Show Notes
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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More from She Goes by Jane: A True Crime Podcast
“If something happens to me, don’t give up until you find out what happened," Pamela Butler told her brother. He could never have guessed he would need to do just that.
For years, Steven Sherer had called his wife, Jami Hagel Sherer, over and over whenever she was away from him. It was a way for him to constantly monitor where she was, who she was with, and to control her actions. On September 30, 1990, he called Jami’s parents’ house twice. And then the phone stopped ringing.Jami had told her mother that morning that she was leaving Steven. Jami told her mother she just wanted to gather a few belongings, grab her favorite lunch, and then return to her parents’ house. It should have taken minutes.Jami never arrived.When Jami didn’t arrive and Steven didn’t call, her mother worried the two had reconciled. But when Steven showed up without Jami claiming he hadn’t seen her, her mother knew something was very wrong. Jami Hagel has been missing since that day in 1990. Listen to Part 2.📍 Redmond, Washington | September 30, 1990
In 1986, 22-year-old Jami Hagel met Steven Sherer at a bar in Redmond, Washington. He was charming, persistent, and was soon sending her a dozen roses. Within months, the relationship that started with romance would become something far more frightening.
On a June night in 1950, seventeen-year-old Barbara Kelley left home for a date with Henry Baird, a 28-year-old World War II veteran she had been seeing for several months. Barbara told her parents she would spend the night at a friend’s house in nearby Eureka. There was no reason for them to worry. The next morning, Henry was found nude on a remote beach along the Northern California coast. He had been shot to death. His companion, Barbara, was nowhere to be found.Henry had been shot in the back of the head. Nearby, his clothes were found neatly stacked. With them were Barbara’s clothes. But there was no sign of Barbara. Within hours, police began to investigate the theory the teenager had been involved in Henry’s death. In the years since the murder and disappearance, speculation has run rampant including false confessions, searches through the woods, and a connection to an eerily similar case in another county.But at the heart of it all is Barbara Kelley, a seventeen-year-old girl who went on a date and never came home.📍 Humboldt County, California | June 17, 1950
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