Where the Sidewalk Ends, Justice Begins

Voices for Justice

Sarah Turney

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.8 • 9.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2026

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Twenty-five years ago, my sister Alissa Turney disappeared. For most of that time, I have lived in the space between grief and action, between not knowing and refusing to look away. This episode is different. It is shorter, more personal, and less about retelling every detail of Alissa’s case than it is about marking what this anniversary means. Twenty-five years is an impossible amount of time to measure. It is birthdays missed, milestones stolen, questions unanswered, and a kind of grief that changes shape but never leaves. But this year also feels like a threshold the end of one road and the beginning of another. This is the place where the sidewalk ends. And for me, it is where the fight for justice continues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I've spent months dreading today, months thinking about what I should do to celebrate 25 years that Alyssa's been gone,
0:09.8	rejecting help for things like a candlelight vigil because it just doesn't seem like Alyssa.
0:14.8	I even wrote out an entire letter that I was going to read for you guys today. But nothing feels quite right. And to be totally
0:23.6	honest, a lot of it felt performative. Writing down a letter with all the thoughts that I know
0:29.6	Alyssa truly knows already somehow, none of it seemed right. And I think that's because deep down, the dark, unsettling truth of Alyssa's case is that it's all wrong.
0:45.1	From start to finish, really, maybe the moment she stepped into our home before I was even born, it was all wrong.
0:56.9	And I think that's why it's so hard for me to try to package Alyssa's case in a neat little package or write something down that is very, you know,
1:03.2	profound, perhaps in my own mind to tell you guys about. The dark truth is that everything in
1:09.0	Alyssa's case, every part of her life, every system designed to protect her just failed.
1:17.4	The teacher who never reported the abuse.
1:20.7	When her dad called CPS to say that Alyssa was going to lie about him,
1:25.5	when he called the police to ask them to arrest her for being gay,
1:29.4	when he reported her missing and nobody showed up at her house. How there was no search for her that
1:35.5	night and the weeks coming in the years after. How he can write in his manifesto that he knows exactly
1:42.4	how Alyssa died and then he killed two men because of
1:45.2	it, how he looked me in the eye and said that he'd tell me how he killed Alyssa on his deathbed.
1:51.1	I know that Alyssa's case has helped so many people and I love that. I love that for her legacy.
1:58.0	But it haunts me. At 4 a.m. I woke up randomly. I opened up my phone, I went to TikTok,
2:06.1	and right there was one of the only books that Alyssa loved. Somebody was reading from Shell Silversteens
2:11.5	where the sidewalk ends. It's so weird because it feels like Alyssa is here with me. It feels like she's always been here with me. My God, on so many teenage nights when I was stupid and honestly probably shouldn't have ever made it home alive, it feels like Alyssa was with me. Through every hard struggle in her case, it feels like she's with me.
2:37.4	And I feel so lucky and so grateful to have the whole world to have all of you guys behind me.
2:42.1	All of that feels like a miracle if I'm being totally honest with you.
	...

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