Fantastic. Thank you!
GA GA - Mary Shotwell Little, 25, Atlanta, 14 Oct 1965
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BUCKEYE1971
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does anyone find it curious that Mary went grocery shopping BEFORE she went to dinner with her friend? she left groceries in her car for dinner and shopping? that's a bit odd. Wouldn't she bring them home first or go in the morning to the grocery if she was really planning on having guests for dinner the next night? I feel like the friend she had dinner with was a lost opportunity to question in more detail. I also feel as if the boss who found her car may have been the one driving it. this feels to me like the place she worked was engaged in some illegal things potentially. this feels very staged to me.
jgfitzge
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Yes, I found the grocery shopping before meeting her friend for dinner a bit odd but not off the charts crazy. If it it was stuff that needn’t be refrigerated then maybe not so odd. Now, the boss going to look for her and finding her car, now that was odd to me! If you did not show up for work would your boss leave the office and drive looking for you?
BUCKEYE1971
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For some reason I feel strongly that the boss is the one that actually had the car so knew exactly where to find it. I found a photo somewhere( I am going to go back and find so I can post) that shows the police looking in the car right after it had been found. The groceries are lined up on the back seat in paper bags undisturbed also. This car was staged for sure. The bank employees ( both the boss and her co worker she met for dinner) both look suspicious to me. There is ZERO proof they even went to dinner and shopping after-- only her word. I find it weird that they even went shopping after eating. They met at 6, ate, shopped, and she was headed towards her car by 8. Her car that had groceries in it for the next night's dinner guests. All non perishable items? really? A lot about the events of that night seem illogical to me and stink of staged cover up. My personal theorey is the bank was being investigated and Mary was inadvertently on to something asking too many questions. She may have met this woman for dinner and confided in her that she felt something was not right and the woman was inside of the corruption ( either by choice or force) and out of fear or loyalty set her up for this.
dogperson
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That always seemed odd to me too. It's hard to believe everything she needed for a dinner party would have been ok to leave in the car for two hours, plus however much time it was going to take her to drive home and put the groceries away.
I think it's odd her boss went to look for her car too. How many people's bosses would do that?
It's weird that the conclusion drawn by her dinner companion was that, "Ok, the mall is the last place I personally saw her so that's where her car must be." If I were her dinner companion I'd have assumed she went home after dinner, so the first place I'd have looked for her was at home. I wouldn't have immediately jumped to the conclusion that something happened to her in the mall parking lot.
BUCKEYE1971
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Yes! I can't get it out of my mind that the dinner companion was a part of the equation.
I found her obituary and she did, indeed, work in at the bank in the HR department. That speaks volumes to me. Also, the boss later worked on bank mergers ( within the next couple of decades) that included North Carolina which was a hot spot for banking also.
I feel very strongly that Mary may have gone to the dinner companion earlier at some point and said she had stumbled across information that was suspicious. I think the dinner companion asked her to meet for dinner to discuss so she could get all the information Mary had and see exactly what she knew. I find it HIGHLY suspect that this woman she met wasn't interviewed more and was a side note in the story.
I also feel very strongly that this wasn't just a bank fraud issue. I feel that some people in law enforcement were possibly in on it and that is why the red herrings took all the media attention. I feel very strongly that mary was never seen in North Carolina and those sightings were either false memories or memories planted by the folks investigating this( with or without intent). There is NO POSSIBLE way those two gas attendants remembered that much detail about that ONE transaction weeks later. They were both possibly shown pictures or had seen the media and their brain remembered the wrong stuff or the investigators suggested too many details they then made fact. Then the files were lost with all the information from the time. That is peculiar as well.
Those receipts were intentional...(.Isn't it interesting as a side note that back then you would sign your names as Mrs. Roy Little Jr and not just Mary Little? And that the card was in the name of Mrs Roy Little Jr. ? We've come a long way baby!) . They were done as a distraction to divert attention to North Carolina and plant a seed to look elsewhere for her and she was alive. I also think the mom calling to stop the investigation after 2 years is suspect.
The grocery shopping before dinner is absolutely ABSURD. Besides canned vegetables and maybe bread and some rice or potatoes...what else was she getting in ALL OF THOSE bags that didn't need to go home first to be properly refrigerated for a dinner the next night? people keep brushing this off but I think it is the key to it all.
