The views and opinions expressed in Cold and Missing are exclusively those of the hosts. All parties mentioned are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Cold and Missing also contains adult themes and languages. Listener discretion is advised. I'm your host, Ali McLaughlin-Sulkowski. And I'm your co-host, Eli Sulkowski. And this is Cold and Missing, where we cover cold cases and missing person cases. Hello everyone and welcome back to Cold and Missing.
I'm your host, Ali. It's just me coming to you this week. My darling husband, Eli, as you may remember if you've listened to some of our past episodes, his mother passed away recently and he just needed to take a little time this week for his mental health. So of course he is supported in doing that. And I love him very much and miss him very much. He's still here in the house, but I just miss him when he's not with me. However, I still wanted to bring you a new episode.
This week we are covering a missing person. So let's just get into it. This week we are covering the story of Katelin Aikens. And this takes place in December of 2015 in Spotslovania, Virginia. But first, a little bit about Katelin. Katelin is 19 years old in 2015. She would be 27 years old today. Katelin at this time is living in Lake Havasu City, Arizona with her fiance Amber. Amber and Katelin had been friends for years, having grown up on the same street together.
When Amber was 10, her family moved to Arizona, but her and Katelin remained close throughout the years, their friendship growing into a relationship. Katelin’s family was supportive when she came out. Her mother only wanted her daughter to be happy more than anything. Katelin graduated high school at the age of 16. She was very smart and very academic. Just 10 days after her 18th birthday, she moved to Arizona to be with Amber.
In the weeks before her disappearance, Katelin was in the process of enrolling in cosmetology school in Arizona. But she talked with her family in Virginia several times a day, either through text or phone calls, often both. Her sister was pregnant with her first nephew and Katelin was going to become an aunt for the first time and was so excited. So now a timeline of events. On Tuesday, December 1st, 2015, Katelin flies back to her hometown to celebrate the birth of her nephew.
She grew up in Caroline County, Virginia. It was going to be a quick trip, just four days since she was slated to start cosmetology school on Monday. She just had to finish up her enrollment, which meant bringing her high school diploma back to Arizona with her. On Thursday, December 3rd, Katelin meets up with old friends and parties at their place. They stay up late playing drinking games and Katelin ends up spending the night there.
She comes home later the next day on Friday so she can pack up her stuff and get ready for her flight the next day. Saturday, December 5th, 2015. Before she leaves for the airport, she makes sure to grab her high school diploma. Her mother, Lisa, had to work that day so another family member had promised to take her to the airport. However, this other family member ended up getting called into work at the last minute.
In a bind, Katelin reached out to her ex-stepdad, James Branton, to see if he would be able to give her a ride. James was really the only father figure that Katelin had ever had in her life since her biological dad was not in the picture. James agrees to take her to the airport, but since he had to work later that day, around 3pm, he'll have to drop Katelin off four hours before her flight so he can make the trip back to get to work in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Katelin was flying out of the Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington, DC at 5.40pm. Katelin got a ride from her mother to James' house and then Lisa headed to work. According to her mother, everything seemed normal when she dropped Katelin off. Lisa told Katelin to call her when she got to the airport and when she boarded the plane. Katelin said she would.
Lisa needed to get to work by 10am so she left Katelin and her ex-husband who were chatting about Katelin’s plans to enroll in cosmetology school. A few hours later, around 1.52pm, Lisa gets a text message from her ex-husband saying that he dropped Katelin off. Lisa texts back, quote, okay, thank you. I was traffic, end quote. To which he responds, not bad.
Eight minutes later, at 2pm, Lisa gets a text message from Katelin’s phone saying, quote, I'm at the airport, battery dying so won't be able to text for a bit, end quote. Lisa shoots back a text, okay, let me know when you get on the plane. A few minutes after this, another series of text messages are sent to Lisa from Amber, Katelin’s fiancée. Amber says that Katelin isn't getting on the plane.
When Lisa asks her what she means, she says that something happened and Katelin is waiting for a new flight. However, Lisa knows that there aren't any other flights that Katelin can get on that night. This was her only flight. Lisa starts to worry. She's still at work so in between customers she calls other family members to recruit them into helping find out what's happening with Katelin. Her sister begins to text her, but she doesn't respond and the calls go straight to voicemail.
As Lisa leaves work that night, she texts James to ask him where he dropped her off at. He said that he dropped her off at the Springfield Mall in Virginia. This was news to Lisa and when she asked why, he said that Katelin wanted to be dropped off there. He said that instead of waiting at the airport terminal for four hours, she was going to walk around the mall and then take the metro train from the mall to the airport. James tells Lisa he had even given her $20 for the metro.
