Randa Jawhari (10 of Spades, Michigan)

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Speaker 1 Our card this week is Rhonda Jahari, the 10 of Spades from Michigan. Renda, known to most as Rhonda, was a natural-born artist, creative, full of energy, and always looking for her next project.

Speaker 1 By the time she was 42, Rhonda had painted murals in Hawaii, appeared in movies and TV shows, and written her own book. It was impossible to imagine anything could dim her light.

Speaker 1 But on February 11th, 2009, someone snuffed it out completely. Rhonda disappeared from her apartment without a trace, and more than 15 years later, detectives are still trying to find her.

Speaker 1 I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

Speaker 1 On February 11th, 2009, Anise Jahari woke up and waited for her phone to ring. Ever since her 42-year-old daughter, Rhonda, moved into her own place, she called every morning at 7.30 to check in.

Speaker 1 And these check-ins were important because Rhonda was dealing with a chronic physical illness and relied on her family to help her through her day. But on that morning, Anise's phone didn't ring.

Speaker 1 When 20 minutes went by with no call or text, Anise knew that something was wrong, especially because Anise was taking care of Rhonda's six-year-old daughter, Madeline, at the time.

Speaker 1 Rhonda definitely would have called to check in on Maddie. So at 7:53, Anise called Rhonda's cell.
No answer. At 8:10, she called again.
Still no answer. And here's Rhonda's younger sister, Dee Dee.

Speaker 5 Rhonda was very predictable. I mean, if she called at 8.30, she did it every day.
She didn't just call at 8.30 randomly one day and, oh, today I feel like this.

Speaker 5 No, she called all of us every day, all day long.

Speaker 1 So Anise got in her car and drove over to Rhonda's apartment less than 10 minutes away in Fenton, Michigan. And when no one came to the door, she used her spare key to get inside.

Speaker 1 Rhonda wasn't in any of the rooms that she checked, but the kitchen light was on and it looked as though her bed had been slept in. None of this was really cause for alarm yet.

Speaker 1 Rhonda typically went to Catholic service in the mornings around like 8:15 after she got off the phone with her mom, of course.

Speaker 1 But what did concern Anise was something else that she saw in the bedroom?

Speaker 1 The clothes that she had laid out for Rhonda that day before, like when she went over to help her get ready for bed, they were still laying on the chair where she had left them, completely untouched.

Speaker 1 And as soon as Anise saw saw that outfit laying there, she knew that she had to call the police.

Speaker 1 She told them all the things that caused her concern that morning and how she had last seen her daughter the night before at 8 p.m.

Speaker 1 wearing her long blue bathrobe, which was now missing from the apartment.

Speaker 1 She expressed even more worry because she said that Rhonda's physical illness and the medication she'd been prescribed for it had taken a toll on her mental health, causing both anxiety and a general dependency on others.

Speaker 4 To see somebody walk off in a bathrobe, disappear in a bathrobe,

Speaker 4 is extremely odd. And you kind of start to formulate different possibilities of what happened.

Speaker 1 That was Fenton Police Detective Thomas Cole. And he told us that when Anise called that morning, Rhonda was actually already on Fenton Petey's radar, but not because she'd done anything wrong.

Speaker 4 Within a week and a half span prior to Rhonda coming up missing, three of us at the police department had been called on her only about a mile away from her residence.

Speaker 4 People that called in were concerned about just the way she looked and it looked like she was struggling walking and those type of things.

Speaker 4 People didn't understand where she was physically and mentally at that time. And at Every point she was picked up, she was dressed.
We never had any calls of her walking around town in her her robe.

Speaker 1 Detective Cole actually directly responded to one of those calls on February 10th. That was the day before Rhonda went missing.

Speaker 1 Someone had called the police just before 11 in the morning to report that a woman looked like she needed help.

Speaker 1 The caller said that the woman was walking in the middle of the road, just kind of wandering through traffic.

