Benita Long: Missing from the System

Benita Desiree Long was 40 years old, a member of the Yakama Nation, and actively working toward sobriety when she was dropped off at the El Corral Motel in Toppenish, Washington, on March 26, 2022. She made one phone call to her sister afterward. Then silence. For three years, her family searched, organized vigils, and called a police department that never called back. What they didn't know — what no one told them until a journalist uncovered it in 2025 — was that Benita's name had never been entered into NamUs, the federal database built specifically to match missing people with unidentified remains. In this episode, we tell Benita's story and investigate the systemic failure that left her invisible to the one tool designed to bring people home. We also examine the broader crisis on and around the Yakama Reservation, where Indigenous women go missing at four times the rate of white women and a local newspaper has had to crowdsource its own list of the vanished. We have to ask, why are the people most likely to go missing, the least likely to be looked for To see more about this case, as well as the sources used to create this episode, visit our Blog Here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.