School of Humans.
Over the past five years making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. And now they have a new way to reach out. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is
Hell and Gone Murder Line. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at six seven eight seven four four six one four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five. Thursday, December first, nineteen ninety four started out as just a normal day for Melissa missy Wit. Melissa was a nineteen year old college student who's still lived at home with her mom, mary Anne, with on a quiet street in a quiet
neighborhood in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Melissa was Marianne's only daughter, and Melissa was her whole world. In interviews later, Marianne talked about how she'd been almost forty years old when Melissa was born. Melissa's dad, Johnny, was fifty four at the time. Today that's more common, especially in places like New York City, where I've spent a lot of my adult life, but back then, in small town Arkansas, it was definitely not. Because they were so close. Mary Anne
was always very protective of Melissa. She always thought about safety. Fort Smith had around seventy five thousand people living there back in the early nineties with a military base. It was much larger and more diverse than say, a lot of towns in the Ozarks, but it still had that small town feel. When Melissa was growing up. It was the kind of place where kids rode their bikes around
town and entertained themselves after school. On that December morning in nineteen ninety four, Melissa asked mary Anne if she could borrow twenty dollars. Mary Anne was trying to teach Melissa about smarter budgeting, so she said no. Melissa and mary Anne actually got into a little argument over this, and Melissa left the house that day without them resolving it.
After Melissa left, mary Anne felt bad about the argument, so she left Melissa a note telling her to come to Bowling World that night, where mary Anne was part of a lady's bowling league. In the note, mary Anne apologized for getting upset with her and offered to buy her a hamburger when they saw each other that night, she signed the note love Mom. Melissa did go to meet her mom that night at Bowling World, but she never made it inside. Instead, Melissa disappeared and Mary Anne
never saw her daughter alive again. For days, no one noticed that Melissa's brand new white nineteen ninety five Mitsubishi Mirage was parked in a far corner of that parking lot, and no one noticed the blood.
Are you and it's being lookout for? A Melissa Whitt be a white female nineteen years of age fot five, have hazel eyes, brownish blond hair. I've seen Thursday, December First.
I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line.
Hi Catherine, this is LaDonna.
I just wanted to talk to you about the Melissa whitcase.
I was introduced to the Melissa Whit case through Lodonna Humphrey, a private investigator and native of Northwest Arkansas. We've been talking about Melissa's case for a couple of years now. Lodonna has devoted years of her life to investigating the case and to getting justice from Melissa's family and friends. She's also written two books about Melissa called The Girl I Never Knew and Strangled, and made a documentary about the case called Uneven Ground The Melissa Whit Story.
I have been a part of.
A nonprofit that I had founded called Let's Bring Them Home. We offered support to families who had adult cases that had gone missing, and we acted as a liaison between the family and law enforcement, and we wanted to film a documentary. Our team got together and everyone kept bringing up the Melissa Wit case, and I was really actually against it in the beginning because obviously she's.
Not a long term missing case. They found her body six weeks after.
She disappeared, but the team out voted me, sent me to Fort Smith, and really.
Kind of the rest is history.
Once I met with law enforcement and realized how passionate they were about the case, I knew that I needed to get involved, and was initially just for the documentary, and then it really morphed into me being more involved in the day to day things that were happening with her case.
Lo Donna had a unique experience. She was able to gain the trust of j c Ryder, who was the lead investigator on Melissa's case for yearsle Donna got access to the case file.
I had brought some information to them in my initial work with the documentary that started putting some pieces together.
For them and kind of led them to a.
Suspect that they've had all along, okay, because he started contacting me.
Because this was before I was a private investigator. I was just normal citizen, you know, filmmaker doing my thing. And I think that they realized that this.
Could be a perfect storm really for the whitb case because it was bringing renewed interest. But not only that, there was information that was coming into the case that was valuable that I was turning.
Over to them that they had never gotten before.
And they made a decision then as a department that they were going to allow me to.
See the case files. There was a bunch of rules around it.
I couldn't take any of it with me, you know, I couldn't share the information in the film some of it.
But they felt like I needed to know some of the.
Information basically because I was dealing with some of the characters that they were looking at really closely in Melissa's murder. But yeah, it was interesting because that doesn't happen very often.
And they allow me.
To the day to continue to stay involved in the case because now more of a partnership than anything else to get justice from Melissa.
