Crime Junkie - MISSING: Bradley Sisters

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

When a pair of young sisters vanished from their home in Chicago, they left behind a mystery that has haunted their family for almost two decades.For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/missing-bradley-sisters/ 

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and I'm Brett. And the story I have for you today is as baffling as it is tragic. Two radiant young sisters with a very special bond go from enjoying a beautiful summer day in the city to leaving behind a mystery that has endured for almost 20 years. This is the story of Tianda and Diamond Bradley. Early on the morning of July 6, 2001, a woman named Tracy Bradley is in her apartment on the south side of Chicago, getting ready to go to work. Now, she's working at a neighborhood park where she makes lunches for all the kids who come to this like summer camp program. So she's got to be there really early to help make sure like everyone's got something to eat. They've got everything settled.

Now, Tracy does have kids of her own. She's actually got four young daughters, but only two of them. Tianda, who's 10, and Diamond, who's the baby of the family at three, are with her that morning. So where are the other two? Well, Tracy's other daughters, Victoria and Rita, actually stayed over at their grandma's house the night before. And basically everyone's planning on meeting up later for a picnic and a camping trip just across the state border, actually over here in Indiana. So right now it's just Tracy, Tianda, Diamond, and Diamond's dad, George, who spent the night with Tracy. So he's there too, like getting up with Tracy, helping with the kids, and he actually has to drop Tracy off at work at the park. So after Tracy finishes getting ready for work and making sure that the girls have their breakfast, she tells Tianda,

remember, don't open the door for anyone while I'm gone. She kisses their foreheads, says goodbye, locks the apartment door behind her and goes to work. Later that morning around seven or eight o'clock, Tracy calls Tianda just to check in, but Tianda doesn't pick up the phone. Now, Tracy doesn't love this. I mean, they're young girls at home. It makes her a little bit nervous, but it's more of this like twinge, not like a full panic. After all, still early, she figures, you know, maybe the girls like got up, ate their breakfast, went back to bed, like all curled up together. No big deal. So after this, she finishes her shift. George picks her up like they planned. Did he like not go to work either? Actually, no. George didn't go to work. He during this time had like gone over to visit another woman that he's seeing and then actually goes to visit his mom and then goes and gets Tracy. So he's not like at work and then picking her up. He's kind of like out doing whatever.

So he picks her up and they go back to Tracy's apartment around 11 a.m. Now, when they get there, she unlocks the door. And the first thing she does is she starts calling out for her daughters because remember, I mean, she hasn't spoken to them since she left. She wasn't able to reach them on the phone. So she starts calling out Diamond and Tianda's names, but the girls don't answer. Tracy calls out again, like a little louder this time, but her heart starts pounding in her chest as the silence starts to sink in. Her daughters still aren't answering her. By this time, she and George are going like room to room looking frantically for any sign of Tianda or Diamond because just beyond her like normal mom worry at this point. Tracy knows that this is super out of character for Tianda. She wouldn't leave the house without an adult.

And then right then, Tracy and George find a note. According to Jeremy Garner and Grace Wong's reporting in the Chicago Tribune, this note is left on the back of the couch. And I wasn't able to find an exact copy of it. And there's some actually different sources out there about what specifically it says. But they all agree that this note looks like it was written by Tianda. Heavy reported that it says basically like, Hey, we went to the corner store, but another Chicago Tribune article from back in like 2001 says that it mentioned that they went to Tianda school, which was a couple of blocks away to play at the playground. So I don't know exactly where they were going, but I'm pretty sure that both of those locations are actually pretty close. It's not like, Hey, we're running away. We're never coming back. They were saying, Hey, we stepped out for a bit and we're really nearby. Exactly. Yeah. Hey, we went out, whether it's corner store, whether it's school, it's close by and we'll be right back.

Right. And I guess the idea with leaving this note is that they would be right back. Right. But I guess I'm assuming that they're gone by the time their mom calls around eight. But if they would be right back, they'd probably be back before their mom got home to check on them. I guess, why leave a note at all in that case? Oh, I see what you're saying, because if we know they're gone at eight, we're assuming if the note was written by them, it was left before that. You're not going to go to the corner store for like three hours. Yeah, I don't know. Why even leave the note? Like just in case they stay longer, I don't get the point. Oh, I think there's a lot of mystery surrounding this note, which we'll kind of get into.

