On Sunday morning, August 12, 1984, thirteen-year-old Eugene Wade Martin left his home in Des Moines, Iowa, to deliver the Sunday paper. He was five days away from his fourteenth birthday. He was saving money for the fair and a bicycle.

But somewhere along the way, Eugene's paper route stopped.

His newspapers were found. But Eugene was gone.

Less than two years earlier, another Des Moines Register carrier, Johnny Gosch, had vanished from his own Sunday morning route. So when Eugene disappeared, the fear in Des Moines shifted. What had once seemed like an ordinary childhood job now felt exposed, vulnerable, and dangerous.

In this episode of SEQUESTERED, we trace the morning Eugene disappeared, the witnesses who may have seen him speaking with an unknown man, the flood of tips that followed, and the massive search that covered neighborhoods, riverbanks, wooded areas, and nearly seventy square miles. We also look at what Eugene's disappearance did to his family; the phone calls, the license plates, the Apple II computer filled with names, and the long vigil of parents who never stopped looking.

If you have any information about the disappearance of Eugene Wade Martin, please contact the Des Moines Police Department at 515-283-4811, the FBI Iowa office at 515-223-4278, or the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST / 1-800-843-5678. NCMEC case number: 601815. Official contact details are listed by NCMEC, and Eugene is also listed with the Iowa Missing Person Information Clearinghouse.

Photos, source material, and additional case information are available at sequesteredpod.com.

On the first day of summer break in 1983, 12-year-old Ann Gotlib rides her bike home through the parking lot of Bashford Manor Mall in Louisville, Kentuky, then vanishes.

Her bicycle is later found outside a department store.

But Ann is gone.

In the days that follow, witnesses report seeing a man dragging a young girl near a field and drainage ditch not far from the mall. Police release a composite sketch. Search teams comb through woods, creeks, and shoulder-high grass. And investigators begin chasing a case built almost entirely on fragments.

A goodbye in a parking lot.

A possible sighting inside the mall.

A mysterious phone call.

A hitchhiker story that briefly changes everything.

And decades later, a dead man publicly named by police as the prime suspect.

In this episode, Sara Reid retraces the disappearance of Ann Gotlib, a bright 12-year-old daughter of Soviet Jewish immigrants whose case became part of a national shift in how America responds to missing children.

But more than 40 years later, Ann has still never been found.

Jennifer Marteliz was seven years old when she disappeared while walking home from school in Tampa, Florida, on November 15, 1982. She was only blocks from home. Witnesses later described seeing Jennifer upset near a crossing guard and possibly near a rust-colored car shortly before she vanished. What should have been an ordinary walk home became one of Florida's most haunting unsolved child disappearance cases.

In Episode 3 of SEQUESTERED Season Four, Sara Reid reconstructs Jennifer's final known moments through witness accounts, search records, media reporting, and the growing fractures inside the investigation itself. As police and volunteers searched neighborhoods, drainage pipes, vacant lots, and wooded areas across Tampa, the case slowly became defined by uncertainty: conflicting sightings, theories that never fully fit, and a timeline that seemed impossibly small for a child to disappear without a trace.

More than forty years later, Jennifer Marteliz has never been found. And the few minutes between school and home still remain unexplained.