Speaker 4 I can remember thinking she just, she looked disheveled. And it wasn't safe for her to be walking out there.
So we, I just took her home. We had an actual conversation.

Speaker 4 I don't recall what it was, but it was definitely nothing out in left field to where I'm like, whoa, we need to get you some mental help right now.

Speaker 1 Given what Fenton Petey knew about Rhonda, they hoped that a call would come in soon from somebody who spotted her walking around the neighborhood.

Speaker 1 And in the meantime, they began checking the surrounding area and local businesses near her home.

Speaker 1 And when they realized there were no traces of Rhonda anywhere in town, they got a warrant to search her apartment, hoping that maybe they could find some clues there.

Speaker 1 But just as a niece reported, aside from the untouched clothing on the chair, nothing looked out of place.

Speaker 1 There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of forced entry, and the apartment looked how Rhonda normally kept it.

Speaker 1 So with that and Rhonda's history of going off on her own, detectives didn't want to jump to any conclusions about foul play. Plus, things like that didn't happen around Fenton.

Speaker 1 But still, detectives weren't just going to to brush this off either. That same day, they got a warrant for Rhonda's phone records.

Speaker 1 That's when they learned that on February 10th, after Anise left Rhonda's apartment, Rhonda spoke to her sister, Fadia, on the phone at around 11 p.m.

Speaker 6 I called her and

Speaker 6 normally she always wants to talk to me and she kept saying, I'm tired, sis. And I was like, oh, that's all right.
You know, just stay on the phone. Let's talk.

Speaker 6 And me and Rhonda used to talk on the phone almost every night. That night was just, just wanted to hang up.
But

Speaker 6 I just kept trying to keep her on the phone for some reason. I don't know what it was.

Speaker 1 Halfway through their conversation, Rhonda told Fadia that she was getting another call and she clicked over to answer it. And then when Rhonda got back to Fadia, she seemed upset.

Speaker 6 I asked her, who was that? And she said it was Diana, my big sister. I was like, what'd she say to you? I noticed a change in her and she wouldn't say anything about it.

Speaker 6 I kept wondering, well, what did my sister say that made her upset? I don't know what it was. And come to find out it was never my sister that called.

Speaker 6 At least that's what the police is saying, that it wasn't her.

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Speaker 1 Rhonda's phone records did show that another number had clicked into the call that night, but it wasn't from Diana, like Rhonda had said.

Speaker 1 Detectives actually showed Rhonda's call log to her family, and they were able to identify most all of the numbers except for this one.

Speaker 1 Nobody had seen it before, and it only showed up that one time.

Speaker 1 That's when detectives began to think that whoever this person was, this person that upset Rhonda that night, it might be the key to her disappearance. Except, of course, it couldn't be that easy.

Speaker 1 Try as they might, they were never able to trace the phone number, and they ultimately decided that it could have been from a burner phone and therefore untraceable.

Speaker 1 By the time they learned that, they were pretty well convinced that wherever Rhonda was, she couldn't get back on her own.

Speaker 1 I mean, it had been two days without so much as a word from her or even a sighting of her. So detectives stepped things up by conducting a helicopter search of the area where Rhonda lived.

Speaker 1 The land around her apartment complex was mostly residential, but there were a few acres of forest that police wanted to get an aerial view of.

Speaker 1 So while detectives flew overhead, family and volunteers searched the ground on foot.

Speaker 4 Originally, the assumption was maybe she had walked off, got lost.

Speaker 4 That's why they searched the woods there really hard, and maybe she twisted an ankle or hurt herself and needed assistance, and that's why she wasn't coming back.

Speaker 4 I think once they flew that area, once they walked that area and they realized, wow, we can't find her. She hasn't come back.

Speaker 4 She hasn't called her family, which she would do for assistance, possibly something else happened.

Speaker 1 With no trace of Rhonda anywhere nearby, this is when investigators seem to start suspecting foul play, meaning Rhonda had to have encountered someone else before she disappeared.