And I wish I could, I could tell you because there's again, nothing more I know about this note and so much about it doesn't sit right with Tracy. So she actually, as soon as she sees this, I mean, she must have the same feelings because she immediately starts like running all around the neighborhood looking for her girls right away. I mean, she looks everywhere she could think of any place with even the tiniest chance that Tiana and Diamond might have stopped by like at any point. But no matter how far and wide in her neighborhood she looks, corner store, school, whatever, it's no use. She doesn't find them anywhere. Has she called the police yet to report them missing? But at this point, Tracy doesn't report Tiana and Diamond missing to police until around 6 or 6 30 that night. But when she does, police take it seriously right away. And by the next day, this is a huge investigation.

According to Maria Cancevellis in the Chicago Tribune, police spend Saturday night canvassing the whole apartment complex with public housing officials. I mean, they're handing out flyers with the girls pictures on it asking if anybody's seen or knows anything about where the girls might be. They're going all out on this. Yeah. And one of the main thoughts right in those like early days of this investigation is that these girls might have just wondered somewhere a little bit different than maybe the note said and gotten into some kind of trouble. Again, not like foul play, but what they're thinking is their apartment's only about a half mile away from one of these like big beaches on Lake Michigan. So police are like focusing a lot of energy on the 31st Street Beach thinking, you know, maybe somehow they got there. And for anyone who's not familiar with Lake Michigan, I mean, it is as massive as an ocean. I mean, you can't see the end of it. It has like currents like you wouldn't believe it can be very dangerous water.

So by July 8th, a Marine unit is already searching the lake and helicopters are skimming overhead looking for any trace of either girl. And honestly, at this point, I was kind of surprised at how big this investigation got and how fast it got there. Like the Chicago law enforcement, at least in this case, really like showed up for this one. And they put a lot of time like pouring over that note and then also like putting feet on the ground looking for clues. OK, but going back to the note, are police 100% confident that Tiana wrote this? Well, here's the thing. So remember how I said that it was super out of character for Tiana to leave the house without an adult? Yeah. So her family says it's also very out of character that Tiana would leave this note at all.

Like normally they say that she would just call her mom if she needed to tell her something or maybe ask permission to go somewhere, like again, to the corner store, to the school, whatever. But beyond that, the girl's great aunt Sheila went on Cold Case Chicago, which is like a show. And she said that the note didn't sound anything like Tiana. She said it read totally different than how Tiana talked. And that's why that she and the rest of the family take this note honestly as a sign of the worst. I mean, from the minute they saw it, they said they believe that the girls were kidnapped and they think that Tiana was either coached forced, coerced into writing this note by whoever took them from the house.

But in theory, it is still in handwriting that is to be assumed to be Tiana's. Yeah. Every source that I have read says that it looks like her handwriting or it is her handwriting or it's, you know what I mean? But everyone's saying like, yeah, we're not saying she didn't write it, but we're saying she wouldn't have written this without someone telling her to. This way or at all. Right. Is there anybody that the family like has in mind that may want to take the girls? Not outright. The Girls Great Aunt Sheila mentioned something to the Chicago Tribune about two men being in the apartment the day that the girls vanished.

And she says, quote, whoever it was knew that those girls were alone. End quote. But I couldn't find anything else about who they might have been or why these two guys might have been in their apartment. And honestly, you'll see that this case is full of little snippets like this. These leads that don't pan out and questions where the answers just lead to even more questions. But then just days into the investigation, some unusual behavior turns everyone's focus a little bit closer to home. At some point early on in the investigation, Diamond and Tiana's mom Tracy doesn't quite fully cooperate with police. What does that mean?

Well, Tracy does some things in the early stages of the investigation that really just raise some eyebrows. I read on CNN that Tracy actually changes her story about what happened that morning. Like she initially told police that she was at home asleep when the girls went missing. And then it was later that she admitted that she had actually left home and gone to work. And it was while she was gone that they went missing. Now, I did read this on like a Nancy Grace transcript. So I'm taking it with a little bit of grain of salt because oftentimes when things get corrected, they don't necessarily get corrected there. But to me, it is totally the type of a thing that like a scared single mom would say if she didn't want.

