The Lake of Lost Girls

Two podcast hosts, Stella from the UK and Rachel from the US, introduce their true crime podcast about Jessica Fadley (known to family and friends as “Jess”), who disappeared from Mt. Randall, North Carolina, in the late 1990s while attending Southern State University. They describe Mt. Randall as a “quaint” small town with a “gorgeous college that sits up on a hill” (2), creating two different worlds in close proximity. Despite the typically low crime rate, the university saw the mysterious disappearances of Jess and three other female students during the 1998-1999 school year.

The hosts explain that Jess was home visiting her family for her little sister’s birthday when she disappeared. She went to her car to retrieve a birthday cake and vanished in what her sister described as “ten seconds”—hence the podcast’s name, Ten Seconds to Vanish. The hosts discuss the recent discovery of human remains near Doll’s Eye Lake, a place Jess had a particular attachment to that the police searched years ago. They speculate that this discovery might finally connect the four missing women cases that authorities previously treated as unrelated, suggesting that police incompetence may have hindered the original investigation.