The Missing Sister: Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff on the case the media ignored

In 2018, 20-year-old midwifery student Joy Morgan disappeared. Estranged from her family after joining the religious organisation Israel United in Christ (IUIC), she was last seen in December. Yet her disappearance wasn’t reported until two months later, when an estate agent contacted her mother, Carol Morgan, to say she hadn’t paid her rent or been seen since Christmas.

I first came across Morgan’s story on social media. Though I can’t recall the exact posts, I remember the calls to pay attention, because mainstream media routinely fails Black people who go missing. Dr Karen Shalev-Greene, Reader in Criminology and Director of the Centre for the Study of Missing Persons at the University of Portsmouth, notes that between 2019 and 2020, more than 150,000 people were reported missing in England and Wales. Of those whose ethnicity was recorded, 80 per cent were white and 14 per cent were Black, despite Black people making up just 3 per cent of the UK population. Yet white people featured in 61 per cent of publicity appeals, compared with 22 per cent for Black people, according to the charity Missing People.

This injustice is what first drew writer and investigative journalist Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff to Morgan’s story. She was one of the first journalists to amplify her disappearance, posting on X in 2019: “Joy Morgan is a student missing from The University of Hertfordshire, who hasn’t been heard from since the 27th of December. She’s a Black woman, so unless we get behind this, the media will not be paying enough attention.” The post was shared more than 10,000 times.

In August 2019, Shohfah-El Israel, a fellow member of Morgan’s church, was convicted of her murder. Two months later, her body was found in a woodland near Stevenage. For Brinkhurst-Cuff, the case has never been just about the violence of one man, but about the environment that surrounded Morgan: the IUIC. Six years on, Brinkhurst-Cuff and journalist-producer Seren Jones revisit Joy’s story in their podcast, The Missing Sister. The series unpacks the history of the IUIC, asks why its teachings resonate with Black communities and seeks to recover the fullness of who Morgan was beyond the headlines.

Below, Brinkhurst-Cuff speaks to Dazed about the ethical challenges of creating a podcast like this, what she uncovered about IUIC during her reporting in the US, and why it’s essential to keep telling Morgan’s story.

When did you first learn about Joy Morgan’s story, and what drew you to wanting to report on it initially? 

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff: I first learned about her story in February 2019, and I was drawn to reporting on it, by the knowledge, even at that stage, that her Blackness and her womanhood might mean that the mainstream media wouldn’t necessarily be as focused on her case as some other cases that were prevalent at the time.

You mention in the first episode that you found it difficult to place this story in any mainstream publication. Why was that, and how did you decide to tell Joy’s story and investigate the IUIC through a podcast series? 

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff: It was extremely difficult to place Joy’s story in a longer-form investigative-style piece in the mainstream media. Going back, I was writing about Joy and what happened to her, for gal-dem in 2019. It was a very small publication, we had limited resources, but I was so proud, even as a baby journalist who was probably doing everything a bit wrong, to get that story out there. Then I moved away from gal-dem, and I pitched the story to various places. The worst knock back that I got was probably from a publication that, during the Black Lives Matter Movement [prompted by the murder of George Floyd in 2020], told me that they didn’t want to publish the piece despite showing initial interest, because they were afraid of criticising a Black led organisation. This really blew my mind, because if they’d actually properly engaged with what I am trying to tell them, they would have realised that this particular group, in my opinion, has quite negative effects on the Black community. So this idea that critiquing them would be considered controversial in relation to Black Lives Matter doesn’t make any sense. 

So yeah, I got knocked back again and again. Then, in January of this year, we got a commission from Wondery+, alongside a company called Free Turn. All of that is to say, I definitely wasn’t set on a particular medium. I’m happy that it is audio, and I think it adds a certain texture and weight, giving you a really beautiful sense of who Joy was. Getting to hear the memories that her best friend from school [Agnes] has of her is so special. I just hope that people walk away from it with a greater understanding of who Joy was, the forces at play that led up to her death, and the things that one should be wary of when entering a new religious organisation.

With Joy, I always felt like there was unfinished business there, just because of the media environment and the fact that we know that ‘missing white woman syndrome’ is a genuine thing

There is this wonderful audioclip in the first episode of Joy laughing with her school friends. She’s trying to study, but her friends want to mess around. It’s such an emotive clip. They sound like girls I went to school with.  

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff: Yeah, totally. When Agnes showed us that the video, we were sitting in my living room. I’d seen videos of Joy from when she was part of IUIC, but that was after she had already left home. When she was not speaking to her best friends in school anymore, she was quite a different person. So to get a sense of who she was before all of that was really beautiful. 

