'How Did She Disappear'

NPR host Tonya Mosley got a call and learned she had a sister—who was missing in Detroit. She and her nephew set out to get answers and found healing along the way

- JOHNNY DODD

When Tonya Mosley’s cell phone rang in 2004, she was a young reporter working in Louisville who had already grown accustomed to having strangers share their intimate and often painful stories with her. But she says this “out of the blue” call from a stranger named Antonio Wiley was different. First she learned Wiley was her nephew. Then he told her that she had a sister, Wiley’s mom, who went missing 17 years earlier and was likely dead. But how?

“That phone call opened up a world that I knew at some point I would be connected to,” recalls Mosley, now 47, who was raised by her mother in Detroit but spent her childhood hungry for details about her absent father’s side of the family. “[I knew] the day would come when I would receive a call that would give me an understanding of these other parts of myself.”

Two decades later Mosley, now the cohost of NPR’s Fresh Air, has transformed the odyssey of her nephew’s search for answers about his mom into a new podcast, She Has a Name. A 10-part blend of memoir and true-crime investigation, it spotlights a mystery but, more important, tells the fuller story of 29-year-old Anita Wiley. A single parent who was struggling with an addiction to drugs, Anita vanished in the summer of 1987 amid Detroit’s economic collapse and an epidemic of violence and crack cocaine. “She was a wonderful mother. But she was human,” says Antonio, 51. “She became an adult in a changing landscape in which she was trying to provide for her family.”