A companion piece to this week’s Vanished Voices episode

On the evening of November 8th, 2021, a doorbell camera outside a home in the 4800 block of North Kenmore Road, on the northeast side of Indianapolis, captured a 24-year-old woman walking out to a truck idling at the curb. She got in. The truck pulled away. And Nakyla Williams has not been seen since.

Five years later, her case remains open, unresolved, and — for long stretches at a time — largely unheard of outside her own family.

Who Nakyla Was

Before any of this, Nakyla Williams was a hairstylist. She’d built out her own salon in the basement of her mother’s home, taught in part by her cousin Terri Davis, a retired hairdresser who says teaching Nakyla felt like watching someone she used to babysit come into her own gift. She was building a real reputation in her neighborhood as a stylist people specifically sought out.

She was also, by every account her family gives, the backbone of a busy household — the oldest of four siblings, with three younger sisters who looked up to her and a younger brother, living with her mother, Nakia Spurlock-Pope, on Kenmore Road. Family describe her as goofy, warm, always trying to make people laugh, “a go-getter.”

That mattered enormously in November 2021, because Nakia had major surgery scheduled for later that month — the kind that would require real recovery time — and Nakyla was going to be the one taking care of her mother afterward. She never got the chance. Nakia postponed the surgery entirely and has still, as far as public reporting shows, never rescheduled it. She spent what should have been her recovery time organizing search parties instead.

The Last Sighting

That night, Nakyla left the Kenmore Road home and got into a gray or white pickup truck with a distinctively loud engine — sources differ slightly on the color, but agree on the sound. The truck is believed to have been driven by a man named Bestin Hoyle, though some reporting spells his name Destyn.

Later that evening, she was seen at a residence in the 3400 block of North Leland Avenue, a house where some of her friends were staying at the time. She left that house sometime that evening. She has not been heard from since.

Her cell phone pinged one final time near Kentucky Avenue — later narrowed by investigators to the 4900 block of Topeka Trail — and then went silent. No further pings. No activity on her bank accounts. No activity on her social media. For a woman her family describes as constantly checking in, the silence itself was the first sign that something was deeply wrong.

Three Weeks of Waiting

Nakyla’s family reported her missing within days. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department did not make her case public — did not issue an alert or ask for the community’s help — until November 30th, more than three weeks after she disappeared.

Asked about the gap, an IMPD spokesperson offered only: “Additional time has passed. Nothing else has changed.” It’s a line that reads very differently depending on which side of the investigation you’re standing on. To police managing thousands of cases a year — IMPD fields around 3,800 missing persons reports annually, and roughly two-thirds resolve as voluntary disappearances — it may have felt like a reasonable default. To a mother who had already sent detectives more than 75 emails on her own, it felt like watching the trail go cold in real time.

The Confrontation

Nakia didn’t wait for the department to catch up. She went back to the Leland Avenue house herself, with her daughter Gekyah, and found Bestin Hoyle standing outside. Gekyah asked him directly whether he’d seen Nakyla. He denied it.

Nakia asked to see any camera footage from around the property — she had her own home security video showing the truck picking her daughter up that night. Shortly after that conversation, people inside the house began moving their belongings out. Hoyle left for Flint, Michigan. Online, he deleted every like and interaction he’d ever had on Nakyla’s Facebook — the detail this episode takes its title from.

None of that is proof of anything on its own. But it was enough for IMPD to publicly link Hoyle to the case within about three weeks of the disappearance — not as a suspect, officially, but as someone believed to have information — and enough for the U.S. Marshals Service to eventually get involved as well. Whether Hoyle was ever formally located, questioned, or cleared has never been made public, as far as our research could determine.

A Search Aimed in Two Directions

Indianapolis activist Terrance Hood organized volunteer search parties almost immediately, and by mid-December, close to 100 people were combing fields near Montgomery Park and beyond — cutting through brush, wading near a small lake, working off the last known cell ping as their only real lead.

It was, in Hood’s words, “looking for a needle in a haystack.” It was also, possibly, a search built for the wrong kind of disappearance. If Nakyla’s family is right that she was trafficked, she may never have been in a field to find at all — trafficking victims are frequently, as advocates describe it, “hidden in plain sight”: moved, isolated, controlled, but not physically lost the way a ground search is built to locate.

One Year Later, a Shift in Language

By December 2022, something had changed in how police discussed the case publicly — not a breakthrough, but a noticeably different tone. Where the department’s language in 2021 had been “foul play not suspected,” IMPD Captain Christopher Boomershine told a reporter a year later, “I can’t say that,” citing the ongoing nature of the investigation. He added that investigators believed a small number of people knew what had happened to Nakyla and simply hadn’t come forward.

