My name is Madoka Nakayama.

I am originally from Minato City, Tokyo, Japan, where I worked for a short time as a copywriter for a Japanese ad agency. I quit my job and moved to the United States to pursue my Masters degree at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where I received my MFA in Literary Reportage. Since moving to New York eight years ago I have worked freelance for various American and Japanese publications. I primarily report on missing persons cases, true crime stories, and the social impacts of homicide on vulnerable populations. In 2019 I published a non-fiction book along with my co-author Lucia Ramirez called Ghosts of Mothers: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women of the Western United States. In it we tackle the often underreported phenomena of native women’s disappearance and murder in the western United States and attempt to describe the systemic, social, and economic factors motivating this tragedy. The experience I had writing the book left a big impact on me. Since Ghosts of Mothers’ publication I have shifted my focus to not only reporting about systemic issues, but also attempting to investigate and solve cold cases.

This website exists to collect data on the anonymous individual identified as WORLDS. I was advised not to publicly explain the details of this study as it may not only disrupt an ongoing criminal investigation, but also the quality and validity of the data collected. However, my ultimate intention is to publish the findings of this study, along with my investigation into WORLDS, in a new book titled The Man in White: Explaining an Unexplainable Murder.