Mary Shotwell Little

Case background and investigation

Mary Shotwell Little, born January 14, 1940, was a 25-year-old secretary at the Citizens & Southern National Bank in Atlanta. Just six weeks before she disappeared, she had married Roy Little, a bank auditor who was away training at the time and planned to return the following day. By all accounts Mary was happy in her new marriage and settled in her work, giving no hint of any reason to vanish. On the afternoon of Thursday, October 14, 1965, she left the office and drove to the Lenox Square shopping center in Atlanta's Buckhead district to shop and to meet a coworker for dinner.

That evening Mary stopped for groceries and then met her friend for a meal at a cafeteria at Lenox Square, and the two shopped before parting ways around 8 p.m. She was never seen again. When she failed to report to work the next morning, her worried boss and colleagues began searching. Shortly after noon on October 15, her 1965 Mercury Comet was discovered parked in the Lenox Square lot. The interior and exterior of the car bore blood, and a strange red dust coated the outside. Inside, her groceries remained in the back, and investigators found women's undergarments, including a slip, girdle, and stockings, folded neatly between the front seats and stained with blood. Her coat, purse, jewelry, and outer clothing were gone.

The physical evidence only deepened the mystery. Blood was found on the steering wheel, the driver's door near the handle, the inside of the passenger window, and the front seats, and testing indicated it was probably Mary's, though the amount was not consistent with a fatal injury at the scene. The car's odometer showed roughly forty unexplained miles. About a day after she vanished, and again in the weeks that followed, her gasoline credit card was used at service stations in Charlotte, North Carolina, her hometown, and in Raleigh. The signatures matched hers, and attendants described a young woman who appeared injured, with a head wound or bloodstains, traveling with one or two unshaven older men who seemed to control her movements.

Despite the vivid clues, investigators were never able to determine who took Mary Shotwell Little or why. Theories over the decades have ranged from a stalker to a targeted abduction, and the case grew even eerier when a young woman named Diane Shields, who had connections to Mary's workplace, was murdered about eighteen months later in a separate unsolved case with unsettling similarities. Over the years the original Atlanta police file was reportedly lost, further complicating any fresh investigation. Mary's body has never been found and no one has ever been charged. Sixty years on, the disappearance remains one of Atlanta's most haunting cold cases, still discussed and re-examined by writers, historians, and investigators searching for answers.