Who Took Jodi Huisentruit?
Thirty years later, it’s apparent that this unpleasant disappearance may never be resolved
The Internet turned out to be mankind’s ultimate genie which can’t be crammed back in the bottle. I’m not going to find excessive fault with the online world: after all, the Internet enabled this newsletter and the conversation we’re having here. It’s delightful, too, how we now enjoy online access to many millions of books, articles, and documents with a couple clicks which a younger me had to dig, by hand, in libraries and archives to find. Plus, how did we ever live without ubiquitous cat memes?
That said, the downside of the Internet is plain to see. Porn, exploitation of kids, myriad financial scams, phishing of every variety, identity theft – you name it, it’s all there. Connecting everything in your life to the Internet was a dumb temptation. If you think this is bad, just wait until AI-driven deep fakes are everywhere and nobody can firmly say what’s real anymore. That dark future is nearly here, folks.
However, my pet peeve with the Internet is its amplification of morons. Take TikTok which, if you’ve downloaded it, you’ve given the Chinese Communists access to everything on your phone (and therefore your whole life), meanwhile it opens the door to epic time-wasting of a kind few could have imagined before our current century.
The democratization of information is in many ways a wonderful thing, which none can deny. The gatekeepers have been evicted from the temple and there’s no going back. Let’s avoid old-man-yelling-at-clouds rants about “experts” losing their established place in the dispensation of wisdom. The dirty little secret, which has been made plain over the last decade, is that most of those “experts” when speaking outside their defined areas of expertise are no smarter than average people, frequently less so.
Podcasts have become the preserve of folks with Wikipedia-level understanding of topics LARPing as Big Thinkers. Yet, podcasts have a large and growing audience, which doesn’t bode well for the signal-to-noise ratio regarding knowledge. Regularly on Twitter/X/Whatever, people recommend World War One podcasts to me so I can learn about, say, the Italian or Eastern fronts. Irony truly is dead and buried.
That said, there’s only so much damage historical podcasts can do. Current events are more troubling, and few online antics disturb me more than amateur podcasts devoted to criminal cases. Here, clickbait idiocy can have real-world costs, including getting plainly guilty murderers released from prison because a popular podcast retconned their case in a wholly lopsided fashion.
All the same, the podcast problem is a subset of the broader challenge of the “true crime” genre. There’s no denying public fascination with murder cases, especially sordid examples of sex crimes and serial killing. Much of the “true crime” genre online is driven by amateur sleuths, frequently women, a cadre that not long ago was known as “mommy bloggers.” Usually, these commentators have no specialized knowledge regarding criminal investigation while a depressing percentage of them can’t be bothered to get basic case facts correct before podcasting about them. If you want ground truth in any “true crime” case, podcasts are the worst way to find it.
This results in the curious situation that people online offer false case details, in circular fashion, with podcasts repeating each other until lies become cosmically true, or at least commonly accepted. Too many “true crime” aficionados can’t be bothered to educate themselves on the basic facts regarding their hobby cases, even when police reports, court files, and ample reporting are easily available online with just a bit of searching.
This is one of the many reasons why I generally avoid discussing “true crime” cases. Nevertheless, I do enjoy unsolved mysteries, particularly when they involve espionage or national security.* Counterintelligence investigation and criminal investigation overlap in places. Cases which I’ve offered my intelligence analysis of at Top Secret Umbra include:
the 1976 disappearance of family-killer State Department officer Brad Bishop
the 1937 disappearance of the famed aviator Amelia Earhart
the 2010 crash of a Polish VIP Tu-154 jetliner at Smolensk, killing all 96 aboard
the 1957 disappearance of an El Paso, Texas couple under strange circumstances
the 1972 destruction of a Yugoslav DC-9 jetliner, killing 27 people
the 1918 disappearance of the collier USS Cyclops with all 309 crew
the 1981 destruction of an Italian DC-9 jetliner, killing all 81 aboard
the 1951 disappearance of a USAF C-124 transport with all 53 aboard
the 2001 murder of Washington, DC, intern Chandra Levy
Yet, there’s one unsolved mystery I maintain an interest in even though it has no national security angle. That’s the troubling case of Jodi Huisentruit, a local TV news anchor in Mason City, Iowa who was abducted before dawn 30 years ago today, on June 27, 1995, never to be seen again.
I missed her disappearance since I was abroad when she was taken by persons unknown, and I only heard of her mysterious end years later. Jodi’s case has never wholly disappeared from consciousness, especially in Iowa. There have been TV documentaries and news reports aplenty, plus a helpful website, Find Jodi, offering a wealth of case information, as well as a Reddit feed of highly mixed quality (or, Reddit).
