Vanessa Richardson (12:59)
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.