True Crime Episodes

In 2023, we told you about Ruthey Smith, a 19-year-old mother who disappeared from Los Angeles on March 2, 2022. Four years later, Ruthey is still missing—and her family is still fighting to bring her home. In this update and rewind, we revisit Ruthey’s original story, examine what has been publicly verified since our first report, and separate confirmed facts from the rumors that can derail a search. Authorities have treated Ruthey’s disappearance as a suspected human-trafficking case, but ther...

Juliana Umba Nzita was reported missing on April 28, 2026. Ten days later, the sixteen-year-old was found dead in Charlotte. Police classified her death as suicide, but her story leaves behind painful questions about urgency, visibility, and what happens when a missing Black girl is not treated like a crisis soon enough. In this episode of No Tears For Black Girls: The Cases They Ignored , Samantha Paul tells Juliana’s story with care, dignity, and one clear demand: Black girls deserve to be not...

Vontisha “Sway” Williams was a mother, grandmother, and business owner trying to rebuild her life after unimaginable loss. She had only been in her new home for two weeks when gunfire tore through it in the middle of the night. Her younger daughter survived. Sway did not. In this episode of No Tears For Black Girls: The Cases They Ignored , Samantha Paul tells the story behind the headline and brings listeners back to the woman at the center of it all: a loving, dependable, hardworking Black wom...

In this episode of No Tears For Black Girls: The Cases They Ignored , we examine the death of twenty-eight-year-old Perdisha “Para” Champion and the questions her family says still remain about what happened inside Virtua Mount Holly Hospital in Mount Holly, New Jersey. Through a direct interview with Para’s mother, Sophia Shannon, this episode follows the final hours before her daughter’s death and the anguish that followed. Sophia says she watched Para experience severe medical distress during...

Hannah “Khadija” Toby-Dean was 25 years old. A Navy veteran. A Muslim woman. A rapper known as Hannah Bandz. On June 13, 2025, she told a family member she was afraid for her safety. Less than ten hours later, her mother got the call that Hannah was dead. Then came the details that made the case even harder to ignore: a disabled GPS tracker, an empty suitcase, and credit cards hidden under a spare tire. In this episode of No Tears For Black Girls: The Cases They Ignored , Samantha Paul walks thr...

In 1996 a South Carolina court convicted a man of promoting the prostitution of a child and sent him home with a suspended sentence. Over the next twenty-three years he filed flyers, built a DJ reputation, and accessed hundreds of Black girls and women across Florence County while law enforcement closed case after case, marked reports unfounded, and watched evidence walk in and out of their offices without making a single arrest that stuck. In 2011 a thirteen year old girl sat in a hospital and ...

Today on No Tears For Black Girls we are doing something we have never done before on this show. We are reading to you. Death Apnea is a book written by J.C. Reedburg, part of the No Tears For Black Girls Case Files series, and it lives inside the same universe as this podcast. It is a story rooted in real documented patterns of Black women disappearing into hospital systems without proper family notification, bodies stored for months while families search, and organs removed without consent. It...

She was fifteen years old when her stepfather assaulted her. She reported it. She gave up his illegal guns. She documented his death threats in a police report. And the Clark County District Attorney's office let him walk out of custody three days later. Eleven days after that, Leonard Woods stabbed Josie Kate Jones sixteen times in a Walgreens parking lot while her daughter watched. In this episode of No Tears For Black Girls, we tell the story of Divina Leal, a Las Vegas woman whose life becam...

On December 1st, 2025, seventeen-year-old T'Neya Tovar left and never came home. Her mother knew immediately something was wrong. Law enforcement had a different word for it. Runaway. And that one word changed everything about how fast the world moved for her daughter. In this episode of No Tears For Black Girls, we go deep into the disappearance and death of T'Neya "TT" Tovar, a teenager from Hemet, California whose case exposes one of the most dangerous blind spots in the American missing pers...

On October 14, 2024 , Baltimore police responded to a home on Aiken Street in Baltimore, Maryland, where five-year-old Zona Byrd was found unresponsive and cold to the touch. What investigators described next is difficult to shake: cupboards reported as empty, food reportedly kept out of children’s reach, and surviving siblings so malnourished that medical staff noted how urgently they ate once they were safe. In this episode of No Tears For Black Girls: The Cases They Ignored , Samantha Paul fo...

She did everything she was supposed to do. She ended the relationship. She set the boundary. She said the words. And on a quiet Wednesday afternoon in Washington, D.C., in front of her three children, that boundary became the trigger. This week on No Tears For Black Girls: The Cases They Ignored , host Samantha Paul covers the February 11th, 2026 shooting death of Rayven Amuan Edwards — a 34-year-old mother of three from Northwest D.C. — whose ten-year-old daughter was injured at the scene, whos...

Imagine watching a murder unfold through a phone screen—and doing nothing. In this episode of No Tears For Black Girls , host Samantha Paul unpacks the connected stories of three women whose lives were stolen by men who believed their rage mattered more than women’s right to live: dancer and actress Stephanie Moseley , shot in her Los Angeles apartment while her husband FaceTimed Floyd Mayweather; Wendy Black , a Maryland nurse anesthetist who begged the courts for protection and was told her fe...

