Criminology - Mary Shotwell Little and Diane Shields

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

In 1965, newlywed Mary Shotwell Little vanished after an evening at Atlanta’s Lenox Square Shopping Center. Her car was later found with blood inside and signs that it had traveled somewhere before being returned to the parking lot. Two years later, Diane Shields—the woman who had replaced Mary at the same bank and even sat at her desk—was found murdered in the trunk of her car.Join Mike and Morf as they discuss Mary Little and Diane Shields. As investigators dug deeper, they uncovered a remarkable series of connections between the two women, including shared coworkers, acquaintances, and even a former roommate. Nearly six decades later, Mary’s disappearance and Diane’s murder remain unsolved, leaving behind the haunting question of whether solving one case could finally unlock the truth about the other. You can help support the show through Patreon.We'd love to connect with listeners on social media. We are available on the following platforms:Facebook - Facebook Discussion group - Instagram - Threads - X Formerly Twitter - Blue Sky - Twitch - Tik Tok Criminology is an Emash Digital production hosted by Mike Ferguson and Mike Morford.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Be sure to search for and subscribe to the True Crime Society podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 429 of the criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Mr. Morford. How you doing, buddy? Doing with the pitfalls of homeownership, you know, broken dishwasher this week. Sink is an issue and I'm juggling repair guys coming out here. It's just one of those weeks. What's new with you? Oh, man. I home ownership is awesome it is but you know there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong in a house

when you think about it and in my experience my wife and I we seem to have things happen in like threes twos or threes it's not just one thing that breaks it's one thing and then right after it one or two more and it can get a little expensive at times oh yeah I'm in the same boat so it's it's one weeks. But I'm doing great, man. I'm having a good week. We're taping criminology. What else could be better? Let's go ahead and give our Patreon shoutouts. We had one new supporter this week, Megan B, but that's great support. I mean, we really appreciate it. Now, thank you so much, Megan. That really helps us out to anyone else that wants to help the show out. Head over to patreon.com slash criminology. You can get started. All right. Let's jump right into this week's case or should I say cases? Because in this,

episode we're talking about the strange cases of two different women and different incidents, but as you'll hear, their cases are hopelessly intertwined and for good reason. That's because in 1965, Mary Shotwell Little went missing in Atlanta under strange circumstances. Two years later in 1967, Diane Shields, the woman who replaced Mary at her job also went missing and was later found dead in the trunk of a car. Nearly 60 years later, both cases remain unsolved. But most experts seem to agree that the two cases are connected. And if you could solve one case, you might solve the other as well. Mary Shotwell was born on January 14, 1940, in Guilford, North Carolina, to her parents, Nathan and Margaret Shotwell. And she had a

younger sister, Judy. Mary attended Myers Park High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she was involved in the Latin Club and Cheer Club, as well as other activities. She graduated in 1957 with plans of becoming a secretary, and she enrolled at the North Carolina College for Women, which is now UNC Greensboro. She graduated from their 1962. By early 1965, she had moved to Georgia and became engaged to Roy Little Jr. The couple was married in September 1965, and Mary was working as a secretary at Citizens and Southern National Bank in Atlanta. and Roy was employed by the same bank and was training to become an auditor. The newlywed couple lived in an apartment in Decatur, Georgia, in the northeast part of Atlanta.

They dreamed of starting a family, but would never get the chance. Just six weeks after they got married, Mary vanished. After work on October 14th, Mary stopped by the Lennox Square Shopping Center. She picked up some groceries for a special dinner party she was planning the next night. Her husband Roy often traveled for work, and this was one of those times that he was out of town. He was returning the next day, and he and Mary planned to have some friends over for dinner. At the shopping center, she met up with one of her co-workers, Ila Stack. The two worked in the personnel department at the bank.

The two women had dinners together at the Piccadilly Cafeteria, also called the S&S cafeteria inside the shopping center. They also did a little bit of shopping at one of the department stores around 8 p.m. The two parted ways and Mary headed to her car. Ila would later tell police. It was a normal night out and nothing unusual happened. Mary seemed to be in good spirits. The next morning, Mary didn't show up at work. Calls to her home from the bank went unanswered.