According to Katelin’s family, this doesn't sound like her. Katelin hadn't taken the metro since she was around six years old and didn't really know her way around it and she had never been to that mall before. She would have either needed to take a bus and then walk to the train in order to get to the airport or walk about 16 minutes with her luggage straight to the train from the mall. Katelin’s mom and sister are convinced that she wouldn't have done this.
At around 7 and 15, Lisa gets two text messages from Katelin’s phone. The first one read, quote, staying with a friend, end quote. And the second one said, quote, I need some time alone, end quote. This was strange to Lisa since Katelin should have been in the air at this time and unable to send a text. Lisa was driving home from work when she got the text messages, so she pulled into a gas station and attempted to call Kateline, but the calls went straight to voicemail.
Lisa texted her daughter saying, call me, and then says, I'm very worried about you. Shortly after, Amber gets a Facebook message from Katelin that said, quote, I can't come back. I cheated on you, end quote. Amber and Lisa talk and Amber has no idea what is happening. Amber and Katelin had not gotten into any fights recently, and there's no reason she can think of on why she wouldn't want to come home.
Lisa decides to call the airport and she finds out that Katelin never even boarded her flight. This sends Lisa into a panic and she calls police to report her daughter missing. But since Katelin is over the age of 18, police tell her that she hasn't been missing long enough yet for them to do anything.
On Monday, December 7, after agonizing over what's happening with Katelin and trying to get a hold of her with no response, Lisa goes to the Spotslovania County Sheriff's Department to report Katelin missing since this was the last place that she had seen her when she dropped her off at James's house.
When Lisa tells police everything, police believe that Katelin just needed a few days to herself and that she would turn up, that maybe she was getting cold feet and didn't want to return back to Arizona. Lisa still insists on filing a police report with them. While Lisa is in the middle of filling out the form, Katelin’s luggage is found.
A road crew found her suitcase in a drainage ditch off of River Road near where it intersects with Fall Hill Road in Spotslovania County, 50 miles from the airport. Police pull Lisa into a room to tell her of the discovery. Her luggage was found unzipped. Her plane ticket, wallet with her ID and all of her bank cards, toothbrush, and phone charger were all in the suitcase, but everything else was missing. Her clothes, her cell phone, and her high school diploma.
The suitcase had a broken wheel and according to Lisa, it looked like it was just tossed out of a window. Police begin investigating Katelin’s disappearance. They find the circumstances suspicious and interview her family at length. Katelin’s case is assigned to Detective Rob Marshall, who speaks with James, her former stepfather, and his statement remains the same, that around 1pm he dropped her off at the mall near the JCPenney entrance.
James told police he didn't think that it was odd at all that she wanted to take the Metro into the airport. Police reach out to the mall, the Metro, and the airport for surveillance footage on the day that Katelin went missing. Later review of the videos will show that Katelin was not caught on any of the security cameras at the mall, metro, or airport. On Thursday, December 10th, Katelin has been missing for five days. Police search the area near where her suitcase was found.
There is a river near this area and investigators search the shoreline. They do aerial searches as well, but nothing additional is found in regards to Katelin, so none of her clothing was found, her cell phone wasn't found, her diploma wasn't found, and she was not found. Police continue to dig into Katelin’s life. They find a Facebook message from the early hours of the day she disappeared, when it was known that Katelin still was in possession of her phone.
It said that she didn't want to be here or there, which investigators took to mean she didn't want to be in Virginia or Arizona. Investigators also talked to the friends that she had spent the night with while she was in town visiting. The house Katelin crashed at belonged to a couple, and they said that when Katelin was over, they were playing drinking games and one thing led to another and they all became intimate.
This does give investigators hope that maybe Katelin is just laying low for a couple days and helps support the Facebook message that was sent to her fiance saying that she had cheated. Police begin to stake out areas that Katelin was known to visit, hoping that maybe some family or friends were just helping her lie low for a few days while she figured out her life.
On December 19th, two weeks since Katelin disappeared, police had found no sign of her and it did not appear that anybody was helping hide Katelin. Police say they're no closer to finding her than the day she vanished. Katelin’s family believe that there is no way she would stay out of touch with them for this long. She would have contacted them by now if she had just needed a few days to herself. It's unclear exactly when, but eventually Katelin’s phone records arrived to police to review.
Police find out through the phone records that when Katelin sent the text to her mother saying that she was at the airport, that that text message pinged to a tower near Fredericksburg, Virginia, about five miles from where her suitcase was found, but far away from the airport. On December 29th, 2015, James is scheduled to come in that day and take a polygraph test. He has been very cooperative with police during their investigation and police really view him as a concerned father.
They scheduled the polygraph as a way to rule him out and move past him since he was the last person to see Katelin. James calls police to tell him that he spoke with his attorney who advised him not to take the polygraph test since he was being looked at as a suspect. Police try to assure James that he's not a suspect, but just the last person to see Katelin alive, that they need to rule him out before they can start looking at other people.
