Missing & Murdered Introduces: The Jaclyn Ferland-Smith Case

March 16, 2026·38 min·3 clips

A 41-year-old Canadian woman vanishes without a trace from a coastal tourist town in Costa Rica, leaving only rumors and fear.

Costa Rica opens lush and alive, then David Ridgen brings the story into Playa del Coco, a coastal tourist town where 41-year-old Canadian Jacqueline Furlan-Smith vanished in 2021. No trace has turned up. Around Jackie, rumour and fear have settled in, and people say they saw something or heard something. The episode keeps a careful tone from the start. A content warning mentions difficult subject matter, including references to suicide, before the first scene slips into domestic sounds and ordinary movement. Jackie is named early, which keeps her present before the questions around her disappearance start to crowd in. Krista’s account changes the pressure in the story. She says she spent time with Sebastian during the search and came away uneasy because he talked so much about Jackie’s mental health. She remembers seeing messages. According to Krista, Sebastian showed her messages from Jackie on the day she disappeared and said they showed distress and instability. Krista does not have copies. Ridgen says he would want to see the messages himself. The reporting stays patient. He goes near a house late in the evening, notices the lights, asks about the entrance, and decides that showing up late with a microphone is not the right move. He waits until tomorrow. That pause says a lot about the method: the approach matters, especially when someone may not want to talk. Another public trace appears in a YouTube video posted on September 5, 2021 by radio personality Yves Mallet, who introduces Pepito Live as a window onto Costa Rica for the expat community. The excerpt ends by sending listeners back to Someone Knows Something. Episode 2 is waiting, but this opener leaves the hard question where it is: what happened to Jackie, and who is ready to say more?

As heard by us

A patient Costa Rica missing-persons opener, built around David Ridgen's fieldwork and the unsettled accounts of Jackie's final day.

Jacqueline Furlan-Smith vanished in 2021 in Playa del Coco, Costa Rica, and this Missing & Murdered introduction hands the case over to David Ridgen's Someone Knows Something with a slow, wary sense of place.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a disappearance case told from the ground up, with no rush to tidy it.

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