I was actually just going to bring that up. Like again, having some history working with top protective services like you aren't going to admit that you left your kids by themselves. And now something bad happened to them, like especially knowing that she has other children in her care. Exactly. Well, it could flag to like the Department of Family Services that maybe something's going on. Like you shouldn't be leaving your young children at home. So, you know, she's got two girls that are missing and now she risks losing potentially the other two. So I mean, I get why why her story was different at first.

But I think the second story that we got was the real one. But beyond maybe her changing story, Tracy does some other things that send up red flags for police. ABC News reported that Tracy refuses to provide a handwriting sample that law enforcement could use to compare against that note from the couch. Like, I mean, obviously they want to see if she was the one who wrote the note as opposed to Tiana and maybe this thing was like totally staged, but she would not give them a sample to compare to. And also, she and the family won't let police talk to her other daughters, Rita and Victoria, at least right away. And then the final thing that everyone thought was kind of bizarre is a few days after the girls went missing, police had found some surveillance footage from a convenience store that they thought maybe potentially the two girls could have been on.

So they asked Tracy to come down and take a look at it. But instead of like herring down right away to take a look, Tracy just kind of says no. Now, she eventually does come in and check the tape after several days. But the fact that she wasn't in a greater hurry, I think they had people questioning like, I mean, your girls are missing. How do you know it's not them? Why aren't you like, why aren't you running unless you know it's not? Now, it's really interesting because the article I mentioned said that at this point in the investigation, police still didn't have any evidence of foul play. So are they saying that the girls ran away?

No, and I actually don't think that they're saying that at all. Like, I know we see that a lot in cases where like things kind of go off the rails and if kids are missing and there's no evidence, they kind of make that assumption. But the article says specifically that at the same time that they're not saying there's foul play, they were also putting together what they called a parallel criminal investigation and asking the FBI for help. So all I think that they meant is that in this case, they didn't have hard evidence of what happened so they can't necessarily prove foul play. But clearly, I mean, again, if you're putting a criminal investigation together, you're asking the FBI for help. They obviously had some kind of suspicion that these girls probably most likely did not walk away on their own. And as you can imagine, again, as they're they're talking about this parallel criminal investigation, but they're saying maybe no foul play. Tracy is getting a lot of flack in the press for not cooperating with law enforcement in the way that people thought she should have.

But I do think it's important that we look a little bit closer because to me, it's just not that simple. Like here is a black single mother living on the south side in literally one of the most segregated cities in the country looking at a police department with a long and well documented reputation for using brutality and violence against people of color. So I mean, you have this disparity. I mean, she probably wasn't comfortable talking or working with police. Definitely. And beyond just the CPD, there's also the fear, like you said earlier, of having her other kids taken away from her because of leaving Diamond and Tiana alone. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, I'm trying to imagine what that must be like.

And for so many reasons, I can't at this point. And I will never be able to, you know, look at her situation and be like, I know exactly how I would react in this situation because I will never truly be able to identify with her. Right. And I, you know, we've talked about this before, I think in so many cases where we've always just said very generally, like, you don't know what you would do in that situation. You don't know how you would respond. Right. But this is even above and beyond what we've mentioned before in a lot of ways. Yeah.

And again, I just keep coming back to her trying to protect her other two daughters because I think what's so important too is not just how police interact with people of color in this specific community. But really when I kind of started looking into how the like CPS and foster care system deals with people of color. And when I was researching for this story, I read on the appeals website that in 2000, which is just a year before Tiana and Diamond disappeared, 36% of the kids in foster care were black. Even though black kids only made up about 15% of like all of the kids in our population in the country. Right. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with how Tracy acts here, but I can see why. I mean, even if she truly had nothing to do with her daughter's disappearances, she would be wary of law enforcement and of this like bigger system, if you know what I mean. Plus that same ABC News article does say that she's acting on the advice of her lawyer, which I think is super important to point out.

