In December 1990, a woman accidentally drowned in the Passaic River in New Jersey. Despite these tragic circumstances, her story garners little media attention. She becomes one of the tens of thousands of individuals who are currently unidentified in the United States. Researchers call these tens of thousands of unidentified our “silent mass disaster.”

This week our guest reader is award-winning actor Crystal Balint. Crystal has appeared on many renowned productions over the span of her career, working alongside some of North America's finest talent with notable credits including CW's The 100 and Supergirl, Disney's Mech-X4, and dramatic series such as ABC’s The Good Doctor and FOX's Prison Break. In 2019, Crystal’s leading role as Iris Bearden in Britbox’s spin-off series The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco won her a Best Actress Leo Award. Crystal also appeared as a series regular on both of writer/director Mike Flanagan's critically acclaimed Netflix original series, Midnight Mass (2020) and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023). She can be most recently seen as a heavily recurring character on the CBC series Allegiance.

Join us on Patreon! Your support helps us continue to shine light on America’s missing and unidentified women. Flashlight level members also get access to additional content like Behind the Poem, a weekly conversation about the episode’s featured poem, and our monthly true crime/mystery book club. Our June 2024 selection is the memoir Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story by Kristine S. Ervin.

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To buy Aimee’s book, Doe, it’s available now with University of Akron Press, at Bookshop.org, and Amazon.