In the end, I don't think she ever had dinner plans. I think she went to the grocery, planned to go straight home. I feel like she met the associate BEFORE she went to the store possibly( and that's where they had a conversation about what she suspected going on) and this happened on her way home.
For me, the chances this is random makes zero sense. It makes more sense in Diane's case b/c they just abandoned the car and body. Why would a random abductor bring the car back at all? That makes zero sense for random and 100% sense for her boss though.
This one keeps me up at night!
Thank you for making this point, Margot. I have a vested interest in Diane's case and have for years and am indeed "ticked off to no end" as you say. Diane has often been simply a post script in Mary's case and people seem to lose sight of the fact that a young woman was murdered. I'm sure they meant no disrespect, but I even saw a commenter on this thread refer to her as "the other girl." If we are going to reference her case, lets at least use her name.
There is a group of retired investigators looking into both cases on their own time and I am forever grateful to them.
JacksonFentry
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Can anyone definitely place Gerald Mason in the Atlanta or in the northeast part of Georgia in 1965 and later ?. Also I admire the hard work of law enforcement now as I did as a boy when Mrs. Little went missing and Ms Shields was murdered. So underpaid, much overworked, I have seen these brave men and women working in these capacities also since a young boy. My best friend I grew up with, had a dad and two grown brothers who were career lawmen and I still have career law enforcement relatives who live their jobs 24/7 365 days a year. I want to just see if I've missed things in cold cases that changed everyone I grew up with in 1965 including Our late Mother who slept with a huge butcher knife under her bed after this happened as well as the Richard Speck murders.
JacksonFentry
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Thank you Dotr.
JacksonFentry
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As others have wondered about the husband Roy Little, I am mindful of someone else sharing about the type of personality you will encounter in a Financial Auditors m.o. too. Being from a retail management career in which high volumes of money and inventory are to be accounted for each day, i found the truth is that most crimes that do involve substantial money or inventory theft, business irregularity, etc, do most often occurr within your own staff or employees. That being said, Mr. Little wouldn't have made a great P.R. rep for a business, but would be spot on exactly what you would want and expect as a Loss Prevention or Financial Auditor. Away from the eyes of those who might not have gotten to know him as well as they thought, he might not have been the same at all away from his job and in the surroundings of his fellow friends family, etc. JMHO.
JacksonFentry
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Only someone in a position of authority that had more than just a typical management to employee relationship would ever do that. Now, it could have been that he might have had looking more closely after Mrs Little because she had been noticed by others receiving troubling phone calls, and shared she was afraid of being alone. But to go to that much trouble for an employee this day in time would certainly be looked at with a difference retrospectively, as social as well as acceptable employer rules and regulations now might be entirely different as was the case in 1965. You have to remember, men were expected to be gentlemen, were looked upon as having much more authority and respect, and I would even say that in remembering things from that time in the south, he might have been in a tough position with the husband had he not have taken off to help and try to at least make an effort to get involved. This was a young lady very well respected, always there and dependable as much as had been disclosed about Mrs Little. I would not find it odd at all if my own Daddy would have done the very same thing as her Boss, just knowing it was a time when gentlemen were expected to be men of honor and respected in this field of work, or even if they were managing a hardware store.
JacksonFentry
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If you re read this story enough, things do begin to really seem to become more questionable, and this is something that I am uncertain about involving Mrs Little and the timeline the day she was last seen. If you theorize that an executive Secretary working during that point in time in Atlanta, would have been either an 8 to 5 pm or 9 to 5 or possibly 6pm. She drives to Lennox square, buys 4 bags of groceries from the Colonial store. Remember how most checkouts used those manual keys and pull down crank stamper for each item ?. I certainly do. I can remember asking Mom if I could go set in our blazing hot sun cooked 64 mercury, rather than to have to stand in those checkout lines for such long waits. She then meets A fellow employee at the cafeteria in Lennox square, has their dinner together, and goes shopping for another hour and a half ?. What time did Mrs Little get off work that Thursday evening, 3 or 4 pm, because that would really be spreading the timeline awfully thin if she did all of this and left Lennox at 8 pm. This time frame sounds too questionable to me. It almost sounds too perfect and accounted for, yet even at first glance you do wonder how could she have done all of that in this time frame, not even giving consideration for the highway construction and back up in traffic which was common in the 1960s same as today. This time frame doesn't fit at all if she worked even to 4 pm that day unless she drove very fast thru downtown Atlanta, etc etc. I call this into serious question.