Speaker 1 So detectives looked into some security camera footage from Rhonda's apartment complex to see who would have been coming and going from the area that night.

Speaker 1 And when they got it back, it showed that between 8 p.m. on February 10th and 8 a.m.
on February 11th, three cars came by the apartment complex.

Speaker 4 Due to the dark, the lighting, everything like that, it's so pixelated, it is extremely hard to tell what type of vehicle those were.

Speaker 4 Go back 15 years with our technology, and this is not the top of the line surveillance at the time either. So you factor that in.

Speaker 4 The apartment parking area is far enough away, even during the daylight, you're not going to be able to tell who that particular person is getting into a car.

Speaker 4 So you factor the nighttime, you can't see anything.

Speaker 1 At the same time detectives were looking around the apartment complex, they were also looking within it, talking with Rhonda's neighbors.

Speaker 1 Now, there are only four other units in her apartment complex, so they believed someone must have heard or seen something.

Speaker 1 Now, the first neighbor detectives spoke to, who we'll call Ellen, said that she last saw Rhonda at 8 p.m. the night before with her mother.

Speaker 1 She said she didn't know Rhonda very well, and their contact was limited to running into each other at the mailbox.

Speaker 1 But she did know that aside from her family, Rhonda didn't typically have many visitors. According to Ellen, Rhonda spent most of her time with a different neighbor who we'll call Dwayne.

Speaker 1 And other neighbors said the same thing. Dwayne and Rhonda were always hanging out together.
So obviously, detectives went to speak with Dwayne.

Speaker 4 He told the initial officer on scene, who was Officer Cross, that he arrived home around 10 o'clock that evening, saw that Rhonda's light was on in her apartment, but did not see her talk to her.

Speaker 4 Detective Skarzynski went out there later that same day on the 11th and talked to Dwayne again.

Speaker 4 And he told Detective Skarzynski that he did see Rhonda and he did talk to Rhonda that evening.

Speaker 4 So his conversation with the detective was kind of opposite of what he told Officer Cross initially, which kind of sparked my interest to that.

Speaker 8 Do we know what Rhonda's relationship was like with Dwayne?

Speaker 4 That varies from who you talk to. Some people would say Dwayne would categorize himself as a big brother to Rhonda and would look out to her.

Speaker 4 Other people would say that there was some type of relationship, maybe even intimate, that was occurring at the time.

Speaker 4 He had told Skarzynski that he'd do whatever he could to help out the investigation. And then when it came to the polygraph, that's when he agreed at first.

Speaker 8 And he did not end up showing.

Speaker 4 Correct. He ended up contacting his attorney and decided not to take the polygraph.

Speaker 1 Rhonda's family didn't know Dwayne very well, but that was actually why they started to become suspicious of him. According to Dee Dee, it wasn't like they heard anything bad about him.

Speaker 1 They just hadn't really heard anything. Now, the Jahari family was extremely close, all 10 of them.
Rhonda had six sisters, one who was her twin and a brother. And they shared shared everything.

Speaker 1 I mean, they typically got together at least twice a week back in those days.

Speaker 4 They're so close that they feel. They feel each other's emotions.
And you'll hear that a lot talking to all of her sisters.

Speaker 4 And they're just like, I feel Rhonda, or I could feel that something was wrong. And they're very, very connected.

Speaker 1 Rhonda's family told detectives that she was a beautiful person on the inside and out. They said that she was always so full of life.

Speaker 5 Rhonda was, I am me, and you couldn't help but love her for it too, at the same time. And she kind of gave me a lot of strength.

Speaker 1 Rhonda was an aspiring actress. And according to her family, she even had bit parts in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie True Lies.

Speaker 1 She did other kinds of art too. Over the course of her life, she wrote, she painted, and at the time of her disappearance, she even taught acting lessons for children at a community center in Flint.