We're going to go through some of the theories in the case, but first we have to go back to the beginning, to the last twenty four hours of Melissa's life to see if there's anything that we missed. Melissa was pretty bubbly, friendly and kind. Her friend Tara, talked to local news channel News five about how she became fast friends with Melissa when they were around five or six years old. She said that they would ride their bikes around town and go to local fast food restaurants
like KFC and Hardy's. They would buy candy cigarettes and pretend to smoke them. When they got to high school, Tara said Melissa always retained that friendly innocence. They would cruise around town on the weekends. Melissa would talk about boys who she thought were cute, but for the most part, Tara said, Melissa remained focused on school. Melissa was an
honor student and a cheerleader. She didn't have a regular boyfriend in high school, but she did have lots of friends After graduation, Melissa enrolled at West Dark Community College, which is now part of the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. Melissa also had a part time job at a dentist's office. She was studying to be a dental assistant. On that Thursday, after leaving home, Melissa had classes in the morning, then she had lunch with a friend at
the mall. That afternoon, she went over to Family Dentistry, the dentist office where she worked. The dentist, doctor Jennings, and the rest of her colleagues said Melissa was her happy and normal, bubbly self. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary that day. Melissa left work a little after five pm. But then something out of the ordinary did happen, because
when she got outside, her car wouldn't start. Now, a woman Melissa worked with told five News that what happened was Melissa had left her lights on for too long, so she needed to get a jump. This coworker said they were looking for someone with jumper cable. They went next door and found a guy who worked at a business there. This was the person La Donna called the Good Samaritan in her book. The Good Samaritan helped Melissa jumpstarter car. The coworker told the news station that she
stayed to watch Melissa start the jump process. Then when the cables were attached, she told Melissa to just leave her car running for like fifteen minutes to make sure the battery was charged. Then the coworker left. Now, in her book and in multiple media reports, we learned that the Good Samaritan was cleared by police pretty early in the investigation. But as we know from previous seasons of Helengne, we can't assume anything. I asked LaDonna about the Good Samaritan.
You know, obviously when someone goes missing, as you know, they're going to look at the day's activities closely.
And of course that was pretty suspicious to law enforcement because to have her car not started, and they looked at that really, really closely. The Good Samaritan, who they try not to name just to not disrupt his life, he worked nearby to the dental office, and as it turns out, she had left her lights on her car most of the day, starting from when she had been at the mall to have lunch, and that's what killed the battery, and so they looked at him so closely.
In fact, I think He was probably interviewed maybe half a dozen times.
And he just had no connection to what had happened to her.
It was one of those things that you know, he was a good smart and he helped her, but it was almost like he was at the wrong place at the wrong time because she went missing that day, but he was completely cleared by law enforcement.
After getting her car started, Melissa drove home, which was just a few minutes from the dental office. She left work at five point fifty, so this would have put her home a little after six. Her dental scrubs were found crumpled up on her bedroom floor, like she had taken them off to do a quick clothing change, and her mom later told investigators that, based on the clothes that were missing, Melissa changed into jeans, a white V neck sweater, silver hoop, earrings with a wavy pattern on them,
and a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. Police figured out later that Melissa must have seen her mother's note because Melissa then headed out to Bowling World. Investigators estimated Melissa arrived at Bowling World between six point thirty and seven PM. Now at that time, the parking lot would have been pretty full. The Bowling League was popular. By the time Melissa got there, pretty much everyone would have been inside, which is part of the reason why police later could not find many witnesses.
But Melissa never made it inside. Mary Anne, of course noticed that Melissa never showed up at Bowling World, and after she got home and saw Melissa's car was not there at the house, she got worried. Maryanne called Melissa's friends, but no one had seen her. Next morning, Friday morning, Melissa's friend Tara, said that her mother walked into her room and asked if she'd heard from Melissa. Her mom said mary Anne had called the house looking for Melissa.
Tara said no, but she said they were supposed to go out on that Friday night. She figured they would catch up later. Then Tara went to class. They had a biology class together, and when Melissa didn't show up in that biology class, Tara immediately suspected something bad had happened. This was not like Melissa. Melissa was extremely responsible. That's when Marianne went to the police. But then the first officer to talk to mary Anne, in my opinion, made
a crucial and unfortunately a far too common error. We see this over and over in this podcast and in our investigations. Mary Anne was talking about what happened that morning, and she mentioned that small argument she had gotten into with Melissa over the twenty dollars that apparently led the officer to believe that Melissa could have been a runaway.
