Kona Gallagher Kona Gallagher

Anthonette Cayedito

In the early hours of April 6, 1986, someone knocked on the door of a home in Gallup, New Mexico. Nine-year-old Anthonette Cayedito answered it. She has never been seen again. A year later, a terrified girl called police and gave her name — before the line went dead.

"Who said you could use the phone?"

Those are the words a police dispatcher in Gallup, New Mexico heard shouted in the background of a 40-second phone call in 1987. Before that, a small girl's voice had given her name — twice — and said she was in Albuquerque.

Then came a scuffle. There was a scream, and then the line went dead.

The name she gave was Anthonette Cayedito. At the time of that 911 call, she had been missing for a year.

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A Knock in the Night

Anthonette was nine years old, a fourth-grader at Lincoln Elementary who lived with her mother Penny and her two younger sisters in Gallup, New Mexico. Her family called her "Squirrel,” and she helped her mom take care of her sisters.

On the night of April 5, 1986, Penny had been out with friends. She came home around midnight and sent the babysitter home. She last saw Anthonette around 3 a.m. When Penny got up at 7 a.m. to wake her daughters for Bible school, Anthonette wasn't in the house.

Penny searched the house, and when she didn’t find her daughter, she went door to door. But no one in the neighborhood had seen her. Neighbors joined the search, and in the days that followed police combed the surrounding foothills and brought in the FBI. Despite three days of searching, no trace of Anthonette was found. There was no physical evidence at the scene, and no sign of a struggle. Anthonette had simply been in her home one moment and gone the next. She ostensibly left only wearing her pink nightgown. Even her shoes had been left behind.

What Her Sister Remembered

Years later, investigators re-interviewed Anthonette's younger sister Wendy, who had been five years old the night Anthonette disappeared. Wendy told them she remembered a knock at the door around 3:30 a.m. She said Anthonette asked who was there, and a voice on the other side answered that it was her Uncle Joe.

Anthonette opened the door.

Wendy told the detectives that two men grabbed Anthonette, and that her sister was kicking and screaming as they carried her out.

The Sightings

In the years that followed, hundreds of tips came in from across the Southwest, but two stuck out.

The first was the 1987 911 call. Penny listened to the 40-second recording over and over and said she was certain the voice was her daughter's. The call was too short to trace.

The second came four years later, when a waitress in Carson City, Nevada reported serving a girl in her early teens seated with an unkempt-looking couple. The girl kept dropping her fork. Each time the waitress bent to retrieve it, the girl squeezed her hand. After they left, the waitress found a note hidden under the girl's plate.

It read: Help me! Call police.

Nothing ever came of it.

Forty Years Later

The Gallup Police Department, the Navajo Nation Division of Public Safety, and the FBI have all continued to appeal for information. The FBI has released age-progressed images and issued outreach materials in both Navajo and English. Anthonette's sisters have spoken publicly about the decades of grief that followed, and about their refusal to give up.

In our full episode, we walk through the night she vanished, the phone call, the sightings, and the questions that have surrounded this case for four decades. This case is solvable, and key players involved are still alive.

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Missing Person: Anthonette Christine Cayedito

Anthonette Cayedito has been missing from Gallup, New Mexico since April 6, 1986. She is a biracial (Native American and White) female of Navajo and Italian descent with brown hair and brown eyes. At the time of her disappearance, she was 9 years old, 4'7" and 55 pounds. She was last seen wearing a pink nightgown. She wore glasses and was known to wear a silver chain with a small turquoise cross pendant. She has freckles, pierced ears, a scar on her knee and lip, and moles on her back, right cheek, nose, hands, and right ankle.

If you have information, contact the FBI Albuquerque Field Office at (505) 889-1300, submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov, or contact the Gallup Police Department.

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Kona Gallagher Kona Gallagher

Susan Walsh

On July 16, 1996, journalist and former exotic dancer Susan Walsh told her estranged husband she'd be back in half an hour. She was never seen again. What followed was a case involving the Russian mob, an underground vampire subculture, a missing calendar page, and a mystery that remains unsolved 30 years later.

"No, I do have a stalker."

Susan Walsh said those words in an interview just two days before she vanished. Her beeper had gone off mid-conversation, and she'd laughed it off at first — must be my stalker — before turning serious and admitting it wasn't a joke.

Two days later, the 36-year-old journalist walked out of her Nutley, New Jersey apartment to use a payphone. She never came back.

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The Reporter Who Went Undercover in Her Own Life

Susan Walsh wasn't an easy person to sum up in a headline, though plenty of outlets tried. She was a freelance journalist who wrote for The Village Voice. She was also, for years, an exotic dancer — a job she'd used to fund her writing and her education, and one that eventually became the subject she wrote about.

Her most explosive piece exposed the exploitation of young immigrant women inside New York strip clubs with alleged ties to the Russian mob. She had also spent months investigating New York City's underground vampire subculture, and had worked as the primary researcher on a book about the sex industry. A German documentary crew and the BBC were both developing projects around her reporting.

The work had made her enemies. She told her father she believed there were contracts out on her life, and she'd started drinking again after over eleven years of sobriety.

The Last Half Hour

On July 16, 1996, Susan left her 11-year-old son with her estranged husband, Mark. She told Mark she was stepping out to use a payphone and she'd be back in about thirty minutes.

No one saw her use the payphone. No one saw her at all that afternoon, and Susan Walsh was never seen again.

What Went Missing With Her

Over the course of the investigation, investigators discovered that an entire page was missing from Susan's calendar — the page covering the month of July 1996. Someone had removed it, and no one has ever explained who or why.

One of Susan’s friends came forward claiming she'd seen Susan get into a limousine about a month after she vanished. Police followed the lead, but it ultimately went nowhere.

Mark Walsh was never officially named a suspect, but a 2006 report revealed that he had refused to let investigators conduct forensic testing inside the apartment he'd shared with Susan both in 1996 and again in 2006.

Mob, Mental Health, or Something Else Entirely

In the years since Susan disappeared, theories about what happened to her have multiplied endlessly. Dancers in the clubs she'd investigated believed she'd been the target of an organized crime hit in retaliation for her reporting. Others believe her years of substance use, a diagnosed bipolar disorder, and a recent relapse into drinking may point toward something far more tragic and far less sinister than a hit. they believe that she may have taken her own life, or suffered some kind of breakdown that no one around her recognized in time.

And then there's the reason a lot of people have heard about Susan’s case in the first place: in the months before she vanished, Susan had become deeply embedded in an underground community of self-identified vampires in New York City, reporting a story that The Village Voice ultimately declined to run because editors felt she'd lost her objectivity. The tabloids seized on it. "Missing, Presumed Undead," one headline read.

Thirty years later

Susan's friend and fellow dancer-turned-filmmaker, Jill Morley, has spent decades trying to keep this case from disappearing the way Susan did. Morley is developing Seeking Susan, a documentary revisiting the investigation.

Susan's brother, Arthur Merchant, has never accepted the idea that his sister simply walked away. "She did not decide to freaking go off and not be coming back," he told a New Jersey newspaper in 2020.

Susan Walsh has now been missing for 30 years.

In our full episode, we dig into the investigation, the missing calendar page, the limousine, and the tangle of theories — from the criminal to the supernatural — that have surrounded this case since 1996. It's one of the strangest, most layered disappearances we've covered.

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Missing Person: Susan Walsh

Susan Walsh has been missing from Nutley, New Jersey since July 16, 1996. She is a white female with bleached blonde hair and blue eyes, 5'6" and approximately 110 pounds. She has pierced ears and a scar on her right wrist.

If you have information, contact the Nutley Police Department or the New Jersey State Police.

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