Jess Trevino lived a quiet life of true crime fandom - until she stumbled upon Talina Zar’s cryptic Facebook post. Isolated because of COVID, Jess assembles an online team of amateur sleuths determined to find out where Talina went. As they get wrapped up in the lives of total strangers, the sleuths discover that the question of What Happened to Talina Zar ? has no easy answers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the premise of 'What Happened to Talena Zar'?
Hi, I'm Melissa Jeltsin, host of What Happened to Talena Zarr. I'm excited to share episode one of our new podcast with you, but I also wanted to let you know that you can listen to episodes completely ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I'm a subscriber and you should be too. So head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today.
Chapter 2: How did COVID-19 affect Jess Trevino's life?
The early days of the COVID pandemic were scary.
The mayor today calling the spread unpredictable and worrisome. This morning, a grim new prediction. Nearly 300,000 deaths in the US before the new year.
People come in, they get intubated, they die, the cycle repeats.
But also, with some distance, the things we did to cope with our fear were pretty weird. Remember disinfecting our groceries, hoarding toilet paper, burning our mattresses? I didn't do that, but I heard about a woman who did because she thought it was contaminated with COVID. I remember holding my breath when I walked past another person, on a secluded lake in the middle of winter with masks on.
I'd left New York for rural Pennsylvania with my boyfriend to ride out the worst of COVID. We packed for a weekend and stayed for two months. I ended up marrying the man too. We have a baby now.
Looking back, what sticks with me the most about that time is that queasy feeling that everyone I encountered, the Amazon driver, the checkout lady at the grocery store, was a potential suspect, someone who could unwittingly kill me and my family just by breathing. COVID isolation severed even the strongest connections, made it easy to hide behind a mask or behind closed doors.
And this changed our collective psyche, made us do things we probably wouldn't have otherwise. Things we were forced into or things we'd always wanted to do and never had the opportunity. It certainly changed the trajectory of Jess Trevino's life.
I was scared, you know, like most of the world. I didn't know what was going to happen or how deadly the virus was, or we didn't know very much, right?
One day in April 2020, Jess is in her kitchen, newly unemployed because, you know, COVID, and she's trying to take her mind off the chaos of the pandemic. She's attempting to replicate the latest food trend she sees online, a two-layered drink called Dalgona coffee.
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Chapter 3: Who is Talena Zar and why is she missing?
Hey, everyone. I'm on day nine of this virus, and I am pretty sure it has reached my lungs. I'm feeling sick. A little raspy and tight. I made the decision at the onset that if it got bad enough, I would not go to the hospital. Those of you who know me well know I have DNR orders in my health directive and I'm not going to let anyone intubate me.
So I've made arrangements to spend some quality alone time at one of my favorite hideaways at one of my favorite lakes, and I've booked it for the remainder of this week. Didn't feel up to driving, so I hired a ride. I'm almost there. Please respect my privacy and give me my alone time on the lake. I haven't been chatting with some of you, calling you back.
I didn't want to be talked out of this plan. After I post this, I am turning off my phone for exactly this reason. I'll catch up with everyone on the other side.
Jess reads closer. The woman's name is Talena Zar. She is 53 years old. It seems that no one has heard from Talena since her post a few weeks ago. Jess squints at Talena's profile picture, a smiling selfie taken in the car, her blue-green eyes twinkling, and tries to understand why a person would make such a decision.
Why would someone with COVID leave their friends and family and go off alone instead of seeking help? And where did she go? Jess will spend the next four years searching for the answer.
Sometimes when I tell this story, they're like, you're making this up. But nobody has an imagination like this. You couldn't make this story up. There's a hundred little twists and turns that every time you go down a different road, it's another, what the fuck is this? Why is this happening? I mean, initially when I told you, did you believe me?
From iHeart Podcast, I'm Melissa Jeltsin, and this is What Happened to Talena Zarr. Episode one, alone time.
My name is Jess Trevino. I'm a really nosy person. So that's how I got caught up in all this. My mom said I've always been nosy my whole life. She said, you've always just wanted to know everything about everything. So if I didn't know something, I'd be poking around trying to figure it out. It's not a very endearing thing about me, but it is who I am. It took me like 40 years to like me.
So I'm just going to embrace it.
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Chapter 4: Why did Jess Trevino become interested in true crime?
I just would join the pages after I'd listened to a podcast wanting to know, like, let's discuss this and like, hey, what do you think of this? What do you think of that? So you were an active participant, not just a lurker. Correct. You'll notice that about me. I don't lurk. I'm out there. I'm an action kind of girl.
All those hours reading about true crime, listening to true crime, discussing true crime, provided Jess with a master class on how not to get murdered. She knows, never go to a second location. Always trust your instincts. You're much more likely to be killed by someone you know than a stranger. If you can run, run.
It also taught her some real-world skills on how to investigate cases, the same type of skills I use in my reporting. In between bartending shifts and putting the kids to bed, Jess learned how to do a background check, how to trace people's internet footprints, how to track down old criminal records, and dig up archival news coverage.
I just love to know, like, how point A got to point F, trying to follow all the dots in between. I know that people get a lot of shit online about being, you know, internet tough guys and internet armchair detectives, but we're in a digital age. Maybe 30 years ago, you needed the boots on the ground and be there, but this is the way that it's happening now, I feel like.