Still, James refuses to take the polygraph test and really stops being cooperative with police after this point. In January of 2016, Katelin has been missing for nearly a month at this point. Detective Rob Marshall decides to get a search warrant for James' house and the swamp area behind his house.
During the search, investigators seize computers and cell phones and spend hours searching his house, property, and vehicles, but they don't find any trace that anything bad happened to Katelin in his home or the vehicles.
Police do, however, obtain James' cell phone records, and they notice that all of the calls he made that day and all of the text messages he sent on the day that Katelin disappeared pinged off of the tower near his home in Partlow, Virginia, not near the mall or airport or even near his job in Fredericksburg. His phone records will also show that James never tried to call Katelin once after she disappeared.
Investigators will also come to find out that James called off work that Saturday that Katelin disappeared. He never went in. In June of 2016, it's been over six months since Katelin went missing. Katelin’s family is desperate to find her, and they start a GoFundMe in order to hire a private investigator. They also have started a Facebook group to try to raise awareness for Katelin’s case.
The Spotslovenia Sheriff's Department says, quote, the case is still open and we have a detective who is actively working on it. We've looked everywhere we know to look, but at this time we have no new leads or information, end quote. In May of 2017, Katelin has been missing for about a year and a half now. The FBI has joined the search, but investigators are still at a standstill. The family is deep in their own investigation into what happened.
Katelin’s sister Pamela says, quote, we analyze everything all the time, different things that could have happened every day, end quote. Katelin’s mom checks Facebook first thing in the morning to see if there's any new posts about Katelin or Googles her daughter's name to see if anything new pops up. Lisa used to talk to detectives every day, but it got depressing. Nothing ever changed in the investigation and there was never any new information.
Lisa has reached out to national TV shows and famous psychics to see if any of them would be able to help get Katelin’s story out there. The show Disappear does do an episode on Katelin and that helps raise awareness about Katelin’s case nationally. When Lisa thinks back to the day her daughter disappeared, she thinks of the text messages that Katelin sent and Lisa does not believe that they were sent by Katelin.
She told a local paper that Katelin never double texted unless she had misspelled something. And when she texted her mother that she needed time alone and was at a friend's house, it was sent as a double text. Police Captain Liz Scott told local media that investigators now believe that Katelin never left the area. Lisa holds out hope that her daughter will be found. She says, quote, We don't know if she's lying in a ditch somewhere or if she's going to be fine.
We don't know if she's living it up, partying around. If she is out there, is she going to be the same Katelin we know? I don't know. End quote. When Katelin went missing in 2015, she was five foot four and about 145 pounds. She had short blonde hair and blue eyes. She has a tattoo of three stars on her foot and five butterflies on her arm that are outlined in blue. Her nose, lip and belly button are pierced and she has gauges in her ears.
So if you know anything about the disappearance of Katelin Akins in December of 2015 or her whereabouts today, please call Crime Solvers at 1-800-928-5822 or you can submit a tip on the FBI website. And the sources for the timeline today come from Cole Pepper's star exponent, Richard Times Dispatch, the Facebook page, help find Katelin Akins, the FBI and Virginia cold case database. So that is the case of Katelin Akins.
This is a case that I was not familiar with, but in a comment section of one of our YouTube pages, someone suggested that I should look into the case. And as soon as I did, I really wanted more information. There just seems to be a lot of questions for me, a lot of lot of questions. And some of the more obvious ones that I'm sure you all had too is what happened to her clothes?
You know, they find her suitcase, and there's some of her stuff in there, some really important stuff, her plane ticket, her wallet, her IDs, her bank cards, her phone charger, but none of her clothes are there. So what happened to all of them? It does seem strange that none of them have turned up, but it does make me hopeful because it's like those are a lot of pieces of evidence that could be found somewhere, some way.
I do share Katelin’s family's thoughts that if she was able to, she would have contacted the family by now. Her mom was talking about how she would be at work and Katelin would regularly call two or three times and text her while she was at work. So it wasn't as if she had a very strange relationship with her family, like, you know, a lot of LGBTQ people sometimes have. She seemed very close with her family, very close with her sister. She flew back to meet her nephew.
So all of that to me just makes it seem like even if she decided to take a couple days because she was rethinking her relationship, maybe going through some stuff, you know, just growing pains of being 19 and figuring out your life and what you want from it, she would have contacted her family. I really do believe that, as does her family. So it makes me anxious to think about what could have happened to her. I also have a lot of questions for her former stepfather.
He claims that he dropped her off at Springfield Mall in Springfield, Virginia, but no security cameras caught him or his car, you know, in the parking lot. They didn't catch her walking into the entrance and there were cameras, you know, at that entrance, the JCPenney entrance that she was walking into. So it just doesn't seem likely that in 2015, especially when, you know, there's a lot of camera footage that she would go missed in a mall with security cameras that nobody would see her.
