When a young soldier leaves the army to work as a physics lab security specialist with the top secret clearance, civilian life turns out to be more dangerous than anything she faced in uniform.

After a series of strange events culminates in her being brutally gunned down, the mystery of her death spawns theories of conspiracy and serial killings in this episode of Last Seen Alive.

Thanks for listening to Last Seen Alive.

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

And as always, I'm your co-host, Scott.

This is the revisited and enhanced edition of one of our early episodes, which features the unsolved case of Kanika Powell. The original edition was recorded in 2020, and we've revisited and re-recorded an episode on

her case in 2025. As I'm sure those of you who've been listening since the early days of last

seen alive have noticed, our production and audio quality have improved significantly over the years.

Lately, we've been working on remaking our earlier episodes. When we originally recorded them,

we were doing the best we knew how at the time. However, our best wasn't the best, and we've learned a lot

since then. We want to honor those victims by telling their stories with the production quality they

deserve. So we've been completely remaking all of our early episodes, including this one.

With that being said, onto Kanika's story. Canica Powell was last seen alive on August 28, 2008.

She was 28 years old at the time and lived in Prince George's County, or PG County, Maryland.

It's a populist county that borders the nation's capital and Kinnika had grown up there.

PG County's location makes it an ideal area for government facilities and it's home to plenty of them,

including the IRS, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Joint Base Andrews

Naval Air Facility, to name just a few. The abundance of employment opportunities in PG County

has made it one of the wealthiest African-American majority counties in the entire country,

attracting many bright minds to the area. Kanika was one of those bright minds. Two years after graduating from high

school, she'd enlisted in the army where she'd served as an enlisted soldier, learning new skills

and seeing other parts of the world like South Korea. After several years of service, including a

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