A lot of stuff is solved, literally.
On the internet. It's on the internet, on a Facebook fan page for crime junkies, where Jess first sees Talena Zar's post about having COVID and choosing to go off into the wilderness alone rather than go to the hospital.
Please respect my privacy and give me my alone time on the lake.
A friend of Talena's, named Nicole, had uploaded screenshots of Talena's post to the group in an attempt to solicit help. I asked Jess to read some of Nicole's plea.
Hi, junkies. Since April 7th, my dear friend has been missing. She left this post and we haven't heard from her since. The information we have doesn't make sense. I've spent every day and night going over them. Out of desperation, I thought I would post here and see what you all think. My friend lives in a very small town near Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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Chapter 5: How did Jess Trevino's true crime hobby evolve?
To open our consciousness to something more than just what's in that Western box. And return.
I clinically died. The heart stopped beating. Which I was dead for 11.5 minutes. My name is Dan Bush. My mission is simple. To find, explore, and share these stories.
I'm not a victim, I'm a survivor.
You're strongest when you're the most vulnerable. To remind us what it means to be alive.
Not just that I was the guy that cut his arm off, but I'm the guy who is smiling. when he cut his arm off.
Alive Again, a podcast about the fragility of life, the strength of the human spirit, and what it means to truly live. Listen to Alive Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I just didn't feel like she would leave that many people worried about her.
This is Nicole Carr. She's the author of the post asking for help finding Talena.
It wouldn't be strange for her to go off because if she was sick, she wouldn't have wanted to make anyone else sick. But for her to just leave people with no way of contacting her and knowing if she was alive or dead was strange to me.
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Chapter 6: How did Jess Trevino get involved in investigating Talena Zar's disappearance?
I kept just kind of asking everybody, anyone else think this is strange? And everybody's like, no, no, this is, you know, this is how she acts. You know, that experiment where they show people that are in a room and there's smoke coming out of the grate and nobody does anything because they're all kind of looking around to see if someone else is going to do something. That was where we were.
People were just worrying in their own space. We're all just waiting for someone else to do something or for word from Talena. But the more time that went on, it just didn't, her story didn't make sense. Nicole wasn't sure what to do, but she felt compelled to at least do something. And so one night out of desperation, I just, you know, I listened to this little podcast.
I had no idea how popular it was. I just knew that I liked listening to it. And so I thought I would go on there and see if anybody else thought it was strange. So I typed out a little message and posted it, went to sleep. And I woke up to thousands of replies. Some of them were from my friends. People I actually knew that I didn't know also listened to this podcast.
And then some of them were from strangers. And none of them were strange than Jess.
It sounded fishy. You've read the post, right?
It sounded really weird. Making her whipped coffee in Minnesota just seized Nicole's plea for help. And her immediate response is bullshit.
The way Nicole explained it in the post was very weird. And then obviously I'm bored. It's COVID and I can't go anywhere or do anything. So I creep on Nicole's Facebook and see that she has another friend who's missing forever. And I was like, there's no way. You know, two people who just up and disappeared. So I called her out on it. I called her a liar.
I'm Soledad O'Brien, and on my podcast, Murder on the Towpath, I'm taking you back to the 1960s. Mary Pinchot Meyer was a painter who lived in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Every day, she took a daily walk along the towpath near the E&O Canal.
So when she was killed in a wealthy neighborhood... She had been shot twice in the head and in the back, behind the heart.
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Chapter 7: What role does Nicole Carr play in the search for Talena Zar?
I don't know what it was that made me say yes, other than I was intrigued. And I thought, well, what could the harm be? I was bored because of COVID, and I was like, sure. And then more girls kind of joined the group, and we just sort of started armchair detectiving this situation.
And I was like, this is crazy. This is Brittany. Younger than the others, she's in her early 20s and works at a bank in Arkansas. Brittany's eager to jump in and help because she too feels drawn to Talena's story.
It seemed like she was like a really sweet person and she was really easy to like. It didn't seem like anyone had like any hatred towards her. She seemed like a nice person that everyone loved. When there's mystery, There's some people that just have to know why and how. And I'm definitely one of those people. I have all the questions all the time.
And so, organically, cosmically, this group of online sleuths comes together and forms a new Facebook page called Find Talena Zarr. Nicole in Tennessee, Jess in Minnesota, Rosie in Ohio, Brittany in Arkansas, and more joining by the hour. These women are strangers, thrust together by their desire to solve the mystery of what happened to Talena. Here's Jess, the ringleader.
We ended up staying up until like 4 o'clock in the morning that first night, talking to each other via Facebook Messenger, and then starting little side messages like, oh, this person's this, or it was almost high school-esque, to be honest with you, just kind of like being a little bit bitchy about who was saying what and what we believe.
The online sleuths, even from that first night, are exhilarated. They're energized for the first time since the pandemic slowed the world down and made their lives very small. Suddenly, they have a distraction and a purpose.
It kind of felt like I was living out one of my fantasy dreams of being a detective. It kind of gave me something to do and something else to think about rather than what's going to happen to the world.
We just wanted to help this person, help Talena and find her. Like, where was she?
In those early hours, as this new group of friends start to gel, the online sleuths return to Talena's post.
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