She Goes by Jane: A True Crime Podcast

Three women disappeared from Pinellas County, Florida over the course of fifteen years.
They came from different backgrounds. Their lives followed different paths. But their disappearances would eventually point investigators toward the same man.
In 1974, Margaret Dash left home to buy medicine for a sick relative and never returned. In 1982, Retha Hiers drove out to buy laundry detergent and vanished. In 1989, college student Donyelle Johnson left for class but never arrived.
Each woman left behind a family searching for answers. Decades later, investigators would come to suspect Cleveland Hill Jr., a married former minister and asphalt contractor with a documented history of violence who was repeatedly investigated but never charged in connection with their disappearances.
This week, we examine the lives of Margaret Dash, Retha Hiers, and Donyelle Johnson, the evidence that links their cases, and the unanswered questions that continue to haunt Pinellas County more than fifty years after Margaret first disappeared.
📍 Pinellas County, Florida
📅 1974–1989
If you have information about the disappearances of Margaret Dash, Retha Hiers, or Donyelle Johnson, please contact the appropriate law enforcement agency.
📖 Featuring an original poem written and read in her honor by Malynda Hale.
➡️ Help bring attention to missing and unidentified women—subscribe and share this episode.
📍 Find us on Instagram & Facebook and Patreon.

📚 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.

More about Malynda Hale:

Malynda Hale is an award-winning actress, filmmaker, singer-songwriter, and storyteller based in Los Angeles. Working across film, television, music, and digital media, her work explores themes of identity, humanity, faith, race, and emotional connection through cinematic storytelling and character-driven narratives.
Most recently, she starred in the feature film Bull Street alongside Loretta Devine and Amy Madigan and made her directorial debut with the short film Curtain Call, which screened at festivals internationally including Bend Film Festival, GAZE International LGBTQIA Festival, and Middlebury NewFilmmakers Festival. Her second short film, Au Gratin, starring Tiffany Daniels, Loretta Devine, and Jay Donnell, was selected for the Poppy Jasper International Film Festival and Wyoming International Film Festival, and will also screen at the LightReel Film Festival in Washington, D.C. and the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival in August, an Oscar-qualifying festival. She is also the founder of JMV Entertainment, a production company focused on developing film, television, and media projects rooted in meaningful storytelling.
Before expanding into filmmaking, Malynda built a career as a singer-songwriter and performer, releasing multiple independent projects and opening for artists including Smokey Robinson and OTOWN. Her music has appeared on television, including CBS and Disney productions, and she has performed for audiences ranging from the Los Angeles Dodgers to the California Democratic Convention. Across every medium she works in, Malynda is passionate about telling stories that create empathy, challenge systems, and connect people more deeply to one another.

Law enforcement called some of San Diego's missing and murdered women "NHIs," short for No Humans Involved. It was police slang used to describe victims they believed didn't matter.
By 1988, the number of women disappearing from San Diego County had become impossible to ignore. Years before, the sheriff had said there was not a disproportionate number of women, but by the time forty-three women were murdered or went missing, the public started pushing for answers.
There would be few to find.
In the final episode of our three-part series, we examine the investigation that became one of the largest homicide task forces in California history, the competing theories that shaped the search for answers, and the unidentified women who remain without names decades later. We also explore how police culture, public perception, and systemic failures influenced which victims received urgency and which did not.
The women of El Cajon Boulevard were never one story. They were daughters, mothers, sisters, and friends whose lives intersected in a city that too often looked away.
This is the final chapter of San Diego's Lost Women.
📍 San Diego, California  | 1980s - 1990s
📖 Featuring an original poem written and read in her honor by Jennifer Cox.
➡️ 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.

More about Jennifer Cox:

Jennifer combines a glowing personality with outlandish humor to invent her own comedic style. She burst on the scene in 1995 with her excellent yet underrated performance as middle child "Jan Brady" in "The Brady Bunch" movies.

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.
📍 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.

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.