Today we look at the mysterious case of Mary Shotwell Little whose unexplained case still intrigues many with its confusing trail of clues and unknown motive.
It was 1965 and 25-year-old Mary Shotwell Little had recently married her husband Roy Little, who worked as a bank examiner while Mary was working as a secretary at the Citizens and Southern Bank in Atlanta, Georgia. It was six weeks after their wedding on the 14th October 1965 that Roy had left town to train to become an auditor and was due to return the next day with his wife planning a party when he returned. That evening Mary had gone out to dinner with a friend and co-worker followed by some shopping for a few hours at Lenox Square Shopping Centre before she said goodbye to her friend at around 8pm and headed to her grey 1965 Mercury Comet that our case starts.
The following morning when Mary failed to show up for work or call in sick, her boss, Gene Rackley, called Lenox Square to see if Mary’s car was there and the centre said they couldn’t find it anywhere. At around noon, Gene went to investigate himself and found Mary’s car in the parking lot where her friend said it was when she last saw her and he immediately called the police.
Police examined the car and found many worrying clues, inside were women’s underwear - a slip and girdle were neatly folded inside, a bra was found on the floorboard alongside a stocking that had been sliced with what appeared to be a knife but Mary’s keys, purse and the rest of her clothing were nowhere to be found. Traces of blood were found on the underwear and inside the vehicle – the windows, windshield, seats and an unknown fingerprint in blood on the steering wheel. Due to the small amount of blood on the steering wheel it was thought it could have come from something such as a nosebleed, testing found that the blood was probably Mary’s. The license plate had also been swapped out for one from a stolen car.
The car was also coated in a red dust, as if it had been driven down a dirt road. Four bags of shopping were also found inside along with Coca Cola bottles and a packet of Kent cigarettes, which were Mary’s favourite brand. Some police felt that the scene was staged due to the large amount of smudging of the small quantity of blood.
Mary’s husband kept detailed mileage logs for the car and after comparing them police found there were 41 miles unaccounted for. No witnesses remembered seeing the car at Lenox Sqaure overnight, this included a police officer who patrolled the parking lot at 6am the next morning. Adding to the mystery police found that Mary’s petrol card was used twice in North Carolina on the 15th October. Confusingly, the first charge happened in the early hours in a place called Charlotte, which happened to be Mary’s hometown, and the second a few hours later in Raleigh. Both credit slips were signed “Mrs. Roy H. Little Jr” in what is largely agreed to be Mary’s handwriting.
Adding to the mystery, sightings were reported during these stops that would have taken roughly three hours. The attendants in the Esso gas stations recalled seeing a woman matching Mary’s description, the woman avoided eye contact and appeared to have a cut on her head and was bloodstained on her head and legs. The woman was with two men in Raleigh who seemed very controlling over her with the woman appearing to try and hide her face. Police then looked at Roy Little who didn’t seem to be very concerned about his wife’s worrying disappearance and refused to take a lie detector test. Some of Mary’s friends had disliked Roy and even refused to attend their wedding but Mary had never alluded to an unhappy marriage and Roy had a strong alibi as he was out of town at the time and had no clear motive so he was ruled out as a suspect.
The mystery of the car itself is confusing, the stolen license plate had been from mid-October in Charlotte and police believe this was why security did not find the car initially as they of course were looking for Mary’s plate. The trip between Charlotte, Raleigh and then back to Lenox Sqaure to the exact spot Mary had been parked in before was a baffling move as well. Police have speculated whoever took Mary’s car kept it hidden on the night of her disappearance before returning it to the parking spot but the timing would be off as it would have been about the time that Mary was seen in North Carolina.
Not long after, Roy received a ransom call demanding $20,000 for Mary’s return, the caller told Roy to go to an overpass in the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina where a sign would give further instructions, police went in Roy’s place and found only a blank piece of paper attached to the sign. The caller never made any more contact after this and it is thought to be a cruel hoax. It was at this time that Mary’s friends revealed that in the weeks leading up to her disappearance she had been receiving phone calls at her work that had left her shaken. On one occasion Mary was reported to have said to the mystery caller “I’m a married woman now. You can come over to my house any time you like, but I can’t come over there.” Mary also received a dozen roses at her apartment from an unknown admirer but never told her husband about it.
According to some of her friends, Mary had been fearful of being home alone or driving her car unaccompanied in the weeks leading up to her disappearance and hinted to her colleagues that she had something important to tell them but why she felt unsafe and what she wanted to share is unknown.
In another twist, Mary’s work, Citizens and Southern Bank had recently hired a former FBI agent to investigate reports of lesbian sexual harassment and prostitution allegedly happening on the bank's grounds. Her boss, Gene Rackley, always insisted that the whole thing was nothing more than a minor scandal involving low level employees and that Mary was never aware of any of it but others said that Mary had mentioned the scandal to them, police do not believe this is connected to her disappearance. Even with all this happening at work, the co-worker that she had dinner with that fateful evening insisted that Mary was in good spirits.
A few days after her disappearance, a woman had come forward to police reporting that a man with a brown crew cut in the Lenox Square parking lot had knocked on her car window to inform her the back tire on her car was low and tried to get her to leave her car but the woman refused the man's help and drove away, this turned out to be false as the tyre was fine. This happened only minutes before Mary was seen walking towards her car on the 14th October.
The following year in 1966, the FBI interviewed a Georgia State Prison inmate that was serving a life sentence for murder who was claiming he knew the two men who were paid $5,000 each to kidnap Mary. He directed them to a house in Mount Holly, North Carolina where Mary was allegedly held captive and then murdered. The inmate said he didn’t know who had hired the men or know the reason. The FBI didn’t think the inmate was credible and dismissed his claims, in the years that followed cold case detectives have looked into this again but have not come to any conclusions.
In a truly eerie and unsettling twist, the woman who took over Mary’s job at the bank also met a mysterious end. In May 1967, eighteen months after Mary’s disappearance, 22-year-old Diane Shields left her workplace and was found several hours later stuffed into the boot of her car. Her cause of death was suffocation from a scarf and piece of paper from a phone book that was stuffed down her throat. Diane was not sexually assaulted and nothing was stolen, even her diamond engagement ring was untouched, so the motive is unknown.
According to her best friend, Diane had revealed a surprising secret not long before her murder, she was working undercover with the police to help them solve the disappearance of a woman called Mary, no official police report has ever been found to prove this claim. Police thought that the two cases may have been connected due to the similarities but eventually discarded the theory, like Mary, Diane’s case remains unsolved. The file of Mary’s case has vanished in the years following her disappearance. Her family still hope that someday they can find out what happened to her.
The theories around the case are that Mary staged her own disappearance and murder for unknown reasons while others believe that maybe the unidentified man who tried to lure the woman out of her car at the shopping centre is involved and there is the possibility that Mary is one of the unfortunate people who are victims of random crimes by people who are unknown to them.
Comments