GA GA - Mary Shotwell Little, 25, Atlanta, 14 Oct 1965

Indeed, and the disheveled layout of that website leads me to suspect that the author himself may be suffering from some sort of thought structure disorder.

You're both right, it IS ridiculous. As I said above, I don't put much stock into the theory and can't quite grasp the fact that some people actually believe in it. When I initially came across the website a few years ago, while reading about Mary's case, my first thought was that I had never read so many words put together in one place before that made no sense at all. I only looked at what they said about Mary and Ronald Tammen. I never went back to the website and only looked it up by googling Mary Shotwell Little's name when I saw Karl's question to see if I could find it again. It makes me angry too that more recent tragedies (Wade Steffey and John Fiocco) are on there.

I think at one point the website says something like, "It's a fact that the suicide rate at high schools and colleges goes up during exam times. This is because students spend too much time studying at their poorly designed desks, and thus go crazy."

So it has NOTHING to do with the stress of exams. Riiight.

There must have been fingerprints all over that Comet. And all the police come up with is a partial palm print? This strikes me as one of those cases where, if everyone had done their job, it would have been solved. :twocents:

I was discussing the new NPO I am starting in GA to someone at our local bank and she asked me if I knew about this case...she went to school with her...I was happy to see it here at WS!!!!

I am interested in following this and looking more into it.

christine2448 said:

I was discussing the new NPO I am starting in GA to someone at our local bank and she asked me if I knew about this case...she went to school with her...I was happy to see it here at WS!!!!

I am interested in following this and looking more into it.

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You are certainly in a good position for finding out some more information about this case. Often the best resources are old newspaper files available on microfilm or in bound copies held in local libraries. Please post what you find on this interesting case.

Hi Richard. Thanks for originally posting this. You initially provided an abundance of information. Is there anything specific you would like me to research here locally?

I posted a link to an article back in April similar to others posted on here. But I did a search and found a new article about classic crimes in Atlanta. They had this to say about Mary Shotwell Little:

The Disappearance of Mary Shotwell Little
On the night of Oct. 14, 1965, twenty-five-year-old Mary Shotwell Little disappeared from the Lenox Mall. Little was newly married to Roy Little and employed at C&S Bank.
Roy Little was out of town so his wife had dinner with co-worker Ila Stock.
The next morning, Little neither showed up for work nor called in to explain her absence. Bank workers phoned her home but got no answer. Her boss, Eugene M. Rackley, discussed her absence with Stock.
Stock recalled the section Little said she had parked in; Rackley contacted Lenox security, asking them to look in that area for her Comet. They reported back that they could not find it. The boss drove down to look for himself and found Little's car right in the sector that security said they had searched.
The automobile contained a blood-smeared stocking.
Roy Little’s alibi checked out and investigators found that he had nothing to gain by her death. There were no reports of major discord in the marriage.
In November 1965, evidence appeared. Little's gasoline credit card had been used both in Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina, the day after her disappearance. Both receipts bore Little's signature in handwriting that experts said "resembled" hers.
Gas station attendants remembered servicing a woman who may have been Little. They had seen a “bloodied” woman accompanied by a man or two men. Why hadn't the workers alerted authorities to an injured woman? Perhaps due to an attitude of “not getting involved.”
If the woman was Little, why had her abductor(s) forced her to drive to her hometown of Charlotte?
As investigators pursued the case, they accumulated a large box of data. It has been lost. This eerie coincidence need not indicate anything sinister, according to John P Quigley, Atlanta Police Public Information Officer: "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 was in 1994. Detective Carl Price worked on it. An informant appeared to have valid information and passed two polygraphs. “Then we obtained a search warrant for the mechanic's shop in Cumming, Georgia, under which the witness claimed Little had been buried,” Price recalls. “The FBI has an instrument to locate a grave, and they flew it down along with two forensic anthropologists to supervise. The imaging machine got hits which indicated the ground had been disturbed.” They dug but found nothing. “The disturbance in the imaging turned out to be because a petrified fence post was there," Price explains."*********************

The case remains open. Major Lloyd says, "We'll check any new information. We solve cold cases all the time.”
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It says mostly the same things as in other articles but I don't remember reading before that they had a lead in 1994 and dug up a mechanic's shop in Cumming, GA looking for her. As far as getting any kind of a break in the case now, I know it's going on 42 years, but it's possible people involved in her disappearance are still alive.

christine2448 said:

Hi Richard. Thanks for originally posting this. You initially provided an abundance of information. Is there anything specific you would like me to research here locally?