Her landlord was contacted and her colleagues were told that she wasn't home. Most concerning was the fact that the morning newspe. paper was still outside by the door. She apparently hadn't been home to bring it inside. It was starting to seem like she had never made it home after dinner with her co-worker. Gene Rackley, Mary's boss at the bank, decided to go to the Lenox Square Shopping Center and see if he could find her gray 1965 Mercury Comet. And he found it there, still in the parking lot. Gene decided to call the police to explain the situation. Investigators responded and found that Mary's car was covered in a reddish-collarine.

colored dust. Like it had been driven quickly down the dirt road, officers searching the inside of Mary's car found some concerning items in areas of interest. The interior was stained with blood, including a bloody fingerprint on the steering wheel and smears on the window. Blades of grass were stuck to some of the smears. Investigators clarified that there wasn't a lot of blood. It was about as much as you would expect from something like a noseblee. Not a vicious assault, but it was still of concern. A pair of women's underwear, a girdle, and a slip had been folded or rolled up and shoved between the front seats. Small red drops were found on them. In the backseat was one stocking that had been slit with a knife and a black

bra. The grocery bags from the night before were still in the backseat, a pack of Kent cigarettes. The brand Mary smoked sat on the front seat. Well, no doubt. This is a concerning scene. I mean, you have somebody who doesn't show up for work. They find their car at the last known location of where they were. And what they found inside, I mean, at the very least, you'd call it concerning.

Blood, but not a lot of blood. Okay. Well, what does that mean? That someone was attacked, Mary was attacked in the car, but it was more like maybe a punch that bloodied her nose. That's possible. Also, what was left behind, though, to me is very concerned. Yeah, you've got the, you know, the panty hose that are sliced. You've got undergarments that she might have been wearing that are in the car. And, you know, certainly she's not going to go out in public with Elkhlozon, you wouldn't think so. That makes you wonder what happened to her where she at. And kudos to the boss for going to look for her because I feel like that doesn't happen as much nowadays.

I think in a lot of these older cases, you hear about the boss or somebody from work going to check on people that don't show up. And nowadays it seems like they just send some text and they don't show up, they don't show up. So a different era, I guess. Well, definitely a different era. And I thought that about the cigarettes, right? A lot of people smoked in the 1960s, much more so than people do today. And the one thing that I always think about in cases that we do when it comes to cigarettes, when someone leaves those behind, it's a bad sign to me.

Because anyone who lived through, you know, the era where a lot of people smoked or knows someone that smokes now, it's not something that you can just do without for long periods of time, right? People get addicted to stuff like that and they need those with them. One thing worth noting is that in a photograph of Mary's Carthos published, a large metal nameplate with the name name Mary Shotwell is visible in the front seat. This isn't listed in any article or report as being found in the car, even though we know about the clothes, the groceries, and even the cigarettes, right down to the specific brand. It could be that the nameplate was likely her old one from work, and maybe she had a new one with the name Mary Little on it at her desk.

Perhaps investigators were trying to hold back information about the nameplate being found in the car, and it was accidentally shared in the photo. Or it could be possible that it was accidentally left out of the list of items reported found by the newspapers. What was not found in the car were Mary's purse, coat, shoes, and jewelry, and neither were the keys to the car. The blood in the car was swabbed and tested. And in a time well before, you know, DNA, all tests could reveal about blood at that time was its type. It matched Mary's blood type and was assumed to be hers. Clearly something had happened to Mary. But what

was it. Police then went to Mary's apartment and searched it, but found no sign of a struggle or a crime occurring there. As in most cases, investigators were suspicious of Mary's husband Roy. They didn't feel as though he was taking her disappearance as seriously as he should have been. It almost seemed like it was no big deal to him. He also refused to take a lie detector test regarding her disappearance, which investigators felt was not to be. behavior of a worried and caring husband whose new wife had vanished. When police talked to Mary's friends, there were signs that maybe Roy wasn't exactly right for Mary, in their opinion. More than one of her friends, specifically her former roommates,

actually skipped her wedding because of how much they disliked Roy. They wouldn't support their friend on her special day if it was going to involve him. This stuck out to investigators. Unless something is seriously, glaringly, dangerously wrong, you generally stick by her friend on their wedding day. Despite reservations her friends had about Roy, Mary seemed happy with him and excited to start her life as a married woman. And Roy was confirmed to have been at least an hour away from Atlanta attending a training session for work.

