JODI Huisentruit was a local television news anchor who disappeared from her Mason City, Iowa home in 1995.
Multiple legal and extralegal parties have led investigations into Huisentruit’s disappearance, but they proved fruitless and the 27-year-old was declared legally dead in 2001.
Jodi Huisentruit reporting for KIMT-TV in the 1990sCredit: ABC
Who was Jodi Huisentruit and what happened to her?
Huisentruit was the early morning anchor for KIMT-TV, a news station located a short drive from her Mason City apartment.
She evidently overslept her 3am report time and was awoken by a call from her producers.
Huisentruit spoke on the phone with her supervisors and assured them she would rush to the station to do the 6am news.
The reporter, however, missed her entire news block, at which point the station contacted the police.
On arrival, police found some items belonging to Huisentruit scattered around her unmoved vehicle in the parking lot of her apartment complex.
Investigators quickly deduced that Huisentruit engaged in a struggle on the day of her abduction. A full timeline of the 1995 kidnapping is posted on www.findjodi.com.
Was Huisentruit’s abductor apprehended?
The case of Huisentruit’s disappearance has been cold for over 25 years.
No one has been charged in connection with the Huisentruit case.
Michelle Martinko, a teenager who bore a resemblance to Huisentruit, was murdered in Iowa in 1979.
Decades later, DNA acquired through a genealogy research company eventually led investigators to Martinko’s killer, Jerry Burns.
During an interview with police, Burns mentioned Huisentruit without being prompted to, according to reporting done by CBS.
Another convicted felon, Tony Jackson, has been loosely connected to the crime since his 1998 incarceration for multiple rapes he committed in the Midwest.
According to ABC News, Jackson maintains that he was not involved in the anchor’s disappearance.
Huisentruit disappeared 26 years ago from her Mason City apartment complexCredit: ABC
Are authorities still looking for Huisentruit?
According to CBS News, John Vancise, one of the last people to see Huisentruit was reignited as a person of interest in 2017 when the Mason City PD completed a search warrant of his vehicles.
A 2019 Facebook post from the KIMT News page indicates Vancise’s health is failing and might render him incapable of contributing further.
Huisentruit was the subject of the true crime podcast Up and Vanished. A television show of the same name was later developed and aired in 2019.
The network television program 20/20 also released a two-hour special on the Huisentruit case back in January 2022.
In September 2023, a private investigator exclusively told The U.S. Sun he believes Huisentruit is dead and someone knows what happened.
“I don’t think there is any hope that she is still alive,” cold-case murder investigator Steve Ridge said. “I think I can say pretty conclusively that she is not alive.”
He added: “I think there are people who know how she met her demise and at least had a hand in it, more than one person. It may have been after the fact.”
According to Ridge, officers leading the investigation “remain hopeful that there will still be some kind of evidence that will allow them to move forward with an arrest or indictment.”