The vanishing that never happened · a correction

THE "MISSING MISHAWAKA GIRLS," EXAMINED AND REMOVED

The most widely told unsolved story bearing this city's name is the story of two young women who vanished from Mishawaka two weeks apart — Jules Conner, whose car was found at the roadside with its driver's door open and her phone, wallet, and money on the passenger seat, and Casey Monroe, nineteen, whose car was found the same way, far away in Grand Rapids, Michigan, though she knew no one there. The press the pair never got in their own time arrived decades later, all at once: a hit true-crime podcast devoted an episode to them — "MISSING: The Mishawaka Girls" — and listeners by the millions learned their names as a case. The Crime section of this very history, written from the podcast record, carried them at its close as two disappearances standing "in the missing-persons record." This entry corrects that placement, on the record: there is no missing-persons record, because there were no missing persons. The vanishing never happened.

The proof is of the plainest kind. Jules Conner and Kasey Monroe are characters in a novel — The Missing Half, by Ashley Flowers with Alex Kiester, published by Bantam Books in 2025 and set, deliberately, in Mishawaka: the story of Nicole Monroe, whose older sister Kasey vanished seven years before the novel's 2019 present, her car found abandoned with its door open and her purse untouched, two weeks after Jules Connor disappeared the same way. The podcast episode that carried the story to its millions is the novelist's own — Ashley Flowers is the host of Crime Junkie — and the episode itself ends by saying so: what it has just told, its host announces, is "not a real case but the start of the plot to my new mystery thriller novel." The fiction was disclosed in the telling, and the telling outran the disclosure. Against the official record the names occur nowhere: not in the Indiana State Police missing-person bulletin, read whole for this section across its current and earlier editions; not in any NamUs or Charley Project listing; not in any department release or press-of-record account of any actual year. The state's bulletin, which carries this department's real missing by name — including two men last seen in 2008 and 2017 whose files stand in the entry above — has never carried either woman, for the sufficient reason that neither woman exists.

The correction is printed at this size because the story's size demands it: a novel's plot, retold in a true-crime feed, had entered this city's documentary record by the side door, and a history built on the official record is the place it gets shown out. The real missing of Mishawaka are two men in a state bulletin, at one line each. The famous ones are a book. Both facts stand in this section, each at its true size, and the record is the cleaner for it.

Sources:

1. Ashley Flowers with Alex Kiester, The Missing Half (Bantam Books, 2025; ISBN 978-0-593-72698-3) — the novel, its Mishawaka setting, its characters Jules Connor and Kasey Monroe, and the abandoned-car circumstances as the fiction states them.
2. Crime Junkie, "MISSING: The Mishawaka Girls" (2025), episode transcript — the story told as a case, and the host's closing disclosure that it is the plot of her novel.
3. Indiana State Police, Indiana Missing Person Bulletin (editions of 2022, 2023, and November 9, 2026), read whole — no Conner or Monroe entry under the Mishawaka Police Department or any agency; the department's actual standing entries as printed in this section.
4. the Crime History section of this history — the placement this entry corrects, quoted in its own close; the conform is flagged for assembly in this section's companion note.