And this stuck out to me morph as being, you know, odd. You and I have both been married for many years, but we've all known people who have gotten married. And I think, you know, not. Everyone likes all people. I mean, that's just normal. There's always going to be someone who doesn't like, let's say, one of the individuals,

their friends decides to marry or whatever, but more than one friend choosing not to go to the wedding over this guy, I think it really tells you something about what they thought of him. because that just seems strange to me. Yeah, I think a lot of times friends in that situation might make little comments, but they don't want to go over the top and start telling their friend what they need to do. And maybe that you, you know, talk more behind the scenes, you know, to other friends. But to see them collectively decide to skip the wedding because they felt this was so wrong,

you know, that's, that is a red flag. But, you know, Roy does have this alibi, you know, as much as they might think he's not great for her, he was confirmed to have been away. Now, he wasn't across the country, you know, on a three-hour flight away or something. He was, you know, an hour or so away. So theoretically, could he have come home and done something there are? You know, I think that's still something the police had to consider. Days after Mary's disappearance, things would take.

a strange turn when Roy received a call from an anonymous person demanding a ransom payment in exchange for a Mary's safe return. Roy was instructed to take $20,000 to a certain sign in North Carolina's Piscan National Forest, where he would find further directions. Roy alerted authorities to the call and they hatched a plant. They got the FBI involved and an agent went to the specified location and found a blank piece of paper taped to the sign. Investigators couldn't determine if this was some kind of hoax or if this was a real ransom attempt and the kidnapper had gotten cold feet or was wary of being caught. And I feel like this is something that comes up a lot in cases where someone goes missing. You know, there's a, there's a ransom demand. But,

Is it from the actual kidnapper or is it from someone who has learned about, you know, what's happened and is trying to, you know, get in on this for the lack of a better term? Like they're trying to profit off of a situation that technically they had nothing to do with. And it seems to happen more than you would think. Yeah, I've never understood that way. if someone would, you know, attach themselves to a missing person's case and put themselves in the crosshair of the FBI and authorities that are searching for this woman, because at the very least, even if they're not involved in the actual disappearance, then you have, you know,

other charges that they can face that are serious. So, you know, if it's somebody that just has nothing to do with it, it's just really foolish. Mary's disappearance made the local news, and after seeing the story, a woman went to the police station in Atlanta to tell authorities about an incident at Lennox Square the night Mary disappeared. Carolyn Smitherman recalled a thin man with a brown crew cut who approached her as she was leaving the shopping center in her car. He first grabbed the door handle trying to get in, but the doors were locked. Then he knocked on her window and told her that one of her back tires was low. She didn't believe him, and she didn't get out of the car. to check. She just drove right to the nearest gas station and had them double-checked that there was

nothing wrong with her tires, which there wasn't. The woman suspected this man was just trying to get her to unlock the door. This would have been right before Mary would have made it back to her car the night she went missing. Perhaps the man tried the same thing with her and she decided to check it before she made the drive home, falling victim to his ruse. They tried to figure out who this man was but had no luck. By the end of October, police were looking to see if Mary's case might be connected to similar cases in Houston, Texas, but nothing came from it. And they decided to focus the investigation close to home. Around this time, the bank Mary Workford offered a thousand-dollar reward for information in her case. Some people reported to police that they were suspicious of Mary's boss,

Gene Rackley, because it seems like he just knew where to find her car at the Linux Square parking lot when no one else knew where she was. And Mary likely would have rolled down her window for her boss if he approached her. But there's a part of the story missing from most reports. Gene Rackley didn't just learn that Mary failed to show up that morning and head right over to Lennox Square. Exactly where she was parked, he tried to call Mary, but she didn't answer. Roy was out of town and hadn't heard from her. The landlord reported the uncollected morning newspaper. And the coworker who went to dinner with her the night before told Gene where Mary said she had parked. And he didn't just rush right over to try to find the car. He actually

called the shopping center, explained the situation, and reported the make and model of her vehicle. But security for the shopping center couldn't find it. Gene decided to go likely on his lunch break, around noon, and searched for it himself. This is when the car was discovered, exactly where Mary's friend said it should have been. So in the surface, it seemed like possibly shady actions on the part of Mary's boss, but there was a clear and innocent explanation for how he had come to discover her vehicle. Police talked to security officers who patrolled that parking lot, and they were confident that they had checked that section of the parking lot

