When a young Spokane-Washington woman goes missing, it's not reported until more than a year later.

Investigators unravel the story of a vanished woman whose adopted family called her their real-life Cinderella in this episode of Last Seen Alive.

I'm your host, Leah, crime analyst by day and true crime storyteller by night.

And as always, I'm your coach, Scott. A quick heads up. This episode contains discussion of

child abuse and some mentions of sexual assault. We won't go into any graphic detail, but still,

please listen with care. Courtney Holden was last seen alive in the summer of 2018.

She was 27 years old at the time and lived in Spokane, Washington.

She shared a home with her mother and some siblings,

but their family dynamic was far from normal.

Scott, I think we've all heard horror stories about foster homes

in which the foster parents have anything but their foster children's best interests at heart.

I mean, a number of them come to mind right off the bat and to think that it's one of the primary broken systems in America would be an understatement.

Right. It's all too common for foster children to not be treated well, but Courtney's story, it takes it to a whole other very dark level.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, when you were doing your intro, it was not the Cinderella story of Prince Charming coming to the rescue that I was getting in my mind.

It was the wicked

step-sisters and that part of the story. That's very much what I was going for when I wrote that

intro. You see, Courtney entered into the foster care system as a young child, and unfortunately,

she ended up in one of those bad homes, the home of foster mother Judy Holden to be specific.

Courtney wasn't Judy's only foster child either. Judy and her husband, from whom she eventually

divorced, took in many over the years. One of her former surviving foster children, a man named

Jensen, told KHQ news that, quote, I think at first they took foster children in for a

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