My-Dung Tran (10 of Spades, Mississippi)

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Having recently sold the nail salon that she owned for years in Pensacola, Florida, 51-year-old Mae Young was enjoying her well-earned retirement. The mother of three spent her newly cleared up schedule with her long-term partner at home or on bus rides to Mississippi and Louisiana, where she would hit the casinos for a couple weeks at a time.
She was even planning an upcoming trip back home

to her home country of Vietnam to visit her family.

But on October 4th, 2008,

a fateful cab ride would postpone that trip indefinitely.

And it would change the course of Mayong's life

and so many others.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. In September of 2008, Mayong boarded a bus from Pensacola, Florida, to Biloxi, Mississippi for a gambling trip, something that she'd recently gotten into the habit of.
Here is Biloxi Assistant Chief of Police Chris Dibak, the investigator on her case today. From what I know, she would come over to Biloxi on the bus, sometimes with a friend, sometimes not.
She'd usually stay a couple days to a week, and from what her family tells me, sometimes it'd be up to three weeks. So wasn't anything unusual for her to be over here.
But she always would, you know, would call or keep in contact with a friend or something. Except this time, she was strangely quiet.
Two weeks passed, then three, then four. But her family hadn't seen or heard from her.
When they got a call from one of their mom's friends who had also been ghosted, they really began to worry. The woman said that Mayong was supposed to visit her after her Mississippi trip, but she just never showed.
And she hadn't returned any of the woman's repeated phone calls either. So the family decided to take action.
On November 5th, Mayong's son Vu decided that he needed to file a missing persons report with authorities in Escambia County, Florida, where they lived. What he told them was that his mom's last known location was in Mississippi.
Well, you know how that works, not their jurisdiction. So they called over to Biloxi, where they got a hold of D-Bak.
They explained the scenario to him and put him in touch with Mayong's family. One of the first things I did was call them to find out more about their mother and what she might have been doing here in Biloxi.
Ask them the normal stuff. Does she have bank accounts? You know, what's her cell phone number? Who might she contact? Who, you know, who her friends were? If she came over with a friend, I did ask them.

We're talking about the end of September, and this is beginning of November.

Why they waited so long?

They kind of reiterated that whole three-week thing, and it kind of made sense a little bit.

You know, wasn't out of the ordinary.

But once they started calling around, they couldn't get in touch with her.

She usually would return calls, and if she wasn't returning calls, that's when they got concerned. Now, when Mae Young boarded the bus back in September, D-Bag told us that she'd been alone.
But that's not to say she was planning on being alone the entire trip. Vu said his mom was very friendly and, quote, she'd talk to anybody.
Apparently, she'd been making these trips to Biloxi for at least a year at that point. So it was likely she knew people there.
They just didn't know who those people might be. She'd never talked about anyone in particular.
And tracking Mayong's movements, even in 2008, was going to be a challenge because there wasn't really a paper trail for D-back to follow.

Mayon only used cash.

Cash to gamble,

cash to pay for her bus ticket,

cash to pay for her hotel rooms.

Vu said his mom often kept

large amounts of cash on her.

She preferred to carry her money this way

and actually didn't even have any credit cards.

She didn't even have a bank account.

When you're tracking missing persons,

that's one of the first things you look at,

along with their cell phone.

And so that was out the window.

So one of the first things D-Bak did

was call Mayong's cell,

just like her kids had tried.

But the same thing happened, no answer.

He also called her long-term partner, Wang,

whose number he got from her kids. Mayong and Wang lived together in Florida.
Everybody I talked to, you know, asked about the boyfriend. Was there problems there or anything like that? And I said, no, they got along real well.
There wasn't anything that raises an eyebrow for anybody. Even checked into that background, because, you know, certainly a domestic is one way to go, but, you know, I was able to confirm he was at work and there was no past reports or any indication that there was an issue there.
When questioned, Wang said that he was working offshore, as he often did as a fisherman during Mayong's trip to Biloxi Casinos. It was only once he got back home in October that he discovered Mayong was nowhere to be found.
Tried to call her, couldn't get a hold of her, went to the normal locations looking for her, couldn't find her, talked to the family and everything else. He also found out that the rent hadn't been paid, none of the other bills had been paid.
About the end of the month, each month, he would send her about $4,000 to pay rent, you know, buy groceries, things of that nature live. And there was no indication that the $4,000 was left behind.
Wang told D-back that Mayong had been talking about taking a trip home to Vietnam to visit family. So D-back immediately began checking airlines and reaching out to federal agencies that

track international travel. And nothing.
They used her maiden name, her current name, everything.

