Mary Shotwell Little

At about eight o’clock on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 1965, a young woman finished dinner with a co-worker at the Piccadilly Cafeteria in Lenox Square, the gleaming new shopping center in the north of Atlanta, and walked out to the parking lot to get her car.

Her name was Mary Shotwell Little. She was twenty-five years old, a secretary at one of the biggest banks in the city, and she had been married for six weeks. Her husband was out of town on a work trip. She was going home to their apartment.

Her car never left the parking lot — or, at least, it was back in its spot the next morning. Mary was never seen again.

Mary

Mary Shotwell grew up in North Carolina and graduated from the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, in Greensboro. She moved to Atlanta, where she found work as a secretary at the Citizens and Southern National Bank, known as C&S. She was bright, friendly, well-liked and attractive.

In early September 1965, she married Roy Little, a bank examiner. They settled into an apartment in Atlanta. On October 14, Roy was away at a training course for work, due back the next day.

The Phone Calls

In the weeks before she disappeared, according to the case files, Mary had been receiving phone calls at work that unsettled her. Co-workers overheard her telling a caller that she was married now and couldn’t see him anymore. No one ever learned who the caller was.

She had also been receiving bouquets of flowers from a “secret admirer.” Police later traced them to a florist near her home, but the person who bought them was never identified.

The Last Evening

After work on October 14, Mary went to Lenox Square. She bought groceries. She met a co-worker for dinner at the Piccadilly Cafeteria. They talked about ordinary things. At around eight o’clock, Mary said goodbye and headed to her car in the parking lot.

When she didn’t show up for work the next morning — something her co-workers said was completely unlike her — her employer called the police.

The Car

Mary’s car, a metallic pearl-gray 1965 Mercury Comet, was found the next morning in the Lenox Square parking lot, parked in the spot where she usually parked. Shopping center security guards later said they hadn’t seen it there the night before.

What investigators found in and on the car was deeply disturbing.

The car was covered in a coating of red dust, the kind of red clay dust found on the back roads of Georgia and the Carolinas. Inside were four bags of groceries she had bought that evening, and her cigarettes. On the front seat, investigators found her underwear, slip, and a stocking that appeared to have been cut, folded neatly. There were small amounts of blood on them, and smears of blood inside the car, likely Mary’s.

Her outer clothes, purse, coat, jewelry and keys were missing.

The car’s license plate wasn’t hers. It was a plate that had been stolen in Charlotte, North Carolina. And when investigators checked the odometer, they found about forty-one miles on it that couldn’t be accounted for.

Charlotte and Raleigh

Then came the most chilling part of the story.

Early on the morning of October 15, Mary’s gasoline credit card was used at an Esso service station in Charlotte, North Carolina, about 250 miles from Atlanta. About twelve hours later, it was used again at an Esso station in Raleigh.

The attendants at both stations described a woman who appeared to have been beaten — she was bloodied and had a head injury — traveling with one or two unshaven men. The signatures on the credit card slips read “Mrs. Roy H. Little Jr.” Handwriting experts thought they looked like Mary’s handwriting.

After Raleigh, the trail ended.

The Investigation

Mary’s disappearance became one of the most talked-about cases in Atlanta. Police interviewed hundreds of people. They looked closely at her husband, who was cleared. They chased leads across the Southeast. A ransom demand was received, asking for twenty thousand dollars, but investigators concluded it was a hoax.

Questions multiplied. How had her car been driven to North Carolina and back — or had it? The red dust suggested it had traveled on back roads, but the forty-one unexplained miles weren’t nearly enough for a round trip to Charlotte. Was the woman in North Carolina really Mary? If so, who were the men with her? Why was her car returned to the parking lot, and why were her undergarments left folded on the seat?

Diane Shields

In May 1967, a year and a half later, another young woman who worked at the same bank, Diane Shields, was murdered. She had left work and was later found dead in the trunk of her car, which had been left near a laundry on Sylvan Road in Atlanta. She had been suffocated.

The similarities were striking: a young woman from the same office, her car left in a public place. Police briefly considered whether the two cases might be connected, but eventually decided the evidence didn’t support a link. Diane Shields’s murder also remains unsolved.

The Bank

Over the years, some writers and investigators have speculated about whether Mary’s disappearance could have been connected to her work at the bank — whether she might have learned something she shouldn’t have, or been involved in something she wanted to get out of. There’s no evidence to prove that.

What remains is a young woman, newly married, who walked out of a cafeteria into a parking lot on a fall evening, and vanished.