Speaker 5 She just had this like full of life personality. She was no ordinary girl, you know?

Speaker 5 So I always felt safe around her growing up and she'd always come up with the best like we'd make up dances, we'd make up plays, we would just have so much fun and just be real creative.

Speaker 1 Rhonda's family said that she was in her late 20s when she first began experiencing the symptoms of her physical illness.

Speaker 1 It wasn't long before these symptoms began to affect her mentally, but she was still able to live a very full life. And then in 2003, Rhonda actually gave birth to Maddie.

Speaker 1 Soon after that, on top of her illness, though, she began to experience postpartum depression and it became hard for her to take care of her baby.

Speaker 1 At that point, Rhonda was living at home with her parents so she could focus on bettering herself while they helped her take care of her daughter.

Speaker 1 And Dee Dee told us that Rhonda had agreed to get help, even had gotten on some new medication, but it just slowed her down and subdued her energy.

Speaker 1 But about six months before she disappeared, Rhonda went on a different medicine.

Speaker 5 She started doing really good, so good that they agreed she's ready for her own place. She got her daughter.
She was taking care of her daughter. She was herself again, and it was so beautiful to see.

Speaker 1 That's when Rhonda moved into her Fenton apartment. Her parents still came over regularly to help her out, but Rhonda was developing her own daily routine.

Speaker 1 She spent her time going to church services, being with her daughter, teaching acting classes, and of course, talking on the phone with family.

Speaker 4 She was always talking to her family. She was very dependent at that time on her family.
So if she needed something, she called them and they brought it to her.

Speaker 1 According to Rhonda's siblings, the something she needed was usually either cigarettes or Pepsi.

Speaker 1 And when she called, whoever in the family was closest to her apartment at the time would bring some over. And that was how Rhonda's Rhonda's life was for a while, structured, predictable.

Speaker 1 That is until the week before her disappearance. That week, Rhonda came down with something and was feeling especially out of it.

Speaker 1 So much so that she decided she needed to hand Maddie off to her parents for a few days while she got some rest and recovered. But even without a child to take care of, Rhonda had a difficult time.

Speaker 1 And that was the week she wandered off and Detective Cole had to pick her up. But even with all of that going on, it seemed like Rhonda could have still been hanging out with Dwayne.

Speaker 1 So Rhonda's family really wanted detectives to take a closer look at this guy.

Speaker 1 And a lake less than 10 minutes from Rhonda and Dwayne's apartment complex where Dwayne used to fish, this place called Crane Lake.

Speaker 1 Now, February in Michigan, the thing was well frozen over, but that didn't mean it'd be impossible to hide a body there.

Speaker 4 You would have had to drill a hole and then weight her body and submerse her in there. That's one of the assumptions.

Speaker 1 Detectives agreed to search the area with canines and they spent about a week walking the dogs around the lake.

Speaker 1 According to detectives at the time, the dogs actually indicated on a few different occasions, which basically means that they signaled to their handlers that they detected the scent of human remains nearby.

Speaker 1 But they weren't able to find anything where the dogs had alerted, and the ice was making things really difficult to search.

Speaker 1 So at a certain point, detectives decided that instead of continuing the search, then they should wait until the lake thawed so that the canines could get a better read on it.

Speaker 1 Now, over the next couple of months, while they waited for the ice to thaw, different tips came in. One from Rhonda's dentist office, even.

Speaker 1 The caller explained to detectives that months ago, she was working the reception desk when Rhonda came in for an appointment with a younger black man.

Speaker 4 He just seemed kind of eager, wanted to be back there with her when she was getting work done.

Speaker 4 She didn't say he was pushy or anything like that,

Speaker 4 or even that his interaction with Rhonda was

Speaker 4 unusual.

Speaker 4 It was just that he was kind of anxious what was going on with Rhonda.

Speaker 4 He wasn't grabbing on to Rhonda or, you know, threatening the people at the front desk.

