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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We refuse to let these voices vanish.

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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 in his backyard in Monte Nido — six miles from the station. She tells his wife she's "just resting." She's gone before deputies arrive. It's the last confirmed sighting of Mitrice Richardson alive.

What unfolds over the next eleven months is a search effort plagued by decisions that defy explanation. K9 dogs pick up Mitrice's scent and are pulled off the trail. A two-day search is cancelled after one day. A volunteer drone is redirected away from the area where her remains will eventually be found. Over 300 volunteers comb 18 square miles and come up empty. Privately organized searches discover disturbing, racially offensive graffiti in a canyon drainage culvert — which authorities paint over.

And then, in August 2010, California State Park Rangers — who are not looking for Mitrice at all — find skeletal remains in a remote creek bed in Dark Canyon. Residents had reported hearing screams from the canyon in the nights after Mitrice disappeared.

The coroner rules the cause of death undetermined. The sheriff's department says no foul play. Deputies move the remains against the coroner's explicit orders, then can't lead investigators back to the correct location. Critical evidence — including Mitrice's clothing — goes missing from the chain of custody. The family is taken to what they later believe was the wrong discovery site, where they find a bone left in the dirt.

No one has ever been charged. No one has ever been held accountable. Mitrice's mother, Latice Sutton, who spent sixteen years fighting for answers, died in September 2025 without ever learning what happened to her daughter.

This one stays with you.

If you have any information about the disappearance and death of Mitrice Richardson, please contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department at (323) 890-5500 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477. A $25,000 reward is available for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

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

Follow @VanishedVoicesPod on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, and please if you enjoy Vanished Voices, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

We refuse to let these voices vanish.

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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 couldn't pay her bill.

The staff didn't just call the police — they called because they were worried about her safety. One employee refused to cover her tab, saying: "She's not safe to go out on her own."

Deputies arrested Mitrice on minor charges and drove her to the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station in Calabasas. Her mother called, begging them not to release her. They promised they wouldn't.

At 12:28 AM, they let her walk out the door — no phone, no money, no car, no way home — into the pitch-black canyons of Malibu. She vanished.

What followed was eleven months of botched searches, hidden surveillance footage, contradicted testimony, and a department that insisted, at every turn, that everything was fine.

This one stays with you.

If you have any information, contact the LASD at (323) 890-5500 or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-8477. There is a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

Find part two next week in your feed, we will close this one out, and you will continue to rage, just like we did.

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

Follow @VanishedVoicesPod on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, and please if you enjoy Vanished Voices, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

We refuse to let these voices vanish.

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