Straight after that clip, you mention that, while the podcast is about Joy and the IUIC, the main crux of the podcast is about ‘The experiences of Black people under an oppressive system. Black people in Babylon.’ The clip of them all laughing is this fantastic reminder that even though these kids have known violence and oppression since they were born, they are still able to laugh and find joy, amidst it all. 

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff: Yeah, we didn’t have the space to get into it in the podcast, but Agnes recounted this story to us about this young boy who they went to school with, who, in their last year, was stabbed outside of his front door. They were a small year group, and they all come back together every year to commemorate him. Then, when Joy was murdered, they also brought her life memory into that annual celebration. I wanted to make it very clear that it’s not some stereotypical narrative about Black people growing up in dangerous areas; that’s part of it, but they also loved where they grew up. The fact that their school community continues to come together after all this time shows you how powerful that community is. They grew up under an extremely oppressive system. Still, they’re also extremely smart, brilliant and wonderful people who have remained there for each other under the harshest of circumstances, and they love where they’re from. 

Can you tell us a bit more about the IUIC, their impact in the UK and what it was like travelling to the US to learn about their origins? 

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff: The IUIC are a religious organisation who are part of the umbrella of the Hebrew Israelites. It’s actually very hard to get a clear handle on what they believe, but the basic thing is that Hebrew Israelites believe Black people, Indigenous Americans, and Hispanic people are the true Jewish people of the Bible and that they are descended from a lost Israelite tribe. It tends to be at the more radical end of the Hebrew Israelite belief system that they’re quite anti-white. They tend to be extremely anti-semitic, have really intensely misogynistic outlooks on the world, and they don’t like the LGBTQ+ community. 

Going to the US was terrifying. I was going in the wake of Trump, and I hadn’t been to the US since he’d been reelected. I think the production company was obviously very concerned about safety. Being in America meant that there were guns, so we had security while we were out there. I hadn’t done that side of journalism before, so it was intense, but I think it was really important to get out there and get a more rounded view of who the IUIC are. In terms of my perception of them now as a group, I don’t want to give too much away, but I think that the story is a lot richer and more nuanced than some of the early headlines about the IUIC suggested. 

I think telling Joy’s story is 100 per cent about honouring her, and it’s about understanding who she was and being respectful of her family

The latter half of the first episode is focused on the ethics of telling this story. Why did you make it such a significant part of the audio-documentary?

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff: I spent six months at the University of Oxford and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism last year, investigating how the media can improve its coverage of missing people. As part of that, the vast majority of the focus was on ethics. I also want to be careful, because I don’t want to pretend like we’ve done everything perfectly with this podcast. I think that there are ways in which we probably could have done better, which I’ll find out in the next year after it comes out. However, I really fought for the ethics portion of that episode to be included, because to me, how can we improve as a society if we don’t understand what’s happening behind the scenes of something? 

There has been quite a lot of discussion in recent years about true crime, and it has become a pejorative, those two words put together. But the next stage of that, in my mind, is like, ‘OK, well, let’s be transparent about what it is that we’re doing to try and make the industry standards a little bit better.’ In the process of trying to get this made, especially in TV land, I’ve seen producers who waste your time and contact the families in really awful ways. They’ll change the names of things and sensationalise everything. They don’t really care about facts that much. I wanted to do everything we could to avoid that. It just seemed natural to me to include the process and considerations we had in the podcast.

Why do you think it’s so important to keep telling Joy’s story? 

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff: With Joy, I always felt like there was unfinished business there, just because of the media environment and the fact that we know that ‘missing white woman syndrome’ is a genuine thing. It’s not just some floaty, ephemeral description of how the industry works; it is being studied, and there’s empirical evidence that shows that, for instance, in parts of the US, Black women are 25 per cent less likely to get media coverage than an equivalent white woman. 

It’s complicated, and I’m wary of being like, ‘We need just as much coverage as an equivalent missing white woman’, because I don’t always think that these big, splashy, endless news cycles about individuals are useful, either. Still, I think that more can be done in the press, such as exploring thematic issues or the bigger stories that some of these individuals' missing cases reflect. In terms of Joy’s disappearance and subsequent murder, that would be the fact that she was part of this, this religious organisation that has been deemed as quite dangerous by some people, that is still operating and growing. 

I think telling Joy’s story is 100 per cent about honouring her, and it’s about understanding who she was and being respectful of her family. In the first episode, Carol Morgan [Joy’s mum] said to me, ‘These people ruined our lives...Take them down.’ I don’t necessarily think that the podcast can take them down, but I do believe that it can raise awareness. If anyone is considering joining them [the IUIC], or has questions about who they are, there is now, I hope, a well-reported, journalistic resource for people to access. 

The Missing Sister podcast is out now