Yeah, I was going to ask that earlier to see if she was under advice of counsel at all. Yeah, so I mean, she's doing exactly what we preach every single week. I mean, that is a crime junkie life role always get a lawyer. So regardless of their feelings about Tracy, though, law enforcement keeps their foot on the gas to find these girls. So it's not like they get so focused in that they stop searching. I was honestly, again, surprised at how big this investigation got because in the first week after their disappearance, 500 officers were involved and that's just police. We're not counting fire department divers like the ones that were like scouring like Michigan. They had canine units hunting for sense.

They had FBI agents involved. And as the summer goes on, the investigation becomes one of the largest manhunts in Chicago's history. I mean, they had a hotline, a command post, dedicated tactical teams, literally the whole nine yards, all investigating every single tip that comes in. But no matter how much manpower they threw at this thing, it was no use. It was as if Diamond and Tiana had literally just vanished into thin air. And the next thing the public really heard was from the FBI. They had come out two weeks after the girls disappeared to say that, in fact, like confirmed by the FBI that Tiana did write that note. I mean, I guess that's good to know, but it doesn't really change anything for me.

Like I never questioned whether or not she wrote it. Anyone could have forced her to do that. Right. Right. No, I totally agree. And the fact that like Tiana wrote it doesn't rule out any of the possibilities that are on the table so far. So the next big break that we hear about and at some point, I wasn't able to find out exactly when police learn about a voicemail that they're hoping could be the big break. That they've been looking for.

According to CNN, on the morning that she and her sister disappeared, Tiana actually called Tracy while Tracy was at work and she left a message on her phone. And here, Brett, I want you to read me what it is reported. She said, the voicemail says, ma, this is Tiana. Pick up the phone ma. George is at the door. He says that we're coming to pick you up from work and we're going to jewels to get the cake. And then the voicemail ends. Wait, George, is that diamonds dad who was staying with them the night before?

So here's one of the things that is so crazy about this case. It might have been that George, but it might not have because as their great aunt Sheila said on CNN in 2011, there's George Washington. That's actually his name. That's diamonds dad. And then there's another man that she calls George and they spell his last name S-E-N-O-R. So again, we only have the transcript of this and the transcript had a like P-H in parentheses after it, which means that the transcriber just spelled it how they thought it sounded. So it could be senior, senior, senior. Honestly, I don't know, but we have this George Washington and then this other George who Sheila says is a close family friend of the Bradleys and he used to babysit the girls from time to time.

So we don't know which one it is in this case. Exactly, because the voicemail as far as we are told, the voicemail has no last name. Just George is at the door. I mean, this is making a lot of sense to me. You said earlier that everyone in the family said that if Tiana needed anything, she would definitely call her mom and not just jot down the note that she left. So this is almost more proof to me that something is up with that note because she did reach out to her mom. Well, and what I think is so weird is clearly we have this voicemail where she is calling her mom. I mean, we have her voice.

You can't say it's not her voice. Right. We're talking about this George on the other side of the door, taking them to get cake. But then why not write something about George in the note? So it almost seems to me like if all of this is related, it's more proof again that this note was coerced and like someone made her write that. And maybe that person didn't even know she called her mom and there's this like discrepancy and they they're thinking that they're covering their tracks, but really they're like adding more questions. Yeah, because even in the voicemail, she says that George is at the door, not that here he's with us, etc. Right.

The thought is that George isn't even in their home yet. Right. When the cake gets brought up in the voicemail, the first thing I went to is like the candy in the white van theory. Oh, yeah. Is the cake just a way to get them out of the house? Something to lure them or? I honestly, from the sources that I read, I don't think so. I honestly think this is more proof that whoever was on the other side of that door and, you know, we both we know that both the Georges knew them.

But I think it's proof that whoever was on the other side of the door knew this family well because the day after the girls disappear, July 7th is actually their sister Victoria's birthday. So if this is some kind of ploy, it's a really smart one because you can see how if it is someone they trusted one of these Georges in their life. Why wouldn't they be picking up a cake for their sister's birthday? Such a believable story, right? Like, hey, we're just going to run this errand for your sister or then we're going to go pick up your mom. And if it really was George Washington, I mean, he's only got this narrow timeframe between this call, getting the girls, doing whatever with them before going to pick up Tracy for work. So again, I don't know anything about this other George or his timeline. But one thing I think is important to mention here too, you know, as we're talking about the scenario of them leaving with someone that they knew is the relationship between Tiana and Diamond.

