Missing in the Midwest: The Disappearance of Emma Baum

It's October tenth, twenty twenty four, and Gary and Deana twenty five year old Emma Baum is just days away from what should have been one of the biggest moments of her life. She's nine months pregnant with her fourth child and getting closer and closer to her due date. Emma's last scene near twenty fifth Avenue in Connecticut Street. At some point that day, she disappears. No one sees where she goes, no one knows what happens next, and as the days begin to pass without a word from Emma, her family is left facing a terrifying question. How does a woman nine months pregnant simply vanish? Hey everyone, and welcome back to Case Uncovered, where we uncover some of the most compelling and lesser known true creme cases. I'm your host, John Rivera. Now we have a lot of new listeners, so I wanted to say welcome. I'm so glad you're here. For those of you that aren't familiar with who I am, I'm an investigative journalist, podcaster, and nonprofit founder, and a lot of the work I do both on and off this podcast centers around missing persons and unsolved cases. Here on Case Uncovered, you'll hear a little bit of everything. Sometimes we're digging into cases that haven't received nearly the attention they deserve. Other Times we'll revisit cases you may already know because they're still unsolved. There are still unanswered questions, and there are still families waiting for answers. And today's episode is part of Missing in the Midwest, a Case Uncovered series where we focus specifically on missing persons cases from communities across the Midwest. Today we're heading to Gary and Deana. Twenty five year old Emma Baum was a mother of three, and when she disappeared in October of twenty twenty four, she was nine months pregnant with her fourth child. What happened after Emma was last seen has left her family searching for answers and asking questions that, nearly two years later, still haven't been answered. So today we're going to walk through Emma's life, the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, what invests the Gators have done to try to find her, and some of the questions and suspicions that have surrounded this case. Because somewhere in all of this there has to be an answer to what happened to Emma. This is the disappearance of Emma Bomb. Before we get into the timeline, I want to spend a little time talking about Emma. Emma Baum was twenty five years old when she disappeared. She was from Portage, Indiana, and was already a mother to three young children. By October of twenty twenty four, she was preparing to welcome her fourth. Her family describes her as outgoing, kind, and fiercely loyal to the people she loves. She was also someone whose life hadn't always been easy. Emma had struggled with addiction, some thing her family has spoken openly about since her disappearance. She also had previous drug related charges, missed court appearances, and outstanding warrants. Shortly before she disappeared, records show she was under a pre trial release supervision agreement connected to a felony case from earlier that year. And I think it's important that we talk about that, honestly, not because those things define Emma. They don't, but because when someone goes missing, especially someone who has struggled with addiction or had involvement with a criminal justice system, those circumstances can very quickly become the lens through which people view their disappearance, and that's something I think we have to be careful about. Emma could struggle with addiction and still be a daughter, a sister, and a mother whose family loved her. Her life could be complicated, and her disappearance could still deserve the same questions, attention, and resources as anyone else's. Those two things can exist at the same time, and Emma's family has never tried to portray her life as anything It wasn't. They knew she struggled, they knew there were times when Emma would go off on her own and not communicate with them for several days. But they also knew their daughter and their sister, and in the fall of twenty twenty four, Emma was approaching a major moment in her life. She was about to have her fourth baby. According to her family, Emma was excited about the baby, and just days before she disappeared, her sister Abigail said Emma was already one centimeter dilated. She was getting close. At any moment, Emma could have gone into labor. And that's where we need to begin our timeline, because on October tenth, twenty twenty four, Emma was in Gary and Deana, and some time after arriving there, the known timeline of her life stops. According to her family, Emma was dropped off in the twenty five hundred block of Connecticut Street near twenty fifth Avenue to visit the father of her unborn child. Gary police would later identify the same area as Emma's last known location. At the time, Emma didn't have a working phone. Her sister, Hayley, later explained that Emma was supposed to get her phone activated that day, but that never happened. And this is where Emma's timeline becomes incredibly difficult to follow. We know she made it to that area of Gary, but after that, there's no clear, publicly confirmed account of where she went next. There's been no publicly released surveillance footage showing her leaving, no confirmed sighting that establishes where she went