The basics of this sad case are straightforward. The 27-year-old Huisentruit, a native of Minnesota, was working as the morning newsreader at KIMT, the local CBS TV affiliate in Mason City (she helped people pronounce her surname by explaining it rhymed with “Jodi Juicy Fruit”) . This was hardly the big show in the TV news business but Jodi, who can fairly be termed bubbly, was popular in Mason City and had dreams of making it big in her industry. She was looking for a better gig when she was taken. Whatever bright future awaited Jodi was never to be.
She was abducted about 0430L on June 27, 1995, as she left her apartment, located just over a mile away from the KIMT station. Jodi was running late that morning and her drive to work should have taken less than five minutes. When she missed her shift, the station called the police for a wellness check, which discovered Huisentruit’s recently acquired red 1991 Mazda Miata in its parking space at the Key Apartments, with personal items including Jodi’s shoes and a bent car key strewn nearby, clear indications of a struggle – but of Jodi, there was no sign.
She had plainly been abducted. Neighbors heard shouts, signs of a struggle, yet nobody called police. Who took Jodi, and why, plus where she went, those questions have no firmer answers than they did three decades ago this morning, when Mason City police showed up looking for her at the Key Apartments. To this day, 30 years later, no sign of Jodi – no remains, no possessions, no leads that have panned out – has appeared. She was seemingly taken off the face of our planet.
I won’t rehash the whole case, which is complex and convoluted in its details, not helped by amateur sleuths with their podcasts muddying waters. If you want more information, press reports and the Find Jodi website are recommended. Jodi was declared dead in 2001, while her mother died in 2014, never knowing what ugly fate befell her daughter. Her sister keeps the flame alight, hoping that we may someday know where Jodi’s lifeless body was dumped. The small possibility that Jodi was abducted but not killed seems so remote, 30 years later, as to be not worth pondering.
So, who did this awful crime? There are four broad possibilities. The only suspect who was in police focus from the moment of Jodi’s disappearance was John Vansice, a local seed salesman who was two decades Jodi’s senior yet maintained a friendship with her that was either sweetly paternal or creepy and cringe, depending on your viewpoint. The recently divorced Vansice endeavored to fit in with the Mason City twenty-something set, with Jodi at the center, and he threw her birthday party in early June 1995, fated to be Jodi’s last.
Vansice’s behavior surrounding Jodi’s disappearance was undeniably strange, while his alibi for the time of Jodi’s disappearance has been questioned, yet he claimed to have passed a police polygraph regarding the case (which he held a kegger party to celebrate), meanwhile two Iowa grand juries failed to indict Vansice. Police warrants to track Vansice’s movements decades after failed to generate valuable leads. Living under suspicion eventually drove Vansice to move to Arizona, where he died late last year, at the age of 78, after a long battle with dementia.
The Vansice-did-it brigade posits that Jodi spurned his romantic advances, particularly because she had recently started dating a new man from out of state (who was contacted by police, but his identity has never been publicly revealed, yet he was excluded as a person of interest early), which drove Vansice to rage and murder. Vansice was known to have a drinking problem and jealously can make people do terrible things, but the police never made the case against their lead suspect stick. Skeptics assess that Vansice was an oaf, not a killer, certainly no criminal mastermind. Regardless, he’s dead. If Vansice abducted and killed Jodi, he got away with it scot-free; if he didn’t do it, he spent the last three decades of his life under an unjust cloud of infamy.
Perhaps a seasoned criminal took Jodi. How about Tony Jackson, a convicted serial rapist who’s serving a life sentence for crimes committed around Minneapolis in the late 1990s, but who was living in Mason City when Jodi disappeared? Jackson’s exact whereabouts and actions on June 27, 1995, have been the source of controversy. However, Jackson steadfastly maintains his innocence from behind bars, while police have indicated he isn’t considered a suspect in the Huisentruit case. Then there’s Thomas Corscadden, a convicted sex offender and all-around creep who died in prison in Minnesota in 2022. Police looked at Corscadden shortly after Jodi’s disappearance, then again in 2004 (including interviews and a polygraph). While Corscadden was known to have an interest in Huisentruit, and had disturbing habits like driving around in a white van in stalker fashion, police didn’t consider him a serious suspect in Jodi’s disappearance. While we’re grasping at straws, how about Christopher Revak, who killed himself in 2009 while in police custody under suspicion for the murders of two women? Revak’s ex-wife was living in Mason City around the time Jodi went missing (in a too-strange-for-fiction twist, the person who moved into the residence when she left was John Vansice). The rest is mere speculation.
What about a stalker gone murderous? Jodi had a mysterious incident with an apparent stalker a few months before her disappearance that worried her sufficiently that she enrolled in self-defense classes. We know little more than that. Claims that a white van was seen around the Key Apartments in the middle of the night shortly before Jodi was taken linger, without resolution. It was a different era, shortly before the Internet and cellphones became ubiquitous. Jodi’s address and phone number were listed in the Mason City phone book (back when such hard-copy items existed). She was easy to locate, if anyone with evil intent wished to.
