Episode 187: Kianna Galvin – Bite-Sized Crime

When a teenage girl goes to a friend’s house and doesn’t return, her family is desperate to find answers. What happened to Kianna Galvin?

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Welcome back to Bite-Sized Crime. This week I’m bringing you a missing persons case that could be on the verge of finding answers. This episode discusses sensitive topics, so listener discretion is advised.

Kianna Galvin grew up in South Elgin, Illinois, a village on the outskirts of Chicago. Kianna’s younger sister Miah described her as nurturing and loving, and her friends said she was the life of the party. Kianna was a typical teenager with an outgoing personality and lots of friends in her circle.

Of course, sometimes teenagers get into trouble. Kianna went through some tough years and ended up on juvenile probation for a short time. She went to live with her father in the neighboring town of Rockford for a year, a choice that really helped her grow and mature. When she returned to South Elgin, Kianna decided to get her GED so she could eventually go to college. She wanted to go to art school and study interior design.

In the spring of 2016, 17-year-old Kianna was working as a housekeeper at a local rehab center for the elderly. She was saving up money to buy a car and add to her college fund. She was also looking forward to her 18th birthday, which was just a few months away. She and her mom had planned a trip to Georgia to look at an art school in Atlanta.

On the morning of Friday, May 6, 2016, Kianna’s mother Fiona got up early to get ready for work. She asked her daughters to clean the house before she got home, then kissed them both goodbye and left the house at 7am. When she got home around 12:45 that afternoon, Fiona was surprised to find her youngest daughter home alone. Miah said that Kianna had gone to a friend’s house and had promised she would be back in a few minutes. Fiona called Kianna’s cell phone, but there was no answer, so Fiona left a voicemail, asking her daughter to check in. She tried again a few minutes later, but again, Kianna didn’t pick up the phone. By 1:15, Kianna’s phone wasn’t ringing at all – it was going straight to voicemail.

Fiona wasn’t worried at first. She knew Kianna’s friends had prom that weekend, so it was very possible that her daughter was hanging out with them and would be home later. She might have even decided to spend the night at a girlfriend’s house. Fiona left another voicemail, reminding Kianna that Miah had a basketball tournament the next day and they would be leaving early.

When morning came, Kianna still hadn’t called, and she wasn’t responding to text messages. Fiona and Miah left town for the tournament, but all day long, Fiona couldn’t stop wondering where her eldest daughter might be and why she wasn’t answering her phone. When they returned to South Elgin that evening and Kianna still wasn’t home, Fiona knew something was wrong. She reached out to a friend in law enforcement for advice, but they told her that she wouldn’t be able to file a missing persons report until Kianna had been gone for 48 hours. Of course, Fiona now knows that isn’t true, but at the time, she trusted her friend and decided to wait.

Finally, on the morning of Sunday, May 8th, Fiona couldn’t wait any longer. It was Mother’s Day, and there was no way that Kianna would have missed the opportunity to call her. None of Kianna’s friends had heard from her, and her phone was still going straight to voicemail. Fiona contacted the South Elgin Police Department and reported Kianna missing. They told her that an officer would come by her house that evening.

But even as the officer took the report, Fiona got the sense that they saw Kianna as just another teenage runaway. She told the Daily Herald, “I think maybe they just thought, ‘Oh, mom and her were arguing again about something and she left again for a little bit.’”

Even though Kianna and her mother had had issues in the past, Kianna had grown in the years since, and Fiona knew her daughter wouldn’t run away. She worried that the police weren’t taking this case seriously. In fact, early reports stated that Kianna had gone to a nearby park, but Miah has long maintained that she told the police Kianna went to a friend’s house. Also, police didn’t canvass the neighborhood until May 10th, two days after Fiona reported her daughter missing. Crucial evidence could have been lost in that window of time.

Meanwhile, Kianna’s family was doing their own investigation. They were able to get access to Kianna’s Facebook account, and when they did, they discovered messages between Kianna and a 21-year-old man we’ll call “J”. Around 12:30 on May 6th, J messaged Kianna and asked her to come to his house to smoke marijuana. Kianna told him she would change her clothes and come right over. J lived in the basement of his girlfriend’s house on Revere Road, just around the corner from where Kianna lived on Concord Avenue. It would have taken her two minutes to walk the short distance; this explained why she had only taken her cell phone and had left her wallet and keys behind. She was planning to come right home.

As soon as Fiona saw the messages, she knew she had to talk to J. At first, J claimed he hadn’t seen Kianna, but when Fiona confronted him with the Facebook messages, he changed his story. He said that Kianna had come over to the house on Friday afternoon, bought a bag of weed from him, then left in a dark-colored car. He remembered that she had been on the phone with someone, but he didn’t know who. He hadn’t seen her since.

Fiona passed this information on to the police, and on May 11th, an officer went to J’s house on Revere Road. According to an affidavit, J confirmed that Kianna had bought weed from him on May 6th, but he claimed that she had never come inside the house and she had been texting another man when she left a few minutes later. However, Kianna’s phone records showed that the last message sent from her phone was to J at 12:35pm when she told him she was on her way to his house. The phone’s final ping was at 1:00pm, and at 1:10, it disconnected from the network.

On May 12th, police got a phone call from a man who lived on Revere Road. The man said that when he went outside to get his trash bin from the curb, he noticed a reddish-brown substance on the lid. It looked suspiciously like blood, and it was a significant enough amount that the man thought he should call the police. The man lived right next door to J’s house, and he told police that he remembered seeing Kianna enter the house the day she went missing, and 15 minutes later, he saw J’s girlfriend enter. He never saw Kianna leave. Police took the report, then came and collected the man’s trash bin and sent it to the state police lab for testing.

