143: San Diego’s Lost Women, Episode 1: Cynthia Maine
About this episode
The episode explores the disappearance of Cynthia Maine and the broader context of women vanishing from San Diego in the 1980s.
In the 1980s, dozens of women disappeared from San Diego, California. One of them was 26-year-old Cynthia Maine. Cynthia was a daughter, sister, mother, and woman trying to survive addiction while working along El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego’s notorious red light district. By 1986, she was rebuilding her life. She had found work as a waitress, but she was also serving as a police informant. Just months before she vanished, she had allegedly begun an affair with one of her police contacts. Late in February, she told her family she was going to watch a movie. She never came home. As investigators searched for Cynthia, few realized they were witnessing the beginning of one of the largest unsolved series of murders and disappearances in California history. In the first episode of this three-part investigation, we examine Cynthia's disappearance alongside the murder of her friend Donna Gentile. Together, their stories reveal a hidden world of vice squads, confidential informants, police corruption, and the extraordinary risks faced by women living on the margins of San Diego in the mid-1980s. This series asks how so many women could disappear from one city and why so many of their…
More episodes of She Goes by Jane: A True Crime Podcast
- 144: San Diego’s Lost Women, Episode 2: Mary Colette Rawlinson
- 142: The Only Missing WASP: The Disappearance of Gertrude Tompkins Silver
- 141: The Disappearance of Ilonka Cann: A Coroner’s Jury Speaks
- 140: The Empty Seat: The Disappearance of Thora Chamberlain
- 139: The Women Who Talk to the Dead: A Conversation with Katherine Schweit
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