It did not appear she left this country. So with neither Mayong's partner nor her children knowing

what happened in Biloxi, D-back was left to try and piece together her last movements on his own. Feeling sexy is supposed to be fun.
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Terms and conditions apply. I started contacting the different casinos to find out if she had a player's card, if she had ever stayed there, any information I could about her.
So when you go to a casino, you can get a player's card. It's kind of like a member card for that casino.
It's specific to each casino. And what you do is like if you're playing slots or something like that, you can put your card in.
It tracks your points. It just tracks your history.
But the only two casinos that really had current activity around that time, the end of September 2008 to October 2008, was the IP Cas in Beaurevage. Employees at the Imperial Palace confirmed that Mayong had checked into that hotel on September 27th and paid with cash for a three-day stay that she had booked in advance.
D-back was able to find activity on her player's card that first day, the 27th, and then again on September 29th and 30th. In all indications, she did stay from the 27th through the 30th.
When we checked with the Imperial Palace, where we know she stayed at, nothing had been left in the room. When D-Bak called the other casino, the Beau Ravage, he found out that Mae Young had also pre-booked a room there from October 1st to the 3rd, but she never showed up to check in.
And after the 30th, there was no more activity on her player's card at any casino in the area. Now, of course, it is possible that she was staying at the casino and just playing games without swiping her card, But without any more activity to track, D-back was stuck.
None of the other hotels or casinos in the area had any record of her either staying or playing around this time. The same was true for the local law enforcement agencies, the hospitals, even the coroner's offices.
None had any information about Mae Young or any unidentified Asian women who matched her description. At the time, it was a little bit difficult.
We really didn't have a place to go search. Certainly, the casinos did our best there with the assistance of surveillance and security.
But other than that, we really had no place to go search. Now, you might be thinking, because I know I was, that surveillance at casinos is pretty intense, like hard for someone to go missing kind of intense.
Casinos usually have not only high-definition cameras, like covering every inch of the floor, but also on-the-ground security teams constantly monitoring everyone and everything around them. Problem was, the surveillance cameras from the Biloxi casinos where she would have been playing only stored footage for around a week.
And because Mae Young wasn't reported missing until over a month after she was last in contact with anyone, most evidence of her movements in Biloxi had been deleted by the time D-Bak got on the case. There was one piece of technology, though, that did still have data, even over a month out.
And that was Mae Young's cell phone. It appears the last time her phone was used was at three o'clock in the morning on October 4th.
She called a phone, it went unanswered. So nobody was able to talk to her at that point if she's the one making the call.
After that point, I can tell you there were several incoming calls, but no answers. So I could tell that she didn't answer.
And I can tell that nobody ever made another call from her phone. By looking at the 24 hours prior to that call to see who she called and, you know, if they knew anything and, you know, what was the reason for that call.
It turned out she was in contact with a handful of people prior to her disappearance. D-Bak tried to reach out to all of them.
Most, it seemed, were friends that she maybe gambled with. And many of them hadn't answered their calls.
I mean, to be exact, Mayong made 15 phone calls between 9.30 p.m. and 3 a.m.
on October 3rd and 4th, and none of them were picked up. 14 of these calls, including Mayong's last, were to the same man.
When D-Beck called that number, the man said that he had met Mayong gambling on a previous trip and that the two had sort of become friends. He said that usually when she would call, it was, hey, come, I'm in town, come gamble with me and all that.
But he was working, didn't really have the time, so he just didn't answer the calls. That was one of the last calls that was made.
The last call that was answered was placed just before 9.30 p.m. It was to a friend that we'll call Bob.
Bob told D-Back that during that conversation, he made plans to meet up with Mayong at the Imperial Palace that night, October 3rd. When Bob got there, he noticed Mayong had brought another woman, someone he didn't recognize.
Well, they hung out at the RP Casino for several hours, and then they decided to go over to the Beau Ravage. They were at the Beau Ravage, the three of them, for another several hours.
And around four o'clock on the 4th, she says, well, I'm going to go down to the Grand Casino. And the gentleman gives her $5 for the cab.
As far as the Grand Casino, we have no indication that she ever arrived through surveillance or a player's card. That's the last time she's seen.
Sometimes you'll find where taxi companies keep the records of pickups, drop-offs. I couldn't find any pickup or drop-off in the area for that time frame.
D-Back doesn't know if someone called this supposed cab or if it was already nearby, or if it was really even a legitimate cab at all. Because to this day, he hasn't been able to pinpoint the company or the driver of that car.
And it is after this 4 a.m. pickup that Mayong essentially goes off the grid.
Now, people continue to call her phone, but she never picked up again. Now, because Mayong's phone continued to get calls, though, it did continue to ping cell towers.
Ordinarily, this could give investigators a general idea of the area where someone is. But not in this case.
The towers that it was hitting on were kind of a red herring. I know she was at the Bar of Eyes on the morning, but if you look at her phone records, it's hitting further north up in the county.
It's a switch tower. So if the tower gets overloaded or something like that, it switches to another location.
So the GPS location didn't help on the cell phone records. D-Bag was never able to locate Mae Young's physical phone.
But he was interested in learning more about Bob and the other woman that she was last seen with. When Bob met up at the IP casino on the night of the 3rd, this unknown feeble was with her.
The only thing he could tell me is that she was foreign. He didn't know where she was from, who she was, anything like that.
So D-Bag tried to see if the casino employees knew anything about this mystery woman. And that's when things sort of took a turn.
None of them could tell me who this person was, but they thought she was involved in some kind of prostitution or something. I don't know how they got the idea.
She might even be involved in prostitution. Nobody ever came forward with any information for that.
I would say I'm very skeptical of this unknown female. I know what people are saying, what they believe.
I don't know how they, I want to say, assumed or what their theory is, where it came from that she might have been involved in prostitution. I still haven't figured that one out.
But if that is anywhere close to accurate, maybe she got hooked up with the wrong people. And maybe that's who she was staying with and something went wrong.
D-Back tried to identify this woman. But other than searching for a player's card, which he couldn't find, there wasn't much he could do without surveillance or a paper trail.