-------------------------------------------
What happened to Mary Shotwell Little?
Newlywed's disappearance shocked Atlantans in 1965
By JIM AUCHMUTEY, GERDEEN DYER and PAT KOESTER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/20/04
When Jim Ponder retired from the FBI after three decades as an agent, he took home a piece of unfinished business: File No. 79-159.
THE VICTIM
On a warm October evening in 1965, newlywed Mary Shotwell Little said goodby to a friend and walked across the Lenox Square parking lot to her car. She was never seen in Atlanta after that night.
THE CAR
Mary's 1965 Mercury Comet was found at Lenox the next day. Blood was smeared around the interior, and later evidence indicated it had been driven elsewhere and returned.
THE FBI AGENT
For almost 40 years, Jim Ponder has kept the file on the only case he never solved. Now retired, he has a theory about what happened -- but it's just a theory.
"That's the only case I worked on that we never solved," he says, laying a brown folder on a coffee table in his DeKalb County home. "I copied this because I figured something would come up and I'd be called."
The call never came. The disappearance of Mary Shotwell Little the most famous missing persons case in Atlanta history seems as baffling today as it did when Ponder saw her blood-smeared car on a warm autumn afternoon in 1965.
He opens the folder, and Little's face stares out from a black-and-white snapshot stapled to the inside. The bouffant hairdo and penciled eyebrows belong to another time. Leafing through the yellowed reports held by rusted paper clips, he pauses when he comes to a form the young woman filled out in a neat cursive script. It's an application to volunteer at the Red Cross. She enjoyed working with children.
"I have a personal interest in this case," Ponder says. "I got to know Mary's family. We never gave them an answer, and that bothered me. It still does."
Now 83, Ponder is one of the last law enforcement officers living who worked on the Little disappearance. For a dwindling band of detectives, it is the mystery of a lifetime, the case they couldn't crack. The clues are so fragmentary and contradictory, the investigators can't agree on what happened. Some think it was a random sex crime. Others believe she knew her abductor.
Some wonder if she's even dead.
While witnesses still could come forward and remains still could be found and identified, solving the puzzle gets more difficult with each passing year. All local police files on the case have inexplicably vanished. No physical evidence survives, making a DNA conviction highly unlikely. The only remaining record of the investigation is the FBI's, and it's incomplete.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution examined hundreds of pages of those files, through a freedom of information request, and interviewed nearly 200 people involved in various aspects of the case. Those documents and candid recollections do not answer the riddle, but they do reveal an exhaustive and frustrating search that was mostly hidden from public view. It is the untold story of a trauma that deeply affected Atlanta as it was on the verge of becoming a big city with big city fears.
News reports suggested police were looking for a stray predator. Behind the scenes, however, cops hounded Little's former roommates. They turned her husband's life inside out. They delved into a sex scandal at the bank where she worked. They even thought a "rose killer" might be sending women flowers as he stalked them.
In 1967, the trail took a gruesome turn as a woman who had worked in Little's office and lived with Little's friends was found beaten and strangled in East Point. Police at first thought the cases were linked some of them still do but what looked like a break faded into a footnote mystery of its own.
Little was 25 and had been married only six weeks when she vanished into the darkness outside Lenox Square on the evening of Oct. 14, 1965. The fate of the "missing bride" quickly became an obsession, leading Atlanta newscasts and front pages and prompting massive searches. Atlanta wouldn't see its like again until the child murders of the early 1980s.
In an era when the ghostly faces of the missing routinely appear on bulk mail and milk cartons, it might seem a bit strange that one woman's disappearance could stir such an overwhelming response. But Atlanta was a much smaller town in 1965. The metro area had less than a third of today's population. There was no major league sports team, no completed Perimeter, no international flights at an airport that boosters were proud to say was the nation's fourth-busiest.
"Atlanta was just beginning to outgrow its britches," says writer Paul Hemphill, who covered the Little case as a Journal columnist. "When something like this happened, it was almost like a warning shot. You wondered: My God, is this the price we're going to pay for being a big city?"
