She Goes by Jane: A True Crime Podcast

In October 1985, 19-year-old Mary Colette Rawlinson walked out of a home in San Diego, California, telling her boyfriend she'd be right back. She was never seen again.
As more women disappeared from El Cajon Boulevard and the surrounding communities, investigators struggled to answer a troubling question: were these isolated crimes, or was someone hunting women across San Diego County?
In Part Two of our three-part series, we widen the lens beyond a single case to examine the growing pattern of disappearances and murders targeting women living at the intersection of addiction, poverty, and survival sex work. Through the stories of Mary Colette Rawlinson and the women who vanished alongside her, we look at how fear spread through the community while families fought to convince authorities that their daughters deserved to be searched for.
The mounting number of victims would eventually force law enforcement to confront the possibility that the cases were connected, but by then, many women were already gone.
This is Part Two of our three-part series, San Diego's Lost Women.
📍 San Diego, California  | October 1985

📖 Featuring an original poem written and read in her honor by Lahna Turner.
➡️ Help bring attention to missing and unidentified women—subscribe and share this episode.
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📚 Get Aimee’s book, Doe, now available via University of Akron Press, Bookshop.org, and Amazon.
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More about Lahna Turner:

Lahna Turner is a comedian, filmmaker, writer, producer, co-director, and published comic book author whose work spans stand-up, television, film, music, publishing, and documentary storytelling.
For more than two decades, Lahna has built a loyal following with fearless comedy, sharp observations, and an unfiltered perspective on relationships, motherhood, grief, family, and the messy realities of life. Her credits include NBC, Comedy Central, Netflix, Hulu, VH1, Animal Planet, CMT, truTV, and SiriusXM.
Known for blending stand-up with original music, Lahna’s one-hour special A Song About It and albums including If These Lips Could Talk, D!@k Jokes and Other Assorted Love Songs, and Limeade showcase her ability to find humor in life’s most uncomfortable truths.
She is also the creator and published author of the four-book Pounds of Power comic series, and the producer and co-director of Come What May, the documentary chronicling the life, legacy, struggles, and impact of comedian Ralphie May.
Whether on stage, on screen, or on the page, Lahna Turner tells stories that make people laugh, think, feel, and connect.

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.
➡️ 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 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.

On November 2, 1945, fourteen-year-old Thora Chamberlain left school in Campbell, California, expecting to attend a football game that evening.
Her friends saved her a seat.
Thora never arrived.
Witnesses later reported seeing her speaking with a man dressed as a serviceman before getting into his vehicle. Within weeks, investigators focused on Thomas McMonigle, a local laborer with a history of violence. Over the course of the investigation, McMonigle gave multiple confessions, led authorities to key pieces of evidence, and was ultimately convicted of Thora's murder.
But investigators never found the one thing that mattered most.
Thora herself.
More than eighty years later, Thora Chamberlain remains one of California's earliest no-body homicide victims. Her body has never been recovered.
In this episode, we examine the disappearance of Thora Chamberlain, the investigation that followed, and the evidence that secured a conviction despite the absence of a body.
This is a story about loss, memory, and the empty seat left behind when a child never comes home.
📍 Campbell, California | November 2, 1945

📖 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.