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Heidi Wong
Crime House has the perfect new show for spooky season Twisted Tales. Hosted by Heidi Wong, each episode of Twisted Tales is perfect for late night scares and daytime frights, revealing the disturbing real life events that inspired the world's most terrifying blockbusters and the ones too twisted to make it to screen. Twisted Tales is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts New episodes out every Monday.
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Vanessa Richardson
House this week in Crime History we're looking at the cases of two young women whose disappearances still haunt us today. On October 14, 1965, the bank secretary, Mary Shotwell Little, had dinner with a friend at an Atlanta area shopping mall and was never seen again. 53 years later, in the early morning hours of October 13, 2018, 16 year old Carly Lane Gousset left her parents house in Chalfont Valley, California. Witnesses saw her walking down a country road. Minutes later she disappeared and despite an extensive search, to this day she nobody knows what happened to her or where she is. Welcome to True Crime this week part of Crime House Daily. I'm Vanessa Richardson. Every Sunday we'll be revisiting notorious crimes from the coming week in history. From serial killers to mysterious disappearances or murders, every episode will explore stories that share a common theme. Each week we'll cover two two stories, one further in the past and one more rooted in the present. Here at Crime House. We know none of this would be possible without you, our community. Please support us by rating, reviewing and following Crime House Daily wherever you get your podcasts and for ad free and early access to Crime House Daily. Plus exciting bonus content. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts this week's theme is Disappearances. Today. We'll start with Mary Shotwell Little, whose 1965 disappearance remains one of the Atlanta area's most infamous missing persons cases. The investigation into her disappearance uncovered several mysterious clues and possible connections to another woman's murder. But to this day, Mary's case has more questions than answers. Then we'll jump ahead to October 13, 2018, the last time California teenager Carly Lane Gousset was seen. The search for Carly was widely reported, but despite all the attention on her case, her family and investigators still don't know where she is. The subjects of today's cases both show how easy it can be to vanish into thin air, that even in a world where everything has a camera, there are always blind spots and sometimes people just fall off the grid and never return.
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Vanessa Richardson
On the afternoon of Thursday, October 14, 1965, 25 year old Mary Shotwell Little finished her day at the Citizens and Southern bank in Atlanta where she'd worked as a secretary. Her husband was out of town on a business trip, so she'd made plans to spend the evening at the Lenox Square Shopping Mall with her friend and coworker Ela Stack. Mary got to the shopping center early so she could buy groceries for an upcoming party. She loaded four bags of food into the back of her car, then returned to the mall and met Isla for dinner at the SNS cafeteria. After dinner, the friends did some window shopping. According to Isla, Mary seemed happy and at ease all evening. At 8 o', clock, Mary said good night and Isla watched as she strolled into the parking lot to drive home. This would be the last time anyone in Atlanta saw Mary Shotwell Little. What happened to her over the next 24 hours remains one of the city's most enduring mysteries. Mary Wallace Shotwell was born outside of Greensboro, North Carolina on January 14, 1940. She was raised in Charlotte, then left home at 18 to attend the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. After graduating in 1962, Mary moved to Atlanta where she lived with three roommates and got a job as a secretary at Citizens and Southern National Bank. Mary's friends described her as a lively and outgoing young woman who loved dancing, canned cigarettes and going to the movies with her friends. For a while, she volunteered at a local hospital, but she started receiving obscene phone calls during her shifts and decided to quit. After that, life went back to normal and In November of 1964, one of Mary's ex boyfriends introduced her to Roy Little Jr. A 25 year old graduate of the Citadel Military Academy who now worked as a bank examiner. Mary and Roy hit it off right away and were going steady by Thanksgiving. In February of 1965, just four months after they'd met, Roy proposed to 25 year old Mary with a Tiffany engagement ring. That September, the two were married in her home state of North Carolina. When Mary Shotwell Little walked out of the church with her new husband, she had her entire life ahead of her. A job, good friends, and the promise of domestic bliss with her