A more innocent time
Only later would it seem ironic that the Journal of Oct. 14 contained an editorial decrying the rising number of sex crimes in Atlanta.
One of the many young people who flocked to the city from around the South during the early '60s was Mary Shotwell.
She came from a middle-class family in Charlotte, where she was known as an outgoing, fun-loving student the kind of girl who volunteered to wear a papier-mâché horse head as her high school's mascot, Millie Mustang. She went on to study secretarial science at what became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She wanted to relocate to New York after graduation, but her parents felt it might be unsafe, so she settled on Atlanta instead.
Shotwell moved into a triplex near Emory University with some college friends and found a job downtown with Citizens & Southern, the bank that was financing much of Atlanta's construction boom. Colleagues considered her reliable, hardworking, fastidious in dress and manners. Like many young women of her time, the slender secretary with the neat brown hair and hazel eyes wanted nothing so much as to get married and start a family.
In 1964, she met Roy Little, a 24-year-old Citadel graduate who recently had finished active duty as an Army lieutenant. They attended a Georgia Tech-Alabama football game and went on to date for 10 months.
Married over Labor Day weekend 1965, they moved into the Belvedere Apartments in south Decatur. During the second week of October, Roy was in LaGrange training to be an auditor with the state Banking Department. Mary was lonesome and arranged to meet a friend from the bank at Lenox Square after work that Thursday.
Compared to the mega-mall of today, Lenox then was an almost quaint open-air shopping center with stone sculptures of "Uncle Remus" characters in the plaza. Little met her friend Isla Stack at the S&S Cafeteria on the Lenox Road side and chatted happily about married life. After dinner, they shopped for an hour and a half. They parted around 8, Little striding into the parking lot with a cheery "I'll see you tomorrow."
When the punctual secretary didn't show up Friday morning, co-workers phoned her apartment. No answer. They called her landlady and learned that Little had not retrieved her morning newspaper.
The bank notified Lenox security to be on the lookout for the car, a 1965 silver Mercury Comet. A few minutes past noon, a guard spotted it in the yellow parking area. He noticed blood on the bucket seats and called police.
Things 'never made sense'
Jim Ponder, the FBI's liaison with local law enforcement, was at Atlanta police headquarters downtown when a wrecker hauled in the car.
"Jop," as his friends called him (after his initials), was a South Carolinian who had served in the Navy during World War II and been wounded in the D-Day invasion. He had been a special agent since 1947, matching wits with Klansmen, Soviet spies and mob bosses. Given the possibility of an interstate kidnapping, he unofficially joined the investigation and sent a teletype to Washington reporting what was known. He was puzzled from the start. "There were a lot of things about this case that never made sense," he says.
The car was full of them.
Two members of the Atlanta Police Department's identification unit inspected the vehicle. They found a fine coat of red dust on the exterior, as if the Comet had been on a dirt road. They also found blood in several places: on the driver's door near the handle, on the inside window of the passenger's side, smeared over the vinyl of the front seats. A few grass clippings were stuck in dried blood where the passenger's head would have rested.
Carefully rolled together and placed between the seats was a set of women's undergarments girdle, slip, panties speckled with tiny drops of crimson. On the floorboard lay a black brassiere and a section of stocking that had been cut neatly, as if by a knife.
Tests indicated the blood probably was Little's. The undergarments definitely were hers and had been worn recently.
There was something about the scene that didn't add up, the crime technicians thought. Bill Moore of the identification unit wondered if the smearing hadn't been a ploy to exaggerate the amount of blood. Larry Howard of the state crime lab seemed to agree, telling Moore that despite the gory display, there was no more blood than you'd get from a nosebleed.
The odd assortment of clues led some investigators to speculate that the scene had been staged to confuse police. A few cops suspected Little of doing the staging.
The car was littered with dozens of other items, including Coke bottles, a package of Kent cigarettes (Little's brand) and four sacks of groceries she had bought the evening before at the Colonial store that anchored the southern end of Lenox.
Other items were missing: Her car keys. Her John Romain handbag. Her flats, white London Fog raincoat and olive-green sheath dress printed with white flowers.
