Vanessa Blacks-Smith: A ‘Fiery Personality’

In the early morning of New Year’s Day in 1991, Timothy Harris, 19 years old at the time, dropped off his cousin, Vanessa L. Blacks-Smith at a bus stop on the corner of N. 28th and W. Wisconsin Ave. in Milwaukee, Wis. He and his then-girlfriend Sarah Herron were going grocery shopping that morning.

He left, and Vanessa wasn’t seen again. 

Timothy was the last family member to see Vanessa. 

“I regret it. I really should have just told her to stay in my apartment,” said Harris over a phone interview. 

For the next 30 years, her family is still wondering what happened to her. 

“She just disappeared,” said Vanessa’s aunt Betty Blacks. 

About 32,711 people have gone missing in the City of Milwaukee in the last 10 years, according to the Milwaukee Police Department. At any given time, about 500 people are actively missing in Milwaukee. Many are people of color, yet very few make the news. 

In 2024 through Oct. 15, 2,466 people were reported missing in the city. Each year in the past decade, between 2,500 and 3,300 people have been reported missing each year. Many are short-term missing cases where people are quickly found, highlighting a crisis of online grooming, group home runaways and other issues. Stereotypical stranger abductions are exceptionally rare, and those are the ones that tend to be highlighted in the news. 

 A team of 12 student journalists spent three months investigating 18 open missing people cases, most of them people of color in Milwaukee but several from smaller Wisconsin cities. The students spoke with family members and detectives and filed open records requests.  In the case of Vanessa L. Blacks-Smith, Milwaukee police declined to answer specific questions on the case, but they did release the full police file to Media Milwaukee.

The student reporter researching Vanessa L. Blacks-Smith’s disappearance was able to get in contact with the family members, her aunt, Betty Blacks, and her cousin Timothy Harris. The police files include family interviews, arrest reports, and DNA documents. The information presented below comes from the family interviews and the police documents. 

It would be a little while until Vanessa’s family caught wind that something was wrong. 

“My son, before spring break, he had gone down to where he and Vanessa would hang out,” Blacks said. “He came home late that night and said to me ‘Mother you need to do something; people down at that place saying Vanessa is dead.’” 

“I said ‘Vanessa’s not dead. What are you talking about?” said Blacks. 

“Some guy was saying that Vanessa was dead and that her body was found in a car with her throat slashed in Oak Creek,” said Blacks. “And that her body was sent back to California, to her mother, which wasn’t true because I talked to her mother almost every day and she didn’t have a body.” 

It wasn’t unusual for Vanessa to leave for a few weeks at a time. She was known to visit her mother in California. At the time though, her mother hadn’t heard from her. 

Betty said that Vanessa would always come around during the holidays for cookouts. 

“Memorial Day was coming up,” said Betty. “I said ‘If Vanessa doesn’t show up for the cookout, I will go to the police and file a missing persons report.’” 

Memorial Day came and went. No Vanessa. 

“To tell the truth, if something happened to her, something fatal,” said Blacks. “We’re wondering how it happened because she would fight a man just like she would fight a woman.”

Born in Mississippi, Blacks spent most of her adult life in Milwaukee. She received her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Later she obtained her Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice from Marquette University. 

Blacks lives in Texas now. She’s older and you can hear it in her voice – the gravelly tinge of someone who’s lived a full life. But her tone is dominant, commanding respect. Over the phone, she spoke slowly and carefully. She was quick with her own questions and cautious with her answers.

According to Blacks, she and Vanessa were very close. 

“Vanessa was like a sister to me,” she said. “We grew up in a house together. Her mom had Vanessa very young. I’m like four or five years older than Vanessa. We were all kids together.” 

Betty Blacks was the one to make the initial report. 

According to Blacks and the police files, people have attempted to report Smith missing several times before the official report was made on July 25, 1991. 

“The guy kept telling me she’s an adult,” said Blacks. “She can go missing as she wants to. She doesn’t have to call you.” 

“It made me sick,” Blacks said. “As if they didn’t care.” 

Police declined to answer specific questions on the case, although, as noted, they provided the files that detail the investigation.

In the police files, Smith’s boyfriend at the time, Tyrone Parker, tried to report her missing. But was denied. 

His reason for concern and wanting to report was because she was a “clean person” and he had all her belongings with him. “It was unlike her to not clean daily,” said Parker in the report.

His attempt was in January of 1991, a couple of weeks after people close to Vanessa started noticing something wrong.

According to the police files, when Parker decided to report Vanessa missing, MPD told him that “they couldn’t take a missing person’s report from anyone other than a relative.” 

In the police files, several interviews indicated Vanessa had a compromising lifestyle. Vanessa was allegedly working at times as a prostitute.

However, Vanessa was also a mother to a daughter and a son. 

“They were very, very young maybe 5 or 6 years old when she went missing,” said Blacks. 

For a little while she was married to a man with the last name Smith. While talking to Betty, the reporter was given the request to include Vanessa’s maiden name, Blacks. 

“She wasn’t married for that long ya know?” said Betty. 

Her aunt described her as a loving person, with a fiery personality and very outspoken. She was the family favorite. 

“She was like a spoiled child that everyone loved,” said Blacks. 

