Vanished Voices, The Overlooked

Not Today Studios
Not Today Studios
  • 5.0 (11)
  • True Crime

Silence can be louder than any scream. Vanished Voices is a true crime podcast that dives into the cases of the missing and the murdered whose stories were buried or ignored. They are echoes, whispers, and warnings from those who can no longer speak for themselves. Through deep research and heartfelt storytelling, this is where the silence is broken, and the vanished are finally heard.

  1. 2d ago

    Don't Jump to Conclusions - The Death of Lauren Smith-Fields

    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.

  2. Sep 10

    She Evaporated - The Disappearance of Lauren Cho

    In June of 2021, Lauren "El" Cho — a music teacher, baker, and tattoo artist from New Jersey — was living a new life she'd built for herself in the California high desert. Then, on an ordinary afternoon, she walked away from the bus she shared with a friend, and in the space of ten minutes, disappeared. What followed was a search that never turned up a single footprint. A friend's theory about a vehicle that investigators denied. A national spotlight that arrived only after another woman's disappearance made headlines — and a family that pushed back on the comparison, even while grateful for the attention it brought. Four months later, Lauren's remains were found in rugged desert terrain. The cause of her death would never be officially determined. This episode traces Lauren Cho's story from Hunterdon County, New Jersey, to Bombay Beach and Yucca Valley, California — through the search, the unanswered questions, and a case that still carries more "undetermined" than answered. 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.

  3. Sep 3

    Into the Dark - The Murder of Aubrey Dameron

    At 3:30 in the morning on March 9th, 2019, Aubrey Dameron told her mom she was going to meet someone. She walked out the door, down a two-football-field gravel driveway in Grove, Oklahoma, and into the dark. Her phone pinged one last time at 3:42 AM — just 100 yards from home — and then nothing. It would take six years, a Supreme Court ruling, and a family who refused to stop fighting to find out what happened to her. Aubrey was 25 years old. She deserved better. If you have any information about Aubrey's case, no matter how small, please contact the Quapaw Nation Marshal Service at 918-238-3137. Aubrey's family is still waiting for answers. Please, if you know something — say something. 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.

  4. Aug 27

    Have You Heard This Voice? — The Murder of Amber Tuccaro

    On August 18th, 2010, Amber Tuccaro — a 20-year-old mother from the Mikisew Cree First Nation — got into a car with a man she didn't know, on a gravel road just outside Edmonton. She was never seen alive again. What makes her case different from so many others is a single piece of evidence: a phone call, recorded almost by accident, capturing the last documented minutes of her life. Two years later, when investigators finally released that recording to the public, they weren't looking to bring Amber home. They already knew, by then, that they wouldn't be. This episode traces Amber's disappearance from that August night through the discovery of her remains, the recording that's never led to an identification, and more than a decade of documented failures by the RCMP — failures her family fought for years to bring into public view, resulting in a federal review, a public apology, and a case that remains open and unsolved to this day. We also look at the wider pattern her case sits inside: four other women found within the same small radius of Leduc County over the same decade, a national reckoning over missing and murdered Indigenous women, and a family that turned sixteen years of grief into public testimony, policy advocacy, and a refusal to let their daughter become a statistic. If you recognize the voice on that recording, please contact RCMP's Major Crimes Unit through the Leduc detachment directly, or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS or online at p3tips.com. Somebody knows something. 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.

  5. Aug 20

    Every Like, Deleted - The Disappearance of Nakyla Williams

    A doorbell camera catches the last confirmed image of Nakyla Williams: 24 years old, a hairstylist with her own basement salon, getting into a loud-engine pickup truck outside her mother's Indianapolis home on the evening of November 8th, 2021. She never comes home. What follows is a case built almost entirely out of absences. It takes IMPD three weeks to issue a public alert. The last person seen with her deletes every trace of their online history together and leaves the state. Her mother postpones a scheduled surgery to search fields near her own neighborhood instead. And a year later, police quietly walk back their own language — from "foul play not suspected" to "I can't say that." Nakyla's family is split on what actually happened to her — one theory points toward trafficking, another toward addiction and a fatal mistake — and neither has ever been confirmed. What has been confirmed is the silence since: no public update on this case since the summer of 2023. This episode traces the three-week gap before police went public, the confrontation with the last person to see her, the community search effort that may have been aimed at the wrong kind of disappearance entirely, and the national conversation about missing Black women that Nakyla's case became a part of without ever finding its own resolution. If you know anything about what happened to Nakyla Williams, contact the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's Missing Persons Unit at 317-327-6160, or Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana at 317-262-8477. 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.