Since Melissa was over eighteen and was an adult, of course, she did have the right to disappear voluntarily, but mary Anne and all Melissa's friends kept telling police there was no way she would do that. This was not like Melissa, this was completely out of character. She would not just disappear. Because of this delay by police, crucial hours in the
beginning of the investigation were lost. Melissa's family did not want to wait, so they got together with some of her friends and other members of the community and they started searching for her. They printed thousands of flyers with Melissa's picture on them. They also put her picture on billboards around town. Local news media took the story and ran with it, and once that story hit local news,
a crucial tip came in. A Bowling World employee called the police and told them that on the night Melissa went missing, a construction worker and his family turned in a set of keys they found in the parking lot. This happened at around seven forty five PM, so this would have been just a few minutes after police say Melissa arrived at Bowling World. The key ring had Missy written on it. The keys belonged to Melissa. Later forensic testing would reveal they had tiny specks of blood on them.
At that point police did suspect foul play. They turned the case over to the Fort Smith Major Crimes Unit and that's when investigator J. C. Rder took over the case. Now should mention here that J. C Ryder has his own checkered history. Ledonna has worked with him for years. She presents him as a competent, carrying investigator who's been instrumental in getting the word out about Melissa WIT's case
and never giving up. But as you all know, I don't take anything for granted, including the backgrounds of the people investigating the case. The allegations against J. C. Rider go back to a man named Ron Fields. He was the deputy prosecuting attorney in Fort Smith from the late
seventies until two thousand and five. Back in nineteen ninety five, when J. C Ryder was p police captain, the FBI investigated claims that ron Fields was dealing drugs and operating basically a hit squad that some people compared to the movie That Departed Inside the Fort Smith Police Department, the FBI investigated allegations that ron Fields ordered j. C Ryder to kill a woman named Lourie Murchison and to get rid of her body. We're actually going to do an
entirely separate episode about Lourie Murchison. It's way too complex and comprehensive to cover here, but needless to say, ron Fields later became a suspect in Laurie's disappearance. J c Ryder, through his attorneys, has always maintained that those federal charges were completely ridiculous and not true. Jac's lawyer at the time told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette that their quote absolutely nuts. The lawyer said the FBI basically went in and intimidated
and threatened people to give them information. The lawyer said the whole thing was a witch hunt. The police detective who led the investigation into Lourie's death also back j c Ryder. The detective said the evidence pointed to Lourie dying of a drug overdose and that there was a suspect in that case, someone who was imprisoned in Oklahoma, a place where Lourie traveled often, but the detective said they just didn't have enough evidence to charge that person
in connection with Laurie's death. Going back to Melissa wit So, now it's December fourth, three days after Melissa disappeared. J. C. Ryder was assigned to the case. He and his fellow detectives immediately searched the parking lot of Bowling World and they found Melissa's white car abandoned there in the northwest corner of the parking lot, so her car had been sitting there for three days.
Now.
This seemed a little bit weird at first that no one noticed that, but Melissa's mom hadn't seen it because again it was in the outer part of the lot when she came out and didn't see Melissa that night, she just assumed that Melissa never came to Bowling World. Officers searched around that car and they found drops of blood. Melissa's blood had never been tested, so they couldn't confirm then that it was a match. But the drops of blood led pretty much from Melissa's vehicle over to the
next row of cars. So the police theory was that Melissa was attacked and thrown into someone else's vehicle, and that the blood either came from her being hit, probably with a blunt force object, or when her head hit the parking lot pavement. Now police had what they believed to be the primary crime scene, they started looking for witnesses. Initially, there were reports that witnesses had seen Melissa with someone
they described as a black, six foot two male. Rumors were flying that she had been involved in drug deals or sex trafficking, mainly because at the time there were a lot of people who dealt drugs, especially methamphetamines, near Fort Chaffee, the military base, but that sighting was later confirmed to be a totally erroneous mistake. Police did eventually find someone who was a credible witness, a ten year old boy who was actually the son of one of
mary Anne's friends. While his mom was playing with mary Anne in the bowling league that night, she sent him out to the car to get some textbooks so he could start doing his homework. When the boy came back in, he said that he saw a man and a woman fighting in the parking lot. At the time, his mom didn't think too much about it, but police later believed that he witnessed Melissa with her abductor. Unfortunately, the boy didn't see enough of the kidnapper's appearance to make a
full sketch. Another early missing poster said Melissa had been spotted quote possibly in nineteen eighty one gray Oldsmobile cutlass with a tall, white male with black, wavy hair and an earring end quote. I saw this tip on a missing poster from an old news report, and I still don't know who were hoarded it or where that came from. As with so many investigations that get a lot of press, thousands of tips were flooding in. So now police had to figure out which ones were good leads and which
ones were dead ends. Everyone in town had a theory about who could have killed Melissa. Was it a drug deal gone bad? Was it a random serial killer who came in off Interstate five while passing through town, or was it someone she knew. Melissa's personal life didn't seem to offer a lot of clues at first. She was well liked, She didn't have any enemies. She also didn't have any turmoil in her personal relationship, no fighting with boyfriends or at least not ones that anyone knew about.
