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This wasn't too much after she disappeared that star talked to me and said that Jamie had run away.

I was shocked. I had always thought that she'd run away and I, over the years, had thought about her and wondered how she was doing and if she ran away to Hollywood.

She was a really good artist and I thought, well, she must have found work somewhere. I bet she's doing what she likes to do and that's always how I thought of her.

This guy has so many connections that will link him to my sister. I don't have any doubt.

On December 7, 1971, 16-year-old Jamie Grissom left her home in Vancouver, Washington, to head to school. She attended classes that morning but got out early because she only had two classes scheduled on that particular day.

Jamie told her foster mother that she would walk home and expected to be there around 1pm. But Jamie never made it. Jamie's family was concerned but local police assumed she was simply a run away.

Was Jamie unhappy at her foster home and ran away. Months later in the spring of 1972, some of Jamie's belongings turned up strewn alongside a country road more than 23 miles northeast of Jamie's home in Vancouver.

Then, as the years were on, more young women began to disappear from the area and it became quite apparent that this was much more serious than a teenager who had run away from home.

Amarissa and from Wondery, this is Episode 333 of The Vanished, Jamie Grissom's story.

Before we get started, I wanted to mention that this episode is more graphic than most of our stories. This episode contains descriptions of adult subject matter, including violence and sexual assault. Please take care while listening.

By all accounts, Jamie Grissom was a teenager who seemed to have a very promising future. She did well in school and everyone seemed to like Jamie. We spoke to Jamie's younger sister, Star, who told us about her memories of Jamie.

I remember her talent. She could do a lot of things that I couldn't draw, she had beautiful, cursive handwriting, and she got aes and penmanship and I flunk. She could write poetry and she was an avid horseback writer, which I was terrified of horses.

She was fearless that way and she was a hard worker and she was a good saver. She saved her money and at the time she disappeared she had $82, which was a lot for 1971.

She was just about going to a lot of friends and people liked her. Usually, our foster parents would favor her or me usually.

Star explained that she was very young when they were removed from their mother's care and placed into the foster care system.

I don't know the year, but I was like three, probably 1959 or 1960. My mother, she had a nervous breakdown and there was my sister, Jamie and me and then the two twins.

They found us with my mother in a car and she told the police that she was waiting for the FBI because there was a gang after her. She was suffering from schizophrenia.

Back then, their way of dealing with it was to just take her kids away and she ended up being in a mental hospital for a while. That's what happened and my father was in prison.

So we ended up being wards of the court and because of that, my mother still had her rights technically to us and so we weren't eligible for adoption until I was eight, Jamie was fine.

But by that time it gets harder and harder and then there were the twins and while they were taken from my mother when they were 18 months and they lived in the home that they were later adopted by that parent.

It was difficult in the sense that you never knew when you might have to move and go to a new school, that sort of thing. So that kind of made us have a lot of anxiety I guess you would say.

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