Every Like, Deleted - The Disappearance of Nakyla Williams

A doorbell camera catches the last confirmed image of Nakyla Williams: 24 years old, a hairstylist with her own basement salon, getting into a loud-engine pickup truck outside her mother's Indianapolis home on the evening of November 8th, 2021. She never comes home. What follows is a case built almost entirely out of absences. It takes IMPD three weeks to issue a public alert. The last person seen with her deletes every trace of their online history together and leaves the state. Her mother postpones a scheduled surgery to search fields near her own neighborhood instead. And a year later, police quietly walk back their own language — from "foul play not suspected" to "I can't say that." Nakyla's family is split on what actually happened to her — one theory points toward trafficking, another toward addiction and a fatal mistake — and neither has ever been confirmed. What has been confirmed is the silence since: no public update on this case since the summer of 2023. This episode traces the three-week gap before police went public, the confrontation with the last person to see her, the community search effort that may have been aimed at the wrong kind of disappearance entirely, and the national conversation about missing Black women that Nakyla's case became a part of without ever finding its own resolution. If you know anything about what happened to Nakyla Williams, contact the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's Missing Persons Unit at 317-327-6160, or Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana at 317-262-8477. 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.