In the 1980s, dozens of women disappeared from San Diego, California. One of them was 26-year-old Cynthia Maine.

Cynthia was a daughter, sister, mother, and woman trying to survive addiction while working along El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego’s notorious red light district. By 1986, she was rebuilding her life. She had found work as a waitress, but she was also serving as a police informant. Just months before she vanished, she had allegedly begun an affair with one of her police contacts.

Late in February, she told her family she was going to watch a movie.

She never came home.

As investigators searched for Cynthia, few realized they were witnessing the beginning of one of the largest unsolved series of murders and disappearances in California history.

In the first episode of this three-part investigation, we examine Cynthia's disappearance alongside the murder of her friend Donna Gentile. Together, their stories reveal a hidden world of vice squads, confidential informants, police corruption, and the extraordinary risks faced by women living on the margins of San Diego in the mid-1980s.

This series asks how so many women could disappear from one city and why so many of their cases remain unsolved decades later.

📍 San Diego, California | February 1986

📖 Featuring an original poem written and read in her honor by Aimee Baker.

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On October 26, 1944, Gertrude "Tommy" Tompkins Silver took off from Mines Field in Los Angeles in a P-51 Mustang on what should have been a routine ferry flight.

She never arrived.

Gertrude was one of the pioneering Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), the civilian women who flew military aircraft during World War II so male pilots could be sent overseas. She was also the only WASP to disappear during the war whose aircraft has never been recovered.

In this episode, we explore Gertrude's extraordinary life, from a childhood marked by a debilitating stutter and an unlikely love of goats to world travel, flight, and a quiet wartime marriage just weeks before she vanished.

More than eighty years later, the fate of Gertrude Tompkins Silver remains one of the last great mysteries of the WASPs.

In this episode we talk about women in aviation, World War II history, and the enduring search for one remarkable pilot who never came home.

📍 Los Angeles, California | October 26, 1944

📖 Featuring an original poem written and read in her honor by Aimee Baker.

➡️ Help bring attention to missing and unidentified women—subscribe and share this episode.

📍 Find us on Instagram & Facebook.

📚 Get Aimee’s book, Doe, now available via University of Akron Press, Bookshop.org, and Amazon.

📰 For more women-centered true crime content, subscribe to Aimee’s newsletter, GIRLHUNT.

On May 26, 1970, twenty-six-year-old Ilonka Cann vanished from the rural Pennsylvania farmhouse she shared with her husband and fifteen-month-old son.

The day before, she had spoken with her parents in Ohio and talked about coming home for a visit that summer.

She never made that trip.

In the weeks and months that followed, investigators searched fields, ponds, and woodlots surrounding the isolated property where Ilonka was last believed to have been seen. Her family spent decades searching for answers as the case slowly faded from public memory.

More than fifty years later, renewed interest in Ilonka's disappearance led to new searches, a coroner's inquest, and testimony that cast the events of May 1970 in a very different light.

In 2024, a coroner's jury concluded that Ilonka Cann died by homicide at the hands of another person.

This episode examines the disappearance of Ilonka Cann, the decades-long search for answers, and what it means when official recognition arrives generations after a woman goes missing.

📍 Huntington Mills, Pennsylvania | May 26, 1970

📖 Featuring an original poem written and read in her honor by Aimee Baker.

➡️ Help bring attention to missing and unidentified women—subscribe and share this episode.

📍 Find us on Instagram & Facebook.

📚 Get Aimee’s book, Doe, now available via University of Akron Press, Bookshop.org, and Amazon.

📰 For more women-centered true crime content, subscribe to Aimee’s newsletter, GIRLHUNT.