The holiday season passed mary Anne's first one without her daughter. No one had a clue what happened to Melissa. Almost six weeks later, on January thirteenth, nineteen ninety five, two hunters were near Turner Bend in the Ozark National Forest when they saw a nude body. Dental records proved this was Melissa Whit. Melissa had been found. This was tragic, but detectives hope now they would be able to gather evidence from her body, hopefully evidence that would get them
closer to finding her killer. Melissa was naked, so all of her clothing, shoes, and jewelry, including her other earring and her Mickey Mouse watch with a brown band, were all missing. Her autopsy revealed blunt forest head injuries, either from an object she was struck with or possibly from her head hitting the ground. Then Melissa's killer or killers probably put her into a vehicle in the next row of cars. Someone drove her to that area where her
body was found. Investigators believe that that remote location is where Melissa Wit died. It's located down a single lane dirt road that's used for logging. The autopsy revealed that the cause of death was exphyxiation strangulation. When I spoke to her, LaDonna talked about how she retraced Melissa's root and how horrifying it must have been for her to be riding in that car with a head wound bleeding, knowing that something horrible was about to happen to her.
Love for something.
They take me out to this remote site in the Ozark National Chorus, and I had a sense of dread the whole way there because.
It's it's just this, you know, there's a lot of beauty to look at, but.
Knowing how remote it was as we're you know, winding around and seeing like there was nowhere for her to go, nowhere for her to escape.
And when we.
Parked the car and I got out, one of the first things that j c Ryder looked at me and said was that if you screamed right.
Now, La Donna hod Bring, nobody would hear you. And I remember being.
Just almost to the point of tears and I'm not like a crier, really very easy, but realizing nineteen year old girl was out there at night was someone who had already attacked her in a parking lot. She had to have known what was going to happen next, the amount of fear that she had, and that part of the case really broke me, especially seeing where he eventually left her body, like she.
Didn't matter to anybody.
Investigators said they found pieces of leaves in Melissa's lungs and grass and other vegetation that was native to the Ozark National Forest in her windpipe. This led them to believe that after Melissa was kidnapped from the Bowling World parking lot, she was immediately driven to that location in the forest, then sexually assaulted and killed there. Because Melissa's body was nude, investigators assumed that there had been a sexual assault. According to the autopsy report, there was another
strange twist to the case. Melissa's body had been moved. First, it was put behind a large rock that was kind of shaped like a tombstone. The body was covered with pine leaves and that's where it stayed for several weeks, But then just a few days before the body was found, someone moved it. Over the years, JC Riders offered up a couple of theories about why he believes someone would
have moved Melissa's body, he said. Either it's because the killer wanted credit for the kill, so they wanted the body to be found so that it would be written about and they would get some kind of celebrity status. Or maybe the move was out of sympathy. Maybe it was someone who knew Melissa and wanted to make sure that she was found so that her friends and family
would have some kind of closure. There's also a third possibility, by the way, that someone who was not Melissa's killer or involved in her murder found the body and decided to move it, but didn't want to admit that because maybe they lived nearby or had history law enforcement, and we're just scared to talk to police for some reason. This theory was bolstered a little bit when police got a mysterious phone call the day before the body was found.
