When a single mother and her two and a half year old daughter go missing from California's Bay Area and a simultaneous mother-daughter homicide slash disappearance, one family seems to be at the center of it all.

From a self-declared street preacher to a babysitter with a murderous past, a host of suspicious individuals haunt the story of a missing child who investigators believe is still alive

in this episode of Last Seen Alive.

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

As always, I'm your co-host, Scott.

This is the enhanced edition of our episode on the Homicide of Nicky Fitts and the

disappearance of Ariana Fits.

The original edition was recorded in early 2020, and we've re-recorded it in

2023 in order to significantly improve its audio quality.

Since we first launched Last Scene Alive, we've come incredibly far when it comes to the recording and editing equipment and methods we use.

We wanted to honor Nikki and Ariana with the production quality their story deserves, hence this re-recording.

And this is something we're actually doing for all of our earliest episodes.

It's going to take a few months, so if you've just discovered this podcast at the time of this re-recording in the spring of 2023, this endeavor is still underway.

So if you'd prefer to wait to listen to the optimized versions of our early episodes, you might want to start with our latest episode and work your way backward through our catalog.

And now, let's get into Nikki in Ariana's story.

Nicole Fitz, who went by Nikki, was last seen alive on April 1st, 2016.

She was 32 years old, and those 32 years of life had been marked by hardships,

hardships that had sharpened rather than dulled Nikki's best traits.

Her life had been characterized by a series of struggles.

There was no question about that, but she struggled with singular purpose. Her sisters

describe her as someone who'd always looked out for others, and that drive was multiplied

exponentially when she became a mom. To stop Nikki from taking care of her family, you would

...