Tamika Huston was young, pretty and missing — but she wasn’t white. There’s no other explanation why after Huston, a 24-year-old Black woman in Spartanburg, S.C., went missing in spring 2004 her case was largely ignored by national media that obsessively covered recent cases of missing white women like Laci Peterson.

Huston’s aunt, Rebkah Howard loved Tamika dearly. This was the worst thing that had happened to their family. Howard was working in PR, had graduated from Howard University School of Law and is married to Desmond Howard, the popular ESPN college football analyst, Heisman Trophy winner and Super Bowl champion.

“When my niece went missing,” Rebkah Howard tells me 19 years later, “I’m like, surely there’s room for Tamika in this conversation. And surely, I have the skills, the contacts, the ability to craft a story, because sometimes you really have to have a narrative for them [media] to make it interesting.”

But even with her skill-set, passion and “ins,” Howards says she hit a brick wall. While she was grateful to local and Black media for the coverage they gave Huston’s story, Howard knew “I really needed to cast as wide a net as possible.” Which is why getting national coverage was critical.

Then that summer, a white woman named Lori Hacking went missing in Salt Lake City. Within hours, national media was all over the Hacking case. The same TV news networks, producers and anchors Howard had been spending half her days pitching Huston’s story for weeks.

“I was just enraged, heartbroken,” Howard recalls. “It’s difficult because at the same time, you really feel empathy for her [Hacking’s] family. They love her just as much as we love Tamika. But I went from being frustrated to being mad.”

Around that time, newscaster and political commentator Gwen Ifill minted the phrase “missing white woman syndrome” to refer to the media’s apparent favoring of covering such cases compared to missing women of color. Howard started changing her media pitches of Huston’s story to include other missing Black women whose cases weren’t getting national media attention.

Then, in spring 2005, Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway, another white woman, went missing while on vacation in Aruba and media was saturated with coverage of Holloway’s case. “I was like, they really are just not making space for us,” Howard says. However, national conversation and coverage about the disparity in coverage increased, for which Howard was thankful, even if the details of Huston’s case were somewhat lost in the mix. Eventually, Howard drew back from doing press about Huston, wary of it becoming exploitive.

Relatively early in the pandemic, David Person, a gifted Huntsville-based journalist who’s worked with outlets like NPR, USA Today, Huntsville Times and others, was watching college football coverage on TV. Seeing Desmond Howard on ESPN reminded Person that he should reach out to Rebkah Howard, whom he’d interviewed years ago when Huston went missing.

Person called Rebkah to catch up, and hearing her talk, it occurred to him Huston’s story would make a great podcast. Person was already working in the podcast space, albeit locally and regionally.

Huston’s case, which was eventually solved to discover her ex-boyfriend Chris Hampton had killed her by striking her in the head with a hot iron, was being included in an HBO docuseries called “Black and Missing.” Although all this wasn’t on Person’s mind when he called, he asked Howard if she would be open to the idea of doing a podcast centered around Huston. She gave it her blessing.

Person’s next call was to one of the great renaissance women in Black America right now, Erika Alexander. Alexander, who Person met around eight years ago through a mutual friend, first rose to fame as an actor. She’s known for playing Pam Tucker on TV’s “The Cosby Show,” Maxine Shaw on “Living Single” and Detective Latoya in 2017 horror film “Get Out.” More recently, Alexander, who grew up in Philadelphia, was in Hulu’s “Wu-Tang: An American Saga.” She’s also written for TV’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and cocreated and written a graphic novel, “Concrete Park.”

“Erika is one of those courageous arts people,” Person says, “who has not allowed fame or fortune to dull her social sensibilities and her passion for justice.” He compares Alexander to “the reincarnation of Paul Robeson with some Harriet Tubman in there.”

Alexander was in. And so was Ben Arnon, her cofounder of Color Farm Media, which aims to be “the Motown of film, TV and tech.” Color Farm’s 2020 civil rights documentary “John Lewis: Good Trouble” has been widely acclaimed.

In summer 2020, the team began working on a demo and pitch package for a narrative podcast series focusing on Huston’s life, case and her impact on the missing women coverage conversation. They began pitching the series that winter.

Color Farm struck a deal with SBR Productions (cofounded by actor/comedian Kevin Hart and radio host Charlemagne Tha God), which has a deal with Amazon’s Audible Original. “Both companies,” Person says, “were offering the level of commitment and support that we wanted, along with a considerable amount of creative autonomy.”

Production on the podcast, titled “Finding Tamika,” began in summer 2021, wrapping that winter. Collaboration occurred via Zoom, Dropbox and other 21st century digital ways, as well as on-the-ground reporting in South Carolina. Asked about Hart and Charlemagne’s roles in the production, Person says, “They were the executive producers, cheerleaders and guardian angels.”

“Finding Tamika,” released spring 2022 and it’s an immersive listen. It’s put together in the style of a neo-noir, true crime drama. Voices including Alexander (her voice, rich with character), Howard (you can hear the resolve), other members of Huston’s family, Huston’s friends as well as South Carolina officials who worked the case, including Trey Gowdy, who went on to become a U.S. congressman and then a Fox News host. James T. Green oversaw post-production, including the vibey score and sound, with significant input from Alexander.

Person’s role included sketching out the arc and breaking it up episodically. “Finding Tamika” ended up being around five hours long, told over 10 chapters, the majority of which are around 30 minutes each, with a seven-minute prologue and 54-minute epilogue. One chapter is mostly a musical tribute to Huston. An early chapter on her backstory includes a clip of her singing a hymn in church.

“Obviously,” Howard says, “this is about Tamika’s story, our family’s story, but it really the larger issue is the invisibility of Black women. And they’re right there in plain sight, but America just does not want to see them. The focus here was the framework of a young woman being missing, but there really is a larger conversation to be had there. And we hope that people give that some thought.”

The appeal of true crime content is all about the stakes. Alexander says the stakes in “Finding Tamika” are even bigger: “If we don’t see these women, then what does it really mean? What are we really saying about ourselves here in America? How long can we operate like that? We must see them before they disappear. And this is not just about the missing. America can’t be America without Black women.”

For Person, the hardest decision involved in making the podcast was whether or not to include the killer’s voice. “I was adamantly against it,” Person says, “until Tamika’s mother suggested that we should see what he has to say. That’s when we decided to reach out to him.” For the podcast, Person exchanged emails with the killer, who’s serving a life sentence, via email. “He’s delusional, and I’ll leave it at that,” Person says.

In early 2023, the “Finding Tamika” creative team traveled to New York for the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards, perhaps the most prestigious award in journalism. “Finding Tamika” was honored along with projects from HBO, CNN, CBS News, PBS, Washington Post and other notable outlets. Like a Grammy winning album or Academy Award winning film, this kind of recognition will allow “Finding Tamika” to reach a wider audience. “Her story,” Howard says,” just keeps growing.”

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