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"New" information is news if you have never seen it before. There are certainly many questions that come to mind when reading about a case like this. But keep in mind that most - if not all - of the "easy" research these days is just the same old internet stuff rehashed over and over again. One website simply copies from another, just like anniversary stories in newspapers copy from previous ones.

When you go back to some of the origional stories, however, you might come up with something which was mentioned only once and then not again. Although this information might not be solid evidence, it might provide a clue or avenue for further searching. The thing is, you never know what might turn up when you read those old news articles. I have seen long, personal interviews with family members in small local newspapers which are never picked up by UPI, AP, or the bigger city papers.

The main thing is to read as much as you can about a case first, and then develop questions about it in your mind and on paper. Once you have asked the questions, the answers will often come to you in ways and at times you least expect.

It may be a week or two before I can get the time to go and do this research...I will post what I find.

It also may take a few trips.

bumping case up. It has now passed the 42nd anniversary of her disappearance.

christine2448 said:

It may be a week or two before I can get the time to go and do this research...I will post what I find.

It also may take a few trips.

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I am horrible! I forgot all about this one! I have been so busy working on more recent cases! Please forgive me.

christine2448 said:

I am horrible! I forgot all about this one! I have been so busy working on more recent cases! Please forgive me.

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I was going to post here and ask if you had ever found anything. I figured you were busy though and, of course, you would have posted something had you found it! There are a TON of articles on this case too so it would take a lot of time to research it.

You're forgiven! LOL!

I stumbled across this case a few months ago and have become fascinated with it. Married only a few weeks Little dissappears, her car is located in an afluent part of town covered with dirt, her underwear found folded in the front seat spotted with her blood, her blood also found in the car, her credit cards used hours later in her hometown, her signature verifed and her idenity verified by the store clerk saying she was with a man who seemed to be giving her orders, had a nasty cut on her forehead, acted scared - tried to hide her face, spotted again with two men and the witness also said she had blood on her face and legs, her co-workers reveal she had been getting troubling phone calls at work and someone had anonomously sent her flowers.
Her abductor(s) were brazen to parade her around like that covered with blood. Also, the police believe her car was parked in the lot during the daylight by her abductors.

Here are some links with lots more information:

http://www.buckhead.net/history/mystery/msl_a.html

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1102670/posts

http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/l/little_mary.html

There's quite a bit of info on here:

http://websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31907&highlight=mary+shotwell+little

Excellent - thank you! I figured it must be on here somewhere. I am surprised it is not a longer thread consider the nature of the crime and all of the evidence found in the car, the sightings, etc. It is very intriguing.

I would love to this the interest in this case revived. There is just so much information, coincidences, clues,etc. The murder of Diane and the fact that both Diane and Mary's police files turn up missing, the strange phone call one of her previous roommates recieved - 'Your Wife Will Be Next.', Mary's mother requesting the investigation be called off after only two years, the woman who came forward and told of being followed that same night in the same parking lot and failed to fall for the 'your back tire is low' trick and quickly drove off - was this Mary's killer? Was it just a random act of opportunity?
If her body was dumped somewhere in 1965 because of surburban sprawl a lot of that open space, forests, etc were cleared for new houses, shopping malls etc and her remains were not found - perhaps they now lay under feet of concrete at the base of a building. I've thought about that alot - the act of dumping bodies in wooded or desolate areas and the chances of them being excavated as a result of construction. You would think it would happen more often than it does.

Nothing new to report, but I found an article written just a year ago on Mary. It's the latest article I could find when doing a search to see if anything new has been written in the last couple years. Here's the link.

http://mensnewsdaily.com/2007/07/07/the-enduring-mystery-of-mary-shotwell-little/

please edit your post above to show just a small part or most important part of article, we do not allow posting of entire articles, copyright reasons. Also, you need to give a link where you found it. TIA

christine2448 said:

please edit your post above to show just a small part or most important part of article, we do not allow posting of entire articles, copyright reasons. Also, you need to give a link where you found it. TIA

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Sorry...I deleted it and just put the link. Thanks.