t disclose to even the dearest people to us. Trevor Farthing, who lived in St Helen’s, Merseyside, was no stranger to mental anguish. Over the years, his long term partner Marie saw in front of her very eyes how the joyful and generous man she’d spent more than three...

Whenever someone goes missing, we inevitably put our last interaction with them under a microscope. For Ann Margaret Allan, her final conversation with her brother Sammy Townsley is one that will be forever seared into her memory. Growing up in a traveller family, he saw his fair share of discrimination from an early age and sadly, as he made his way through adolescence and into adulthood, he foun...

Imelda Keenan kept a diary, where she wrote down her most personal feelings and aspirations. In 1994, she was 22 years old and living in Waterford City in the Southeast of Ireland. There she lived in a second story bedsit just a stone’s throw away from the river Suir. She was a student, she had a boyfriend and a family that loved her. But on January 3rd, she walked out of her home and was never se...

You’re in your home office. It's the middle of a busy work day and the house phone rings. You pick up, slightly irritated at the interruption, only to be greeted by the police and asked if you are your father’s next of kin. We all know that nothing good comes after that question. Kate Armitage, whose father, Neil Skinner went missing in the Scottish highlands in 2022, lived that experience. After...

Older sisters, for those of us that have them, leave an indelible mark on the lives of their younger siblings. Whether it's the music they played, the jokes they told, or the secrets they shared, being around them felt like a sneak preview of adulthood. Jill Brown, who was nineteen years old when she vanished without trace from the seaside town of Dovercourt, Essex, was beloved by her younger sist...

The sixth series of The Missing begin with the heartbreaking story of Aamina Khan. We urge you to listen to her father, Safraz. Imagine you’re a parent, sharing custody of your young child with an ex partner. You go to collect them one day and no-one answers the door. Perhaps wires have been crossed and dates and pickup times have been miscommunicated? That wasn’t the case for Safraz Khan, who in...

When it comes to long term missing person's cases, you never quite know when you're going to catch a break. Most lay dormant for years at a time, with nothing in the way of new clues or leads, leaving relatives and authorities alike feeling like they've exhausted every avenue of inquiry... Such was the case for Lauren Saffery, whose mother Lisa Pour was last seen in Willesden Green in north west L...

It's a sad fact of life that in the major cities of the world, missing person cases are a dime a dozen. In places like London, New York and Tokyo, tens of thousands of people vanish every year, to the point where they’re barely even newsworthy. But in a quiet seaside village like Killala, on the west coast of Ireland, the disappearance of just one person can upend an entire community. That’s what...

On the 23rd of March 2020, due to the growing threat posed by the coronavirus, the United Kingdom locked down. For most of us, it marked the start of many months spent trapped in our homes, where the lack of freedom and face to face contact with others, had a profound effect on our collective mental health.  One such person was James Miller, a thirty-seven year old mechanic, who on the night...

500 yards is a relatively short distance. Its about the length of four and a half football pitches, a journey most of us could make in six minutes or less. It also happens to be the distance between Sperrings community shop on Lower Addiscombe Road in Croydon and the home of the Hicks family. On a cold spring night in 1986, sixteen year old Kevin Hicks walked out his front door with nothing but a...

Rachel Pickthall has been birdwatching for as long as she can remember. It's a passion she shared with her older brother Simon and as children, the pair spent many an evening together camped out in their back garden, bird guide in one hand and binoculars in the other. In late December 2013, Simon, then aged 48, travelled to Bempton Cliffs on the Yorkshire coast, the UK's largest mainland seabird c...

Sandra Gant of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex has three daughters, Carrie, Michaela and Lauren. Their relationship with their mother has always been fraught, complicated as it was by her struggles with alcoholism. Sandra lost a lot of battles with her demons over the years but as we all know, addiction is a war…one Sandra was very much still fighting when she disappeared on the 14th of November, 2003. Th...

Consider what the average person goes through when they’re trying to locate a missing loved one. For starters there’s the ongoing dialogue with the authorities, where you’re doing your utmost to provide the investigation with the information it needs to progress. Then you have the media, as well as poster and online campaigns to manage, in an effort to get the word out as quickly as possible. Fina...

It doesn’t matter how old your children get, whenever they go on a trip you’re always dreading that phone call…The one that often comes in the early hours of the morning…The one with the solemn voice at the end of the line.  The Nutley family of the Welsh village of Caerwent, received one such call in October 2004. James, who at 25 was the eldest son, had failed to return to his hotel after t...

When Carmel Fenech went missing in London in the summer of 1998, her mother Deirdre, of Broadfield, Crawley, didn’t panic. She was well practised at bringing her daughter home. This wasn't the first, second or even tenth time her child had gone AWOL. Carmel had a well documented drug problem, one that had pulled her into the orbit of people and places that no-one, let alone a sixteen year old girl...

What would you do if the police knocked on your door one day and told you they had just arrested your parents for your brother’s murder? That was the nightmare scenario facing Victoria Orr, whose beloved mother and father were taken into custody in September 2020, suspected of killing their own son. Steven Clark had vanished during a walk in the seaside village of Saltburn almost two decades earli...

The Missing is BACK - Launching on June 12th - a brand new series with TEN more stories of long-term missing people. For more information on this case, and every episode from every series visit https://themissingpodcast.org And to visit details of the most recent appeals - like you one you may have heard in this episode, please visit : https://missingpeople.org.uk/recent If you want to listen to T...

Take a look on the list of missing people on the missingpeople website, and you’ll see a large number of them are Vietnamese nationals. For years, traffickers have been bringing young people into the country from Vietnam – often illegally – and these people have then gone missing. This episode explores this issue – asking how they arrive in the country, why they vanish, and why it’s often the case...

Anthony was 27 years old when he vanished in 2012, near his home in Colchester, Essex. He withdrew cash at an ATM a few minutes walk from the house he shared with his parents. But from there… he seemingly vanished. Police investigators used data from his phone to reveal he’d last been around 2-3 miles from home, but they had no clue exactly where he had gone, or why. And for ten years there has be...