San Diego’s Lost Women, Episode 1: Cynthia Maine

In the 1980s, dozens of women disappeared from San Diego, California. One of them was 26-year-old Cynthia Maine.

Cynthia was a daughter, sister, mother, and woman trying to survive addiction while working along El Cajon Boulevard, San Diego’s notorious red light district. By 1986, she was rebuilding her life. She had found work as a waitress, but she was also serving as a police informant. Just months before she vanished, she had allegedly begun an affair with one of her police contacts. 

Late in February, she told her family she was going to watch a movie. 

She never came home.

As investigators searched for Cynthia, few realized they were witnessing the beginning of one of the largest unsolved series of murders and disappearances in California history. 

In the first episode of this three-part investigation, we examine Cynthia's disappearance alongside the murder of her friend Donna Gentile. Together, their stories reveal a hidden world of vice squads, confidential informants, police corruption, and the extraordinary risks faced by women living on the margins of San Diego in the mid-1980s.

This series asks how so many women could disappear from one city and why so many of their cases remain unsolved decades later.

📍 San Diego, California  | February 1986

📖 Featuring an original poem written and read in her honor by Aimee Baker.

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