Speaker 4 She just thought it was odd.

Speaker 1 Detectives followed this tip up with a forensic sketch artist and put that drawing out on Rhonda's missing person flyers, but nothing ever came of it. No one recognized the man from the sketch.

Speaker 1 Detective Cole actually looks back on that tip now as a bit of a distraction.

Speaker 1 But the reality was, detectives didn't have much else to go off of, and they wanted to exhaust every possible lead that they got.

Speaker 1 Another tip came after some skeletal remains were found about two hours from Rhonda's apartment, but within days, dental records confirmed that they weren't hers.

Speaker 1 And then, in July, detectives were finally able to go back to Crane Lake to search, this time with sonar tools. But there was nothing.

Speaker 1 Now, Dee Dee didn't think that that necessarily meant there was never anything to find there. She couldn't help but wonder if investigators had just been too late.

Speaker 1 What if Rhonda had been in there, but in the time since the first search, she'd been moved? Either way, with no new indications, detectives found themselves at the end of the road, yet again.

Speaker 1 Here's Rhonda's brother Sam.

Speaker 9 As time went by, here's the one year, you know, the newspapers are calling you, the news teams are calling you. Then it's another year, then another year, and it's like nothing is happening.

Speaker 9 But every year, it's the anniversary, we get back on TV, everything gets reopened up, but nothing has happened.

Speaker 4 But the wound just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Speaker 9 And every day you wake up and it's like, still nothing. We're still in the same boat.
Is she really gone? Is she here? Is she going to just show up? Is she suffering? Is she eating? Is she awake?

Speaker 9 Is she sleeping? What's going on with her?

Speaker 1 It took 10 years before police got their next break in the case. 10 years for someone new to come forward with a tip about Rhonda.

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Speaker 1 This tipster, who we'll call Brenda, came to police in February of 2021 with a story that she said happened about six or so months prior.

Speaker 1 She said that she was driving around Fenton with her mid-30-something nephew when, apparently, out of nowhere, he pointed out the window and said something along the lines of, she should be buried over there somewhere.

Speaker 1 Now, somehow, she knew that he was talking about Rhonda.

Speaker 1 But Brenda didn't offer any other information to detectives other than to let them know that that nephew, who we'll call Jack, had been killed in a car accident just a few months earlier.

Speaker 1 Now, she didn't say if she knew Rhonda or how or why her nephew was talking about Rhonda, just that she wanted to get this off her chest after he died.

Speaker 1 Now, detectives were confused, to say the least, but they saw the lead through anyway.

Speaker 4 A single canine unit went over and searched that immediate area Jack had pointed off to Brenda where he was told that Rhonda was. They did not indicate on any area there.

Speaker 1 Still, detectives agreed that Brenda's tip was too bizarre to just brush off. So they started looking more into Jack.

Speaker 1 At the time of Rhonda's disappearance, Jack was in his 30s, but he was also in prison.

Speaker 1 That meant that he couldn't have been responsible for whatever happened to Rhonda, but he still could have known who was.

Speaker 1 Now, with Jack having died, detectives knew that they wouldn't be able to get any more information from him, but they thought maybe they could get something from his brother, who we'll call Bill.

Speaker 1 In March of 2021, Bill agreed to sit down with detectives. And in that interview, they asked him who else would know more about Jack's connection to Rhonda.
And Bill said, I kid you not, Dwayne,

Speaker 1 who, by the way, had not been attached to this case publicly at this point.

Speaker 4 These dots keep on connecting on a certain avenue, and it is hard to not push more down that road.

Speaker 1 Now, it didn't really seem to detectives like Dwayne would have had a strong motive to harm Rhonda, but they came up with a couple of possible theories as to what could have happened that night if he was involved.

Speaker 1 The first was that Rhonda and Dwayne actually had a more serious relationship, maybe, and something sparked a fight between them that night, which maybe led to Dwayne losing control and harming Rhonda.

