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.

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We refuse to let these voices vanish.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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