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I've said many times, you know, Mama, if you're out there and you're embarrassed, you don't need to be. You don't have to be upset. I'm not mad. I have a big problem.

I've said many times, you know, Mama, if you're out there and you're embarrassed, you don't need to be. You don't have to be upset. I'm not mad. I just want you to come home. I just want you to get in touch with me. And I just want answers at this point.

I still feel like she did not just up and leave, though. To me, that doesn't add up. I have all kinds of theories of what could have happened, but they're just theories, so...

There's nothing. It's like her and her vehicle disappeared and we have no idea where from what point it disappeared.

At 8.30pm on December 9th, 2001, 38-year-old mother of three, Michelle Hunley Smith told her family that she was going Christmas shopping. She left the home in her green 1995 Pontiac Transport van, with the North Carolina license plate rocking on.

She was headed for Martinsville, less than 20 miles away over the border into Virginia. Michelle, her husband, and their three children lived together in Stoneville, North Carolina, a small town with less than 300 families, just off of Highway 220, and only six miles from the state border into Virginia.

Going shopping at night wasn't unusual for her. And being right before Christmas and just days before her oldest daughter's birthday, no one thought twice about it.

But by midnight, Michelle's husband woke their 14-year-old daughter Amanda, worried because she had not come home. Michelle never returned, and neither her nor her van have ever been seen since.

Amarissa and from Wondery, this is episode 146 of The Vanished. Michelle, Hunley Smith's story.

Well done. You've sorted through the embarrassment of riches that is the modern podcast landscape and found me Rob Briden on my podcast.

In this series of Briden and I talk to, among others, Harry Hill, Ben Elton, Charlotte Church, Steve Cougan, and Dame Harriet Walter. And that's just a few.

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It's interesting to note where Michelle lived was just minutes away from where Angela Whalen Hudson from episode 136 also disappeared.

There's nothing to suggest that these two cases were linked, but it can't be ignored that both Angela and Michelle went missing within three months of each other, and in the same part of rural Rockingham County.

For this episode, I spoke with Michelle's daughter Amanda, who was just 14 at the time of her mother's disappearance.

You will often hear her refer to her mom's disappearance as the time when her mom left, which is what Amanda believed for so many years.

But now, after growing older and like many family members of the missing, Amanda too began questioning whether her mom really did just leave.

It never made sense to her, and now she questions everything about that time.

I was 14. I have a sister and a brother. My sister was, she was about to turn 19 when she left.

And because she knows she left on December 9th, and my sister sparked AIDS December 18th.

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