and hadn't seen Mary's car there overnight. Other cars that had been parked there overnight had received parking tickets, but not Mary's. If Mary's car had been parked there since the night before, even if no one actually went looking for it, or if they just did a very poor job of searching, it should have been ticketed along with the other cars, but it wasn't. No witness could remember seeing her car overnight. This seems to suggest that her car was actually parked back at Lenox Square after her disappearance was noted, but before her boss made it to the parking lot, especially because investigators found a witness who believed she saw Mary driving out of the parking lot the night

before, and according to the witness, she was alone. Either way, the car couldn't have been driven very far. Despite the fact that the car was found in the last place Mary was seen, Roy Little's mileage log book that he kept in the car showed that it had been driven about 41 miles over the past day, miles that were unaccounted for, possibly making the red clay on the car of more interest. And this, to me, Morph, is a very interesting development. You would think that if, Mary's car had been parked in that that lot all night and a whole bunch of other cars or however many other cars were also there had been ticketed and hers wasn't. That it's kind of logical.

That maybe it ended up back in the parking lot sometime later. And we mentioned very early on that there was, you know, the red dust or red clay found on the car. And we're talking Georgia, right? everybody knows that Georgia's kind of famous. Georgia and Alabama and that area is famous for their red clay. My mind immediately goes to my cousin Vinnie, the movie, right? When he gets stuck in the red clay and they're talking about it,

it does make you wonder if the car kind of went down like a back road at some point. And we don't know all the details, whether, you know, that clay had been on there, you know, some point before Mary went missing, maybe she just hadn't had her car washed that week or something like that. But I think police had to consider, is it possible that her or someone else was driving this in an area that caused that clay? And if so, what area is that? And then the other question is, why do they bring it back and drop it off at the same place

Mary was last seen? The fact that Roy even tracked Mary's mileage is another reason that he seems to be suspected by some people. It seemed very controlling and could sort of point to the reason her friends didn't like him. But meticulously tracking your mileage by hand was much more common in the 60s. And Roy and Mary both used that car. He wasn't tracking her mileage. He was tracking the car's mileage. He sometimes used it for work.

and would need accurate mileage logs for any kind of reimbursement. So the fact that Roy had his mileage tracking book may not be as suspicious as it looked. Police continued talking to Mary's friends and coworkers and found out that Mary had confided in some of them recently about being scared of something or someone. She didn't want to be alone, especially at night or while driving. But she never explained why. Co-workers noticed that she had been acting kind of different too. and there had been weird phone calls to her at work. According to the Tribune.com,

a coworker heard Mary while she was on the phone saying, I'm a married woman now, and you can come over to my house anytime you like, but I can't come over there. She also received roses from an anonymous sender just days before her disappearance. Most reports say that 5% while others say a dozen,

but reports agree that they didn't make her happy. She immediately threw them away in the trash. Reports differ as to where Mary received the roses. Some reports say they were sent to her office, while others say they were sent to her home, but the office makes more sense. Then again, perhaps she received flowers at home as well. The florist had delivered the roses was tracked down, but there was no record of who sent the flowers to Mary. The shop was closer to Mary's apartment than to the bank's offices for what it's worth.

And to me, more of, I think, you know, if your law enforcement, you're very interested in, who's making these calls? Who's sending these roses? Because you think about the tenor of the calls. I'm a married woman now. Okay. That seems to denote someone she's familiar with, someone she maybe had a past with,

who is still pursuing her. And she's letting them know she's married. But they're still sending her roses. that's someone that you really want to talk to. And maybe you would list as a person of interest at the very least. Yeah, and from that conversation, the gist of it sounded like she knew this person. It wasn't like someone was harassing her.

