Before dawn broke on the morning of June 27, 1995, Jodi Huisentruit was woken up by the shrill ringing of a telephone.
The 27-year-old news anchor stirred, groggy and disoriented, as she reached for the receiver inside her Mason City, Iowa, apartment.
Her producer at KIMT News, Amy Kuns, was on the other end of the line. She informed Huisentruit that she was already 30 minutes late for work as it was past 4 a.m.
In a voice tinged with sleepiness, Huisentruit, still half-asleep, assured Kuns that she would get up and arrive at the station within 15 minutes.
But by 5 a.m., Huisentruit was still nowhere to be seen. She was due on air in an hour to anchor her morning show DayBreak.
Despite trying to reach Jodi again, Kuns was unsuccessful as only an answering machine responded. Consequently, Kuns had to step in and deliver the morning news in place of Huisentruit.
Quietly, concern for Huisentruit steadily built within the newsroom.
Police were called to conduct a welfare check at her apartment complex after she still hadn’t shown up by 7:13 a.m. – and the concern soon gave way to dread.
Jodi Huisentruit has not been seen or heard from since the early hours of June 27, 1995
She was abducted after stepping outside her apartment in Mason City, Iowa
Huisentruit’s new red Mazda Miata was still parked out front, but strewn around it were several of her personal items, including a bent car key, a hairdryer, a pair of red shoes, and a can of hairspray.
Muddied drag marks and a partial palm print found on the car indicated signs of a struggle.
But where Huisentruit was taken, and by whom, are questions that remain unanswered almost 30 years later.
Huisentruit vanished without a trace, seemingly swallowed by the early morning darkness.
And without answers, her loved ones are left only with theories to explain her enduring absence.
‘I can’t think of anybody who would want to hurt her,’ the anchor’s best friend, Tammy Baker, told Daily Mail.
‘But my gut feeling has always been that it was someone who had become obsessed watching her on TV. She was so warm, funny and beautiful, that I think somebody watching her may have thought, “that’s my ideal woman.”
‘They may not have been intending something to happen to her – maybe it all just went wrong.’
Tammy Baker told Daily Mail she believes a crazed stalker fan abducted Jodi
Jodi’s red Mazda is seen idle in the parking lot as investigators hunt for clues
Police were called after Jodi failed to show for work and missed anchoring her morning show DayBreak
A Rising Star
Huisentruit joined KIMT News in the fall of 1993.
The Minnesota native was hired to anchor the 6 a.m. and 12 p.m. news by then-station director Doug Merbach.
Merbach said giving Huisentruit the job was a ‘no brainer.’ She was intelligent, displayed a sound news judgment, and her infectious personality radiated through the screen.
She quickly established herself as a rising-star at the station and enjoyed a microcelebrity status in the small city of 27,000.
Outside of work, Huisentruit also indulged in a vibrant social life.
She met Baker at an event in 1990, and the pair immediately clicked.
They would spend most weekends together, embarking on spontaneous trips to museums, dancing and drinking in bars, and occasionally playing the odd game of pick-up basketball.
‘With Jodi it was always fun,’ Baker said. ‘The word that always comes to mind when I think of her is effervescent.
‘She was smart, charming, and she got a lot of attention. She was very nice to people who wanted to talk with her at length.
‘That was the only time I’d ever get irritated with her. She would be talking to someone at a bar or in a store, and I’d tell her, “Okay, Jodi. It’s time to go.” But you could never pull her away. She loved talking to people.’
Jodi Huisentruit was a rising star at the network and was looking to move to a bigger network when her contract expired in the fall of 1995
She had just celebrated her 27th birthday weeks before she disappeared
Baker spent the last two weekends of Huisentruit’s life by her side.
The pair, along with a group of friends, had spent the weekend before her disappearance in Iowa City, carousing and waterskiing on a boat owned by John Vansice.
Vansice, who was recently divorced and more than 20 years her senior, lived close to Huisentruit and even named his boat after her.
One night, Huisentruit and Baker stayed up in bed gossiping, and at some point, Baker said she asked her friend about Vansice.
‘I said, “Are you and John a thing? You seem to be spending a lot of time together, so is there any interest there?”
‘And she goes, “Oh, no, no, no. We’re just really good friends.” And I asked him the same question, and he told me he thought of her as a daughter and he wanted to protect her.’
‘Jodi Is Missing’
Baker and Huisentruit returned to Mason City that Sunday.
The following day, on June 26, 1995, Jodi participated in the Mason City Chamber of Commerce Golf Outing at a local country club, along with Merbach.
Merbach remembered seeing her sparingly at the event. They were golfing in different groups and only spoke for 30 seconds as they crossed paths during an awards dinner in the clubhouse that evening.
Their brief conversation ended with Merbach telling Huisentruit: ‘See you in the morning.’
