On the morning of July 6, 2001, in a South Side Chicago apartment complex, two young sisters disappeared under suspicious circumstances.

There were four sisters in total — Rita (12). Tionda (10), Victoria (8), and Diamond (3) — but at the time Rita and Victoria were staying at their grandmother’s home working on planning Victoria’s birthday party to be held the following day. That left Tionda babysitting Diamond while their parents were working.

Tionda was a lively and athletic child, running track at school and remembered fondly for her love of dancing and for speeding down the city streets on her bicycle. She had even earned local awards for her running and gymnastic abilities. Her family remembers that Tionda’s favorite song was Queen’s ‘I Want It All’ and that she enjoyed playing dolls with her sisters. At home, she was quite protective of her little sister, even as the two occasionally bickered in the way of children separated by seven years. Diamond, for her part, was a sweet girl, shy yet capable of sudden, chatty warmth; she loved peanuts and ramen noodles and, like many toddlers, sometimes clashed with her siblings in flashes of stubborn independence.

That Friday morning, their mother —Tracey Bradley — had risen early to prepare for the day. By 4:30 am, Diamond’s father and Tracey’s on-again, off-again partner George Washington had also arrived at the apartment. Roughly two hours later (6:00 – 6:30 am) he drove Tracey to her job at Robert Taylor Homes, where she prepared breakfast and lunch for summer-camp kids. According to Tracey, their plan was for George to return after her shift finished; he would pick her, Diamond, and Tionda up before heading off on a camping trip to Indiana. The details about this plan are unclear, but one assumes they thought they could make it back in time for Victoria’s birthday party the following day. Apparently, Tracey and George were not together at the time because he spent his free time that day at his girlfriend’s and then later at his mother.’s. Meanwhile, Tionda and Diamond were playing by themselves back at home.

During the day, phone records and family accounts indicate Tracey called the apartment three times between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. but received no answer, an unusual silence that later haunted her. At approximately 8:30am, Tionda allegedly left a message on her mother’s phone saying “Mama, this is Tionda. Mom, pick up the phone. George is at the door. Can I open the door? He said that we are going to Jewel’s to pick up a cake there. We’re coming to pick you up from work.” Jewel-Osco was a local market and the reference to a cake was presumably for Victoria’s birthday. The identity of “George” has never been conclusively established, though the family consensus has long been that Tionda was speaking of Diamond’s father, not a neighbor who sometimes babysat and shared the name. Police and the FBI have never publicly confirmed the voicemail’s existence or produced any record of the call, yet its reported content has remained a persistent thread in every family retelling.

When Tracey’s shift ended, George had arrived to pick her and some of her colleagues up. He then drove them around, dropping other people off before he and Tracey finally arrived at the apartment complex sometime between 11:00 am – 12:30 pm (accounts vary slightly, though the search for the girls began in earnest soon after). When they entered the apartment, Tracey found the front door locked and the rooms empty. On a lounge chair in the living room lay a handwritten note in what handwriting experts, including those from the FBI, later verified as Tionda’s own script. The note stated that the girls had gone to a nearby store and then to the playground at Doolittle Elementary School, just a few blocks away, where Tionda was enrolled in summer classes. At first the message seemed almost plausible; the walk was short enough for even Diamond to manage, and the Lake Meadows Shopping Center across from the school offered an obvious destination. Yet as the hours passed without their return, unease turned to panic. Neighborhood children later recalled seeing the sisters playing outside near the building and at the school playground around noon, but no faculty or staff at Doolittle Elementary remembered them arriving, and Tionda was marked absent from her summer session. Diamond had left her backpack behind; nothing suggested a planned departure.

Tracey and relatives scoured the streets, the nearby Ida B. Wells housing complex, the lakefront, and the 31st Street Beach. Around 6:00 or 7:00 p.m.(about seven hours after she had last seen her daughters) Tracey filed a missing-persons report. What followed was, at the time, the largest missing-persons search in Chicago history: more than a hundred police officers, FBI agents, canine units, and volunteers combed thousands of apartments, roofs, sewers, stairwells, elevator shafts, Burnham Park along Lake Michigan, lagoons, abandoned buildings (more than 5,000 of them), paint factories, drive-in theaters, and nearby forest preserves. Freshly turned dirt in a nature preserve, psychic visions of bags tossed into water, and anonymous tips about sex trafficking in distant Illinois towns were all pursued and exhausted. No trace was found.

