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.

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

We refuse to let these voices vanish.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 remains were found under a blanket behind a vacant mansion in Shaughnessy, about six kilometres away. Parts of her remains were missing, and the cause of death was undetermined. Police ruled her death not suspicious.

In this episode, we follow Chelsea’s family through a ten-day wait for a public alert and a nineteen-month search they largely carried themselves. We look at the questions the official story doesn’t answer and the investigations into how her case was handled, which are still unresolved. And we look at why her family, and Indigenous leaders across Canada, refuse to accept that no one knows what happened.

If you have information about Chelsea Poorman, contact the Vancouver Police Department’s Major Crime Section at 604-717-2500.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 made herself. Somewhere between 3:30 and 4 a.m. on November 1st, a friend dropped her off at her apartment complex outside State College, Pennsylvania. Cindy made it inside. That's the last thing anyone knows for certain.

In this episode we follow the days before anyone official stepped into her apartment. We cover a police department with no body and no crime scene, and a mother who flew in from Seoul and couldn't speak to investigators without a translator. We also cover the students, led by the Penn State Black Caucus, who refused to let her case go quiet.

Then come the leads: a sighting in Philadelphia's Chinatown, a taxi passenger who was never publicly identified, and an informant who tied Cindy to a man with bodies buried in his yard. Investigators have never been able to prove or disprove that last claim.

Cindy would be 46 today. If you have any information about her disappearance, please contact the Ferguson Township Police Department at (814) 237-1172.

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 everyone she knew. Then her phone went silent.

Prisma was born in Veracruz, Mexico. She arrived in Texas speaking only a few words of English and finished high school a year early. She became a paralegal while raising her son as a teen mom, and she served in the National Guard.

Police searched every floor, every door, and every elevator shaft of that building. They cleared everyone she called that day. They still can't say how she left, or whether she did.

In this episode, we follow Prisma's last day hour by hour, go through what investigators found and the theories that remain, and share how her family is still fighting for answers for her son.

If you have any information about Prisma's disappearance, please contact the Mesquite Police Department at 972-285-6336 (case #19038244). Anonymous tips: North Texas Crime Stoppers, 1-877-373-TIPS (8477).

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.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 knocking on doors trying to identify her, and no one in the unit called for about 12 hours. Everyone who was there told investigators they hadn't noticed she was gone.

In this episode, we go back to who Bella was and what brought her to Toronto, and then follow the night this took place.

We look at what police did, what Detective Darren Worth said publicly about what he believed, and why the case ended up "parked." We also look at how her sister, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, and her family went public, requested police and coroner files, and have kept Bella's memory alive on Lubicon land every summer since.

Police classified Bella's death as suspicious.

If you have information about the night of July 19 to 20, 2013, Toronto police have said they want to hear from you.

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.

And as always, refuse to let these voices vanish.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 up on a grieving family and told them to stop calling — twice, a month apart — and a rape kit that was never performed at all.

Then there's the detail that could have answered everything: the man with her that night told police they didn't have sex. In her bathroom trash can was a used condom, with semen that hadn't dried. Nobody ever tested it. Nobody ever will.

This episode traces the full story of Lauren's case: the night of her death, the investigation that barely happened, the eerily parallel case of Brenda Lee Rawls — another Black woman who died in Bridgeport that same day — and the years-long legal fight that followed.

We cover the internal affairs records that surfaced years later, the federal court ruling that reshaped both families' cases, and the two Connecticut laws that exist today because of what happened to Lauren.

This isn't a cold case from decades past. The internal affairs findings came out in 2024. The federal ruling came in 2025. The settlement was finalized in 2026 — this year. Lauren Smith-Fields' story is proof that these failures aren't history. They're still happening.

To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.