sweetheart. But instead, six weeks later, she would vanish from the parking lot of the Lenox Square shopping mall. On October 15, 1965, the morning after her dinner with Isla Stack, Mary didn't show up to work. Her colleagues were concerned. Mary was very punctual. If she was ever running late, she was sure to call the office to let them know. Her boss, Jean Rackley, tried to call Mary at the apartment where she lived with her husband, Roy, but nobody picked up the phone. Jean was worried, so he drove to Mary's apartment and convinced the building manager to let him in to see if she was okay. The but the apartment was empty. Gene was sure that something was wrong, so around 10am he called Roy. Mary's husband was on a business trip in the town of Lagrange, about 70 miles away, but he rushed home to join the search. When Roy got back, he helped Jean search the apartment. Nothing was out of place. Not even the birth control pills Mary took every night. And the one she should have taken before bed was still there, which meant she had never made it home after her dinner with Eileen. Around noon, Jeanne and Roy contacted the Lenox Square mall. Security guards began working their way through the parking lot looking for Mary's gray Mercury Comet. Eventually, they found it parked in row 32 of the shopping center's yellow lot. The doors were unlocked and the four bags of groceries she'd bought the night before were visible in the backseat. But it was clear that someone had been in the car because when security guards opened the passenger side door, the they found blood covering the seat and the rest of the car's interior. Mary's clothes were neatly folded on the center console, lightly spattered with blood, and a black bra lay on the passenger side footwell. Although Mary herself was nowhere to be seen, the security guards immediately contacted the Atlanta police. The mystery of Mary's disappearance had just taken a disturbing turn. Once detectives arrived on scene, they began a more thorough investigation of Mary's car. One of the first things they noticed was that the car's exterior was covered in a thin layer of fine red dust. Inside the vehicle, they found a couple of empty soft drink bottles and a single tan colored shirt button on the floor by the driver's seat. The investigators dusted for fingerprints, but only found prints belonging to Mary and the security guards. The biggest revelation came when the police Interviewed the security guards. According to the men who'd been patrolling the parking lot, Mary's gray comet had not been parked there at 9am which meant someone had driven it and brought it back to the mall. But that person likely wasn't Mary, because when police checked the car's odometer against the mileage log that Roy and Mary kept, they found that mary had recorded the drive from her apartment to the shopping center. But since that last entry, the car's odometer showed it had been driven an additional 40 miles. Since then, the question was, where did it go? And where was Mary? Over the next month, Atlanta police launched a wide ranging investigation into Mary's disappearance. Every available police officer in the city was called up to take part in the search, as well as hundreds of army reservists who canvassed the woods near the shopping center. A fleet of airplanes even flew over the atlanta area, Scanning vacant lots around the city for signs of a body. But these efforts didn't turn up a single clue. Meanwhile, detectives were digging into Mary's personal life, Searching for potential suspects. Their first person of interest was Mary's husband, Roy little. The couple had only been married for six weeks at the time of Mary's disappearance. And although mary had told her friends she was happy with her new husband, Investigators found a few reasons to be suspicious. When they spoke to Mary's friends, Detectives learned that many of them found Roy difficult to get along with. After the couple first got engaged, Roy reportedly got into some arguments with Mary's roommates. At the time, investigators found Roy's behavior suspicious as well. In the immediate aftermath of his wife's disappearance, he didn't seem particularly worried. One detective described him as cold and aloof, While an FBI agent who interviewed him said, quote, you had to drag everything out of roy. He didn't volunteer anything. Despite Roy's unusual behavior, investigators soon found he had an airtight alibi. On the night of Mary's disappearance, Roy was 70 miles away in lagrange, georgia, on a business trip. He had dinner with co workers and returned to his hotel room around 6:45pm Just over an hour before mary disappeared. The following morning, he joined his co workers for breakfast at 7am during the period of time that Mary's car was still missing from the parking lot. It just wasn't logistically possible for him to be involved in her disappearance. But as investigators spoke to other people who'd been at the mall that night, they found another compelling suspect.