In that call, it sounded like there were two people talking. You could hear an older woman. Police later said. It sounded like a grandmother and a grandson, and you can hear the woman saying, tell them what you found, Tell them what you found. Then the caller hangs up. Police cannot definitively say that that caller was connected to Melissa Whit but the timing seems like a pretty big coincidence. Police never found that caller, and back then they had
no way to trace them. Le Donna has said, by the way, that she does not agree with law enforcements theory because the night Melissa was killed was a really cold night. She thinks it's possible Melissa was sexually assaulted somewhere else, maybe even kept somewhere for days or weeks, and then was murdered near where the body was dumped. When I look at these cases, I always go back to the very beginning. I asked myself if it was possible that Bowling World was not the primary crime scene.
Maybe Melissa had left that parking lot with someone and later they took the car back and parked it there. After all, it wasn't found for three days. I have seen this in other cases. Anyone who has basic knowledge of crime scenes. No, if you can waste police time by staging a false crime scene, you can throw them off the trail for quite a while. But Melissa's keys and the spots of blood made me think this is much less likely because those keys were turned in at
around seven forty five pm. But the fact that the body was moved, and some other little odd tidbits about this case made me think it's definitely possible that the crime scene was stage. Maybe sexual assault wasn't the motive. Maybe someone was angry with Melissa and hit her and then took her out to the dumb site and took her clothes off, even to conceal evidence, or also maybe to make it look like a random serial killer did it. So let's go back to what could have happened that
night in the parking lot at Bowling World. Melissa got to Bowling World. The parking lot was pretty full because of the Ladies' leak. Almost everyone was inside. Melissa got out of her car, and whatever happened had to happen really quickly because she had her keys in her hand. Presumably she didn't take the time to lock her car and put them into her purse because her purse was missing, but the keys were there. Melissa started arguing with someone.
The argument got heated. Maybe she got scared and went to get back inside her car. But before she had time to put the keys in the door and to get back in her car to safety, the killer hit her over the head with a blunt forsce object. Grabbed her and threw her into their vehicle. This would have taken just a few seconds, just long enough for the keys to slip out of her hands, and that would also explain another piece of evidence they found there, Melissa's
crushed hair clip. The killer or killers grabbed Melissa's bag and threw it in the vehicle with them, but probably in their panic, they didn't notice those keys. Almost every single theory that has been mentioned in connection with this case, all of them have one thing in common. This was not a planned attack. This was something probably an argument that got out of control and escalated, which brings us back to who would have known that Melissa was going
to be there that night. Over the years, police have gotten thousands of tips. There have been a few people of interests who've come up over and over, and we're going to go over those now. One person of interest who was mentioned pretty early on was a guy named Larry Sweeringin He was convicted of the nineteen ninety nine murder of a young woman named Melissa Trotter in Texas. Le Donna wrote in her book there were actually a lot of similarities, at least on the surface, between Melissa
Trotter's case and Melissa WIT's case. Other than the obvious, which is they had the same first name. Both Melissa Trotter and Melissa Witt were nineteen years old. Both of them were strangled. Both were found several weeks after they disappeared in national forest areas. Melissa Trotter's body was found on January twenty second, nineteen ninety nine, in sam Houston
National Forest in Texas. Melissa Trotter had a knife wound on her neck, her throat had been cut, and the pockets of her shorts were torn, exposing her red underwear. She had been strangled with a pair of panny hose. Larry Swaringen was twenty seven years old, he was married, and he had a long criminal history with allegations of sexual assault against multiple women. It turned out that there were a lot of issues with the case against Larry Swaringen.