afterward, and because Emma didn't have an active phone, investigators didn't have the usual digital trail that might help peace together her movements. Days had passed, and initially Emma's family wasn't panicking. Remember, they knew Emma sometimes went a few days without checking in, so they started asking around, had anyone talked to her, had anyone seen her? Was she staying with someone? Her family reached out to friends and people Emma knew, trying to figure out who had heard from her last. But as the days continued to pass, nobody had heard from her, and eventually Emma's ads since stop looking like one of those times when she had simply gone off on her own, because now there was another question becoming impossible to ignore. Where was the baby? At some point, her family expected her to give birth, but there was no call saying Emma was in labor, no announcement that the baby had arrived, and still no contact from Emma. Her family knew something wasn't right. Emma's mother, Jamie, began to panic. In October twenty eighth, Emma was reported missing to the Gary Police Department. By that point, eighteen days had passed since her last known sighting. Now I want to pause here for a second, because I know that's a detail people are going to hear and immediately question why did it take eighteen days to report Emma missing? Well, on paper, that sounds like an incredibly long time, but we have to look at it within the context of Emma's life now. As I mentioned before, her family stated that she sometimes went days, sometimes weeks without contacting them. Initially, they were trying to find her through friends, family, and other people she spent time with. They didn't know on October eleventh that Emma would still be missing. On October twenty eighth. That realization happened gradually, and once her family understood that this was different, they immediately went to police. Unfortunately, from an investigative standpoint, those eighteen days couldn't be recovered. And that's where this case becomes really difficult, because investigators weren't starting with a disappearance that had happened a few hours earlier. They were trying to reconstruct nearly three weeks, three weeks of people coming and going, of vehicles moving through the neighborhood, of memories beginning to fade, and potentially surveillance footage being overwritten or lost. So when Gary police began investigating Emma's disappearance, they had to work backward back to October tenth, back to the twenty five hundred block of Connecticut Street, and back to the people who had been around Emma that day, but most importantly, back to the question that's still hasn't been answered what happened after Emma arrived there. Sergeant Mark Salazar took responsibility for the investigation, and police began interviewing people who may have had information about Emma's whereabouts. They canvassed the area around twenty five hundred Connecticut Street. They followed tips, they searched multiple locations that emerged during the investigation, and according to police, investigators reviewed available video from areas connected to Emma's last known movements. But Emma's family wasn't waiting at home for someone else to find her. They started searching too. They walked through overgrown lots, They checked abandoned buildings, knocked on doors, handed out flyers. They stopped people in the neighborhood and asked whether anyone remembered seeing Emma. CA Nine teams were also brought into searches as the effort to locate her expanded. And I think this is where the location matters. The area surrounding twenty fifth Avenue in Connecticut Street contains vacant lots, overgrown areas, and a lot of abandoned properties. When you hear that someone was last seen at an address, it can sound incredibly specific you think, okay, start there, But when investigators are dealing with an area like this, where there are empty properties, open lots, alleys, and places someone could potentially move through without drawing much attention, that search becomes much more complicated. Emma's family searched those places themselves. As we mentioned, her sister Hayley described stopping people in their cars, stopping people walking down the street, talking to basically anyone who might have seen something, And the family made something else very clear publicly, they weren't going to stop looking. Emma's mother said she would continue searching for her daughter. Her sisters pleaded for anyone with information to come forward, and during a November press conference, Emma's sister, Abigail spoke directly to her. She wanted Emma to know that, regardless of anything that may have happened, her family still loved her and they wanted her home safe. That message matters because at this stage, investigators still had to consider different possibility. Please. Could Emma have left voluntarily, Could she have gone somewhere to give birth without telling her family, Could something have happened medically, or had someone else been involved in her disappearance? Those possibilities require very different investigations. But as the weeks passed without Emma, some of the people closes to her became increasingly convinced that she had not simply chosen to disappear, and their attention kept returning to the same place, the home Emma had reportedly gone to on October tenth, and the person she had gone