There was no shortage of fingerprints. One would tantalize investigators for years: an unidentified partial print smudged in blood on the steering wheel.
Public pitches in
In the days ahead, thousands of people enlisted in the largest search Atlanta had ever seen.
Pilots scanned the area looking for signs of a body. Military reservists scoured the woods around Lenox. Even jail inmates were pressed into the hunt.
Reward posters offering $1,000 and then $3,000 went up around the state.
The city's top-ranked radio stations, WSB and WQXI ("Quixie in Dixie"), asked residents within a 20-mile radius of Lenox to check their property for the personal items missing from Little's car. A corner of police headquarters soon resembled a thrift shop, with piles of clothing, purses and other items of female apparel.
Ponder spent days exploring the woods and side roads along I-85, a relatively new four-lane then known as the Northeast Expressway. "We searched old abandoned wells and everything you could think of," he says.
None of the efforts paid off. In fact, publicity became something of a burden as police had to check out all leads, well-intentioned and otherwise. A tipster claimed Little's killer was trying to flee on a bus bound for Chicago, and authorities had it pulled over in Cobb County. It was a hoax. A wedding ring that resembled Little's was found beside the Chattahoochee River. It wasn't hers. A dollar bill surfaced with the scribbled words: "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese cookie factory. Mary Shotwell Little." It was a bad joke.
Little's parents, Margaret and Nathan Shotwell, came from Charlotte to keep vigil with their son-in-law at the couple's apartment in Decatur. They saw the brown lounge chair and ottoman Mary had recently picked out for Roy. While the Shotwells waited for word of their daughter's whereabouts, the phone rang repeatedly and a voice would whisper, "It's Mary, help me." Police traced the calls to a young prankster and made sure they stopped.
Detectives decided that the movements of Little's car were a key to unlocking the mystery. Based on the odometer and her husband's mileage log, they estimated the Comet had been driven 41 miles that couldn't be accounted for. They theorized that Little's abductor had taken her somewhere, assaulted her and returned to Lenox.
There was just one problem with the theory: No one remembered seeing the Comet in the parking lot overnight or before the start of business the next morning. Police interviewed scores of people who had been at Lenox in the off hours, including guards who patrolled the lot. Other cars had been noticed and even ticketed, but no one saw the Comet. Investigators concluded it must have been driven back later that morning, a daring return in broad daylight.
Another possibility received little credence. Margaret Fargason, an Atlantan who had been shopping at Lenox the night Little disappeared, told her husband she had seen a silver Comet leave the mall about 8 with a woman fitting Little's description at the wheel. She was alone. Fargason noticed the car, she explained when the Journal-Constitution contacted her recently, because she drove a Comet, too.
Her husband reported the sighting to police. They never talked to Fargason, even though her story called into question whether Little had been abducted elsewhere or been abducted at all.... (much more, including photos, in the below link)
Link:
http://ads.cimedia.com/RICH/Cox_AdBanners_workaround.html[/QUOTE]
-------------------------------------------
What happened to Mary Shotwell Little?
Newlywed's disappearance shocked Atlantans in 1965
By JIM AUCHMUTEY, GERDEEN DYER and PAT KOESTER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/20/04
When Jim Ponder retired from the FBI after three decades as an agent, he took home a piece of unfinished business: File No. 79-159.
THE VICTIM
On a warm October evening in 1965, newlywed Mary Shotwell Little said goodby to a friend and walked across the Lenox Square parking lot to her car. She was never seen in Atlanta after that night.
THE CAR
Mary's 1965 Mercury Comet was found at Lenox the next day. Blood was smeared around the interior, and later evidence indicated it had been driven elsewhere and returned.
THE FBI AGENT
For almost 40 years, Jim Ponder has kept the file on the only case he never solved. Now retired, he has a theory about what happened -- but it's just a theory.
"That's the only case I worked on that we never solved," he says, laying a brown folder on a coffee table in his DeKalb County home. "I copied this because I figured something would come up and I'd be called."
The call never came. The disappearance of Mary Shotwell Little the most famous missing persons case in Atlanta history seems as baffling today as it did when Ponder saw her blood-smeared car on a warm autumn afternoon in 1965.