There were serious problems with the physical evidence, though actually the biggest issue in the case against Larry Swaringen was the timing. The Houston medical examiner who conducted the autopsy testified during Larry Swaringen's trial that Melissa Trotter had been dead the entire time that she was missing, so for almost three weeks, but in two thousand and seven, the medical examiner recanted her testimony. Now she said that Melissa Trotter had been dead for no longer than two weeks
when her body was found. The problem with that is that three days after Melissa went missing, the police picked him up on an outstanding warrant, and he was in jail when her body was found. I absolutely believe that if Larry Swaringen were charged without murder today, he would not be convicted. Not only do I not believe he's a viable suspect in Melissa WIT's case. I think it's
highly unlikely that he killed Melissa Trotter. But even with all the questionable evidence, Larry's Swaringen was convicted and he was sentenced to death. After the Innocent Project took up the case, his execution was stayed five times, but finally Larry Sweringen was executed by lethal injection in two thousand. His last words and a final statement were quote today, the State of Texas murdered an innocent man. While police were investigating Melissa wis It's case, another possible person of
interest came up. His name is Travis Dale Crouch. He was also known by his nicknames Tramp or Skull. Travis is from ozark and did time for the rape of a twenty year old woman in Colorado in nineteen ninety seven. Travis was panhandling in a mall parking lot. He started chatting with his victim, then he attacked her in her own car. He forced her to drive to this remote location on a mountaintop, and over a period of hours, he subjected her to a brutal sexual assault. Somehow, his
victim escaped. She was dazed and she ran out of there completely naked and got help. Law enforcements saw similarities between this case and Melissa Whits case, and they figured out that around the time Melissa disappeared, Travis was in Arkansas. Actually, Travis was a carpenter at a church camp a few miles from the remote area where Melissa's body was found. He was seen driving as Chevrolet Caprice near Bowling World
around the time when Melissa disappeared. Travis was also a deer hunter, so he would have known the forest well. Police safe fibers in his car were tested at one point, but then nothing more was ever reported about the results of those tests. Travis was sentenced to sixty four years in prison for the rape of the twenty year old victim in Colorado. He becomes eligible for parole next year,
twenty twenty four. According to multiple reports, Travis has also always denied any involvement in Melissa Whits murder, which in a way brings us back to where we started. We can eliminate some possibilities. None of the rumors about drugs or sex trafficking rings made sense. Melissa never did drugs. No drugs were found in her system. Police later publicly said that the whole black male suspect and Fort Chaffee connection were just red herrings and had been a complete
waste of time. Also, sex traffickers don't drive into full parking lots and kidnap random women. It's sad to say this, but sex traffickers do not have a problem finding young victims. They groom at risk young teens and runaways, but they don't randomly kidnap people from parking lots. Over the years, a number of armchair detectives on podcasts have mentioned possible suspects. The podcast True Crime Garage talked to Lodonna a few years back about a guy named Gary Hilton, aka the
National Forest serial Killer. But in my opinion, this doesn't make a ton of sense. On the surface. There are a few similarities, but Gary Hilton's mo was abducting women from remote areas. For example, one victim's car was found abandoned in a field, another was on a hike. Over the years, LaDonna has devoted countless hours to researching what
could have happened to Melissa Whitt. A few years back, she was contacted by women who said years ago, when the woman was twenty three and living in the Pacific Northwest, this woman had been in a fetish video and this was a very creepy story. The woman said that this creepy director wanted a video where the young woman was wearing a Mickey mousewatch. He wanted her to pretend that she was dead and in a morgue. As a result of this, Ledonna did a deep dive into some very
disturbing internet forums. I've been on a lot of those same forums and there are some definite violent creeps in there, But I don't think that this direction will ultimately lead to Melissa's killer. There are a lot of people who enjoyed dark fetishes who never cross the line. I also don't think that Melissa Wits killer was a random stranger. First of all, I find it hard to believe that a random stranger would trawl through a packed parking lot to find a victim. This wasn't two am in a
car garage. This was prime dinner time in the middle of the Ladies bowling League. Over the years, some people have suggested the Mickey Mouse watch might be some kind of important connection, like maybe Melissa Trotter and Melissa Witt were both targeted because they wore Mickey Mouse watches. Ay magazine did a story about the case. They called it
the Mickey Mouse Killer. I get why people might focus on the watch, because both Melissa Trotter and Melissa Wit wore that style of watch and they were missing when the bodies were found. But in my opinion, this is also just a coincidence because that style of watch was everywhere in the eighties and nineties, lots of young women wore them. I just don't believe that there was a
serial killer targeting young women because they wore Mickey Mouse watches. Now, I could, of course be totally wrong, and if other evidence points in that direction, I will change my mind, But I think that the killer taking Melissa WIT's clothes was more of an attempt to not leave blood or saliva or anything else that could connect them to Melissa. J. C Ryder seems to agree. Melissa's killer knew her, they knew her re and they were waiting for her in
the parking lot that night. But when I talked to Ldonna, she was focused on a suspect much closer to home, someone she says, who knew Melissa well, someone who contacted her early in the investigation.
So this this particular guy, I guess he was the one that's called me kind of creepy, called me for many, many years, and it started out with him calling me weeping over Melissa, you know, wanting me to go with him to the.