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Seemintmobile.com After 25 year old Mary Shotwell Little disappeared from the Lenox Square Mall on October 14, 1965, multiple women came forward to say they'd seen a strange man in the parking lot that night. One of these witnesses, Carolyn Smitherman, had been shopping at the mall around the same time that Mary was there. Carolyn later told police that as she left the mall and walked to her car, a strange man began following her through the parking lot and he was a thin white man, approximately 5 foot 10 with a crew cut. Carolyn got a bad vibe from him, so she rushed to her car, jumped inside and locked the door. Moments later, the man appeared at her passenger side window and tried to open the door. As Carolyn started the car, he began knocking on the window. She turned to him and shouted, if you think you're going to get in my car, you're crazy. The man responded that one of her back tires was running low and needed more air. Carolyn ignored him and drove away. After she'd put some distance between herself and Lenox Square, she stopped at a gas station to check the air level in her tires. They were all completely full. Multiple other women told police that they'd encountered a strange man in the parking lot that night. One said that a man had followed her as she left the Lenox Square grocery store where Mary had stopped earlier that evening. Another woman reported that as she left the mall around 6:30pm A man pulled up to her in his car and exposed Himself to her. These unsettling encounters raised the possibility that Mary could have been abducted by a stranger who'd spent the evening looking for a woman to kidnap. But then police took a closer look at Mary's personal life. They discovered that there seemed to be someone close to her who her husband and friends didn't know about. And this mysterious acquaintance's behavior made him an even more compelling suspect than a random creep in the parking lot. Mary's co workers reported that a few weeks before she'd vanished, someone had sent her a bouquet of red roses. Then, on October 11, three days before she disappeared, Mary was overheard talking to someone on the phone. And she told the caller, please leave me alone. I'm a married woman now. A few minutes later, Mary hung up the phone in distress. Two days later, on October 13, the day before her disappearance, another co worker overheard Mary on the phone again. This co worker told detectives that they heard Mary telling the caller, roy is out of town. You know, I'm not coming over there. You know, I don't hold anything against you. You. You can come over to my house anytime you like, but I can't go over there. Following her disappearance, police talked to everybody Mary knew, But none of them knew the identity of her mystery caller. Detectives even tracked down the florist who delivered the bouquet of roses to Mary's office. But they couldn't remember who'd placed the order. Based on these anecdotes, police began to consider the possibility that there was a jilted ex boyfriend in Mary's life. He could have been holding out hope that Mary would take him back and then gone off the deep end. After she and Roy tied the knot, it's easy to see how harassing phone calls and flowers could escalate into kidnapping or worse. Detectives pounded the pavement trying to figure out who Mary's secret admirer was. But every lead took them straight to a dead end. It would take until a month after Mary's disappearance for the police to find their next next big break. Not one, but two credible sightings of Mary in the hours after she disappeared. When investigators got access to Mary's financial information, they made a startling discovery. Her credit card had been used twice in the day after she vanished. Sometime between midnight and 2:30am on October 15, Mary's card was used at a gas station outside the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, nearly 250 miles away from Atlanta. When detectives went to the gas station and checked the sales records, they found a copy of the credit card receipt for Mary's purchase. The Receipt was signed Mrs. Roy H. Little, Jr. And experts confirmed that the signature matched her handwriting. Investigators questioned the gas station attendant who'd been on duty that night. He clearly remembered seeing Mary. He told police that she'd arrived in a car being driven by an unknown man. She was curled up in the passenger seat of the car, holding a paper road map to her head, seemingly as a makeshift bandage for a head injury or to hide her face. The