Or I would hope that police went and, you know, kind of canvassed the mall as well, like maybe some of the JCPenney workers who were working that day or whatever the stores just beyond that are. I would hope that would be done. Because I think people might remember, you know, a young woman walking in with a suitcase kind of dragging it around. You don't always see that at a shopping mall, so that might have stuck out to some people. So I hope that was done.
But ultimately, I don't think she was ever at the mall. It doesn't sound like she ever made it there. And I did notice as well that between the statement that her stepfather gives to police, which is that around one, he drops her off, Lisa doesn't get a text from him until 1 52. So that's a 52 minute gap. And you know, maybe it's as innocent as, oh, like, I dropped her off, I immediately turned around because I needed to get to work, which we later find out he called off that day.
But maybe it is as innocent as I turned around and was in traffic. And I just didn't think about it until 52 minutes later. And I texted her. And maybe him not going to work is as innocent as I got caught in traffic. I knew I wasn't going to make it. So I had to call off the rest of the day. But that doesn't seem to be his story. Like that's not included in his statements to police, at least that police have revealed.
So for me, in order to kind of rule him out as a person of interest, or even like the police said, just as the last person who saw her, you kind of have to start there and then go beyond. I can't rule him out yet. Like, you know, no evidence was found that a crime had taken place in his car or in his home. So I would take that to mean there. They didn't find any blood. No signs of struggle. No recent dig marks on his property.
You know, there wasn't anything that stood out to them as something bad had happened there. But I do wonder if they found any evidence of her at all, just because she was in his car. So you know, did they find a hair? Did they find her DNA? You know, on the armrest or anything? Was her DNA found at all? Because it should be there. If what he says is true, he drove her, you know, an hour to this mall that she wanted to be dropped off there.
So that way she could kill time at the mall and then head over via the metro in DC. I do think that if Katelin was dropped off at the mall, she would have been able to figure out the metro system to get to the airport. A lot of her family kind of made the comment that she wouldn't have done that because she doesn't know how to. But you know, Katelin was also very smart. She was very book smart.
I think she could have figured it out, especially if she had a smartphone with her that could kind of, you know, give her the step by step directions. But I always come back to the fact that she was never seen on any of the cameras at the mall. So I don't think she was ever there to figure out how to get to the airport from there.
And you know, all her cell phone, all the texts that were sent from her cell phone pinged 50 miles away in Spotslovania County where her stepfather lived or her former stepfather lived near where her suitcase was eventually found with her plane ticket in it. So that just leaves me with a lot of questions that I would love to have answered as I'm sure her family and police would love to have answered as far as her former stepfather James goes. I do hope that this case will get solved.
You know, this is from 2015, even though, you know, we are in the year of 2024 as I'm recording this. So you know, this December will be nine years. That's a long time to not have somebody and for somebody to be missing. But I feel like since it did happen within the last 10 years that there is a lot of information that police still have.
There's a lot of technology that the police have that I think could provide more answers, especially if they're able to take newer technology, like maybe there are texts that need to be recovered or, you know, things that were kind of hidden on the phone that can be brought to light, you know, using new technology.
I hope that that is done for Katelin and that we're able to get some answers and know what happened to her and hopefully bring her home so that way her family can know where she is one way or the other. And she disappeared during the day. So you know, if anybody saw anything from December 5th, 2015, again, you are encouraged to call Crime Solvers at 1-800-928-5822. You can submit a tip directly to the FBI if you go on their website, especially if you search her name.
So please, if you know anything, if you saw anything in that area, please submit a tip. Let's get some answers for Katelin and get this thing solved, get this thing closed. We'll be posting pictures of Katelin on our Instagram. If you're not following us there, I definitely suggest you check us out. We put any updates with the podcast on there as well as post in our stories about cases happening here and now. We'll of course be posting pictures of Katelin on our Instagram at Cold and Missing.
You can find us there. If you have a second before you move on to the next part of your day, if you could please leave us review, especially if you're an Apple podcast, leaving us a written review helps others find us and helps bring these cases to more people and get people interested in these cold cases, in these unresolved missing person cases. So if you've already done that, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. If you haven't, I strongly encourage you to do it.
It's such a free way to support this podcast. You can always visit us on our website www.coldandmissing.com. You can review us there as well. If you're not a part of Apple podcasts, you can also donate to us if you wish to support us that way. And also if you or someone you love is hard of hearing, we have transcripts on the website so that way you can follow along with us there. Thank you so much for listening to Cold and Missing. I'm your host, Ali McLaughlin-Zilkowski.
Have a great week and stay safe, y'all.