And she's saying, who is this? Don't call me again. So it seemed like there was some kind of connection there. And police needed to try and figure out who that was. Police discovered something interesting at citizens in Southern Bank, and that was that the bank was in the middle of its own internal investigation. At the time of Mary's disappearance,

there were rumors of some kind of sex work rang, being run out of the bank and some kind of so-called lesbian sexual harassment going on. Now, accounts differ as to whether Mary was involved with or even aware of this issue an investigation. According to her boss, Jean, Mary had nothing to do with any of it and didn't even know about it. But according to other employees, Mary had discussed it with them. In the end, there's no indication that Mary's disappearance had anything to do with the bank's investigation. And this part of the case actually really shocked me, right? We're talking to the 1960s, a bank in Georgia and there's an investigation that there's some kind of sex work ring going on or being run

out of the bank. I mean, how many people work at this bank, first of all, how many of them are women and who is the ringleader of this thing? Yeah, that caught me off guard too. You know,

if this had been some kind of embezzling was going on or some kind of counterfeiting or something along those lines, I was like, okay, that's, it's a bank. You know, I could expect that, but this kind of potential investigation, it just, that caught me off guard.

Police turn their attention to trying to figure out where Mary's car had been and to see if the red clay on it could be traced, but it was far too common a clay to link it to any specific area. But then investigators got a break. They discovered that Mary's gas card was used twice on the day she was reported missing, after she was last seen. sometime between midnight on the 15th and 2.30 a.m., just hours after Mary left her dinner, her credit card was used at a gas station in her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. The receipt indicated she paid for 17 gallons of gas. Just 12 hours later, it was used,

this time at a gas station in Raleigh, North Carolina, to pay for 15 gallons of gas. The two cities are less than 200 miles apart. It certainly wouldn't take 12 hours to drive from one to the other, so this suggests that if it was Mary using the credit card there, she spent the day in North Carolina, possibly, but not necessarily driving around. And to investigators, this was the biggest lead in the case. But by the time they learned of her card being used there, time had passed.

It's not like today where the authorities can flag an account to alert them when it's used. Back then, paper signed bills were turned in and only after the credit card company got the tickets. Could they alert police? So detectives had lost valuable time. They learned that for both gas purchases, the tickets were signed as Mrs. Roy H. Little Jr.

The signature looked to investigators to match Mary's handwriting. Despite the passage of time, the attendance at both gas stations remembered the woman who used the gas card, and it seems like it was really Mary. Both attendants described a woman who fit Mary's description. But they recalled that Mary wasn't alone, and she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car, not the driver's seat.

In Charlotte, she was with the man, and in Raleigh, she was with two men. The men were described as middle-aged and unshaving. In both sightings, the man or men she was with, were said to seem controlling. and Mary seemed to be hurt. Both attendants recalled that the woman in the passenger seat, who signed the credit slips, had some kind of head wound that was bleeding. This lines up with the blood smears found in her car. And this caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First of all, you know,

Mary is thought to have been seen with one man at one gas station, with two men at another gas station, but she's got a head wound that the attendance described, and yet it must not have risen to the level where they thought they needed to alert authorities. And we mentioned it, right? There wasn't a lot of blood found in the car. So we don't know what this scene was like for the gas station attendance, but they said head wound, but yet didn't call the. authorities. Yeah, I pumped gas for for a few years when I was younger and you would remember,

you'd get dozens and dozens of people getting gas every day, but you'd remember ones that, you know, stood out as strange or just something unusual about them. You know, if it's, you know, very noticeable and it seems like they're, you know, being held against their will, something like that, you might take the initiative to say, you know, I got to call the police. But in this case, it seemed like even though they thought it was strange, they weren't, you know, concerned enough that they needed to call someone. And it's so strange when you say you pumped gas when you were younger, right? But New Jersey, right?

That's where you lived. Yeah. They had some kind of law, I thought, back in the day, or maybe still do, I don't know, where you couldn't pump your own gas. I remember going to New Jersey one time. and was shocked that I couldn't pump my own gas. Yeah, that's the Jersey thing. I think it's still the case,

and it was always the case when I was growing up. Investigators were excited that they were going to find out what happened to Mary, and they pressed the witnesses for more details. The attendants told police that the woman in the passenger seat at both gas stations tried to avoid making eye contact. In Charlotte, she was hiding her face with a map. In Raleigh, she had a towel wrapped her on her head. The driver passed her the credit card slipped the sign.