gas station attendant also noticed blood on Mary's clothes. The man driving got out of the car and used her card to pay for the gas, then took the receipt back to the car for her to sign. The gas station attendant was suspicious, so he made a point of writing down the car's license plate number before they left. But when police ran the number, they found it belonged to a license plate that had been stolen off a car in North Carolina the day after Mary's disappearance. However, they were able to find out where she'd gone next. Mary's card was used to buy another tank of gas. On the afternoon of October 15, more than 12 hours after that stop in Charlotte, it was in Raleigh, North Carolina, a further 170 miles away. And this time, the gas station attendant saw her in a car with two men. Mary was wearing a tan raincoat, and it seemed like she'd replaced the paper map with a towel wrapped around her head. Like before. She stayed in the car while one of the men paid for the gas with her credit card and brought her the receipt to sign. The attendant had noticed blood stains on her dress and scratches on her legs, and later told police that it looked like the two men were commanding her in some way. This second sighting confirmed that Mary was still alive nearly 24 hours after her disappearance in a city 400 miles away from where she'd disappeared. But police were never able to track down the car or the two men. We don't know who they were, what they'd been doing in the time they were together, or what their plans were for her after that. As of this recording, Mary hasn't been seen in more than 60 years. Some investigators have come to believe that Mary's disappearance had something to do with her job at Citizens and Southern Bank. A few employees told police that some of Mary's co workers were mixed up in something illegal and that she may have learned too much. Mary's husband Roy, told investigators that before her disappearance, two of them had run into one of her bank co workers while on a trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee. According to Roy, Mary said hi, but the man gave her the cold shoulder. When Roy asked her about it, she said that the man had gotten into trouble at work and she knew about it, but she never told him what the trouble was. The suspicious activity at the bank continued in the aftermath of Mary's disappearance. Weeks after she vanished, another young woman was hired to take her job at the Citizens and Southern Bank. 22 year old Diane she Shields started working at the bank in late 1965. She even wound up living with one of Mary's old roommates. And Mary's case was definitely on her mind. She told multiple people that she'd begun investigating Mary's disappearance either on her own or as an undercover operative with the police, depending on who she talked to. It's not clear why, but Diane abruptly quit her job at Citizens and Southern banks sometime in 1966. She went on to work at a different company. But shortly after she started, on October 26, 1966, Diane received a delivery at work. A bouquet of red roses delivered anonymously. Diane's co workers reported that she was very upset after receiving the flowers, which she threw in the garbage. She later told co workers that the sender was a former employee at Citizens and Southern Bank, a man who'd been fired for making inappropriate comments to multiple female employees. Despite her co workers urging, Diane decided not to call the police. She told them that it wasn't a crime to send roses and that if somebody wanted to kill her, they'd do it whether she worried about it or not. This statement turned out to be darkly prophetic. Seven months later, on May 19, 1967, police found Diane dead in the trunk of her car. She was fully clothed and had been suffocated with a scarf stuffed down her throat. Had Diane been murdered by the same person who had abducted Mary? Their cases have a lot in common. They worked in the same office. They both received a bouquet of roses from an anonymous sender shortly before they vanished. And despite extensive police investigations, both of their cases remain unsolved. The disappearance of Mary Shotwell Little and the murder of Diane Shields are forever entwined as one of Atlanta's most baffling mysteries. There's no shortage of baseless theories about who's responsible or what the motive was. But without any evidence or a credible suspect, those theories are the closest thing we have to the truth. Up next, another mysterious disappearance that captured a community's attention.
Heidi Wong
So good, so good, so good.
