Tacoma disappearance of Teekah Lewis to be featured on Dateline podcast Tuesday
Perhaps Tacoma’s most well-known missing person case, the 1999 disappearance of 2-year-old Teekah Lewis, will be featured Tuesday on Dateline’s Missing in America podcast.
The series tells the stories of missing persons in the hopes that someone out there has information about cases that have long stumped investigators and have left the families of the vanished without any sense of closure.
Teekah was last seen the night of Jan. 23, 1999, near the arcade of New Frontier Lanes bowling alley in Central Tacoma. Police believe she was kidnapped, but no primary suspects have been identified, and hundreds of tips over the years have led to nothing but dead ends.
Missing in America’s 35-minute episode, “Taking Teekah,” dives into the details of the night she went missing, the search that followed and some of the case’s most compelling leads. NBC News correspondent Josh Mankiewicz speaks with the Tacoma police detective who inherited the case in 2021, Teekah’s grown-up siblings and her mother, Theresa Czapiewski, who has never given up the search for her daughter.
“My kids have suffered for 26 years not knowing where their sister’s been,” Czapiewski told Mankiewicz.
Teekah’s case has been covered at length in newspapers, magazine articles, true-crime television shows and a number of podcasts. Posters of the girl have been displayed on the side of semi-trucks used for shipping across the United States.
Dateline’s podcast provides more detail about a person of interest in the case with a pockmarked face. Detectives began looking into the man in 2020 after finding a 911 call placed the night Teekah went missing. The Tacoma Police Department held a news conference when the discovery was made, but it wasn’t until 2023 that detectives were able to pay him a visit.
Months after detective Julie Dier and her partner spoke to the man, police went back to his home and learned he had died of natural causes.
The episode also explores the latest development in the case, the three-day excavation of a Tacoma home’s backyard in the 3200 block of South Gunnison Street, a short drive from where Teekah vanished. That search ended without any findings.
The case is a difficult one to crack. Detectives have previously said that the biggest challenges are a lack of evidence and no clear eyewitnesses.
Teekah was last seen wearing a green Tweety Bird T-shirt, white sweatpants and red, white and black Air Jordan shoes. She had black hair, brown eyes and pierced ears. Teekah would now be 28 years old.
Anyone with information about her disappearance is asked to contact the Tacoma Police Department at 253-591-5950.
You can find Missing in America’s podcast episode, “Taking Teekah” at nbcnews.com/datelinemissing, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other platforms.
