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 busy downtown street in broad daylight, and despite the support of Ed and Elizabeth Smart, hundreds of volunteers, and investigators in two countries, she stayed missing for three years.

Then, in May 2018, a man pulled off the road in Hobble Creek Canyon and found her remains just steps from the pavement. No cause of death has ever been determined.

A penny found at the site carried a man’s DNA. And a church picnic she attended four days before she disappeared was held at the mouth of the very same canyon.

Eleven years later, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office is still asking for help. If you were in Provo in the spring of 2015, or at Kelly’s Grove on April 12, please call the Investigations Division at 801-851-4010.

To see the sources we used to create this episode read more about this case, visit our website at vanishedvoicespodcast.com, or click here.

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