February 23, 1946. Grandview Heights, Ohio.

Twenty-four-year-old Lola Chaley leaves her parents' residence in order to walk to the bus stop,

but she soon vanishes without a trace.

An eyewitness later reports seeing a woman struggling with a man inside a moving vehicle,

before a red shoe is thrown out the window. And since Lola was wearing a red shoe like that when

she went missing, it is suspected that she became the victim of an abduction.

Ten years later, the Grandview Heights Police Chief announces that the case has been closed

because Lola was found alive in another town. But no evidence is ever produced to confirm this.

So the red shoe mystery is never officially solved.

After that, the trail went cold.

Hello everyone and welcome to our latest episode of The Trail Went Cold.

I'm your host Robin Warder, and this week we're going to be covering an older missing person's case.

The 1946 disappearance of Lola Chaley, aka the red shoe mystery.

That was just her narrating our intro as Miranda Merrick, the host of another podcast called The

Midnight Library, so thank you very much Miranda. Our respective shows are doing some cross-promotion

this month, so if you would like to learn more about the Midnight Library, I will be playing a promo

for them later on in this episode. Anyway, the victim in today's story is Lola Chaley, an Italian

immigrant who vanished without a trace 77 years ago from Grandview Heights, Ohio.

The reason this case is known as the red shoe mystery is because Lola was wearing a pair of

red-swayed slip-on shoes at the time she went missing, and an eyewitness report seeing a red

shoe being tossed from the window of a moving vehicle where a woman matching Lola's description

appeared to be putting up a struggle with an unidentified man. This seemed to suggest that Lola

...