there to see, her boyfriend and the father of her unborn child. Now, I want to be very clear before we go any further. Emma's family has publicly expressed suspicion about him and has questioned what he knows about her disappearance, but he has not been charged in connection with Emma's disappearance, and police have not publicly identified him as a suspect. At the same time, if we're going to look at this case in its entirety, we can't ignore the questions Emma's family has been asking publicly since she disappeared. According to Emma's mother and sistors, they believe he was one of the last people known to have been with Emma Jamie. Emma's mother has said publicly that she believes he knows more about what had happened to her daughter than he has revealed. And Emma's sisters have raised questions about the information they say they received regarding Emma's final known movements. There's also another piece of the timeline that brought even more attention to the boyfriend. On October twenty ninth, one day after Emma was officially reported missing, her boyfriend was arrested. Now, when you hear that, your immediate reaction might be arrested for what happened to Emma. No, unfortunately, and this is really important, the arrest was not related to Emma's disappearance. According to the information in this case, he was taken into custody on unrelated charges. He was questioned about Emma while he was in custody, but there has been no arrest or criminal charge connecting him to her disappearance. So where does that leave us? Well, with questions, a lot of them. If Emma was dropped off to see him on October tenth, when was the last time he saw her? Did Emma leave the property? If she did, was she alone with someone coming to pick her up? Did she say where she planned to go next? Is there anything that independently confirms her movements after arriving in that neighborhood? Those are the kinds of questions that matter here, not because asking them prove someone committed a crime, it doesn't, but because when someone disappears, investigators have to reconstruct the last known hours of that person's life as precisely as possible, and right now, at least publicly, there is still a gap after Emma arrived in that area. That gap has fueled a lot of speculation and rumors online, and I want to be careful with that too. There have been rumors about Emma's disappearance. There have been accusations, There have been people online claiming to know what happened. But a rumor repeated one hundred times is still a rumor unless we can trace something back to law enforcement, Emma's family, court records, or another credible source, I'm not going to present it to you as fact. What we can talk about, though, are the theories Emma's family themselves have raised. They have questioned whether she may have gone into labor around that time she disappeared. And remember, she was already at the very end of her pregnancy, and according to her sisters, she was already about a centimeter dilated. So as October turned into November, the family wasn't only asking where Emma was, but they wanted to know where the baby was, especially because there was no confirmed information that Emma had delivered the baby or that she was at a hospital. This created an unusual and incredibly complicated situation for investigators because they weren't just searching for one missing person anymore, they were searching for two. By November, Emma had been missing for weeks. Her family continued searching Gary while police followed leads and investigated locations connected to tips, and one of the most important developments came when authorities began searching properties in the area surrounding Emma's last known location. According to Gary Police, officers can act in multiple searches based on information they received during the investigation. Now, if someone said they saw Emma somewhere, police had to determine whether that sighting was credible. If information pointed to investigators toward a property, they had to evaluate it. If someone claimed to know where Emma might be, that information had to be followed, and with every search that ended without finding her, the same question remained, where could she be? There was another challenge investigators faced. Emma's physical appearance may not have remained exactly the same. She was visibly pregnant when she disappeared. If she gave birth some time afterward, someone encountering Emma later might not necessarily have realized they were looking at the same woman pictured on a missing person flyer. That possibility also raised questions about medical care. Was there any record of her seeking treatment somewhere, could she have given birth outside of a hospital, and if she did, where was the baby. These are questions Emma's family continued asking publicly as they pleaded for information, and despite the searches and the interviews, despite the attention surrounding the case, Emma remained missing. There are a few things about Emma's disappearance that I really want to dig into, because even with everything we've talked about so far, there are still some major gaps in this case. And I think the biggest one is also the simplest. Did Emma ever leave that area of Connecticut Street. That's something we still don't have a clear public answer to. We know where Emma was reportedly dropped off, but we don't have a