She Wrote Her Name on a Scrap - Hidden in His Van

Missing person stories · Jul 25, 2026 · 21m

She Wrote Her Name on a Scrap - Hidden in His Van

The smell of something cooked and gone cold led to a scrap of paper pressed against an arm: "My name is Karen Wells. I am being held." A woman missing for nineteen days had hidden a pencil in her sock for eleven days and wrote that note in four minutes - so how did she end up eleven feet below a workshop less than four miles from the grocery where she was seen alive?

In this episode, we lay out the sequence of observable facts from the grocery parking lot to the van with a removed decal, the records that tied the vehicle to a contractor, and…