That same December carried a second weight for the family: Nakyla’s uncle, Charles, had been killed in a homicide back in December 2012, and it was Nakyla who always organized the family’s annual remembrance for him. For the first time, nobody did.

Two Theories, No Resolution

By the summer of 2023, Nakyla’s case had become part of a larger national conversation about missing Black women, prompted in part by the widely covered disappearance of Carlee Russell in Alabama. Her grandmother, Lucille Samuels, spoke publicly that summer about the birthdays and holidays she’d missed, and pushed back forcefully against any suggestion that Nakyla’s history with drug use should affect how seriously her case was taken.

Her cousin, Barry Stewart, offered a different theory entirely — one centered not on trafficking, but on addiction, and the possibility that Nakyla was given fentanyl-laced pills by someone she trusted. Neither theory has been confirmed. The person Stewart has in mind has never been named a suspect.

Where the Case Stands

As of this writing, we have not been able to locate any public update on Nakyla Williams’ case newer than July 2023. No confirmed resolution to the Hoyle lead, no update on the private investigator the Black and Missing Foundation mentioned taking on the case, no follow-up to Captain Boomershine’s comment about people who haven’t yet come forward.

What we do know is this: Nakyla Williams is still missing. Her family is still looking. And somewhere, someone still knows more than they’ve said.

If you have any information about Nakyla Williams, please contact the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit at 317-327-6160, or Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana at 317-262-8477.

Listen to the full story on this week’s episode of Vanished Voices, “Every Like, Deleted: The Disappearance of Nakyla Williams”, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcasts!

Vanished Voices is a true crime podcast dedicated to the cases that don’t get the attention they deserve — unsolved cases of people of color, LGBTQ+ victims, MMIW cases, and stories that still need tips to be solved. New episodes drop every Thursday. Subscribe and follow us anywhere you listen to podcasts.

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Resources:

Allen, J. (2021, December 17). Missing woman last seen five weeks ago. The Indianapolis Star, A1, A10.

Allen, J. (2022, December 9). Mystery around Nakyla Williams persists 1 year later. The Indianapolis Star, A3.

Bellamy, C., Ede-Osifo, U., & Adams, C. (2023, July 21). Carlee Russell’s case gave hope that missing Black women finally mattered — until doubts set in. NBC News. Carlee Russell’s case gave hope that missing Black women finally mattered — until doubts set in

Black & Missing Foundation, Inc. (n.d.). Nakyla Williams — Have you seen this missing person? Have You Seen this Missing Person? Black and Missing Foundation

Black & Missing Foundation, Inc. (n.d.). NewsNation interview with Derrica Wilson, Nakyla Williams (missing). NewsNation Interview with Derrica Wilson, Nakyla Williams (Missing) | BAMFI

The Charley Project. (2023, July 23). Nakyla D. Williams. Nakyla D. Williams – The Charley Project

Jirasek, M., & Hughes, M. (2023, July 20). Nakyla Williams: Family pleads for someone to speak up. NewsNation. Nakyla Williams: Family pleads for someone to speak up

Untold Stories: Black and Missing. (2023, July 19). The Last Ride: Tracing the last moments of Nakyla Williams’ mysterious disappearance (No. 4) [Audio podcast episode]. In Untold Stories: Black and Missing. https://sites.libsyn.com/472332/the-last-ride-tracing-the-last-moments-of-nakyla-williams-mysterious-disappearance

WABC12/WJRT. (2021, December 3). Police: Woman reported missing from Indianapolis may be in Flint. ABC12 News. Police: Woman reported missing from Indianapolis may be in Flint | News | abc12.com

WISH-TV. (2021, December 23). US Marshals Service joins search for missing Indianapolis woman, her mom says. WISH-TV. US Marshals Service joins search for missing Indianapolis woman, her mom says

WRTV. (2021, November 25). Family and friends search for missing 24-year-old Nakyla Williams. WRTV. https://www.wrtv.com/news/public-safety/family-and-friends-search-for-missing-24-year-old-nakyla-williams

WTHR. (2021, December 2). IMPD asking for public’s help in finding woman missing since early November. WTHR. IMPD searching for missing 24-year-old Indianapolis woman | wthr.com

Fox59. (2021, December 2–3). Police make progress in search for missing Nakyla Williams. Fox59. IMPD makes progress in search for missing Nakyla Williams

Every Like, Deleted: The Disappearance of Nakyla Williams

Who Nakyla Was

The Last Sighting

Three Weeks of Waiting

The Confrontation

A Search Aimed in Two Directions

One Year Later, a Shift in Language

Two Theories, No Resolution

Where the Case Stands

Further Reading

Follow Nakyla’s Case

If You Have Information

Learn More About the Broader Issues This Episode Touches

Related Coverage of This Case

A Note From Us

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