‘She was a social butterfly, and she was meeting and greeting and enjoying herself,’ said Merbach.
‘The last person she wanted to talk to was her boss.’
At the event, Huisentruit confided in two golfers that she was planning on changing her phone number the next day because she’d been receiving ‘nasty’ and ‘naughty’ calls from an unknown creep, FindJodi.com reported in 2017.
The golfers, who request anonymity, said Huisentruit didn’t seem overly concerned and brushed the calls off as an annoyance that ‘goes with the territory.’
Jodi Huisentruit took part in a golf tournament hours before she disappeared. She is seen above at a different tournament with her boss, Doug Merbach (left)
Doug told Daily Mail he remains haunted by the what-ifs of that fateful morning
However, eight months earlier, she had contacted MCPD to report a man in a white pick-up truck following her as she made her way to work on October 8, 1994.
Her family said she was left shaken by the experience. Huisentruit was briefly provided a police escort and started taking self-defense classes.
Aside from the 1994 incident, Huisentruit told friends and her self-defense instructor that she believed she was being followed but no further incidents were reported to police.
Huisentruit left the golf club around 8 p.m. and returned home.
She called a friend in Mississippi at 8:24 p.m. whose husband answered. He told police she sounded cheerful and appeared to be her normal self.
Her movements for the remainder of the evening are not clear.
The only notch in the timeline came from Vansice, who told police Huisentruit had stopped by his home that evening to watch a video of a surprise 27th birthday he’d thrown for her weeks earlier.
‘We watched the tape and we chuckled, we laughed, we giggled – we hee-hawed,’ Vansice told KIMT in 1995, insisting nothing seemed untoward.
The next morning, Huisentruit was gone.
Vansice was the last person to see her alive; Kuns was the last person to talk to her.
Several neighbors told investigators they heard a scream around 4:30 a.m., but nobody dialed 911.
Another neighbor reported seeing a white Ford Econoline van parked in front of Huisentruit’s apartment, facing the street.
The neighbor couldn’t tell if the engine was running or if anyone was inside, but said the van’s front parking lights were switched on.
‘I saw a white van parked in the parking area, having gone down that road many times, I’d never seen it there before,’ they told FindJodi.com.
Friends fear a viewer may have become obsessed with Jodi, with their unhealthy fixation developing into a deadly abduction
Jodi is pictured with friends at her birthday party. Standing above her is John Vansice, the last person known to have seen her alive
Without A Trace
Merbach’s wife woke him sometime after 7 a.m. that morning: Kuns was on the phone, and it was urgent.
‘Jodi didn’t show up for work this morning,’ Kuns told him.
By the time Merbach made it into the office, the police were already at Huisentruit’s apartment and an investigation was underway.
‘You don’t think the worst,’ said Merbach. ‘You think the most mundane and normal thing has happened… you don’t immediately think of abduction.
‘We sent a reporter over there with a camera, and that’s when we realized we were dealing with something much more severe than an employee not showing up.
‘All of a sudden, it turned into a story that became a five-headed monster.’
Huisentruit, who had spent her career reporting the news, had now become the headline.
Back in her native Minnesota, her 11-year-old niece, Kristen Nathe, was at home with her father when the phone rang.
It was the Mason City Police, and needed to speak with an adult.
Kristen Nathe, Jodi’s niece and goddaughter, picked up the phone when police called her family to report the tragic news
A partial palm print found on Jodi’s car has never been identified
Nathe knew her aunt lived in Mason City, but wasn’t initially concerned.
She handed the receiver to her father, and watched as his face turned ashen white.
‘I could tell then that it was something serious,’ Nathe told Daily Mail.
‘I pressed him, asking him what happened, and he told me that my Aunt Jodi was missing.
‘I just couldn’t comprehend what that meant. I knew kids went missing, but I couldn’t understand an adult going missing.’
Nathe was spared the details of the crime scene and forbidden from watching the news.
Soon, the news came to them, with a horde of TV crews and reporters gathering on their front lawn.
The hours and days ticked by agonizingly, without answers or concrete leads.
Nathe still struggled to understand why someone would want to abduct her aunt, and wondered to what end?
She had last spoken to her on the phone weeks earlier, wishing her a happy birthday.
The pair shared an incredibly close bond, and Nathe looked at Huisentruit as more of an older sister.
‘She was somebody who, no matter who she was talking to, you felt like you were the most important person to her at that time.
‘Who would want to hurt somebody like that?’
Friends and family remembered Jodi as a radiant, warn, and positive force
Billboards still stand in Mason City in the hope they prompt a memory or lead that lands a long-awaited breakthrough
Prime Suspect?
Vansice quickly landed himself on the police’s radar by showing up at the crime scene and declaring he’d been the last to see her.
He was quietly investigated by MCPD for years but never publicly named a suspect.
