Season 3 of The Unforgotten has arrived!
Welcome to Finding Dolores Wulff. Episode 1: Life of the Party
Hello listeners of The Unforgotten,
Today we’re excited to present you with the first episode of Season 3: Finding Dolores Wulff.
Listen to Episode 1: Life of the Party wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
For the past few years, my co-host Adam Rittenberg and I have been chasing this story. As ESPN reporters, we’ve spent our careers covering college football -- coaching changes, championships and other key topics on and off the field -- but this story grabbed us in a way no other story has. We first started reporting on it in 2020 and haven’t let go since.
The story is about a woman who vanished in 1979, a family left in pieces, and a case that drifted into silence -- until one day, it emerged again.
We wrote about the case in 2021, through an ESPN feature story centered on Dolores’ youngest child, Paul, who is now the head football coach at Cal Poly. But from the beginning, we knew this was something we wanted to go deeper on. To really feel the impact, it’s important to hear from the people who lived through the trauma. This story is about people -- complicated, unforgettable people. It’s about a family’s decades-long search for answers. It’s about what happens when those answers finally begin to emerge. We believed this story needed the space and intimacy that only a podcast can offer. The voices. The emotion. The resolution.
But getting here wasn’t easy.
We spent years reporting and wrestling with how to bring Finding Dolores Wulff to life. ESPN supported our journalism throughout the process, but the subject matter eventually strayed too far from the world of sports to be a natural fit for a traditional ESPN platform. That’s when we partnered with Wes Ferguson at Free Range. Everyone agreed immediately that Dolores’ story was a natural fit for The Unforgotten and one in which listeners of the podcast – especially Season 1 – could invest their time in. Through the continued support from ESPN, we finally had the right home for this story.
As a fan of The Unforgotten, you know what this show is all about: restoring names to the missing, the forgotten and the overlooked. And that’s exactly where we start -- with Dolores.
In Episode 1 — Life of the Party — we introduce you not just to a disappearance, but to a person. Because to truly care about what happened to Dolores Wulff, we believe you first need to know her.
She was the daughter of Portuguese immigrants who left on a steamship in the early 1900s. She had four kids – three boys and a girl. She made people laugh. She made people happy. She lived a complicated. And then she was gone.
Too often, true crime stories reduce victims to headlines or plot points. We didn’t want that. Dolores was so much more. Her children, her cousins, her nephews -- they remember her clearly. Their stories helped us understand who she was.
This season is about what happened to Dolores, but it’s also about what happened after she disappeared -- how a family searched, how a case stalled, and how, decades later, long-awaited answers finally came into focus.
We’ve reported a lot of stories in our careers. But none have pulled us in like this one.
We’re grateful you’re here with us on Day 1, and we hope you’ll stick with us through every twist, every reveal and every moment of heartbreak that brought this family to where they are now.
Welcome to The Unforgotten: Finding Dolores Wulff.
—Kyle Bonagura, co-host