Like you might think that because of the age difference that Tiana and Diamond might not be very close. Yeah, they're what like seven years apart. Yeah. My kids are just almost exactly 10 years apart and they're not super close. They're like getting close now that May, who's two is like a little bit more interactive and can talk. But there's definitely a place where like Eli is like, I have no desire to have anything to do with her at this point. Like I can see there being some like not division, but just not that connection that you expect to see between siblings or even sisters. Well, that's why I wanted to bring it up because I think that's what a lot of people assume is that with a seven year age gap, they probably aren't super close.

They have not a lot in common. But it's actually the complete opposite in this case because despite the like age difference, they were super, super close. Honestly, Tiana and Diamond are practically inseparable. They play together all the time. Like wherever one goes, you're going to find the other one. Even their great aunt Sheila told Kokei Chicago all about how Tiana would just like pick up Diamond, set her on her hip and walk around the house carrying her. Like wherever she was going, whatever she was doing, they were together. She was Diamond's little mama.

Exactly. It's how I remember being with my little brother, David, who now edits the show. Like I was 10 years older than him and I was. I was a second mom. He was like, he was my baby. So to me, it makes sense that if Tiana did open the door and trusted someone enough to go with them, that Diamond would be right there too. So I don't even know, you know, when we think about motive, were both of them the targets? Was one of them the target and the other just like went along because they did everything together?

Like automatically, yeah. Yeah. So going back to the voicemail for a second, when did Tiana leave that? Because I feel like that would really help narrow down the sort of timeline of events in this situation. I would love to know, but we don't because something mysteriously happens to that voicemail. Somehow that voicemail just happened to get deleted. What? Yeah.

How does that even happen? I honestly don't know. Like there is zero information around this for me. Like I don't know. I have to assume it happened after police actually heard it. I don't know whose phone it was on. I don't know what kind of provider they had. I was gonna say, it's almost like it was there somewhere one day and then the next day it was gone.

Well, yeah. But again, to be super clear, I also don't know if like maybe her mom had the voicemail and once she heard it, she deleted it. And then just told police about, I have no details around what happened to this voicemail. I only know that they know what it says, but now there's like no way to recover it or to like get any data from it. Which is really frustrating, especially because I was just looking into a case that there was a voicemail that was kind of like a butt dial situation. Yeah. And it was able to be recovered and it was even able to be cleaned up a little bit more. Yeah.

And it was able to provide at least a little bit more information as to like the victim in this case is like last movements. Yeah. Again, I don't know. So there was one source that said police like actually got to hear it according to their great aunt Sheila. So I have to think that it was like preserved long enough. And maybe when they collected their phone, like I don't know if it was in police custody when that happened. Maybe that's why we're not hearing so much about it is because they like messed up pretty bad. One thing that comes to mind to me is and obviously I don't know the situation with, you know, where their mom worked or anything,

but my old employer really didn't want us to be on our cell phones. And so if our kids or kids schools needed anything, they had to call our work lines. And so that's something that I wouldn't have even had to control over. Yeah. Like what those records look like versus if my kid or my kid's school had called my cell phone. Well, and I also like that that comes into play too for me. I just there's so many questions. Yeah.

And I don't know when you're talking about different, again, even cell phone providers, if you're talking about like a Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, some of these big companies with these big data plans will probably hold your data for a lot longer. Whereas if you're going like... But in 2001, we have a million tiny little cell phone companies. Or even just going like month to month, like on a prepaid plan. I'm sure nobody's keeping that data. So I can see why, where, you know, we see, you know, messages being recovered in other cases, why maybe it couldn't hear. But I mean, without them being able to recover it, they know what it says.

