Where is Jodi Huisentruit?

CNN

4 hours ago

She was the darling of local morning television in Mason City, Iowa — not as glamorous as it might sound, since that meant arriving for work at 3 a.m.
Despite the daily incredibly early arrival time for the morning broadcast, Jodi Huisentruit had never missed a show, not once. On June 27, 1995, she finally overslept. 'I'll be right in,' she said when her news producer called to wake her up at 4 a.m.
Huisentruit lived alone in a small apartment complex in Mason City just about a mile from work. The Long Prairie, Minnesota, native was the youngest of three daughters. She excelled in sports early, and especially loved golf. Before starting her career as a journalist, she worked briefly as a Northwest Airlines flight attendant. A friend remembers that she liked to say that she wanted to be 'on the air, not in the air.'
That morning, when she still didn't show up at the station, 'the assumption Jodi's coworkers had was she had probably fallen back asleep,' investigative journalist Caroline Lowe said.
With Huisentruit missing, the station's producer anchored the 6 a.m. broadcast. But then, with still no sign of the newscaster, the station asked the police department to go check on her.
Police didn't find the 27-year-old Huisentruit, but they did find disturbing signs of her absence.
'When police got to the scene, there was no sign of Jodi, but her car was there. There were definite signs of a struggle' — such as a bent car key, Lowe said, that 'indicated that she was probably attacked from behind and there was a lot of force used. And then on the ground, you see her stuff strewn like her red heels, her blow dryer, earrings.'
'There were drag marks in the parking lot,' said Brian Mastre, who was Huisentruit's KIMT-TV coworker at the time, and 'her items in her purse, because she was running late, were scattered in the parking lot.'
But that was nearly it. Her building had no security cameras. Police found no witnesses, and no blood.
Jodi Huisentruit hasn't been seen since. What's unusual about her case is that, 30 years later, a devoted team of volunteers, like Caroline Lowe, is still trying to solve the mystery. New and old leads are being evaluated — and, far from Mason City, grim excavations in hopes of finding Huisentruit's body are still being conducted.
Mason City is on its fourth police chief since the disappearance.
Current Police Chief Jeff Brinkley says that tips continue to 'come in consistently throughout the year,' and that his investigators are doing their part to 'further the investigation.'
'Obviously, things pick up a little bit this time of year as we near an anniversary, but we do regularly get communication from various people in the community and around the country with ideas and information about Jodi's case,' Brinkley said.
Huisentruit gave indications she was concerned about her safety well before her disappearance. In October 1994, nearly nine months before she went missing, Huisentruit filed this police report regarding a 'suspicious subject' who was 'following her, driving a small white newer pickup.'
She had also taken a self defense class.
The day before she disappeared, Huisentruit played in a charity golf tournament. There, she told some of her fellow players that she was considering changing her phone number after receiving harassing phone calls.
'Her schedule was public, and she had the same schedule every day. Her information, where she lived, her phone number, home address were in the phone book,' Lowe said. 'So that would have been very easy for a stalker.'
Over the years, police have looked at numerous people who may have been connected to Huisentruit's disappearance. John Vansice was one of them.
He and Huisentruit ran in the same social circle, though he was 22 years older. He told police she'd been at his place the night before she disappeared. They had watched videos from a recent birthday party that he helped organize for the news anchor.
Police remained interested in Vansice though he was never named a suspect or charged.
'From day one, John Vansice claimed he cared about Jodi. He consistently denied any involvement in Jodi's abduction,' said Lowe.
In 2017, investigators attached GPS mobile tracking devices to two vehicles connected to Vansice. He also complied with a court order to provide DNA, fingerprints and palm prints to the FBI.
The tracking, though, seemed to provide nothing. Some of the information gained from this exploration was unsealed in April this year; some, for reasons yet unknown, was not. 'Mere curiosity is never a sufficient reason for potentially interfering in an ongoing criminal investigation, especially of a major crime,' the presiding judge wrote about the release, in response to a public records request brought by Iowa attorneys who argued the public has an interest in knowing.
Chief Brinkley declined to comment when asked if Vansice had been officially ruled out as having had anything to do with Huisentruit's disappearance.
Vansice maintained his innocence until the day he died, in December 2024.
Police do have a few things. 'We've got a palm print in evidence,' Chief Brinkley said — and the department still has Huisentruit's belongings that were collected at the scene, he said.
The print was found on Huisentruit's car. But whose palm print is it? That's the great frustrating unknown at the heart of this case.
