HOST (intro): I am the Seeker, and this is Radio Silent. I’ve been receiving emails from all over North America, asking me to inform our listeners about one case after another. I do my best, listeners. I try to keep on top of things, but as much as I’d like to, I can’t do every case.
I wish I could.
I’m going to return today to Houston, where Nia Williams and Vanessa Rodriguez are still missing.
There’ve been a few developments in the case since I last spoke to you. For one thing, the meetup that Carla and Danetta organized was extremely successful. I’ve been in touch with Carla, who tells me that almost three dozen people showed up, and they came with information.
RECORDING: (voice of Carla Garcia) There was a huge turnout, and we learned from a few regulars at Impact Café, along with a couple of other servers that worked with Vanessa, that Vanessa and Nia had struck up a friendship over the past few years. As far as we know, they didn’t socialize outside of the diner, but Nia always sat in Vanessa’s section, and during quieter late shifts, the two of them would often end up chatting for long stretches, with each other as well as with the other regulars around the place. It was kind of amazing, because we started to hear stories about how Vanessa and Nia were really friendly. I guess you’d call them friends. Then this guy got up and told us that he works at Impact Café, and he told us a story.
RECORDING: (voice of Bradley Plum) I’m a server at Impact and I worked a lot of the same shifts as Vanessa, and every once in a while, she’d have to deal with guys getting fresh with her or whatever. You work in enough restaurants and you start to see the kind of shit women put up with when they’re waiting tables. Anyway, there was this one man in particular who started coming in every few nights, and he liked to bug Vanessa. Sometimes she’d ask me to take his table so she wouldn’t have to deal with him. But one night, Nia happened to be in the restaurant, sitting at her normal booth, nursing a beer, and the guy started to harass Vanessa. I was caught up with a really big table on the other side of the restaurant, a bachelor party or something like that, and I didn’t have time to intervene, but by the time I had the chance, Nia was already on the case. (Laughter) She was being pretty funny, ridiculing the guy, and people at other tables were even getting involved, turning around and laughing. You could tell that the guy was pissed. He eventually got up, dropped his money on the table, and stormed out. We never saw the guy again.
RECORDING: (voice of Danetta Bryce) Bradley told this story, and it wasn’t anything too crazy. I mean, it’s not a really bizarre thing to learn that a waitress was harassed by a man she’s serving. We all live in the world, right? But the fact that both of them had this kind of encounter with some creep—it was unsettling to say the least. And then…well, we asked Bradley when all of this had happened.
HOST: As it happens, the encounter Bradley describes happened less than a week before Nia went missing.
RECORDING: (voice of Carla Garcia) It was like a bomb had been dropped into the middle of the room. Nobody spoke for a very, very long time. But we knew we had something.
HOST: What follows is a recording from a public press conference held yesterday by the Houston Police Department.
RECORDING: (voice of Detective Britta Wilkinson) Due to recent information that has been brought to our attention, the Houston Police Department has begun to investigate the possibility that the unsolved disappearances of Nia Williams and Vanessa Rodriguez could be connected. We want to be clear that, at this point, this is solely a theory, but we would like to bring to the public’s attention a composite sketch of a man believed to be a person of interest.
HOST: On our show page and social accounts, you’ll find a link to the sketch that a police sketch artist provided based on the description Bradley Plum provided and other details of the renewed investigation.
As always, we appeal to anyone in the Radio Silent community in and around Houston to pay close attention to this case, and please let us or the authorities know if you have any relevant information.
Is there something we can do to help?
Listen up.
Let’s try.