Welcome to Jigsaw - the brand new series from the makers of The Missing. Brought to you with Locate International. Jigsaw invites you to help pull together the pieces on an on-going case. There are more than 1,000 unidentified bodies in the UK. All of them will be mothers or fathers, daughters or sons. Their lives cut short - but without an ending. Can you help reunite these people with their name? This week we tell the story of The Balmore Man - discovered in Scotland, with several clues...

The first twenty-four hours of a missing person case are the most crucial. Its of vital importance that the authorities are working with the most accurate and up to date information in order to best direct their search efforts. Steven Durand was 31 when he went missing in Salford, in the North West of England. He was a mixed race man who walked with a limp, due to cerebral palsy. He had learning difficulties and mental health problems and was known to the local police as vulnerable. When the...

The disappearance of 14 year old schoolgirl Charlene Downes is one of the most notorious missing person cases in UK history. When Charlene vanished from Blackpool in the North West of England in November 2003, it resulted in a media frenzy, one monetized by tabloids cashing in on rumours and exploited for political purposes by the far-right. In the two decades since she vanished, countless theories have been suggested and dozens of suspects put forward, including members of Charlene’s own...

Sarm Heslop was never afraid to choose the road less travelled. The 41 year old from Southampton, couldn’t bear the thought of spending forty hours a week in an anonymous office, chained to a computer. Which is why, in the spring of 2021, she found herself working on a catamaran on St John in the US Virgin Islands. Sarm was working as the boat’s chef, captained by her partner at the time. One night, whilst moored at the harbour, the pair went ashore for dinner and drinks. Their return...

All of us have things that we associate with the people that we love: a smell of perfume they wear; a taste of something they might cook; a personal possession which they once gave us, or which once belonged to them. When it comes to her brother, Marshal, what pops into Paige Fogen’s head is his truck. Marshall drove a dark blue, 2009, GMC SIERRA pickup. It was his pride and joy. Marshall and Paige had driven thousands of miles together in it over the years. The siblings had gone through a...

In many missing person’s cases, there’s a potential suspect, a clear motive, or a reason why the missing person might have wanted to vanish….But sometimes cases come along with none of that. Cases which feel like such a mystery, it’s hard to know what to think or where to start. Cases like that of 51 year old mother and grandmother, Patricia Duncan, who disappeared more than 20 years ago from a quiet seaside village on the coast of Scotland. From the outside Patricia lived a full life. She...

In season seven of The Missing, we’re examining, for the first time, missing person cases outside of the UK and Ireland. Today’s episode takes us to the United States, and the city of Tenino, Washington. That’s where Nancy Moyer, a 36 year old mother of two, who worked at the department of ecology, lived. When her daughter Sam thinks of her, she imagines Nancy smoking on the porch of her house. She recalls her enjoying a glass of wine in the kitchen. She remembers the feeling of her mother’s...

The moment when a child enters adulthood is a tricky time for every parent. Do you get involved when they make mistakes, or in a bid for independence, do you let them figure it out themselves? For Anthea Langelaan, this question was one she grappled with endlessly. Every time she reached out a helping hand to her son, Cian, who lived in a small village in Donegal, Ireland, he would refuse all offers of assistance or guidance. Eventually, she made the tough choice to simply let him go his own...

Living in a big city can make you feel small. It’s easy to feel isolated - despite being surrounded by millions of people - to lose sense of community and, perhaps, your self. Community was very important to Svetlozar Yotov, who lived in Angel, in central London. To the 30 year old aspiring culinary entrepreneur, his personal relationships were the most valuable things in his life. You could see it in the way he interacted with his flatmates - whom he loved to cook for - and in every text,...

THE MISSING IS BACK. We're thrilled to announce the new series of The Missing is complete, and the first episode will be available on Wednesday February 14th. We have eight more episodes - eight more unsolved long-term missing cases which need your help. And - for the first time - we're adding something different. We've integrated the podcast with Missing People's Urgent Appeals, meaning that if there's an urgent appeal for a recently missing person, you'll get the detail delivered straight...

We're just a week away from the brand new series of The Missing. While we wait - why not check out another show, from the same team. Smoking Gun tells the story of the extraordinary ways in which forensic science has solved crimes. It's hosted by Tracy Alexander - Britain's best known forensic scientist - and the first episode is out now. If you enjoy it - there's 30 more episodes available to binge. And a brand new episode every week. Members of What's The Story Crime can already hear...

Pandora is back to give listeners a quick update on the next season of The Missing. And she recommends a brand new podcast, hosted by Stephen Fry! The Missing Lines is available now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Imagine you’re working at a fairground. All around you, ferris wheels are rotating, bumper cars are colliding at top speed and the air is full of the sound of raucous laughter and the smell of deep fried food. What a place to be when whilst casually scrolling through your phone you spot a message from someone. Someone who knows your brother. Someone who is getting in touch to tell you that your brother is missing. The emotional whiplash Robbie Hives felt at that moment, when he found out that...