He opens the folder, and Little's face stares out from a black-and-white snapshot stapled to the inside. The bouffant hairdo and penciled eyebrows belong to another time. Leafing through the yellowed reports held by rusted paper clips, he pauses when he comes to a form the young woman filled out in a neat cursive script. It's an application to volunteer at the Red Cross. She enjoyed working with children.
"I have a personal interest in this case," Ponder says. "I got to know Mary's family. We never gave them an answer, and that bothered me. It still does."
Now 83, Ponder is one of the last law enforcement officers living who worked on the Little disappearance. For a dwindling band of detectives, it is the mystery of a lifetime, the case they couldn't crack. The clues are so fragmentary and contradictory, the investigators can't agree on what happened. Some think it was a random sex crime. Others believe she knew her abductor.
Some wonder if she's even dead.
While witnesses still could come forward and remains still could be found and identified, solving the puzzle gets more difficult with each passing year. All local police files on the case have inexplicably vanished. No physical evidence survives, making a DNA conviction highly unlikely. The only remaining record of the investigation is the FBI's, and it's incomplete.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution examined hundreds of pages of those files, through a freedom of information request, and interviewed nearly 200 people involved in various aspects of the case. Those documents and candid recollections do not answer the riddle, but they do reveal an exhaustive and frustrating search that was mostly hidden from public view. It is the untold story of a trauma that deeply affected Atlanta as it was on the verge of becoming a big city with big city fears.
News reports suggested police were looking for a stray predator. Behind the scenes, however, cops hounded Little's former roommates. They turned her husband's life inside out. They delved into a sex scandal at the bank where she worked. They even thought a "rose killer" might be sending women flowers as he stalked them.
In 1967, the trail took a gruesome turn as a woman who had worked in Little's office and lived with Little's friends was found beaten and strangled in East Point. Police at first thought the cases were linked some of them still do but what looked like a break faded into a footnote mystery of its own.
Little was 25 and had been married only six weeks when she vanished into the darkness outside Lenox Square on the evening of Oct. 14, 1965. The fate of the "missing bride" quickly became an obsession, leading Atlanta newscasts and front pages and prompting massive searches. Atlanta wouldn't see its like again until the child murders of the early 1980s.
In an era when the ghostly faces of the missing routinely appear on bulk mail and milk cartons, it might seem a bit strange that one woman's disappearance could stir such an overwhelming response. But Atlanta was a much smaller town in 1965. The metro area had less than a third of today's population. There was no major league sports team, no completed Perimeter, no international flights at an airport that boosters were proud to say was the nation's fourth-busiest.
"Atlanta was just beginning to outgrow its britches," says writer Paul Hemphill, who covered the Little case as a Journal columnist. "When something like this happened, it was almost like a warning shot. You wondered: My God, is this the price we're going to pay for being a big city?"
A more innocent time
Only later would it seem ironic that the Journal of Oct. 14 contained an editorial decrying the rising number of sex crimes in Atlanta.
One of the many young people who flocked to the city from around the South during the early '60s was Mary Shotwell.
She came from a middle-class family in Charlotte, where she was known as an outgoing, fun-loving student the kind of girl who volunteered to wear a papier-mâché horse head as her high school's mascot, Millie Mustang. She went on to study secretarial science at what became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She wanted to relocate to New York after graduation, but her parents felt it might be unsafe, so she settled on Atlanta instead.
Shotwell moved into a triplex near Emory University with some college friends and found a job downtown with Citizens & Southern, the bank that was financing much of Atlanta's construction boom. Colleagues considered her reliable, hardworking, fastidious in dress and manners. Like many young women of her time, the slender secretary with the neat brown hair and hazel eyes wanted nothing so much as to get married and start a family.
In 1964, she met Roy Little, a 24-year-old Citadel graduate who recently had finished active duty as an Army lieutenant. They attended a Georgia Tech-Alabama football game and went on to date for 10 months.
Married over Labor Day weekend 1965, they moved into the Belvedere Apartments in south Decatur. During the second week of October, Roy was in LaGrange training to be an auditor with the state Banking Department. Mary was lonesome and arranged to meet a friend from the bank at Lenox Square after work that Thursday.