After receiving a tip in October, Mason City investigators worked with police in Winsted, Minnesota, to search near a farm construction area. They found only animal bones. 'We didn't find any remains,' Brinkley told CNN. 'There was nothing else gained from the search.'
But a few months later, a member of the Mason City Police met with a Wisconsin Sheriff to compare notes and revisit leads related to a man named Christopher Revak. He had been linked to two other cases with female victims; his potential involvement in this case had previously been dismissed.
'It's something that we're reviewing,' Brinkley said. What spurred their fresh interest? Revak's first wife, they learned, had lived in Mason City at the time Jodi disappeared. (The wife is not considered a suspect.)
'There's a probable cause standard here. There's got to be evidence that supports those things in any direction that we would go in terms of an indictment, or, you know, closing the case, those kinds of things. And so, when that evidence is clear and, and we can move in a direction, then we'll do that,' Brinkley said.
Revak, also, is dead. He died from suicide in a Missouri jail in 2009, while charged with second-degree murder of a woman.
Soon enough, few with direct knowledge of Huisentruit's disappearance or its suspects will be left alive. Will the case be solved before then?
'I do feel a sense of momentum right now,' Lowe said. 'I can't explain it, but it's been a lot of activity in the past year between the court case and the search and the interview in Wisconsin, and that's kept things going,'
'But,' she said, 'I feel like I say that every year.' For her and her colleagues who are trying to solve the case themselves, the developments that don't work out keep them on an emotional roller coaster. 'I don't want to be back doing the same thing,' she said.
Brian Mastre, formerly the evening news anchor on KIMT, had worked with Jodi. He can still feel the anxiety and shock as if it were yesterday.
One surreal element of the case is that Huisentruit's coworkers had to cover the news of the disappearance as it was unfolding. Mastre wrote a two-page script for that evening's broadcast. He kept it, of course. Here, he read it aloud again, nearly 30 years later.
'I thought I would bring it back and maybe somebody remembers, and it takes them back, and it jogs their memory,' Mastre told CNN.
Now a news anchor and investigative reporter at WOWT-TV in Omaha, Nebraska, Mastre says that nothing could have prepared him or his team for having to report on the disappearance of a beloved colleague.
'It was just crazy, trying to get the story and figuring out what happened, swarmed by other stations doing the same things, FBI and DCI' — that's the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation — 'interviewing us while we're trying to write a show,' Mastre said. 'We were trying to get information from them, and they were trying to get information from us.'
He said he is surprised that nobody has slipped up over the years to reveal any secrets that would lead to any answers.
'She is one of ours. I feel we owe it to her as part of our family. I want to bring her home,' said Caroline Lowe. She spent 34 years as a reporter for WCCO-TV in Minneapolis. After leaving the station, Lowe was on special assignment for KARE-11. There, she covered the Jacob Wetterling abduction case, which became a national story. It took nearly three decades for an arrest to be made in the killing of the 11-year-old, and the case was solved after Wetterling had been missing for 27 years, with the suspect eventually admitting to the abduction and killing in court.
The Wetterling case shows that even the coldest of cases can eventually be solved — with luck, and with legwork.
Lowe is part of a larger community of journalists who have zealously worked on the case. In 2003, journalist Josh Benson, then a reporter and anchor at KAAL-TV in Austin, Minnesota, co-founded the group, 'Find Jodi,' along with his news director at KAAL-TV, Gary Peterson. Other members of the group include Brian Wise, a photojournalist formerly with KAAL-TV in Rochester, Minnesota and Scott Fuller, the General Manager of County10.com, a media company in Wyoming. The nonprofit group also places billboards around Mason City for Huistentruit's birthdays and for the grim anniversaries of her disappearance.
This year, the group has a billboard on display on Highway 122, across from the Mason City Municipal Airport. It has an image of Huisentruit and reads simply '30 years. It's time.'
Thirty years ago, it was an 11-year-old named Kristen who answered the phone when police called to tell the family that Huisentruit had gone missing. (She asked that CNN not disclose her last name for her safety; she currently runs a Facebook page for the family.)
'The phone rang, and I answered, and they ID'd themselves as the Mason City Police. They recognized I was a kid and asked for my mom and my dad.' She recalled watching her father. 'I remember his face when he took the call, I knew it wasn't good, I saw his face drop.'
'At 11 years old, I didn't have any concept of what 'missing' meant,' she said. 'I didn't understand an adult going missing.'
It's stuck with her all these decades. 'You don't move on; it becomes a part of you; it's always with you,' she said. 'This is an ambiguous loss; we don't have any answers or justice in the case.'
Chief Brinkley told CNN he's still hopeful police will solve the case. 'Under the right set of circumstances, it could be any day,' he said. 'Whether it's DNA, whether it's a confession, there are one hundred different ways that this could go.'