Graveside, those kind of things.
But it was definitely, yes, he's someone that knew Melissa, and his name is definitely in that diary.
Because of that, and because he had been.
Reaching out to me, and there was no possible way for me to know that name. You know, it wasn't something that I could have gone to law enforcement and just make up.
This was, you know, information that really just kind of fell into my lap. They realized how critical.
This piece could be because I could literally gather some information for them and give it to them as intel that they were never going to have with him because he had lawyers.
Even though I wasn't acting as an agent.
Of the police or even as a private investigator at that point, as a filmmaker and doing an investigative journalism piece part of it, I was.
Still able to go ahead and talk with him. And reading that case file helped me because I at least knew.
Some of the statements he made, and then I would know immediately if he was being honest with me, and for the most part, he always lied, which was really really interesting and intriguing to the case.
I believe something scared Melissa. She got into an argument with her abductor, either because she said no to some kind of sexual advance, or maybe because they were having some kind of a fight, maybe even a lover's quarrel. Maybe Melissa Witt was seeing someone secretly. It could be
someone who might have had a girlfriend or even a wife. Then, when Melissa Witt raised her voice and they started getting into a more heated argument, the one the ten year old boy witnessed her killer wanted her to be quiet, so they hit her, then panicked and threw her into their vehicle. Maybe her killer took her into the Ozark National Forest, sexually assaulted her and strangled her. Or maybe they hit her, panicked, threw her into the car, then
went to dump her in the forest. Maybe they thought she was dead, but when they realized she was still alive, they knew they had to finish the job. In either scenario, I think Melissa Whitten knew her killer, that it was someone local or maybe more than one person.
What's the missing piece?
What can people do to help at this point?
I think that there's a couple of things.
One is that this guy has had lots of problems with drugs and alcohol over the years, and I do believe that.
He's talked to different people in his life, and.
I think that those people are probably very fearful of coming forward.
And you know, we need those people to come forward because I know they exist. We also need any of the women that were connected to him to come forward.
I do believe that this alibi can be negated he has. I believe that there's a lot more there and a lot more violence that got swept under the rug. That he was never prosecuted for and we need those people.
To come forward.
Marianne Whip passed away in twenty eleven without ever knowing who killed her daughter. She was seventy five years old, and she was buried right next to Melissa. J c Ryder has said the case has followed him over the years. He said he's never forgotten about it. That's why, even after retirement, he continues to work for justice and closure for Melissa and her family. Over the years, Leadona Humphrey has teamed up with J. C Ryder. She's continued to
push forward on this case. She's seen the case file, and she's seen Melissa's diary. In her book, she writes that, in her opinion, there are some other people who need to be investigated.
Further, he's given an alibi.
He has had not had anybody come forward to help to negate that alibi, and that's the.
Piece that we really need to crash.
And I think a lot of people that are around this particular individual are.
Very afraid of him.
He's a very volatile, very violent person, and so it stands to reason that you know, people are afraid or that now they're afraid that they've kept information to themselves for so long that they're afraid to come forward.
Now they're not hurting anybody except Melissa. In my opinion, the quest to get justice for Melissa went. I mean, they would really just be a hero. It would help take somebody off the street too. I believe very well may do it again.
He is a very dangerous, violent man, and it all comes down to that.
Ledonna co founded a nonprofit organist called All the Lost Girls. It's dedicated to finding justice for female strangulation cold cases in the United States, and police say they are still working on Melissa Wits case. Captain Daniel Grubbs of the Fort Smith Police Department talked to News five and in that interview, Captain Grubbs said that they do have items that they can test for DNA. I would love to get more details about exactly what is in the case file.
I wonder if they could test familial DNA, or maybe someone will be scrounging through in a state sale or in a relative's old basement, maybe they'll find that Mickey Mouse watch with a serial number that could match it to Melissa Wit. In the past, when I've seen news reports of updates in Melissa Wits case. I've seen a lot of descriptions of the police looking at known criminals
in the area, including local sex offenders. But after everything that I've looked through on this case, I'm convinced that Melissa Witt knew her killer and that the answers to who killed Melissa Witt will only be found by taking a closer look into her life. Do you think that this person is still in the area.
It's still an archisias, So if.
You were friends with Melissa Witt, please get in touch. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts. Music is by Ben so Lee. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie Crowley. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at six seven eight seven four four six one four five.
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