Maybe I didn't read all the links thoroughly, but have a few questions. Did the car that twice purchased gas look like Mary's vehicle? Also, have they had handwriting experts to prove that it was Mary's handwriting on the charge receipt instead of her family believing it is? I just keep thinking some scenario of Mary being hit on the nose/face area causing an actuall nosebleed while forcing her into her vehicle. The person could have had blood on his hand when he got it on the driver door handle and on the steering wheel. Big drops of blood could have been smeared as Mary was forced across the seat and onto the passenger window from being pushed over. Her short dress that would have been in fashion could have been scooted up over her girdle and with her head hanging down blood drops could have fell on the undergarments. I'm still trying to figure out the undergarments being left but the hosiery and other clothing being missing, but wonder if all depended on which was taken off first or last or at all.
This is my understanding about the cars and it can be quite confusing - it's clear that some writers of the newspaper stories weren't clear about some of the details themselves. On Thursday evening, October 14, Mary's Silver 1965 Mercury Comet was parked on the Lenox Road side of the mall - near where I believe the Rich's department store would have been at the time. One of the articles gives the exact location as Yellow 32 parking zone or something similar to that. Mary's friend, Isla Stark (I think) apparently said goodbye to Mary on the sidewalk or perhaps even in the store at around 8 pm on Friday evening. Her friend Isla saw Mary walk into the parking lot in the direction of her car (it was dark by 8 p.m. on a Thursay evening in October) but she did not watch Mary walk away and did not see Mary reach her car.
The next morning, Friday, October 15th when Mary failed to arrive at work at 8 a.m. - her co-workers, including her manager, began looking for her. They called The Belvedere apartment manager who told them Mary's newspaper was still in front of her door and Mary had not answered his knock - he may have later entered the apartment to confirm she wasn't there, I don't know for sure. Because her friend Isla also worked at C&S, she told her C&S co-workers about Mary's departure from Lenox Mall the previous evening. According to the newspaper account, one of the things Gene Rackley, Mary's manager at the bank did that morning was to call the Lenox Mall security and to ask them to look for her car. Security told him Mary's car was not located anywhere in the mall parking lot and specifically was not in the Yellow 32 Zone. In fact there were almost no cars in the mall lot at that time of morning, the mall didn't even open until 10 a.m. or later - especially the shops on that side of the mall.
This picture of how this part of the Lenox parking looked around that time (Scroll down to the end of the article for the photo) is especially helpful, I think. You can imagine if the mall were closed how easy it would be to spot any car remaining in the parking lot, esepcially if you had the specific zone to be searched.
//http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1102670/posts
At around noon on Friday, Gene Rackley drove himself from the C&S office on Mitchell Street to the Lenox Mall parking lot and spotted Mary's car parked in the spot described by Isla Stark. He looked in through the car window and immediately saw the blood smears and some of the underwear that is described in some articles as folded or rolled neatly on the console between the front seats. Mr. Rackley called police and they found the car was unlocked. The Atlanta Police Department (APD) immediately began to search the car for evidence and put out a missing persons report for Mary.
Because the credit card system was manual and not online in 1965, it was two weeks later when APD was alerted that two charges were made to Mary's gasoline charge account after midnight on Thursday, October 14th (or in the early morning hours of Friday, October 15, 1965) at a Charlotte Esso station (this would have been say around 3 am, some 5 to 6 hours after Mary said goodbye to her friend Isla at Lenox.) A second charge was made to Mary's account some 10 or 12 hours later that same day, Friday, in Raleigh, NC also at an Esso station. When detectives questioned the two Esso gas stations employees, the attendants not only remembered the charges, they gave remarkably similar accounts. The Charlotte gas station attendant said he remember an unshaven man driving a woman who appeared to be injured and seemed to be avoiding eye-contact or hiding her face - the man passed the charge receipt to the woman in the passenger seat of what was described only vaguely as a sedan (if I remember correctly) and the woman signed. Mary's parents and others who knew her confirmed the signature was hers, "Mrs. Roy H. Little, Jr.".
The second gas station attendant at the Raleigh Esso station gave an almost identical account of the driver, the woman who appeared to be injured (she may have had blood on her legs and elsewhere), and a vague description of the car - except the Raleigh attendant said there was a second man, also unshaven, in the back seat of this car (not Mary's car which at the time of this second gas charge had already been located at Lenox and seized by police).
Both gas station attendants also recorded the same tag number on the car - a tag that had been stolen from the Charlotte, NC area days earlier - a dead-end lead for police unfortunately. The practice for gasoline charge purchases at the time was for the merchant to make a manual imprint of the credit card, wirte the tag number on the receipt, write the amount of the charge, and get the signature of the card holder. There was nothing in the process that required a description of the car to be noted - so law enforcement had only the vague description given by both attendants from memory.
Although these details are confusing, mysterious, and subject to interpretation, they are a part of what makes Mary's story so compelling. If she had simply disappeared that night, Mary sadly would probably have been forgotten by the public after all these years as many women are who disappear every day.
In answer to your question, I believe the car in NC was a definitely a different car, a older sedan with stolen plates - not the new silver Mercury Comet (a two-door coupe) owned by Mary and her husband. I've found no detailed description of the NC car - please let me know if you've come across one.
When Mary's car was found at Lenox around mid-day on Friday, October 15th, it had an unaccounted 41 additonal miles on the odometer (calculated from the mileage log Mary and Roy kept), a fine coating of red dust on the exterior (as though the car had been driven on a dirt road), the smeared blood on the interior, along with some dried grass on the seat mixed with the blood. It also contained Mary's previously-discusssed undergarments, the bags of groceries Mary'd bought from the Colonial Grocery the night before, and some typical litter: cigarrettes and cigarette butts (Mary's brand but what a great source of DNA evidence if they could be tested today) and Tab bottles (a soft-drink brand Mary had been known to drink).
Hope that answers your questions about the cars at least.