Speaker 1 Now, Dwayne was known to be a pretty heavy drinker, so that could have factored into a brief episode of rage, but it would have been a one-off.

Speaker 1 Detective Cole confirmed that he couldn't find any police records that showed Dwayne had a violent history.

Speaker 1 The other theory was that Rhonda and Dwayne were maybe hanging out as usual when, given Rhonda's weak physical state, she suffered some sort of fatal accident.

Speaker 1 And Dwayne then just panicked and tried to cover it up.

Speaker 1 Now, unfortunately, by the time detectives went to check on these theories, they discovered that Dwayne had actually passed away four years prior in 2017.

Speaker 1 So they were kind of stumped until Detective Cole stepped in. When Cole got put on the case in 2023, this is like 14 years after Rhonda went missing, he decided to start from scratch.

Speaker 1 He spent months reworking the case from the beginning, starting with the who.

Speaker 4 I've gone back and I've talked to all the family members. I've brought them in here.
I've interviewed them one by one.

Speaker 4 And like I said prior, the ones that couldn't come in because they're out of state, I talked to them via Zoom or over the phone.

Speaker 4 Other people that lived in the complex that are still alive today, I've tracked the vast majority of them down and I've talked to them. The most I get is very little,

Speaker 4 which is

Speaker 4 I know nothing about nothing. The least I got was

Speaker 4 I'm not going to waste my time coming in and talking to you about this.

Speaker 4 They have so many missing pieces of the puzzle that would help me to where if Dwayne's not somebody to look at, I could move on so much easier instead of wasting all this time.

Speaker 1 Detective Cole even went back to the dentist's office and to Brenda. He also put call outs on social media and in the papers, but no one had any new information for him.

Speaker 1 And by that point, a lot of the people connected to this case had passed away, including Dwayne, Jack, and Bill.

Speaker 1 So Cole focused on the evidence, hoping that another comb through with fresh eyes might reveal something new.

Speaker 1 And he really wanted to start with that mystery phone call that had interrupted Rhonda and her sister's conversation the night she went missing.

Speaker 1 Now, back in 2009, all detectives knew was that the number had a Saginaw area code, which Saginaw is like a few cities over from Fenton.

Speaker 1 But it seemed like they didn't have the capabilities to trace it back then.

Speaker 1 Well, in 2023, even though new technology existed, Cole said it was still difficult to trace a number that was now 15 years old.

Speaker 1 He even brought in analysts from the Michigan State Police Department, but they weren't able to link the phone number to anyone either. So with that, Cole moved on to the wear.

Speaker 1 And he dug up the footage from Rhonda's apartment the night that she went missing. And as initial detectives found, that video quality was bad.

Speaker 4 It's not well lit out there, and that could be some of the problem we're having because it's the headlights and taillights that are distorting the image at nighttime. It's very, very frustrating.

Speaker 1 All Cole could see and confirm were the three cars that investigators noted during the initial investigation.

Speaker 4 There's one that I'm particularly looking at that came in right around five o'clock in the morning. The Michigan State Police have analyzed the surveillance video hard drive.

Speaker 4 They even took it frame by frame of the one particular car around 5 a.m. and tried to enhance it with no success.
I also had the FBI take the hard drive and do similar thing with no success.

Speaker 1 With the quality of the video, Cole said that he couldn't even determine the color of the car, let alone the make or the model.

Speaker 1 He also went to check out Crane Lake, hoping to uncover what the cadaver dogs indicated there initially, even though no body body was ever found when they'd searched it.

Speaker 4 There's more than one assumption when it comes to those indications if you believe those dogs had a train-indicated response.

Speaker 4 You look at the wind, you look at, okay, maybe she wasn't put in the water, maybe she was put in a shed around that particular area, maybe she was anywhere around there.