Compared to the mega-mall of today, Lenox then was an almost quaint open-air shopping center with stone sculptures of "Uncle Remus" characters in the plaza. Little met her friend Isla Stack at the S&S Cafeteria on the Lenox Road side and chatted happily about married life. After dinner, they shopped for an hour and a half. They parted around 8, Little striding into the parking lot with a cheery "I'll see you tomorrow."
When the punctual secretary didn't show up Friday morning, co-workers phoned her apartment. No answer. They called her landlady and learned that Little had not retrieved her morning newspaper.
The bank notified Lenox security to be on the lookout for the car, a 1965 silver Mercury Comet. A few minutes past noon, a guard spotted it in the yellow parking area. He noticed blood on the bucket seats and called police.
Things 'never made sense'
Jim Ponder, the FBI's liaison with local law enforcement, was at Atlanta police headquarters downtown when a wrecker hauled in the car.
"Jop," as his friends called him (after his initials), was a South Carolinian who had served in the Navy during World War II and been wounded in the D-Day invasion. He had been a special agent since 1947, matching wits with Klansmen, Soviet spies and mob bosses. Given the possibility of an interstate kidnapping, he unofficially joined the investigation and sent a teletype to Washington reporting what was known. He was puzzled from the start. "There were a lot of things about this case that never made sense," he says.
The car was full of them.
Two members of the Atlanta Police Department's identification unit inspected the vehicle. They found a fine coat of red dust on the exterior, as if the Comet had been on a dirt road. They also found blood in several places: on the driver's door near the handle, on the inside window of the passenger's side, smeared over the vinyl of the front seats. A few grass clippings were stuck in dried blood where the passenger's head would have rested.
Carefully rolled together and placed between the seats was a set of women's undergarments girdle, slip, panties speckled with tiny drops of crimson. On the floorboard lay a black brassiere and a section of stocking that had been cut neatly, as if by a knife.
Tests indicated the blood probably was Little's. The undergarments definitely were hers and had been worn recently.
There was something about the scene that didn't add up, the crime technicians thought. Bill Moore of the identification unit wondered if the smearing hadn't been a ploy to exaggerate the amount of blood. Larry Howard of the state crime lab seemed to agree, telling Moore that despite the gory display, there was no more blood than you'd get from a nosebleed.
The odd assortment of clues led some investigators to speculate that the scene had been staged to confuse police. A few cops suspected Little of doing the staging.
The car was littered with dozens of other items, including Coke bottles, a package of Kent cigarettes (Little's brand) and four sacks of groceries she had bought the evening before at the Colonial store that anchored the southern end of Lenox.
Other items were missing: Her car keys. Her John Romain handbag. Her flats, white London Fog raincoat and olive-green sheath dress printed with white flowers.
There was no shortage of fingerprints. One would tantalize investigators for years: an unidentified partial print smudged in blood on the steering wheel.
Public pitches in
In the days ahead, thousands of people enlisted in the largest search Atlanta had ever seen.
Pilots scanned the area looking for signs of a body. Military reservists scoured the woods around Lenox. Even jail inmates were pressed into the hunt.
Reward posters offering $1,000 and then $3,000 went up around the state.
The city's top-ranked radio stations, WSB and WQXI ("Quixie in Dixie"), asked residents within a 20-mile radius of Lenox to check their property for the personal items missing from Little's car. A corner of police headquarters soon resembled a thrift shop, with piles of clothing, purses and other items of female apparel.
Ponder spent days exploring the woods and side roads along I-85, a relatively new four-lane then known as the Northeast Expressway. "We searched old abandoned wells and everything you could think of," he says.
None of the efforts paid off. In fact, publicity became something of a burden as police had to check out all leads, well-intentioned and otherwise. A tipster claimed Little's killer was trying to flee on a bus bound for Chicago, and authorities had it pulled over in Cobb County. It was a hoax. A wedding ring that resembled Little's was found beside the Chattahoochee River. It wasn't hers. A dollar bill surfaced with the scribbled words: "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese cookie factory. Mary Shotwell Little." It was a bad joke.
Little's parents, Margaret and Nathan Shotwell, came from Charlotte to keep vigil with their son-in-law at the couple's apartment in Decatur. They saw the brown lounge chair and ottoman Mary had recently picked out for Roy. While the Shotwells waited for word of their daughter's whereabouts, the phone rang repeatedly and a voice would whisper, "It's Mary, help me." Police traced the calls to a young prankster and made sure they stopped.