Given the timeline and phone call / note from Tionda, a timeline is difficult to establish. The girls were allegedly seen at the park around noon and Tracey was home by 12:30 by all accounts. If they were approached while outside the apartment, the kidnapper would have to return with them to the apartment before 12:30 pm (latest estimate for the mother’s arrival) and drop off the note. But that seems unnecessarily risky. Option two is the kidnapper left the note before going after the children, but it seems unlikely he would be able to so perfectly mimic Tionda’s handwriting. A third option is that someone took them from the apartment after they had returned . This would put their disappearance very close to Tracey’s return and begs the question how the suspect knew he had enough time and why the girls would leave with him right when Tracey was supposed to be returning.

The authenticated note troubled the family deeply. Tionda had always preferred calling her mother directly; her great-aunt Sheliah Bradley-Smith and her sisters noted that the grammar, spelling, and phrasing seemed unusually polished for a girl attending summer school to strengthen her reading and writing skills.

Neither girl was likely to be persuaded by a stranger as both were relatively shy, though Diamond was said to be chatty when she wanted to be and Tionda was remarkable out-spoken and intelligent for her age. But to be convinced to write that note and allow a stranger into the home? The family does not believe it would be credible. Sheliah has long maintained that Tionda wrote the note but was likely coached by someone she trusted, someone familiar enough to persuade two shy children, wary of strangers, to leave the apartment or step into a vehicle without raising immediate alarm. The narrow window between the last confirmed neighborhood sighting around noon and Tracey’s return made any scenario involving an outsider both logistically tight and psychologically improbable.

Investigators scrutinized those closest to the family. Tracey passed a polygraph examination early in the inquiry, though she grew markedly less cooperative in the months that followed; in March 2002 she shoved an officer who asked her to come to the station to discuss new leads, was briefly handcuffed and taken in for questioning, and then, at her attorney’s insistence, ended the interview. She missed subsequent appointments and became reclusive, yet she has never been named a suspect. George Washington’s polygraph results were inconclusive; he was questioned extensively and provided conflicting accounts of his movements. The day after the disappearance he purchased large contractor bags and gloves; a neighbor reported seeing him burning something in a 55-gallon drum in his garage, after which charring appeared on the rafters and five bags were missing from a roll. A blanket recovered from his trunk contained hairs later determined to belong to Tionda. He claimed he had sometimes sneaked the girls into drive-in movies hidden in the trunk, an explanation investigators found implausible given the distances involved and the single operational theater at the time. No charges were ever filed against him.

Another lead involved a North African man who had been paying child support for Tionda under the mistaken belief he was her biological father. Tracey had filed a paternity suit against him roughly a month before the girls vanished; testing later proved he was not the father, and the payments stopped. Hairs recovered from his trunk matched the Bradley family DNA profile, though they could not be distinguished from Tracey’s own. FBI agents traveled to Morocco to investigate; they found nothing linking him to the disappearance.

Sheliah, who has served as the family’s tireless spokesperson for more than two decades, organized searches, distributed flyers, and maintained Facebook pages dedicated to the case. She sat for two full days in her Dodge Caravan in the apartment parking lot, watching every vehicle and pedestrian, convinced the answer lay close at hand. Annual vigils on July 6 (complete with prayers, hymns, white balloons, and T-shirts bearing the girls’ photographs) continue to draw relatives and supporters. Tracey has had two more children in the years since; Rita and Victoria, now adults, speak of their lost sisters to younger siblings and cousins who know them only through stories and pictures. Tionda’s sassy wit, her habit of calling relatives just to say “hey,” her constant dancing; Diamond’s sweet, shy smile and the way she would peek at her big sister performing—all remain vivid.

Over the years, sporadic tips have surfaced only to dissolve. In 2004, a firefighters said he saw the girls in an Indianapolis park. In 2013, a woman from Gary, Indiana contacted the girls’ great-aunt and said she might have relevant information for the case. She felt compelled to report that on that day years before her boyfriend returned to the home clearly upset, saying he has made a mistake and talking about killing an unknown female who had seen something (CBS Chicago, 2013). In 2019, a woman from Texas claimed to be Tionda, but it was later proven to be untrue. In May 2023 another woman in Texas posted a video on social media claiming to be Diamond, pointing to a scar on her scalp that matched one Diamond had carried. She contacted the family, submitted to fingerprinting and DNA testing through the FBI, and described fragmented memories of being separated from her sister. The results confirmed she was not Diamond Bradley; the case remained cold.

Nearly twenty-five years later, the FBI and Chicago Police Department continue to list both girls as endangered missing, offering a $10,000 reward and maintaining age-progressed photographs that show Tionda as a woman now in her mid-thirties and Diamond as one in her late twenties.