Yes, it's a little suspicious, but ultimately the voicemail is just another heartbreaking dead end. It doesn't lead them to any answers. Probably just makes them more suspicious of these Georges in their life. But I couldn't find anything else out about the other George, that family friend. And he's really never mentioned again after like you stop reading about this voicemail. Like he does not come up a whole lot more in this case. But I did find something super interesting about George Washington. According to Amar Madhani and Kim Barker's reporting in the Chicago Tribune,

the FBI learns that Tracy filed a paternity suit against George back in June with the claim that he's Diamond's dad. And that he's the third man that she has sued over Diamond's paternity. Now, he's actually been really cooperative this whole time since the girls went missing. Like he voluntarily goes in for questioning. He gave the FBI his permission to do a full search of his house in his garage on July 11th, which is just five days after the girls went missing. And the FBI stresses to the Tribune, like when they do this search, like, listen, we're not going in like guns blazing, looking for something specific.

We're just kind of covering all of our bases. And ultimately that search comes up empty as well. But I did read that police found some hair in the trunk of his van. But it's unclear if the hair turned up during this specific search on the 11th or possibly another one. Who's hair? Well, so here's the thing again. So the tests on these hairs say it could potentially be from Diamond or Tiana or Tracy. Which would kind of make sense since they're all related.

Right. And so like anyone who knows about like hair DNA as well is it's really good for like talking about the maternal line of your family. So connecting it to like, you know, two daughters and a mother is what you would expect. So the hair is from somebody in that family, but it's not telling us exactly who it's from. Okay. So that doesn't really sound like great hard evidence to me. Right. Like you said before, George was on good enough terms with Tracy that, you know,

he spent the night with her the night before the girls disappeared. He was obviously fairly at least a little bit involved in their lives. This could have been from anything, even unloading groceries, you know. Oh yeah. So the night someone's house, you have to have a close enough relationship where I would assume you could get their hair on them. And again, I always think about things like in a way you would take them to court and this has like reasonable doubt written all over it. All over it. Right.

Which is why, I mean, he's never named a suspect. So once again, law enforcement's hopes just drop. Like they feel like they're on the right track, but they've got nothing solid, but they're not giving up and the pressure stays hot on the investigation. And that first month in particular, this case is, is honestly like really hardcore. It's getting national attention. And as the summer wears on, police really go over honestly every inch of that neighborhood with a fine tooth comb, expanding their search to over 20 miles. I mean, they're looking at vacant lots, landfills, railroad cars, and in 5000 abandoned buildings and old factories. Can you even imagine searching 5000?

I can't. I honestly cannot even like comprehend what that would look like. Yeah. And while doing all of this, I mean, they also have teams that are talking to over 30 of Diamond and Tiana's relatives doing interview after interview with them. And they talked to more than 100 registered sex offenders in and around the area where the girls went missing. But again, despite all this legwork, nothing is leading police any closer to the truth. Gradually, as summer starts slipping into fall, the tips begin slowing down and the public attention kind of goes elsewhere, especially after the events of September 11th. So to keep things on track, sometime before the year is out, a private investigator named Pete Foster is brought in to help.

By who? He never specifies exactly who hired him or when. And during his interview on Cold Case Chicago, he says he's there to basically give an independent perspective and be someone else for the Bradleys to talk to who isn't CPD, kind of like a go between to like a liaison. Yeah. Yeah, kind of help ease the tension and be that like, again, that middleman liaison, exactly. But even with his fresh pair of eyes, it doesn't keep the leads from drying up once more. Now, the girls aren't forgotten in their neighborhood, though. And even though the media focus is all but gone outside of the Chicago area, police do keep searching.

And then in June of 2002, almost a year after that fateful day that the girls went missing, it seems like they may have finally gotten the break that they've been waiting for when a bone shows up on the shores of Lake Michigan. Don Terry reported for the Chicago Tribune that a private detective find this bone inside a bag on the southern part of the lakefront just a few blocks away from the Bradley's apartment and it looks to him like a finger, like specifically a child's finger bone. But after it's sent off for testing, the bone turns out not to belong to a human at all, which is a huge relief. But it's also a painful thing to accept because I mean, here's this finger in a bag. It doesn't belong to either of these girls, which is great. I mean, whatever that means, I mean, I still don't know who puts like animal bones in a bag. I feel like there's something going on there. I still have a lot of questions about the situation. Right, right. But it's at least a little bit of hope, like, oh my God, like something, whatever that would have meant didn't happen. But it doesn't get them any closer to knowing what did, like they're right back at square one.