And we don't know how the mystery woman or Bob's nights ended after Mayong allegedly left.

According to D-Bak, there was nothing to suggest that Bob was involved in Mayong's disappearance.

And though all of the new information he provided was helpful, there were still tons of gaps in the timeline. And honestly, even more questions.
You know, she checks out IP on the 30th. Where did she stay between the 30th and the morning of the 4th? I can't even put her gambling at any of the casinos other than two days during that period.
One being the last day and one being one of the first days she's there. So I haven't been able to determine or figure out what she did in the middle there.
It's just the story is so weird between those dates that she just, she wasn't at a casino, or if she was, she wasn't using her player's card. She wasn't on any kind of video that we know of, and she wasn't checked into a hotel.
So I don't know where she was staying at, who she was with. And majority of the time, we get a report of a missing person.
We find them a couple hours later, and, you know, sometimes they're sitting at another casino. Sometimes they just, you know, went to sleep or whatever it is.
But thankfully, majority of missing person reports, that's how they end up. They just lost track of time or whatever.
Cell phone died, whatever it is. By the end of November, D-Back hadn't received so much as one tip from the public.
It was starting to feel like there was nothing more he could do. But on December 5th, just as he was on the verge of losing hope, D-Back got a call from a waitress at the casino.
She told him that just the day before, she had seen Mae Young and she wasn't alone. Stop allergy season in its tracks with big savings from GoodRx.
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The waitress who said she saw Mae Young on December 4th told D-back that she recognized her because she had served her at the casino many times before. She said, I think I saw her on December 4th with an unknown white male and never seen the guy before, nothing.
So I asked her, I said, well, where did you see her in the casino exactly? And what was she doing?