While they waited for the results, investigators continued to follow up on any leads that came in. They worked with the U.S. Marshal Service to analyze Kianna’s phone records, and they searched various locations in South Elgin and Rockford, where Kianna’s father lived. They also collected items from Kianna’s bedroom, such as a hairbrush and her computer, and they scoured her social media accounts, looking for any clues or connections that might lead to her location. They talked to Kianna’s friends and ex-boyfriends. South Elgin Police Chief Chris Merritt told the Daily Herald that they couldn’t rule out anything yet. “We’re continuing to look at everything and continuing to have an open mind, and just conducting the investigation by the numbers as we see fit.”

Kianna’s family struggled with the lack of answers as her 18th birthday came and went. Fiona told the Daily Herald that she cried all the time and couldn’t bear to enter her daughter’s bedroom. Kianna’s father said he had a hard time believing it was real. “You see this stuff on TV and you read about other people’s predicaments like this. When you go through it, it’s a totally different ride. It’s a nightmare. You can’t believe it’s happening to you.”

In June, one month after Kianna disappeared, investigators got a tip that the house on Revere Road had undergone some remodeling. Specifically, the bathroom in the basement – the basement where J lived – had been completely redone. Investigators wondered whether the remodeling had less to do with design and more to do with covering something up.

In September, investigators finally received results from the state crime lab. The substance on the trash bin lid was human blood, and there was a 99.99% certainty that it belonged to Kianna Galvin.

On November 8th, police executed a search warrant at the house on Revere Road. According to the affidavit, they had reasonable grounds to suspect that Kianna had been the victim of aggravated battery and possibly homicide. Crime scene investigators searched for any evidence in the house that could connect to Kianna, including clothing and fingerprints. After the search, police refused to say whether or not they found anything of value. Kianna’s case went quiet.

Six months later, in April of 2017, J was arrested and charged with attempted murder and aggravated domestic battery, but not in Kianna’s case. J had allegedly stabbed his girlfriend and slashed her throat with a steak knife during an argument. She survived the attack, and J was sent to the county jail to await trial. Kianna’s family was shaken by the news that such a violent man was likely the last person to see their daughter.

On May 6, 2017, Kianna’s family gathered to mark the one year anniversary of her disappearance. They planted a garden in her honor and shared their favorite memories of her. Fiona told NBC Chicago that not seeing her daughter had been a living nightmare. “I pray every day that she’ll come through the door, and if that doesn’t happen, I have to wrap my brain around it being something else that I don’t want to believe – but that could be the outcome.”

Police conducted several searches of local forest preserves, and residents told the Daily Herald that police had once again been at the house on Revere Road on March 21, 2018. Deputy Chief Randy Endea stated that they had only executed one search warrant in the case – the other searches were consensual.

In April of 2018, J pleaded guilty to one felony count of armed violence in the stabbing case. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The years continued to pass, and Kianna’s family waited for answers. In 2020, they held a candlelight vigil in front of the South Elgin police station. Fiona told the Daily Herald, “My whole mission in this vigil is to light a candle to keep focus on this case that’s still ongoing, that’s not solved, and to pressure the police to get more evidence to charge the person who’s the primary suspect with the circumstantial and probable cause evidence that they have.”

In 2025, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office announced that their Special Victims Unit was looking for new leads in Kianna’s case. It had been nearly nine years since Kianna disappeared, and the renewed attention caught the eye of Pamela Childs, a retired Chicago police detective working on a missing persons documentary series. Childs began to dig into the case, pouring over police records and interviewing Kianna’s family and friends. She also tracked down several people who had never been interviewed by the police, and she spoke with the family’s private investigator and a local journalist, who were able to shed light on new aspects of the case.

One interesting piece of information came from an unredacted police affidavit which states that J’s cell phone data showed him leaving the house on Revere Road at 4am on May 7th, the day after Kianna was last seen. He was almost an hour and a half late for work that day – where was he and what was he doing in those early morning hours?

Childs sent all of her information to the South Elgin Police Department, and on April 1, 2026, Kianna’s episode of “Hunt for the Missing: Chicago” was released. The documentary sparked new public interest and was the catalyst for a new search warrant.

On May 7, 2026, investigators conducted a forensic excavation at the house on Revere Road. Ground penetrating radar had revealed “anomalies” in the yard. Although the original owners – J’s girlfriend’s family – had sold the house in 2024, the new owners were willing to cooperate with investigators. Police collected evidence from inside and outside the home, setting up tents to protect the search from the probing eyes of the media.

Unfortunately, the search came up empty. Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser issued a press release, stating that they uncovered no new leads in the case. “While yesterday’s search did not uncover the answers we had hoped for, our commitment to finding the truth about Kianna’s disappearance remains unwavering. We will continue to pursue every credible lead and stand with Kianna’s family as this investigation moves forward.”

As of this recording, Kianna Galvin is still missing and is considered a potential victim of homicide. She was last seen on May 6, 2016, at a home on Revere Road in South Elgin, Illinois. At the time of her disappearance, Kianna was 17 years old. She would be 28 today.

Kianna was a fun, outgoing girl who loved her family and had big dreams for her future. Her family deserves to know the truth; they deserve to find justice.

If you have any information about Kianna’s case, please contact the Cook County Sheriff’s Office at 773-674-9490. And please share Kianna’s story. Let’s bring her home.