‘We’re all praying and hoping she’s okay,’ he told local media within hours of her disappearance.
‘And we just have to keep praying and hoping and I think she’ll come back, I really do.’
Vasince agreed to take a polygraph test a week after Huisentruit vanished – he passed. He also voluntarily supplied DNA, and finger and palm prints.
But it appears investigators have never conclusively ruled him out.
Two grand juries have reportedly convened in the last 30 years in connection with Huisentruit’s case.
Vansice was subpoenaed to appear in front of a grand jury in Iowa, on March 2, 2017.
Grand jury proceedings are confidential and because the jurors did not vote to indict, the basis for subpoenaing him is not clear.
Around the same time, a search warrant was served on Vansice, demanding examination of GPS data on two of his vehicles.
Last month, a judge ordered the affidavit from the search warrant to remain sealed to preserve the integrity of the ongoing investigation, which remains active.
John Vansice denied any involvement in Jodi’s disappearance
He died in December last year from Alzheimers
Vansice passed away in December 2024, following a battle with Alzheimer’s.
In a statement issued through private investigator Steve Ridge in 2019, Vansice maintained his innocence and claimed he’d been ‘living in a suspended hell.’
Those who knew Huisentruit are torn over Vansice’s viability as a suspect.
Baker, though, is sure he wasn’t involved.
She doesn’t remember anything in the time that she and Huisentruit spent together with Vansice that strikes her as concerning.
The only odd interaction she could recall came two weeks before the disappearance, when they were out drinking and an admirer who recognized Huisentruit approached her.
‘She was dancing with that guy, and he was being a little touchy feely, and John got a cranky about that,’ recounted Baker.
‘The guy was being a little forward… so [Vansice] got a bit belligerent about that, but he wasn’t attacking the guy or screaming, he was just upset about how forward he was being.’
Baker confronted Vansice amid mounting suspicions, asking him directly if he was involved.
‘After that conversation, I left thinking he didn’t have anything to do with it.
‘He wasn’t someone who sat and plotted… if he wanted to do something to her, he wouldn’t abduct her in front of her building where people knew him because it’s much riskier than going into the woods or doing something out on his boat.’
Stalker Fears
Huisentruit was declared legally dead in 2001.
Baker is convinced that whoever took her friend was an obsessed stalker who eventually fixated their obsession into a deadly abduction.
She said she often lectured Huisentruit about her naivety, saying she was too willing to see the good in everyone, which Baker believes may have played a part in her suspected murder.
Baker recalled an encounter when the pair were walking to a football game, and two men in a convertible pulled up alongside and asked, ‘Hey, you girls want a ride to the game?’
Huisentruit replied ‘sure’ and was already walking towards the car when Baker reached for her arm and pulled her back.
‘She told me it was fine, but I said, “No. You don’t know these men, anything could happen.”
‘And if someone approached her at five in the morning on the day she vanished and told her, “I love your show,” she wouldn’t have hesitated to talk to that person.’
Kristen Nathe (left) saw her aunt as more of a big sister and the pair were incredibly close
The investigation into Jodi’s disappearance remains active and ongoing
Her family’s agony over what happened to her and why has almost lasted three decades
Nathe and Merbach share Baker’s suspicions, but neither has ruled out Vansice.
‘My mind goes back and forth between it being someone she knew, and someone who became obsessed with her from TV,’ said Nathe.
‘I try not to pigeon hole myself into one way of thinking,’ added Merbach. ‘What I’m fearful of is that it was someone from outside the area who was in town briefly and happened to see her on TV that has no connection to her.
‘How would we ever find them?’
Fears that a crazed viewer may have killed Huisentruit sent panic rippling through the KIMT newsroom.
Merbach said he wished he knew of Huisentruit’s stalker fears before her disappearance, because it may have changed the way her colleagues reacted to the chain of events that fateful morning.
‘You look back at everything and think, could I have done this? Could I have done that?… it hurts,’ said Merbach.
‘End Our Suffering’
This June will mark 30 years since Huisentruit vanished.
Despite the lack of leads, Baker, Merbach and Nathe all cling to hope that they’ll one day have answers.
Appealing to the culprit, Nathe asked Huisentruit’s abductor to come forward and end her family’s suffering.
‘Please don’t make us continue to have to wait for answers on where Jodi is and what happened to her.
‘We’ve existed in this nightmare for too long, so find compassion in your heart to help us find the peace that we and Jodi desperately need.’
As the wait for answers continues, Nathe takes inspiration from her Aunt Jodi’s ascription to the Optimist Club.
She has a copy of the Optimist’s Creed printed out on her desk, which she reads any time she feels her hope waning.
‘With all the time that passes, it makes it seem less and less likely that we’re going to find Jodi,’ she said.
‘But I try to remain hopeful and optimistic… because that’s what Jodi would’ve wanted.’