publicly confirmed sighting that tells us where she went afterwards, or if she even left that house, And that distinction is important because if investigators could establish that Emma left that area on her own, even if they couldn't immediately determine where she went, it would completely change the direction of the timeline. Now there is another possibility we do have to talk about. Could Emma have simply chosen to leave on her own. We know there were times in the past when she went several days, sometimes weeks without communicating with her family. She also had outstanding warrants and unresolved legal issues, so on the surface, you could argue that there were reasons Emma might want to avoid contact or stay under the radar. But there's a difference between asking whether something is possible and asking whether the evidence actually supports that. If Emma intentionally disappeared, then what happened next? Where did she go, how did she support herself, who helped her, and at some point what happened when she gave birth. That's where the voluntary disappearance theory becomes much more complicated. This wasn't someone who could simply get into a car, leave town and remain unnoticed indefinitely. Emma was at a point in her pregnancy where delivery was approaching. That doesn't make voluntary disappearance impossible, but it does create another event that would somehow also have to occur without producing a publicly known trail. And now we're approaching two years. It's a very long time for someone to remain completely disconnected from their family, particularly when there has been continued attention surrounding their disappearance. Could it happen, of course, anything's possible, but right now there isn't publicly available evidence showing that it did. And then there's the baby. This is probably the part of EMA's case that I struggle with the most, because whatever happened to Emma, there's still another unanswered question, what happened to the baby. We don't know that the baby was actually ever born, and we don't know at this point whether Emma's still alive. There's too many questions that need to be answered, and unfortunately, unless someone comes forward and provide some of that information, we might never know. Now. The other thing that needs to be considered is what actually was found when the canine teams were involved. What investigators might be keeping from the public. As we know, sometimes investigators do do this to protect the integrity of the case. But did they find something that they haven't told us about is there more that they know and they're just not sharing. This is all possible, and I think this is especially important in Emma's case because there's been so much speculation surrounding it. But when you strip everything else away, we have a woman who disappeared during an incredibly vulnerable point in her life. We have a final portion of her publicly known timeline that has never been completely filled in. We have a family that doesn't believe Emma voluntarily walked away from her life, and we have law enforcement that has continued investigating her disappearance. But we have no publicly confirmed answer telling us what happened after October tenth, twenty twenty four. And that's the part I keep coming back to. Not the rumors, not the accusations, not what somebody on social media claims happened. It's the gap somewhere between Emma's last known movements and the moment her family realized she was truly missing. Something happened, and someone out there knows what that was. Someone may have seen something they didn't realize mattered, someone may have been told something afterward, or there may be evidence investigators again haven't made public. We simply don't know, but until Emma is found, I don't think any possibility can be comfortably dismissed. And that's why, nearly two years later, her family is still asking the same question, where is Emma Bomb. If you have any information about the disappearance of Emma Bomb, please contact the Gary Police Department at two one nine eight eight one one two two nine. You can also submit an anonymous tip through the Gary Police Department's text to tip line at two one nine two zero seven eight four seven seven. No piece of information is too small and could potentially lead to finding Emma and her baby. If you know something, say something. Thank you so much for being here and for listening to Emma's story today. If you'd like to help support the podcast, one of the best things you can do is leave a five star reading and review. It helps more people discover the podcast, which means more awareness for the families and cases we talk about here every week. To learn more about my advocacy work through the Regnited Project, you can visit the Reignited project dot com, where you can learn more about my nonprofit and the work we're doing to support families of the missing and those with unsolved cases. You can also connect with me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube at gen Rivere Investigates for more case coverage, updates, and behind the scenes content. And if you're not already subscribed to my YouTube channel, make sure you do. I have a ton of new video content coming out aside from the podcast and I'd love to see you over there. And until next time, stay curious, stay vigilant, and stay safe out there. Fire Eyes Media