She Seeks Justice

  There are some stories that never truly leave a state. They linger in the backroads, in faded newspaper clippings, in abandoned parking lots, and in the memories of families who have spent years — sometimes decades — waiting for answers that never came. For years, Arkansas has carried those stories quietly. Now, LaDonna Humphrey is preparing to bring many of them into the light with her upcoming book, The Lost Girls of Arkansas , a sweeping investigative work focused on missing women, unsolved murders, forgotten victims, and the systemic failures that often allowed those cases to fade from public view. Humphrey has built much of her career around the uncomfortable spaces other people avoid. Through podcasts, investigative journalism, advocacy work, and longform true crime writing, she has repeatedly returned to one central question: what happens to the victims nobody fights for long enough? That question sits at the center of this book. Rather than presenting Arkansas as a collec...

 She disappeared in 1974. A Native American mother of three vanished from Michigan after telling family she planned to visit them. More than a decade later, a man was convicted in her presumed murder, yet Christine Marie Honson has still never been found. This is not just a story about one missing woman. It is a story about how vulnerable women—especially Indigenous women—were too often allowed to disappear quietly while the world moved on around them. Fifty years later, her family is still without answers. Still without a gravesite. Still without her. Read the full story here: https://faithfireandtheforgotten.substack.com/p/the-woman-who-never-came-home

She walked out of a Missoula bar in the early morning hours of June 16, 2018… and seemingly vanished into thin air. Jermain “Liz” Charlo was 23 years old, a mother of two, and a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Nearly seven years later, her family is still searching for answers in a case that has become one of the most haunting symbols of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis in America. This is not just a story about one missing woman. It is a story about violence, silence, systemic failure, and the families who refuse to stop searching for the people they love. Read: She Walked Out of a Missoula Bar and Vanished https://faithfireandtheforgotten.substack.com/p/she-walked-out-of-a-missoula-bar

There is a particular kind of arrogance that develops when someone spends years building a platform off publicly humiliating other people. Eventually, they begin believing they are the narrator instead of the subject. They convince themselves they are the one holding the flashlight, never the person standing inside its beam. But public records have a funny way of humbling people who build careers weaponizing the mistakes, allegations, arrests, lawsuits, and embarrassing moments of others while pretending their own history deserves privacy, nuance, or forgiveness. That hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore when the same podcast personalities who gleefully splash someone else’s mugshots across the internet suddenly grow very quiet about their own court records. For years now, portions of the true crime podcast world have transformed into something far uglier than journalism. It is no longer enough to report facts. The modern formula requires humiliation. Mugshots are treated like trophi...

 The story of is unsettling not simply because of what prosecutors said happened in the parking lot of a bowling alley in 2010, but because of the details that feel oddly ritualistic, improvised, and predatory all at once. According to testimony, Peter Allen Roberts Sr. encountered 24-year-old Elizabeth Davey outside Blackiston Bowl in the early morning hours after both had been inside bowling and drinking. What followed became the center of a criminal trial that prosecutors described as “shocking” and “unbelievable.” Roberts was ultimately convicted on all counts related to intimidation, battery, and criminal confinement after jurors deliberated for more than five hours. The prosecution’s version of events painted a terrifying picture. Davey testified that Roberts grabbed her outside the bowling alley, dragged her to his truck, forced her inside, placed a rope noose around her neck, and threatened her with a knife while she begged to be released because she had a young child wai...

 On May 26, 2007, in Whitehorse, Yukon, nineteen-year-old Angel Carlick stepped out into the night with plans, with purpose, and with a future that—by every account—was just beginning to take shape. She was weeks away from graduating high school, a milestone that should have marked the start of something new. Instead, it became a dividing line between who she was and the unanswered questions that now define her story. Angel was not drifting through life. She was building one. She worked at a local non-profit, running a dinner program where she cooked meals for children in her community. That detail matters, because it speaks to who she was at her core—someone who showed up for others, someone who understood responsibility, someone who gave her time and energy to people who needed it. She loved music and painting, and those who knew her describe a young woman who was both creative and deeply connected to the people around her. She was a youth advocate, a loyal friend, and a protecti...