When Timothy Paul Stone collapsed alone in a Phoenix motel bathroom, his three sons — Winston, Timothy Jr. and Marcel — had already been taken by police and handed to a woman their grandparents say was a stranger. Today, Timothy is dead and the boys are still missing. In this update to our original Timothy Stone episode, we break down the Stones’ newly filed federal wrongful‑death and civil‑rights lawsuit. The complaint names the State of Arizona, Governor Katie Hobbs, Attorney General Kris Maye...

On January 9, 2024, someone kidnapped Timothy Stone's three children—two autistic. He called 911. Police refused to help. 54 days later, Timothy was dead. 692 days later, his sons are still missing. This is the story Arizona doesn't want you to hear.

Twenty-year-old Jade 'Sage' McKissic was a University of Houston junior with everything to live for—orientation team leader, strategic communications student, beloved daughter and friend. On September 11, 2025, she walked a familiar route from Third Ward bars toward campus, stopping at a gas station for a slushie before disappearing into the darkness near Brays Bayou. Four days later, the water gave her back. Police found no signs of trauma, but her family demands answers that go deeper than "no...

In September 2025, Reading, Pennsylvania became the scene of one of the most horrific family annihilation in recent memory. Three bodies.Three locations. One devil's work. Geraldina Peguero Mancebo was a 31-year-old Dominican immigrant trying to keep her family afloat in one of America's poorest cities.Working a warehouse job while supporting four children, she made a choice that millions of desperate women make every day—she accepted financial help from an older man who wanted something in retu...

On September 10th, 2025, the conservative movement was rocked when Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was murdered at Utah Valley University. Tyler Robinson, his killer, claimed he acted because Kirk "spreads too much hate." But Kirk's death may have triggered something far more sinister. Just five days later, on September 15th, 21-year-old Demartravion "Trey" Reed was found hanging from an oak tree at Delta State University in Mississippi. What authorities initially called a suicide ha...

In this powerful episode of No Tears For Black Girls, we explore the chilling case of Rebecca "Becky" Bliefnick, whose appearance on Family Feud with her husband became tragically prophetic. When Becky jokingly told Steve Harvey that her biggest mistake was "saying yes to my husband," she had no idea those words would foreshadow her own murder just months later. On February 23rd, 2023, Becky was found shot to death in her Quincy, Illinois home by her estranged husband Timothy Bliefnick - the sam...

A 19-year-old chasing a modeling dream in Atlanta is found at dawn in Oakland City Park—shot with specialty ammo and left to send a message. We trace her final hours from a Memorial Drive Shell station to a car abandoned near Stone Mountain, and unpack the larger system around her: LA-origin crews embedded in Atlanta’s nightlife, the blurred lines between “security” and control, and why leaving can be treated like treason. Featuring timeline breakdowns, forensics (the Sprite bottle DNA), and voi...

In Brooklyn's notorious Pink Houses, survival means playingby unwritten rules that can change without warning. Shatavia Walls mastered the game - navigating rival gang territories, dodging bullets, and staying alive in one of NYC's most dangerous projects. But when two gunshot wounds and a drug charge put her backagainst the wall, she made a decision that would seal her fate. Was she a snitch who broke the street code, or just another young woman trying to survivein an impossible situation? This...

In the unforgiving streets of Detroit, loyalty isn’t just a virtue—it’s a matter of life and death. But what happens when that loyalty crosses the line? This is the explosive story of Jobina “JB” Brown, the woman behind Tee Grizzley’s rise, whose shocking murder unleashed a storm of rumors about forbidden love, secret pregnancies, and betrayal at the highest levels of hip-hop. Was this a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was JB silenced to protect secrets that could d...

In this gripping episode of No Tears For Black Girls , we journey to Eastpointe, Michigan—a community where hope and hardship walk hand in hand. Through the lens of one devastating morning, host Samantha Paul peels back the layers of ordinary life to reveal the extraordinary resilience required to survive in a world that seldom offers second chances. We meet Jennifer Harris—known as “Jamma” to friends and family—a devoted mother of six and the unbreakable backbone of her community, who worked ti...

Essence Peters believed in love, even when it hurt. But when her boyfriend’s devotion turned deadly, her family was left searching for answers—and justice. In this episode, Samantha Paul unravels the haunting story of a young woman whose light was extinguished by the very person who claimed to love her. Discover the chilling truth behind the backyard burial that shocked New Orleans, and the urgent lessons her story leaves behind.

On this riveting episode of No Tears For Black Girls , we delve into the haunting case that shocked Atlanta’s elite and exposed a labyrinthine web of privilege, race, and cold-blooded murder. Lita McClinton Sullivan—vibrant, ambitious, beloved—was gunned down at her own front door, moments before a legal showdown with her wealthy estranged husband. What unfolded was a nearly twenty-year odyssey for justice: a story of deep family betrayal, relentless detective work, globe-trotting fugitives, and...