Cindy: The Vanishing of Courtney Corrinna Holden

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

March 7, 2022

Courtney Corrinna Holden was twenty-six years old in the summer of 2018, living in a house on Heroy Avenue in northeast Spokane, Washington, with her adoptive mother Judy, her adoptive brother Joshua, and her own young son. She was a Native American woman, between five foot five and five foot seven, with black hair and brown eyes, and by every account that would later surface, she loved her child fiercely and wanted nothing more than an ordinary life with him. What she had instead, according to neighbors and a former resident of that same house who spoke to reporters years later, was something closer to captivity. Joshua and Judy reportedly called her Cindy, a nickname derived from Cinderella, because of how much of the household's cleaning and chores fell to her and because of how rarely she was permitted to leave.

Courtney had no cell phone and no car. She was not allowed to come and go freely, and surveillance cameras had been installed around the property, ostensibly for security but functioning, according to people who later described the household, as another layer of control over her movements. She kept a Facebook account for a while, until Joshua discovered it and made her deactivate it. Her final message on the platform, sent shortly before it went dark for good, read simply: "I gotta go. I gotta go. Josh is coming."

A Duffel Bag and a Doorway

The clearest picture anyone outside that house ever got of what Courtney's life looked like in her final months came from a neighbor who witnessed a specific moment sometime in the summer of 2018. Courtney had packed a duffel bag and was attempting to leave the home. She told the neighbor, in essence, that she was done, that she was not staying there any longer. Before she could get away, Joshua, described by people who knew him as well over six feet tall and roughly three hundred pounds, physically intercepted her and forced her back inside the house.

That is the last confirmed sighting anyone outside the household has ever come forward with. Whatever happened to Courtney Holden after that afternoon happened behind closed doors, in a home where the surveillance cameras pointed outward and the woman living inside had no phone to call for help.

The frightening part is that her disappearance did not register as urgent to the people positioned to notice, or at least not right away. Bank withdrawals from her account continued after that summer. Food stamp purchases tied to her name kept happening. A prescription was refilled in her name in July 2018. On paper, in the months that followed, Courtney Holden looked like a woman who was still alive and still moving through the ordinary transactions of a life, right up until October 2018, when the bank withdrawals stopped for good.

More Than a Year Before Anyone Called It In

Nobody reported Courtney missing until October 2019, more than a year after the duffel bag incident and roughly a year after the last bank activity tied to her name. It was the father of her son, who had not seen her in roughly two years by that point, who eventually went to police. When Spokane detectives began asking questions, Judy and Joshua gave shifting, inconsistent accounts of where Courtney had gone. At various points they suggested she had left to travel with a boyfriend, that she had run off with a fiancé, or, in other tellings, made comments that suggested she was actually still confined somewhere in the home.

When police carried out a welfare check at the Heroy Avenue house, what they found undercut every version of the story that suggested Courtney was simply off living her own life somewhere. Her mattress sat bare, stripped of the kind of everyday evidence, sheets in use, personal items scattered around, that would indicate someone had recently been sleeping there. Detective Randy Lesser, who worked the case, would later tell reporters that his concern was that Courtney could potentially be deceased, adding that in his assessment she would never have simply abandoned her own child.

Shortly after police started circling closer, Judy and Joshua left Spokane. They took Courtney's young son with them, and they also removed the home's DVR surveillance system, the same cameras that had once watched Courtney's movements around the property, before disappearing themselves. At one point, someone contacted a regional Crime Line claiming to be Courtney and offering reassurance that she was alive and well. Investigators later determined the caller was not Courtney at all, but her adoptive sister, apparently attempting to relieve pressure on the family by impersonating the missing woman.

Found in Texas

Detectives eventually traced Judy and Joshua to Plano, Texas, where they located them in mid-December 2019, still with Courtney's now seven-year-old son in their custody. Joshua and Judy were arrested on charges connected to identity theft, for allegedly continuing to access and withdraw from Courtney's bank accounts after she vanished, and second-degree custodial interference, for keeping her son despite not being named anywhere in his parenting plan. Neither of them was named as a suspect in Courtney's actual disappearance, at least not formally, though investigators made no secret of where their suspicions pointed.

Joshua had a documented violent history that predated Courtney's disappearance by well over a decade, including a 2005 rape charge that was ultimately dropped after the victim in that case stopped cooperating with prosecutors. Neighbors who spoke to reporters described him bluntly as dangerous, violent, and unpredictable. Courtney herself had reportedly shown visible bruising in the past, and people close to the situation said she had described Joshua beating her, with the most recent visible black eye dating to roughly two years before she vanished entirely.

The family's attorney, Steve Graham, pushed back publicly against the darker implications swirling around the case. Speaking outside a courtroom in March 2020, he told reporters that Courtney had, in his clients' account, simply left the child with them, and that he remained optimistic she would eventually be located alive and well. In the same breath, though, Graham acknowledged that the court documents assembled against Joshua and Judy suggested something more sinister might be going on, a strikingly candid admission from a defense attorney representing the two people closest to a missing woman's last known days.

A judge declined to dismiss the felony warrant against Joshua, while Judy was ordered released once authorities could confirm her grandson's safety. Joshua was later granted a temporary release from custody due to COVID-19 health concerns in the spring of 2020 and returned to Texas, while Judy remained in federal custody in Nevada as the case wound its way through the legal system.

A Resolution That Resolved Nothing

By 2021, the criminal case against Joshua and Judy reached its conclusion, though it left Courtney's central disappearance as unanswered as it had ever been. Joshua ultimately pleaded guilty to custodial interference and criminal mischief and was sentenced to 135 days in jail, credited for time already served, meaning he walked out shortly after sentencing. Judy pleaded guilty to second-degree custodial interference. Neither of them was ever charged in connection with what actually happened to Courtney herself, since prosecutors evidently did not have enough to bring a homicide case, or any case at all, tied directly to her vanishing.

Spokane Police have said they suspect homicide, though no arrest has ever followed that suspicion, and no body has ever been found. Investigators have stated they have seen no evidence that Courtney Holden is alive, a carefully worded but unambiguous signal about where the case stands in their own estimation. Her case remains classified as endangered missing, still open, still unsolved, still waiting on a break that as of this writing has not come.

What lingers about Courtney Holden's story is not just the disappearance itself but everything that surrounded it: a household nickname that reduced an adult woman to a fairy tale servant, a duffel bag she never got to carry out the door, a year and more during which nobody outside her family thought to ask where she had gone, and a surveillance system that watched her every attempt to leave but vanished the moment police started asking real questions. Somewhere in that house on Heroy Avenue, or somewhere beyond it, the answer to what happened to Courtney Holden still hasn't surfaced. Her son, meanwhile, grew up in the custody of the two people investigators most suspect of knowing exactly what became of his mother.

Anyone with information about Courtney Corrinna Holden's case is asked to contact the Spokane Police Department at 509-755-2489 or Crime Check at 509-456-2233.

Sources