The Hidden Third

Podbit · The Hidden Third

The World’s Best Bounty Hunter: How Michelle Gomez Finds People Who Vanish

Explore episode Jun 24, 2026

Where this was said

The Assault That Started It All: How Michelle Got Into Skip Tracing

At 21:20 · chapter starts 13:44

Michelle's entry into skip tracing is rooted in a painful personal chapter. In her 30s, a controlling fiancé hit her once — and she spent an entire year ensuring he was prosecuted to the fullest extent. During that year, she was working at a large Texas personal injury law firm, where she discovered a natural gift for gathering and organizing information. Her boss gave her two weeks off to handle the situation. During that time she met Russell, a man in the repossession business, who introduced her to the world of skip tracing — which she initially thought sounded illegal. Her first test case: a van belonging to a family whose grandfather had just died, which had been missing for eight months. Michelle located it in a single phone call using a ruse about being a florist, gathered the funeral details, and refused to seize the van until after the burial. She later helped the family use their life insurance payout to buy it back — and became friends with them. That first case crystallized both her professional method and her ethical core.

Similar podbits

True Crime
Cocaine Inside a Boa Constrictor: The Wildlife-Drug Trade Overlap

#2536 - Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride · Aug 6, 2026 True Crime

The illegal wildlife trade and the drug trade aren't just parallel industries — they actively overlap. Smugglers force-fed cocaine to boa constrictors to evade customs, packed drugs beneath layers of live animals in crates with spitting cobras on top, and exploited the chronic under-resourcing of US Fish and Wildlife inspection teams.

True Crime
Anson Wong: The Global Kingpin of Reptile Smuggling

#2536 - Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride · Aug 6, 2026 True Crime

Anson Wong from Malaysia was the Pablo Escobar of the global reptile trade, supplying rare animals — including Komodo dragons — to buyers across the world. He was caught in a sting, extradited to the US, and served the longest wildlife crime sentence at the time. The animals seized from him went on to stock some of America's biggest zoos.