A Newlywed Walked to Her Car at an Atlanta Mall and Vanished. Then Her Gas Card Was Used Hundreds of Miles Away.

At about eight o'clock on the evening of October 14, 1965, a young woman said goodbye to a friend in the parking lot of Lenox Square, a shopping center in Atlanta, and walked to her car.

She had been married for six weeks. Her husband was out of town on business. She had groceries in her bags and was in a good mood.

She never got home.

The next day, her car was found in the same parking lot, covered in red dust, with her underwear folded on the console and traces of blood inside.

And hundreds of miles away, in North Carolina, gas station attendants were selling gas to a woman with blood on her head and legs, traveling with men who seemed to be giving her orders. She signed the receipts with Mary's name.

Sixty years later, Mary Shotwell Little has never been found.

Mary

Mary Shotwell was born on January 14, 1940, and grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. She went to Myers Park High School, and then to the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, now UNC Greensboro. She sang in the college choir and was involved in campus organizations. She graduated in 1962 with a degree in secretarial administration.

After college, she moved to Atlanta and got a job as a secretary at the Citizens and Southern Bank, known as C and S. She shared an apartment with roommates.

On September 4, 1965, she married Roy Little Jr., who also worked in banking. She was twenty-five.

By all accounts, she was happy.

October 14, 1965

On Thursday, October 14, Mary's husband was away on a business trip. He was due back the next day.

After work, Mary went to Lenox Square, a shopping center in the Buckhead neighborhood. She bought groceries. Then she met a co-worker for dinner at a cafeteria in the shopping center. Afterward, the two women did some shopping together.

The co-worker later said Mary seemed happy, and spoke warmly about her new marriage.

At about eight o'clock, they parted in the parking lot. Mary walked toward her car, a metallic pearl-gray 1965 Mercury Comet.

That is the last confirmed sighting of Mary Shotwell Little.

The car

The next morning, Mary did not show up for work. She did not call in sick. That was not like her.

Her supervisor grew worried. After talking with the co-worker from the night before, he went to look for her car at Lenox Square.

He found it in the section of the lot where it was supposed to be. But mall security, which logged and ticketed cars left overnight, had not ticketed it. Investigators came to believe the car had been moved during the night, and then brought back.

The outside of the car was coated with red dust, the kind you get from Georgia dirt roads.

Inside were her groceries. Four bags. Bottles of Coke. A pack of Kent cigarettes, the brand she smoked.

And her undergarments. Her slip, her girdle, her underwear. Most of them were neatly folded on the console between the seats. Her bra and one stocking were on the floor. The stocking had been cut.

There were small amounts of blood in the car. On the undergarments, the steering wheel, the area of the driver's door handle, the passenger window and the front seats. Investigators described it as roughly the amount you might see from a nosebleed. There was an unidentified fingerprint in the blood on the steering wheel.

Her purse, her keys, her dress, her raincoat and her jewelry, including her college class ring, were missing.

Later, when the car's mileage was checked, it had been driven about forty-one miles that could not be accounted for.

The gas stations

Then came the strangest part of the case.

Early in the morning on Friday, October 15, Mary's gasoline credit card was used at an Esso station in Charlotte, North Carolina, her hometown, about two hundred and forty miles from Atlanta.

About twelve hours later, it was used again at another Esso station in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Attendants at both stations remembered the woman. They described her as having a minor head injury, with blood on her head and on her legs. She was with one or two men, unshaven and middle-aged, who seemed to be giving her orders. She kept her face hidden. She did not ask anyone for help.

The receipts were signed "Mrs. Roy H. Little Jr." The signatures appeared to be in Mary's handwriting.

And the license plate number written on the receipts was a North Carolina plate that had been reported stolen a few days earlier.

The admirer

As investigators dug into the weeks before Mary's disappearance, they found things that had been worrying her.

She had been getting unsettling phone calls at work from someone who would not identify himself. According to one account, she told the caller she was married.

She had also received flowers at work from a "secret admirer." Roses. The florist was near her home, but the person who bought them was never identified.

Friends said she had become afraid to be home alone, or to drive alone.

And a few days before she disappeared, she hinted to co-workers that she had something important to tell them. She never got the chance.

Another detail: a woman later reported that, on the same evening, shortly before Mary would have walked to her car, she had been approached by a man in the Lenox Square parking lot. That man was never identified.

The ransom call

After the gas station story was published in the newspapers, someone called with a demand. Twenty thousand dollars.

The caller told the family to go to an overpass in the Pisgah National Forest, in the mountains of western North Carolina, for instructions. An FBI agent went to the overpass. All he found was a blank sheet of paper.

The caller never called again. Investigators believe it was a hoax.

The investigation

Police looked closely at the people around Mary. That included her husband. He had been out of town, had an alibi, and was never charged. Investigators found no sign of marriage problems.

They looked into rumors about misconduct at the bank. The bank had hired a former FBI agent to look into complaints of harassment and other problems among staff. Mary knew about it. But investigators never found evidence connecting that to her disappearance.

And then, eighteen months later, in May 1967, another young woman who worked at the same bank, Diane Shields, was found murdered in Atlanta. Her body was in the trunk of her own car. Her case was never solved either. For a time, police considered whether the two cases were connected. They later ruled out a link.

Over the years, Mary's original police file disappeared. Some records were lost or destroyed. There is no DNA evidence from the case.

The theories

There are two main ways investigators have looked at this case.

The first is that Mary was abducted from the Lenox Square parking lot that night. Someone, perhaps the unidentified caller, perhaps the man who approached another woman in the lot, perhaps someone else entirely, took her, drove her car somewhere on red dirt roads, brought it back, and then forced her north into the Carolinas. The bleeding woman at the gas stations, hiding her face and following orders, would be Mary.

The second is that the scene was staged. Some officers noticed that the blood looked smeared, rather than spattered. The undergarments were folded neatly. The car was returned to its proper parking spot. Under this theory, Mary chose to leave her life behind, and the scene was set up to make it look like something else.

Each theory leaves questions. If she left on her own, why would she use her own credit card, sign her own name, and go to her own hometown, where she might be recognized? And if she was abducted, why was her car brought back and parked so carefully?

What we still don't know

Lenox Square is still there. It is one of the busiest shopping centers in the South. Thousands of people walk through that parking lot every day.

Sixty years ago, a young woman walked across it to her car and disappeared. Her family spent the rest of their lives looking for her. Her father died in 1979. Most of her family and friends are now gone.

Mary Shotwell Little has never been found.

Was the woman at those gas stations really Mary? Who were the men with her? And who sent the roses?

If you have any information about this case, the Atlanta Police Department is the investigating agency.

What do you think happened to Mary?