Last, there have long been rumors that Jodi’s disappearance was mixed up with criminal activity, specifically the drug trade. Mason City indeed was located on a significant drug-smuggling corridor across the Midwest back in the 1990s, so the notion cannot be dismissed out of hand. However, nobody has ever plausibly explained how Jodi might have gotten involved with such unpleasant types, nor why drug smugglers may have wanted to silence her. Again, we have more unsubstantiated innuendo, what spooks call RUMINT, than anything which might be termed evidence, much less viable leads.
Yet, what can be stated without reservation is that the Mason City Police Department hardly covered itself in glory investigating Jodi’s disappearance. This occurred just as DNA was becoming a big deal in routine criminal investigation, and the MCPD frankly made a hash of what information they uncovered. Some find malfeasance in this depressing litany of procedural errors, but the truth is that Mason City is a small place, a burgh of less than 30,000 residents nestled amid Iowa cornfields, and the MCPD is a small-city cop shop that rarely encounters complex criminal investigations.
Never attribute to malfeasance what can be more plausibly blamed on routine incompetence. Investigators who tried to resolve Jodi’s disappearance 30 years ago have retired, while a new MCPD generation is pursuing the Huisentruit investigation, which they insist is cold but not closed. Nevertheless, it’s hardly reassuring that in late 2016 a member of the Iowa House of Representatives issued a scathing public letter in which he accused Mason City officials of obstructing progress in the Huisentruit case while rather directly accusing the MCPD of a cover-up:
The Mason City Police Department seems to have a dubious lack of interest in following up on leads that could shed the light of day on Jodi Huisentruit’s disappearance … I have this gut feeling that something is being covered up in Mason City. As in so many cold cases, eventually the case fades into oblivion for the public which is what the Mason City Police Department seems to be hoping for again.
That’s not evidence either, just a hunch, yet that vexatious hunch has been felt by quite a few people over the last 30 years, watching the MCPD fail to resolve Jodi’s disappearance. What really happened to Jodi Huisentruit? We simply don’t know. Worse, we may never know. Several persons involved in the case, or suspected of involvement, are dead. Perhaps there will be deathbed confession someday. If not, Jodi’s fate may remain unresolved in perpetuity.
However, I’m confident that someone, indeed several people, in and around Mason City know Jodi’s fate. Recent offers of a handsome cash reward for information leading to the discovery of Jodi’s remains haven’t delivered any results to date, but they might someday. Greed married to guilt promotes confessions on occasion. One revealing point is that there’s no consensus in Mason City regarding what happened early on June 27, 1995. If you talk to a dozen Mason City residents about the Huisentruit case, folks who were living there in 1995, you’re likely to get a dozen different takes on what occurred – all of them largely speculative. You will hear claims of all four possibilities of whodunit. Even locals who knew Jodi seem uncertain about who took her and why.
Which leaves me unsure of exactly what awful fate befell Jodi Huisentruit. All four scenarios cannot be wholly excluded, even if just barely, while it needs to be considered that there is a fifth possibility, namely the involvement of persons who have never been publicly associated with this investigation, perhaps never appearing on law enforcement radar. In which case he – it’s almost certainly a he – got away with it, at least so far. Forensic genealogy is now routinely solving long-cold murder cases, thanks to DNA analysis, and in a surprising number of these solutions the perpetrator turns out to be someone who was never considered a suspect. For now, we wait, hoping for an increasingly unlikely break in this frigidly cold case.
My own interest in Jodi Huisentruit’s disappearance lingers. Is it because we’re both Gen-Xers (Jodi’s less than two years older than I am)? Is it because I, too, was driving a 1991 Mazda Miata in the summer of 1995? Or is it because Jodi bore a startling resemblance to a pretty Midwestern gal I dated long ago, right down to the identical you-betcha Minnesota twang that Jodi tried hard to lose, to boost her TV career? I don’t know, really. The notion that someone can get away with murder because nobody speaks out for decades troubles me deeply.
There will be a minor media upswell today in Iowa, on the 30th anniversary. Let’s hope this jogs a memory or two in Mason City and we can finally discover what happened to Jodi Huisentruit, who didn’t deserve the evil fate that was inflicted on her.
Addendum: Some relevant images in the Huisentruit case:
*A subset here is TSU’s deep dives into the 1988 bomb-destruction of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, which exposed that the U.S. Department of Justice has never played this awful case straight with the public:
Bill Barr Needs to Answer Some Questions (07 DEC 2020)
The Unsolved Mystery of Iran Air Flight 655 (28 NOV 2021)
Reopening the Lockerbie Case is a Blood-Soaked Gamble (22 DEC 2022)
Plus relatedly:
Rethinking the Screaming Eagles’ Deadliest Day (11 FEB 2024)