Isabella Skelton was many things to many people but first and foremost, to her daughter Lynda, she was a Mum. The void she left in the lives of those who loved her has remained, ever since the day she vanished back in 1969, when she left her home on Lidiard Street in Crumpsall, Manchester and was never seen again. Strangely, Isabella wasn’t reported missing to the authorities at the time of her disappearance. Fifty years later, Lynda, determined to find out what happened that day, walked into...

It's hard to ever truly know what's going on in someone’s head. Most of us are fighting private battles, the details of which we don’t disclose to even the dearest people to us. Trevor Farthing, who lived in St Helen’s, Merseyside, was no stranger to mental anguish. Over the years, his long term partner Marie saw in front of her very eyes how the joyful and generous man she’d spent more than three decades with, could fall victim to bouts of acute anxiety and severe depression. There were...

Whenever someone goes missing, we inevitably put our last interaction with them under a microscope. For Ann Margaret Allan, her final conversation with her brother Sammy Townsley is one that will be forever seared into her memory. Growing up in a traveller family, he saw his fair share of discrimination from an early age and sadly, as he made his way through adolescence and into adulthood, he found solace in bad company and illicit substances. Sammy would occasionally get into trouble with...

Imelda Keenan kept a diary, where she wrote down her most personal feelings and aspirations. In 1994, she was 22 years old and living in Waterford City in the Southeast of Ireland. There she lived in a second story bedsit just a stone’s throw away from the river Suir. She was a student, she had a boyfriend and a family that loved her. But on January 3rd, she walked out of her home and was never seen again. A home her family have since searched every inch of, for Imelda’s diary, hoping to find...

You’re in your home office. It's the middle of a busy work day and the house phone rings. You pick up, slightly irritated at the interruption, only to be greeted by the police and asked if you are your father’s next of kin. We all know that nothing good comes after that question. Kate Armitage, whose father, Neil Skinner went missing in the Scottish highlands in 2022, lived that experience. After slowly piecing together her elderly father’s movements, who had neglected to tell his family he...

Older sisters, for those of us that have them, leave an indelible mark on the lives of their younger siblings. Whether it's the music they played, the jokes they told, or the secrets they shared, being around them felt like a sneak preview of adulthood. Jill Brown, who was nineteen years old when she vanished without trace from the seaside town of Dovercourt, Essex, was beloved by her younger sister Libbi. So much so that she insisted on meeting her at her bus stop every evening when she got...

The sixth series of The Missing begin with the heartbreaking story of Aamina Khan. We urge you to listen to her father, Safraz. Imagine you’re a parent, sharing custody of your young child with an ex partner. You go to collect them one day and no-one answers the door. Perhaps wires have been crossed and dates and pickup times have been miscommunicated? That wasn’t the case for Safraz Khan, who in 2011 learned that his ex-wife had abducted their eight year old daughter Aamina and taken her to...

SERIES 6 IS COMING! Join us for a brand new series on October 25th. We'll have new episodes EVERY WEDNESDAY. And if you can't wait - the whole series will be available to binge from October 25th exclusively on Crime Corner! Crime Corner is your home for brilliant true-crime storytelling. Subscribers can get access to every episode from every series of The Missing completely ad-free. PLUS - your subscription helps to ensure we can bring the show back season after season. And that's not all -...

 When it comes to long term missing person's cases, you never quite know when you're going to catch a break. Most lay dormant for years at a time, with nothing in the way of new clues or leads, leaving relatives and authorities alike feeling like they've exhausted every avenue of inquiry... Such was the case for Lauren Saffery, whose mother Lisa Pour was last seen in Willesden Green in north west London on the 16th of January, 2013. For close to a decade, there wasn’t a shred of fresh...

It's a sad fact of life that in the major cities of the world, missing person cases are a dime a dozen. In places like London, New York and Tokyo, tens of thousands of people vanish every year, to the point where they’re barely even newsworthy. But in a quiet seaside village like Killala, on the west coast of Ireland, the disappearance of just one person can upend an entire community. That’s what happened when twenty eight year old Sandra Collins left her home on a wet December night in the...

On the 23rd of March 2020, due to the growing threat posed by the coronavirus, the United Kingdom locked down. For most of us, it marked the start of many months spent trapped in our homes, where the lack of freedom and face to face contact with others, had a profound effect on our collective mental health.  One such person was James Miller, a thirty-seven year old mechanic, who on the night of December 22nd 2020 walked out of his family home, never to return. James was already wrestling...