Detectives decided that the movements of Little's car were a key to unlocking the mystery. Based on the odometer and her husband's mileage log, they estimated the Comet had been driven 41 miles that couldn't be accounted for. They theorized that Little's abductor had taken her somewhere, assaulted her and returned to Lenox.
There was just one problem with the theory: No one remembered seeing the Comet in the parking lot overnight or before the start of business the next morning. Police interviewed scores of people who had been at Lenox in the off hours, including guards who patrolled the lot. Other cars had been noticed and even ticketed, but no one saw the Comet. Investigators concluded it must have been driven back later that morning, a daring return in broad daylight.
Another possibility received little credence. Margaret Fargason, an Atlantan who had been shopping at Lenox the night Little disappeared, told her husband she had seen a silver Comet leave the mall about 8 with a woman fitting Little's description at the wheel. She was alone. Fargason noticed the car, she explained when the Journal-Constitution contacted her recently, because she drove a Comet, too.
Her husband reported the sighting to police. They never talked to Fargason, even though her story called into question whether Little had been abducted elsewhere or been abducted at all.... (much more, including photos, in the below link)
Link:
http://ads.cimedia.com/RICH/Cox_AdBanners_workaround.html[/QUOTE]
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[URL='https://search.aol.com/aol/image;_ylt=AwrE1xxphGBg0csAi5lpCWVH;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzIEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?q=mary+shotwell+little+photo&ei=UTF-8&fr=webmail-searchbox&th=122&tw=103.4&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.doenetwork.org%2Fcases%2Fimages%2FMLittle1.jpg&rurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.doenetwork.org%2Fcases%2F556dfga.html&size=7KB&name=The+Doe+Network%3A+Case+File+556DFGA&oid=18&h=150&w=127&turl=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.aNhzC-xSg16JzQcG3HoZjwHaIv%26pid%3DApi%26rs%3D1%26c%3D1%26qlt%3D95%26w%3D103%26h%3D122&tt=The+Doe+Network%3A+Case+File+556DFGA&sigr=lflr3uIDpdd6&sigit=x2Y5OiKUjcF0&sigi=o8MXGlI3XJJE&sign=54WHK0mOmCIx&sigt=54WHK0mOmCIx&v_t=webmail-searchbox&s_it=img-ans'][URL='https://search.aol.com/aol/image;_ylt=AwrE1xxphGBg0csAjJlpCWVH;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzIEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj?q=mary+shotwell+little+photo&ei=UTF-8&fr=webmail-searchbox&th=122&tw=162.4&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Forion-uploads.openroadmedia.com%2Flg_ddaa8d-InsideCar.jpg&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthe-line-up.com%2Fmary-shotwell-little&size=61KB&name=Mary+Shotwell+Little%3A+The+Chilling+Mystery+of+the+Missing+...&oid=19&h=556&w=740&turl=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.Dp4wJ9-ZVBGMcxLRJGPIgwHaFk%26pid%3DApi%26rs%3D1%26c%3D1%26qlt%3D95%26w%3D162%26h%3D122&tt=Mary+Shotwell+Little%3A+The+Chilling+Mystery+of+the+Missing+...&sigr=JzpK9.0043.y&sigit=xrXBtMbfIeay&sigi=U.ctNln5AAYh&sign=mKmavosh85np&sigt=mKmavosh85np&v_t=webmail-searchbox&s_it=img-ans'][/URL][/URL]Mary Shotwell Little, Missing since 14 October 1965
LINK:
Mary Shotwell Little: The Chilling Mystery of the Missing Bride
I am in contact with the team that is working the case. If you have pertinent information, I can have someone get in touch with you.
Ozoner
Former Member
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I can't speak for kh—1975, but most people here don't have information to provide; we're interested in learning information so that we can try to solve the case ourselves. We all want to know who Ray Pate's prime suspect was.
Diane Redfern
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Just a question: Was her boss ever investigated? I find very surprising he took the time to look for her car, he may be the kindest boss ever, I had one of those, but it's kind of weird... May he be the mysterious flower guy?
I don't want to point fingers on anyone, I just ask.
I don't want to point fingers on anyone, I just ask.
Noirdame79
Amateur Sleuth
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