Did she appear to be scared, anything like that?

She said, no, she appeared to be normal.

I didn't go up and talk to her or anything like that, but I'm pretty sure it was her.

So I started checking into that, checked her players' records, got with surveillance,

to figure out exactly what camera she might be on.

And they were never able to find anything. And so whether it was her or not, I couldn't tell you.
D-back said he believed the waitress was reliable. So he had the Imperial Palace look through their surveillance video based on her tip.
But there didn't appear to be any footage of Mayong anywhere. So, unable to confirm the waitress's story,

D-back had to assume that maybe she was mistaken.

She couldn't say anything else about the man she allegedly saw Mae Young with,

other than he was white,

which left D-back with another possible person of interest

that he had no way to identify.

That same month, D-back also got a call from Mayong's son Vu, the one who had initially reported her missing. He told D-back that he had received a call from somebody saying that they saw Mayong at a casino in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and that's over four hours from Biloxi.
So I got with the Louisiana Gaming Commission. And between them, Mississippi Gaming Commission and casinos, we were able to check every casino nationally and put out a bolo.
And there was nothing. New Orleans, Lake Charles, Las Vegas, nothing other than here in Biloxi.
And unfortunately, that was the last tip D-Bak received in this case.

In fact, those two tips were the only ones he ever got.

In January of 2010, D-Bak entered Vu's DNA into CODIS.

And over the years, he's gotten a handful of hits for possible matches to unidentified remains found out of state. But each one was eventually ruled out.
At this point, I can't say that there's a person of interest. But at the same time, you know, whether you want to call them witnesses or friends, associates, it's an active missing person case.
So it's kind of hard to rule anybody out at this point. But no, there's no front running, you know, person of interest, nothing like that.
I'd love to talk to that driver, the unknown white female, and let's say December, citing was accurate, the unknown white male. Those would be the three people that I'd want to talk to right now, or anybody that knows where she may have been staying at between the 30th of September and the 3rd of October.

D-back said that because it's been so long and Mae Young hasn't resurfaced anywhere,

she hasn't gotten a ticket in another state or popped up on any NCIC lists,

he can only assume that there was foul play involved in her disappearance. But other than that, he says he doesn't have enough information to come up with a theory about what really did happen to her.
Here's our reporter Nicole speaking with Detective D-Bak. What would you say has been the most challenging part of this case? The unknown, the inability to get information on those few days in the middle of where exactly she was and what exactly she was doing.
And not having the ability to go back and get the surveillance, a lot of the surveillance, most of it, as a matter of fact, because it's just gone.

You know, we lost it in time. The records at the time, as far as the cell phone records, you know, certainly details are better nowadays than they were even in 2008.
And not being able to pinpoint, you know, that cell phone ping where she was making the calls because it hit a switch tower. And then, unfortunately,, majority of the calls she made in that last day went unanswered.
So that, to me, that's the frustration. You just, there's nowhere to go to get, to get the questions answered.
And unless somebody comes forward that knows, you know, has those answers, there's no technology we can use to get it. No records we can go dig up.
We haven't received any new leads, any new information in over a decade now. And the few attempts or times that I've been able to pull it out and look at it and try to rerun the information, trying to find a new connection, I've gotten nowhere.
I think anything is important, especially if we're talking about the time frame again through the end of September. I say through the beginning of October, but if she was observed or seen after that, that information is important too.
So it doesn't matter how small it is or insignificant you believe it is. You know, any information can help.
And it's a puzzle. You're trying to put the puzzle together and you may have that piece.
Whether it's very valuable or it's not as significant, it's still part of the puzzle. Today, Mayong would be 67 years old.
At the time of her disappearance, she was 5 feet tall and 140 pounds.

She had black hair, brown eyes, and pierced ears.

You can find her photo in the show notes.

So if you know anything about the 2008 disappearance of Mae Young

or her movements in Biloxi from September 27th to October 4th,

please call Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers at 1-877-787-5898.

Or you can submit a tip online thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? No-cost Gen Eds provided by Strayer University affiliate Sophia.
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