Soon after Vanessa went missing, rumors started going around that she was deceased. People spread the narrative saying she was found in Oak Creek in a car with her throat slashed or strangled. 

Betty stated that she filed a missing persons report again around July when Jeffrey Dahmer’s case came to light.

“I went back to the police,” said Blacks. “To find out if she was among the people.” Dahmer’s known victims were all men, however.

During the investigation, Blacks conducted her own interviews with acquaintances and friends, gathering clues to help the police find where Vanessa could be. She tried her best to locate her by putting up missing person posters and featuring her in the news. 

In the files, in April of 1992, a program on TV by Geraldo Rivera featuring “truckstop murders” comes up, which showed truckstop murders in Ohio. The possibility is raised that Vanessa could be among the victims. 

Blacks stated she had VHS tapes of the programs featuring Vanessa, but lost them when she moved states.

In June of 2024, Betty created a Facebook page dedicated to Vanessa. In her last post, she asked for donations to the Wisconsin Missing Persons Advocacy, Inc.

“Their mission means a lot to me,” wrote Betty in the post. “I hope you’ll consider contributing as a way to celebrate with me.”

Due to Vanessa’s alleged lifestyle, people have pointed to different subjects in her life that could’ve allegedly been a threat to her life.

Mary Dell Crowley indicated that an unidentified white man Vanessa used to date could’ve brought harm to her. He frequented the Ambassador Hotel but had stopped coming around once Vanessa disappeared.

Crowley stated that he told her that Vanessa made him so mad that he could “kill her, he could just tie her up and cut her up.” 

However, Betty Blacks believes that the the answer lies closer to home. 

“There is a person of interest since the beginning of the case that has not been arrested,” stated Blacks. 

This person is Vanessa’s ex-boyfriend. Because he has not been charged, Media Milwaukee is withholding his name.

In the investigation, several people testified stating that the man allegedly threatened his girlfriends with Smith’s disappearance, the police reports say. 

“He would say ‘No body, no evidence,” stated another woman, the man’s girlfriend at the time, in one of the reports. “And said ‘You could be missing too.” 

According to that woman, Vanessa allegedly came to the ex’s home armed with a straighter razor and started cutting him. The ex allegedly suffered several superficial wounds and ‘snapped.’ He got the upper hand, cut her throat, stuffed her in a suitcase or plastic bag, and threw her in the Milwaukee River, the police reports allege.

However, the boyfriend denied making these statements and harming Vanessa. He defended that he made the threats to make sure women “didn’t get too close to him,” the police reports note.

The ex was never arrested, as the police didn’t have enough evidence or a body. 

“There’s too much information in there that implicates him,” said Blacks. “I think something should have been done a long time ago.” 

On Nov. 22, 2024, student journalists were invited to the Sojourner Family Peace Center. There they met up with the Milwaukee police Sensitive Crimes Unit Captain Erin Mejia, Sergeant Fawn Schwandt, and the lone detective working on all these long-term missing cases Detective Jamie Sromalla. 

Detective Sromalla has been a police officer for seven and a half years. It wasn’t her first choice to become a police officer, but circumstances led her down the path to becoming one and she hasn’t looked back since. 

She’s been working for the Sensitive Crimes Division at MPD for only three months, taking over the position from Keyona Vines. 

The 12 student journalists had an opportunity to learn from Detective Sromalla and her superiors about the Sensitive Crimes Unit and how they conduct missing person cases. While they declined to comment specifically on the cases the students were researching, Detective Sromalla presented reporters with a PowerPoint presentation. She showed us the nuances and rules that go into missing persons cases. Revealing that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to conducting these investigations. 

“This position is very challenging, but I’m up for that challenge,” said Sromalla. 

She states that every case has its own unique circumstances. 

“Every missing case is different,” said Sromalla. “But it’s not a crime to go missing, so it’s really hard to prove that something other than them packing up their stuff and leaving happened.” 

Long-term missing cases aren’t the only things that Detective Sromalla focuses on. Sometimes she’s pulled away to help with more recent cases that need extra attention. Critical missing cases that are fresh have more urgency. At any given time, there are approximately 500 open missing person cases in her caseload. 

Somalla says that for each of her cases – color isn’t a factor for her. Neither is whether they are drug users, dealers, mentally ill or they have a troubled past. She says she just wants to provide closure to the families. 

“I try to put myself in their situation if it was my child, my parent, my loved one I would want someone to help me,” said Sromalla. 

Thirty years later Vanessa’s family is still seeking answers. 

According to Blacks, she’s had several meetings with the another police officer working on the case, Vines and MPD. Over the phone, she stated that during the Thanksgiving holiday, she planned on getting the family to stir things up regarding Vanessa’s case. 

“Maybe try to get something started again right?” said Blacks. “Alert people what’s going on.” 

Blacks and the rest of Vanessa’s family hope to get closure. 

“Give the police department what they need so that we can put this to rest. My sister left this world not knowing where her firstborn was. Her dying wish was – please, please don’t give up on my daughter,” said Blacks. 

If you know anything that could help in locating Vanessa L. Blacks-Smith contact the Milwaukee Police Department Sensitive Crimes Division at (414) 935-7405.

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into missing people’s cases in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available here.