The Enduring Mystery of Mary Shotwell Little
On the night of Thursday, Oct. 14, 1965, a young woman disappeared from a shopping mall in one of the better parts of Atlanta, Georgia. She has never been found although her disappearance was accompanied by a long trail of tantalizing and terrifying clues.
A pleasant, friendly, 25-year-old with no known enemies, Mary Shotwell Little did not seem like the sort of person to occupy the center of a mystery. Pretty, dark-haired, and green-eyed, she had been married only six weeks to a bank examiner named Roy Little and was herself employed as a secretary for C&S (now Bank of America) Bank. Photographs circulated after her presumed abduction show a smiling young white woman with wide lips and a somewhat pug nose, her hair lightly teased and flipped in a style popular in the mid-1960s.
Roy Little was out of town the night his wife disappeared. She expected him back the next day when they planned to host a party at their home. Mary Little bought groceries at a store at Lenox Square, then had dinner with a female co-worker nameds Ila Stock. As reported in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Kathy Hogan Trochek, Little walked to her car, then told Stock, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The next morning, Little did not show up for work or call to explain why. Bank workers phoned her home but got no answer. Her boss, personnel manager Eugene M. Rackley, discussed her absence with Ila Stock. Little enjoyed a reputation as a reliable worker. It seemed suspicious that she would miss work without bothering to call.
Stock told Rackley where Little had parked. Rackley contacted Lenox security, asking them to look in that area for a new gray Mercury Comet. They did and reported back that they could not find one. Later that day, Rackley drove down to look for himself. He easily found Little’s car in the sector that security said they had searched.
When Rackley looked inside the small car, he was stunned. Along with a bag of groceries, he saw neatly folded women’s underwear. He also saw bloodstains. When the police opened up the automobile, they found a slip, panties, a girdle, a bra, and a single, blood-smeared stocking.
Had the relationship between the newlyweds soured? Did Roy Little harm his wife? The answer to both questions appears to be a certain no. Roy Little had a rock-solid alibi. Investigators found that he was indeed out of town when his wife disappeared and that he had nothing to gain by her death. Further, there were no reports of major discord in the marriage.
Lt. Jack Perry worked on the case. The police were initially optimistic about solving it although they harbored little hope that Mary Little would be found alive. As Gerdeen Dyer writes in her website on mysteries that originated in Atlanta’s Buckhead area, “It seemed incredible that a woman could have been overpowered, injured and forced to strip naked in the Lenox parking lot at 8 p.m. without attracting any attention.” The alternative was plausible but even more ominous: Little had been kidnapped and forced to drive, or been driven, somewhere else where she was wounded. Then her kidnapper had brazenly taken the car back to the very spot where the abductor had found it.
As investigators researched Little’s life, they discovered hints of fear and a possible “admirer.” She had received roses shortly before Oct. 14. The police were able to trace the gift to a florist but were unable to discover who had sent them or find out anything about that individual.
She had also received troubling phone calls. Co-workers told police that they had overheard an irritated Little tell someone, “I’m a married woman now.” Then she had said, “You can come over to my house any time you like but I can’t come over there.”
Was she talking to an old flame? Why would she tell him (investigators thought it would probably be a man) that he could come to her place but she couldn’t go to his? If she were afraid for her reputation, why would it have been all right for her neighbors to see them together but not his? Was she concerned about his reputation?
Several weeks into the investigation police discovered that Little’s gasoline credit card had been used in Charlotte and Raleigh, N. C., the day after her disappearance. Both receipts bore Little’s signature in handwriting that experts said “resembled” hers.
Gas station attendants in both cities were able to remember servicing a woman who may have been — but could not be positively identified as — Little. According to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the attendant in Charlotte “recalled a woman with a cut on her head, trying to hide her face, traveling in the company of a man who seemed to be giving her orders. In Raleigh, the attendant told of a ‘bloody woman,’ with blood even on her legs, traveling with two men.”
If the injured woman was in fact Little, why had her abductor(s) forced her to drive to her own hometown of Charlotte, a place where she might be recognized? Was the kidnapper, or at least one of them, also from Charlotte? Had he first met her there?
The report from Raleigh indicated that at least two men might have been involved in Little’s disappearance. Police theorized that one abductor might have driven her car back to the Lenox Square lot while another held her captive since by the time the car was dropped off — if in fact it had been taken out of the lot in the first place rather than just overlooked by Lenox mall security — Little was in North Carolina.
The investigation continued but without valid new leads. According to Major Mickey Lloyd, commander of the Atlanta Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons Section, “Both Lt. Perry and Detective John Hinshaw, who also worked on her case (both investigators have since died), were haunted by it.”
As is sadly usual in unsolved cases, some saw the tragedy as an opportunity to play cruel practical jokes. Crank phone calls were made to Little’s distraught family. Messages supposedly from her were left on the mirrors of public bathrooms; a teenager wrote a note on a C&S deposit slip reading, “HELP! Mary Little. Being held captive”; and a fraudulent ransom demand was made.
In the many years the investigators pursued the bizarre case, they accumulated a large box full of data. In an eerie parallel to the fate of its subject, that box was inexplicably lost. As Officer John P Quigley, Atlanta Police public information officer, notes, “The turnover in personnel probably has something to do with items getting lost. New people come in and they’re not aware of whether some items are properly stored.”
The last major activity in the case took place in 1994. Det. Carl Price worked on that lead. As he recounts it, “Lt. Bill Miller of Forsyth County had an informant come forward. He called me and Kenny Crook, a special agent at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. I pulled the investigative folder on this case and went and talked with the witness. There were things the witness said about the homicide which coincided with the evidence found in Mrs. Little’s car, and we gave the informant two polygraphs, which she passed. Then we obtained a search warrant for the mechanic’s shop in Cumming, Ga., under which the witness claimed Little had been buried. The FBI has an instrument to locate a grave, and they flew it down along with two forensic anthropologists to supervise. The imagining machine got hits which indicated the ground had been disturbed. We dug five and a half feet deep in an area 25-feet long and 25-feet wide but didn’t find anything. The disturbance in the imaging turned out to be because a petrified fence post was there.”
The case remains open. Maj. Lloyd says, “We’ll check any new information. We solve cold cases all the time. In a case like this, where you have ample cause to suspect foul play but no body or suspects, you can’t put any closure at all to it.”
More than a quarter of a century after her disappearance, there are still no answers in the case of Mary Shotwell Little. Only questions.
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