Speaker 4 It led me to start looking into that area, and I found somebody who lived on the lake at that time that was

Speaker 4 i i think one of dwayne's best friends this is the thing it's more of a private lake so that led me to think

Speaker 4 he had to know somebody on that lake

Speaker 1 actually dwayne knew multiple somebodies who lived at least close to the lake Along with his best friend, who's unfortunately deceased now, Jack and Bill's family also lived in that area.

Speaker 4 I'm not talking a mile away. I'm talking walking distance away.

Speaker 4 And without giving too much more, because I'm still actively looking over in this particular vicinity, there is a big chunk of undeveloped land over there. I mean, big.

Speaker 4 We're talking well over 100 acres that I'm combing through right now.

Speaker 1 With this search underway, Cole is hopeful. He wants to learn more about Dwayne and his circle of friends.
But he said his number one priority is still finding Rhonda.

Speaker 4 It's not for my closure, it's for her family's closure. I see their pain.
Every time we talk to them, I want to give that to them.

Speaker 4 And that will be the highlight of my career. I've had a very amazing career.

Speaker 4 I've got to do a lot of awesome things, meet a lot of really good people, but this would by far be the biggest highlight highlight of my career is finding Rhonda.

Speaker 8 How many homicides or missing people do you even have here unsolved?

Speaker 4 This is it.

Speaker 4 This is our one and only cold case.

Speaker 1 Detective Cole has exhausted every resource at his fingertips.

Speaker 1 Along with sending evidence to the MSP and the FBI, he has also partnered with Western Michigan University's cold case program to look over and digitize around 1,600 pages of Rhonda's case file.

Speaker 4 I am not going away. This investigation's not going away.
It's getting bigger.

Speaker 1 And thanks to a new cold case card deck that came out earlier this year, Rhonda's story is getting even more attention.

Speaker 1 For the Jahari family, seeing Rhonda's face on the Ten of Spades meant everything.

Speaker 5 It gave me strength to keep going on. It gave me that little kick in the ass and get your ass up and let's go do this and let's find her.

Speaker 1 But Didi knows that she can't do it alone. Just like Cole, she is hoping that someone, anyone with information, is going to come forward and finally bring some justice for the Jaharis.

Speaker 5 Do it for you and do it for Rhonda. Do it for her family and for her daughter.
Do it for her daughter who deserves that. She had to grow up without

Speaker 5 her mom. She's always waiting for her mom to come back.
You know, she always has it in the back of her mind. You know, is she going to show up for this? Is she going to show up for that?

Speaker 5 Just do it. Just do it.

Speaker 1 Take a load off.

Speaker 5 That's what I'd say.

Speaker 1 Rhonda's daughter, Maddie, was only six when Rhonda disappeared. She's spent the last 15 years longing for answers that have never come.

Speaker 1 Earlier this year, Maddie wrote a remembrance for her mom that was published in the local Fenton newspaper, the Tri-County Times. And I want to end this episode with an excerpt from it.

Speaker 1 It says, I spend so much time wondering if she'd be proud of me, wondering if she'd smile when I walked in the room.

Speaker 1 I spend time trying to remember what it felt like to hug her, to hear her say, I love you. I sometimes feel as though I hardly know my mom, but I did know her.
I loved her. I still do.

Speaker 1 And I always will. The hardest part of loving someone is losing them.
The hardest part of losing my mom is not knowing what happened to her.

Speaker 1 If you know anything about the 2009 disappearance of Rhonda Jahari, or if you have any information about suspicious activity relating to the Crane Lake area at that time, you can reach Fenton Police Detective Thomas Cole at 810-629-5311 or you can email him at colet at fentonpolice.org.

Speaker 1 And if you prefer to remain anonymous, you can report information to Crime Stoppers of Flint and Genesee County at 1-800-422-5245 or on their website, crimestoppersofflint.com.

Speaker 1 The deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.
So what do you think, Chuck? Do you you approve?

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