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Vanessa Richardson
53 years after Mary Shotwell Little disappeared from an Atlanta parking lot, another young woman vanished without a trace. On October 13, 2018, 16 year old Carly Lane Gousset disappeared from her parents house and never returned. In the years since, police, her loved ones and online sleuths have gone over every detail of her behavior in the hours before she disappeared, looking for clues to where she went. But so far, those clues haven't led anywhere. Karlie Lane Gousset was born on May 13, 2002 and spent most of her life living with her dad, stepmom and three brothers in the rural community of Chalfont Valley in Eastern California. According to everybody who knew her, she was a normal, friendly, outgoing teenager. She attended high school in the nearby town of Bishop, where she got good grades and had an active social life. She liked horror movies and spent a lot of time hanging out with her boyfriend, Donald Arrowwood iii. All in all, it seemed like Carly had a perfect life. But everything changed on the night of October 12, 2018. That afternoon, Carly called her stepmom, Melissa Gousset, and asked if she could go with Donald to a high school football game that night. Melissa gave her the okay to go to the game, but that wasn't where Carly ended up that night. Instead, Carly and her boyfriend went to a house party hosted by their friend James Doolin. There was marijuana at the party and Carly smoked some with Donald and the other guests. That's when the night took a turn for the worse. Shortly after she got high, Carly started to panic. First the loud music at the party started scaring her. Then she got paranoid to the point that she believed her boyfriend was going to kill her. The host of the party, James, gave her and Donald a lift up back to Donald's parents house where he tried to calm her down. But around 8:30pm she got so upset that she called her stepmom to come pick her up. Melissa was disturbed by how frantic Carly sounded on the phone and rushed over to Donald's. But by the time she got to the house, Carly was gone. Melissa called Carly back and learned that she'd fled the house in fright. Carly told her that she was running down a nearby country road and begged Melissa to come find her. Melissa started driving down the road Carly had mentioned and eventually found the 16 year old running through the darkness alone. Melissa managed to coax her stepdaughter into the car, but that didn't do much to improve Carly's mental state. Melissa later said that she looked pale as a ghost and that her pupil pupils were dilated. As they drove back to their house, Carly continued to panic. She scrambled back and forth between seats multiple times and told Melissa that the car was going to kill her. When they got home. Carly's father Zachary tried to help Melissa calm the frantic girl down. When she admitted to them that she'd smoked marijuana at the party, Zachary suspected that the weed may have been laced with another more powerful drug. Hoping to turn this experience into a teachable moment, Melissa and Zachary started filming Carly's panic attack. The 8 minute 45 second video they recorded is the last best record of Carly's state of mind before her disappearance. In the video, Carly told Melissa she was scared and that she thought Melissa was going to kill her. When Melissa told her that was a ridiculous thing to say, Carly responded that she was thinking, quote, demonic stuff and couldn't help it. Then Carly asked her parents if they'd call 911 if she died. They both assured her that they would. The video ended with Melissa telling Carly that she loved her. Carly told her stepmom that she loved her too. Shortly after filming this video, Carly's parents put her to bed. What happened after that is a little less clear. In the immediate aftermath of Carly's disappearance, Melissa Gousset told the media that she left Carly alone in her bedroom until 5:45 the following morning. That's when she poked her head into the room to check on her and saw Carly fast asleep in bed. An hour and a half later, at 7:15, she Melissa returned to wake Carly up and she was missing. Melissa's story would change over time. As of this recording, she maintains that she actually stayed in Carly's room all night to keep an eye on her. At some point, Melissa says, she fell asleep and when she Woke up around 7, Carly was gone. Regardless of which story is true, they both Take Us to the same place Shortly after after 7am on October 13, 2018, Melissa and Zachary realized that Carly was no longer in the house. She'd left her phone, glasses and wallet behind. The moment they saw that she was gone, they rushed out the front door and began their search. Chalfont Valley is a tiny unincorporated community of 600 people at the foot of the White mountains just off U.S. highway 6, a two lane road that's the only way in and out of town. There are tight clusters of houses on unlit residential roads separated by wide stretches of arid wilderness and scrub grass. It's a lot of space to get lost in, especially for a young person in the middle of a mental health crisis. Melissa and Zachary canvassed their neighborhood, knocking on doors to ask if anyone had seen Carly. One of their neighbors, Richard Eddy, told them that he'd spotted her walking down the road outside his house at around 6:30am she was alone and despite the morning cold, she was only wearing a T shirt and a pair of pajama bottoms. Strangely, she was also waving a piece of paper around. Two other neighbors shared similar stories. They looked out their windows and seen her waving a sheet of paper and looking at the sky. Melissa and Zach Zachary drove all over town looking for Carly. Their neighbor, Richard Eddy, joined the search too, jumping on his dirt bike to search a nearby canyon, but none of them could find her. After searching for two hours, Zachary called the Mono County Sheriff's Office to report the devastating news his daughter had disappeared.