Now, two years after that, another lead pops up, not in Chicago, but actually right here in Indianapolis. Now, for those of you who aren't from the Midwest, Indy to Chicago is about like a three or four hour drive and it's this like straight shot on one highway, the whole drive. So there is a lot of traffic back and forth between these two cities. Yeah, and if you don't want to or don't have the means to drive, there's buses and trains, like it's a pretty like straight shot just like from Chicago to here or here to Indy, like it's kind of a triangle. Exactly, exactly. And I mean, on a darker note of that, though, I was reading in the Indy Star about how Indiana as a state is actually a big hub for human trafficking because of all of the interstates that run through to like big cities. I mean, we have I-65, 69, 70, they don't call it crossroads of America for nothing. And as we talked about in the Brittany Drexel episode last year, minors and children aren't immune from that whore. They're especially vulnerable to it. So in June of 2004, an Indianapolis firefighter named Mark is doing this community event in Garfield Park, which is like kind of downtown or just south of downtown.

And it's one of these big things where people can come, they can bring their kids, they have like candy, they have a lot of like police officers, firefighters. The intention of it is supposed to be like a place for public servants to come and actually like connect with like the community that they're serving. Yeah, interact with community members. Right. So while he's there, Mark is struck by these two little girls who are just super cute, super well mannered, just like waiting patiently for their turn without getting like over excited. Nothing happens this day. He just kind of takes note these girls that kind of stand out. He remembers them. Well, about a month later, Mark is out in Lawrence, which is on the east side of Indy working as a reserve police officer when he sees a poster about the Bradley sisters who went missing in Chicago. Wait, so there was a poster for the Bradley sisters outside of Indianapolis? Yeah. Again, don't underestimate when I say it was like a big operation and they had posters all over and it did, again, back in the day, get some national attention.

So posters went from Chicago even here to Indy. So when he sees this poster, he's like convinced that he saw Diamond and Tiana on that day in Garfield Park. So he gets in touch with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the hopes that, you know, maybe this is them and he can actually like help bring them home. What is bananas to me is Mark isn't even the only person who thinks he's seen the Bradley sisters in Indianapolis. Sandra Chapman reported for WTHR News that Chicago police make the trip down to Indy to check surveillance footage at some point after getting a tip that someone had seen the girls at a Walmart in Lawrence. And I mean, that's not a lot to go on, but like at least it's something. But I guess when they got down here, like all it says is basically the lead turns out to be nothing. Chicago police do find the two girls that this witness is claiming could have been that like on the footage, but they don't believe that the girls in the footage were Tiana and Diamond.

And then they don't believe then that the girls Mark saw were Tiana and Diamond either. So the case just kind of goes cold again. And this kind of sets up, I mean, I don't want to say a pattern. But over the years, these things keep happening like some bones human this time actually ended up getting found on the south side of Chicago 2005. Hopes get raised, but then it turns out not to be them. Then with the birth of social media, false hope ends up taking on a digital dimension. Because in 2008, there is this MySpace profile that pops up and it gets flagged as maybe being Tiana. So this girl, she would be 17 in 2008, so it's like the perfect age range, it looks like her, it seems like her.

And this time a private investigator even determines that it really is her. But like with everything on the internet, not everything is what it seems. Officials end up determining that in fact this girl on MySpace is not Tiana. And this is heartbreaking and it's frustrating all at the same time because we see that new technology does create new ways of research and investigation. Like having the internet opens up this whole world to victims and families and advocates. But we also see how careful people need to be before jumping to conclusions and getting their hopes up. So I mean, the poor family is already dealing with, like I said, bones showing up.

And now like constantly having to deal with stuff on the internet of, okay, a profile popped up. Is this them? Is it not them? In 2016, Jeremy Garner and Grace Wong did a look back at this case and highlighted other tips and leads that took the investigation. And I mean, all of these like crazy directions, though none of them ever panned out. And there is the usual stuff like psychics claiming that they've had visions of where Tiana and Diamond's bodies are buried. And then there's like more mainstream ideas like they did get a tip that the girls are being used as sex slaves in central Illinois. And yet another tip claims that they had been taken out of the country to Morocco as victims of a parental abduction by a Moroccan man thought to maybe be Tiana's biological father.