  6. Aug 13

    Waiting in the Hallway - The Murder of Kanika Powell

    Kanika Powell did everything right. She refused to open her door to a stranger claiming to be with the FBI. She called the Bureau directly to check his story. She called the police. She emailed her friends and family, warning them, days before it happened. When two more strangers showed up at her door posing as delivery men, she refused them too, and confirmed with the carriers that no packages were ever coming. None of it saved her. On August 28th, 2008, Kanika returned home from running errands and was shot multiple times in the hallway of her Laurel, Maryland apartment building. She died the next day. She was twenty-eight years old — an Army veteran, a security specialist with a top-secret clearance, a devoted daughter and best friend, days away from a trip to Atlanta Pride with a woman she'd just started falling for. There was no eyewitness. No weapon was ever recovered. And despite a ballistics trail checked against every gun recovered in the county — and nationally — in the years since, Kanika's killer has never been identified. This week on Vanished Voices, we walk through the week of warnings that preceded Kanika's murder, sit down with the theories her family and investigators have chased for nearly two decades, and ask the question Prince George's County Cold Case Squad is still asking today: who wanted Kanika Powell dead, and why? If you have any information about the murder of Kanika Powell, call the Prince George's County Police Department at 301-352-1200, or PG County Crime Solvers at 1-866-411-TIPS. A reward of up to $25,000 is being offered for information leading to an arrest. 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.

  7. Aug 6

    Does She Feel Safer? A Conversation with SafeNest's Liz Ortenburger

    For decades, the domestic violence movement has operated on a familiar script: abuser is bad, survivor should leave, and the system's job is to punish after the fact. Liz Ortenburger, CEO of SafeNest — Nevada's largest domestic and sexual violence nonprofit, serving Clark County since 1977 — has spent the last ten years challenging that script from the inside. In this conversation, Liz walks us through the real, layered reasons abuse gets passed down through generations, and why SafeNest made the controversial decision to work directly with abusers alongside survivors. We talk about the DALE lethality assessment and the 4,300 people SafeNest had to turn away from shelter last year alone. We talk about "hope planning" — Liz's data-driven framework for helping at-risk kids see a future that doesn't repeat their past. And we talk candidly about where thirty years of well-intentioned policy — mandatory arrest, no-drop prosecution, VAWA — has and hasn't delivered for the people it was built to protect. Liz's core question threads through all of it: not "did the system punish him," but "does she feel safer." It's a reframe that has real implications for how we fund, measure, and talk about this work going forward. In this episode: Why abuse is often a generational, learned pattern — and what breaking that cycle actually requires The DALE lethality assessment and the resource gap in domestic violence shelters SafeNest's "hope planning" model and Camp HOPE The history and unintended consequences of mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution Why funding for abuser intervention programs is controversial — and why Liz thinks it shouldn't be What VAWA does and doesn't fund, and what's at stake in its 2027 reauthorization What listeners can actually do — for survivors, for policy, and in their own communities You can contact SafeNest, even if you aren't a resident of Nevada at: safenest.org Hotline: 702-646-4981 If you are in a situation where you don't feel safe, you can also reach out to: The National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) | Text START to 88788 | Live chat and 24/7 AI-assisted chat at thehotline.org — available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, offering free, confidential support with crisis intervention, safety planning, and referrals in more than 200 languages. This includes a quick exit option for browsers, and suggests clearing your browser history after visiting, with instructions on how to do just that. National Sexual Assault Hotline (RAINN) — 1-800-656-4673 National Human Trafficking Hotline — 1-800-373-7888 StrongHearts Native Helpline (for American Indian and Alaska Native survivors) — 1-844-762-8483 | Live chat and text support, offering culturally appropriate services NNEDV Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women — 1-888-7HELPLINE (743-5754) National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline — 866-331-9474 | TTY 866-331-8453 — for young people experiencing abuse or curious about healthy relationships NNEDV The Deaf Hotline — Video phone: 855-812-1001 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.

  8. Jul 30

    Nobody Came - The Disappearance of Ella Mae Begay

    In the early hours of June 15, 2021, Ella Mae Begay's daughter called 911 to report a break-in at her own home. No one came. Minutes later, she watched her mother's truck pull out of the driveway — a truck Ella Mae, a cautious woman who never drove after dark, would never have taken out herself. By the time officers finally responded to a second call, Ella Mae was gone. Her truck has never been found. Neither has she. Ella Mae was a master weaver known throughout the Navajo Nation, a grandmother of nine, and a mother whose son still texts her on her birthday. Her case would go on to become one of the most widely covered instances of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples in recent memory — not because law enforcement moved quickly, but because her niece, Seraphine Warren, walked 2,400 miles from Sweetwater, Arizona to Washington, D.C. to make sure the country couldn't look away. A suspect was identified within days, but not charged for two years. There was a confession thrown out by federal appeals judges, a plea deal a judge himself called too lenient, and a release from prison that came exactly five years — to the day — after Ella Mae vanished. No one has ever been charged with her disappearance. No homicide charge was ever filed. And Ella Mae Begay has never come home. If you know anything about the disappearance of Ella Mae Begay please contact any of the following: FBI FBI Phoenix Field Office: (623) 466-1999 National FBI tip line: 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324) BIA Missing & Murdered Unit Call: 1-833-560-2065 Text: BIAMMU and your tip to 847411 Email: OJS_MMU@bia.gov Navajo Nation Division of Public Safety: 928-871-6111 or 928-871-6112 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.

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Silence can be louder than any scream. Vanished Voices is a true crime podcast that dives into the cases of the missing and the murdered whose stories were buried or ignored. They are echoes, whispers, and warnings from those who can no longer speak for themselves. Through deep research and heartfelt storytelling, this is where the silence is broken, and the vanished are finally heard.

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