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Vanessa Richardson
Now 16 year old Carly Lane Gousset spent the early morning hours of October 13, 2018 sleeping off a drug induced panic attack. But when her stepmom went to check on her in her bedroom just after 7, she wasn't there. Neighbors reported that they'd seen Carly walking down the street in her pajamas just after 6:30am waving a white piece of paper in the air. But by the time Carly's parents, Zachary and Melissa Gousset, started searching for her, she was long gone. That's when they called 911. When sheriff's deputies arrived, Zachary and Melissa explained about Carly's bad reaction to the marijuana the night before. By the early afternoon, police were combing the 10 mile radius around Carly's house with drones, helicopters and teams of search dogs. As the search intensified, investigators from the Sheriff's department tracked down 18 year old James Doolin, who'd thrown the party where Carly got high. They asked James and Carly's boyfriend Donald if the marijuana had been laced with any other drugs, but they insisted that it wasn't. Everybody at the party had been smoking the same weed and Carly was the only one who had a bad reaction. Police later tested the weed and the pipe that Carly smoked from and confirmed that there was nothing else in it. Donald also told police that this wasn't the first time Carly had gotten highly paranoid from marijuana. It was starting to look like this was just how Carly's body reacted to the drug. As investigators eliminated the possibility that Carly had been drugged against her will, the search parties made a discovery that pointed them towards her last known location. As teams searched the area around Chalfont Valley, dogs picked up Carly's scent not far from her house. They followed her scent for just under a mile to the edge of Highway 6, where they lost track of her. Investigators believe that at this point, Carly got into a car, although we don't know whether she was forced or got in willingly or which direction she went. Traveling south, Highway 6 runs through Bishop and down into Southern California. A few miles north, it continues into Nevada. There were a lot of places Carly Lane Gousset could have gone, but to this day, nobody knows where she actually went. Police kept up their search of the area around Chalfont Valley for a week, but found no sign of Carly or where she'd gone. Finally, on October 20, 2018, the search parties were called off while detectives continued to look into Carly's disappearance. They had no real leads. All they knew for sure was that Carly had walked out of her house and made an it as far as the highway. To raise more awareness about her disappearance, Carly's father and stepmother went to the media. Melissa and Zachary appeared on Dateline, Dr. Phil and Nancy Grace's podcast to spread the word about Carly and beg anyone who'd seen her to contact the police. They also took to social media, holding regular Facebook live streams to talk with a growing community of online supporters about the the case. These appearances made Carly's vanishing a national story. But the publicity and the online army of amateur sleuths trying to figure out what happened to Carly turned out to be a double edged sword. Eventually, followers noticed that Melissa's story had changed. On Dateline, she claimed she checked on Carly at 5:45am in a later interview, she said she'd been in her daughter's room all night. Online trolls seized on this discrepancy to claim that Melissa couldn't be trusted. Carly's biological mother, Lindsay Fairley, who had divorced Zachary when Carly was 2, stoked the flames of the online mob claiming there was evil in the Gooset's house. Thanks in part to her suspicions, Melissa still became the target of serious harassment both on and offline. People obsessed with the case even started showing up in town, following her around and snapping pictures of her home. Eventually, the Mono county sheriff had to publicly ask online sleuths to leave the family alone. And just when it seemed like the case was about to go cold forever, the investigators finally got their next break. Nearly two and a half years after Carly's disappearance, in March of 2021, police received their first credible report of a sighting. A recovering addict told police that he'd seen Carly shortly after her disappearance. It was at a party in the small town of tonopa, Nevada, about 100 miles from Chalfont Valley. The tipster confirmed to police that Carly had been picked up along Highway 6 and gave them the make and model of the car that she'd ridden