I really can't state enough how terrible it feels to know that both of those scenarios are actually plausible. Yeah, even though they sound a little bit off the wall. We know that family abduction is by far the most common type of kidnapping in the U.S. I mean, to the point that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says that 60% of the Amber Alerts in 2016 were issued for family abduction cases. But even with these tips or that tip that turns this local investigation into an international case, just like everything, it all comes up empty. No one's arrested, nobody's a suspect. Yeah, and honestly, it's not that no one's a suspect, it's like they can't even rule anyone out, which I don't even know what's worse. Really, everyone could be a potential suspect.

There just hasn't been enough information to even start to narrow it down. Even though this case spends the next few years alternating between heating up and going right back to ice cold, the Bradley family holds out hope that Tiana and Diamond are still alive. And despite being burned by that MySpace profile, they actually do see how social media becomes a tool, like I said, for victims' families to be their own advocates. And so they start taking to these new platforms to keep people posted on what's going on, to keep interest going in the case, to do anything they can to try and get the answers that they've been aching for for all these years. And in the spring of 2019, they actually get this shocking message. The message came in in early May of 2019, which is almost 18 years now after Tiana and Diamond first went missing. And it all started when their great aunt Sheila decided to make a post on the missing Diamond and Tiana Bradley Facebook page. And it wasn't anything like crazy, like no monumental time, she was just kind of sharing her thoughts about how much she misses them, how she still hopes that they'll one day be able to come home.

And under this post in the comments, a woman answers, we're trying. Wait, what? Yeah. So according to NBC 5 News Chicago, this woman is living down in Beaumont, Texas, and she claims to be Tiana, but she doesn't stop there. Over a series of Facebook messages, this woman says that she and Diamond have been together for the whole time that they've been missing and that Diamond is now going to college. And she says that both her and Diamond both have kids. So as you can imagine, after such a long time, so many dead ends, Sheila is super skeptical. But also, I mean, there's that little voice inside her that is whispering like, what if, like, what if this is really them?

It's everything that we hope for. So she does keep the conversation going. And the woman eventually agrees to a DNA test to prove her story. And? Before it's even time to take the DNA test, this woman who's going by the name Lele Rodriguez on Facebook starts giving Sheila some sketchy answers. As Sheila described it to WGN News, Lele knows, you know, the basic details about this case, but she clams up and gets really defensive whenever she's asked about anything more specific. She also gets pretty manipulative as like a defense mechanism, I think, like, oh, you know, you should know it's me, we're family. How dare you ask that kind of stuff?

Okay. Yeah. So as hopeful as this was, I mean, they're getting more and more suspicious and the family gets their PI to investigate further. This is the same like Pete Foster, who came in in 2001, who they at this point have known for years. Yeah. And once Pete gets to work, he finds some pretty disturbing information about this Lele. First, he finds out that Lele is clearly not her real name. She actually goes by multiple names.

And all of her information on social media is fake. Pete and police learned that she's tried to reach out to other members of the Bradley family before actually. So to answer your question, I don't think it actually ever gets to the point of this Lele taking a DNA test because it seems pretty clear to me that the Bradley's already knew by that point that this woman was not telling them the truth. And she was just trying to insert herself into the investigation or the family or something. Yeah. Like the whole thing was just a cruel hoax. But that cruel hoax was the last glimmer of hope that they had as of this recording because as of 2020, Diamond and Tiana Bradley are still missing.

The pain of their loss and almost two decades of uncertainty have changed their family forever. Their oldest sister, Rita, has talked about how she's overprotective of her own children, which I totally understand. And their other sister, Victoria, who was only nine when they vanished, it was actually remember her birthday cake that was mentioned in that voicemail. She says that she couldn't celebrate her birthday for over 10 years because it was just too painful for her to confront. No matter how much time has passed, Diamond and Tiana's loved ones deserve to know the truth. If you have any information about the disappearance or whereabouts of Tiana and Diamond Bradley, please call the FBI's field office in Chicago at 312-421-6700. If you want to see pictures and our source material for this case, you can see that on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast.

And we'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?