in. Investigators were able to locate the car in tonopah. As of 2023, police and the FBI were running DNA tests on the car's interior to see if Carly had ever ridden in it. But while the authorities have confirmed that they are investigating leads into nopa, there have been no further updates on Carly Lane Gousset's case since. While the Internet is full of outlandish theories about what happened to Carly or whose response to the fact is, we just don't know. All we do know is that her loved ones have been through hell trying to answer those questions and her community is still reeling from her disappearance. To this day, there are still posters of her all around the town of Bishop. If you have any information about the disappearance of Carly Lane Gousset, contact the Mono County Sheriff's office at 760-932-5678. Looking back at this week in crime history, we can see the void that's created when someone disappears. Mary Shotwell Little left behind a husband, friends and co workers who spent the rest of their lives wondering where she went and one person who was murdered while trying to find her. Carly Lane Gousset's disappearance tore a hole in her rural community and left her family reaching out to anonymous strangers online for help. It's a reminder of how many lives each one of us touches and who will come looking for us if we fall off the map. Foreign thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is True Crime this week part of Crime House Daily. Crime House Daily is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. At Crime House, we want to express our gratitude to you, our community, for making this possible. Please support us by rating, reviewing and following Crime House Daily. Wherever you get your pop podcasts, your feedback truly matters. And for ad free and early access to Crime House Daily plus exciting bonus content. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. We'll be back tomorrow. True Crime this week is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios this episode was brought to life by the True Crime this Week team Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzovsky, Lori Marinelli, Stacy Warrenker, Sarah Camp, Truman Capps, Beth Johnson and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
Heidi Wong
Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong is perfect for spooky season. Dive into the real events behind the world's most terrifying blockbusters and beyond. Twisted Tales is a Crime House original. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, new episodes out every Monday.
Host: Vanessa Richardson
Date: October 12, 2025
This week’s True Crime This Week episode, hosted by Vanessa Richardson, explores two haunting disappearance cases linked by their shared theme: young women vanishing without a trace. The first case examines Mary Shotwell Little, a 25-year-old Atlanta bank secretary who vanished in 1965 under mysterious, still-unsolved circumstances. The second investigates the 2018 disappearance of 16-year-old Carly Lane Gousset from rural California. Both cases highlight the enduring pain of unresolved disappearances and the ripple effects on families and communities.
[04:04 - 22:57]
Background and Disappearance
Investigation Begins
Weird Details & Immediate Theories
Suspects and Witnesses
Mystery Callers and Ex-boyfriend Theory
Post-Disappearance Sightings
Possible Work-Related Motive
A Chilling Parallel: Diane Shields
Diane, Mary’s successor, received anonymous roses and was murdered two years later in 1967.
Both crimes remain unsolved and are viewed as possibly connected.
[24:24 - 40:20]
Background and Events Leading Up to the Disappearance
Family Response and Last Known Footage
Timeline Uncertainties
Search and Investigation
Social Media and Public Interest Backlash
A Possible Lead
On the Subject of Vanishing:
On the Legacy of Disappearance:
Chilling Premonition:
Mary Shotwell Little case begins: [04:04]
Diane Shields parallel case: [19:55 - 22:57]
Carly Lane Gousset case begins: [24:24]
Both the disappearance of Mary Shotwell Little and the case of Carly Lane Gousset remain unsolved, casting long shadows over their communities. This episode powerfully illustrates the pain left behind by enforced absence and the complexity of unraveling these mysteries, even in an age of surveillance and instant communication. As Richardson notes, the desperation of those left to search becomes a defining part of the story. The host closes with a call for information in Carly’s case and a sobering reminder of the deep connections and lasting voids left by each vanished person.