She wouldn't make conversation and she didn't ask for help or indicate that she needed anything. So both of the attendants completed the transaction, pumped the gas, and went on with their days. The attendants described the car Mary was in as a white or light blue 1956-1957 Buick, and luckily, both of them had recorded the car's license plate number. Unfortunately, this turned up to be a dead end because the plate came back as one that had been stolen off a car in Charlotte, North Carolina. The search for Mary Shotwell Little went cold in North Carolina. And I want to go back for a minute to the mysterious calls that Mary received at work, the conversations that coworkers overheard, the roses that were sent.

The search for her goes cold in North Carolina. That's where she was from. She moved to Georgia. It makes me think that possibly, whoever was calling or whoever was sending the roses was an old flame back in North Carolina. I don't know. What do you think, Morph? Yeah, it's strange that in all the places that, you know, these attendants would witness this and have proof that she, you know,

gas, her gas card was used there, you know, the fact it's back in her home state and her home city in the first incident. That is kind of strange. And I agree with you. I wonder if it's worth checking out an old boyfriend, someone who's jealous of her new relationship. Maybe they had been stalking her. And after she moved, they, you know, had had enough and they wanted to go find her and bring her back. You know, I don't know how much of the investigation, you know, took part in North Carolina.

But I hope they did check out different people there. Well, and it's always tough, right? when you're researching a case that occurred in the 60s, you're not going to get normally as many details as we would today, right? They reported on things, but obviously we have many more news outlets today. One of the most puzzling parts of Mary's disappearance is the car showing back up at Linux Square. Why was it so important to the sussex?

or suspects to make sure it was back where it should have been. Even if they had a car parked in the area, they didn't need to park Mary's at Linux Square. They could have dumped her car anywhere and then just walked away from it. It almost feels like the location is a crucial part of the case. It's interesting that Mary asked Ila to meet her for dinner there that night. First of all, it was somewhat late. And there were plenty of other places that could have met that were close. to the bank's offices.

More interestingly, she and Ila weren't exactly friends. They did work together, but Ila was older, and they didn't really talk that much. The dinner just before Mary's disappearance was the first and only time they ever spent time together outside of work. After Mary went missing, women in her Georgia community were understandably shaken and nervous. They wondered at the person that had taken Mary was still out there and could strike again. And it turns out that in 1967, just two years after Mary disappeared, another woman would vanish. And not just any woman, but the very woman who replaced Mary at the bank, Diane Shields.

And when police began to investigate Diane's case, they found a lot of things that she had in common with Mary Shotwell Little. Diane Shields was born on January 19, 1945, in Mobile, Alabama, to parents, Forest and Ada Shields. She had a sister named Sandra and a brother named Terry. She attended Marshall County High School, graduating in 1963. She was described in her yearbook as her class's most beautiful girl, standing at just five foot three, a Birmingham Post-Herald article called her, sweet and petite and very friendly but quiet. After high school, she attended Sneed Junior College before making her way to

Atlanta. In the fall of 1965, she took a job at Citizens in Southern National Bank in Atlanta, replacing Mary Shotwell Little and taking her death. It's not clear if Diane knew the story about the woman she had replaced, and we don't know how she felt about taking over for Mary under such strange circumstances, but she settled in and made friends with her coworkers. In fact, she hit it off so well that she moved in with some of her co-workers, but she didn't live with them long. Diane's sister Sandra had recently got married and settled into the Atlanta area at 1924 West Virginia Avenue in College Park. But her husband went to Vietnam to fight in the war, so Diane decided to move in with her so that Sandra wouldn't be lonely. Soon after, Diane left her job at the bank and took a secretary job at a company in Atlanta called Associated Industry,

of Georgia. This was located about 10 miles away from Lennox Square where Mary Shotwell Little had dinner the night she went missing. Around this time, Diane had become engaged to be married to a man named Tom Antel, who was from the area, and worked at an insurance agency. Their wedding was set for July, but they'd never get the chance to say I do. Diane was last seen leaving the downtown office. She worked at just after 5 p.m. On Friday, May 19th, 1967, that night Tom was supposed to come over to visit Diane. But when he got there, Sandra told him that Diane hadn't come home.

Tom waited for Diane, but as the hours passed by, with no word from her, he became word. He called local hospitals, but none of them had any patience fitting Diane's description. Finally, he called police. Shortly after midnight on Saturday, Day the 20th and launched a missing person's inquiry, he told them to be on the lookout for her car, a blue and white Chevy Impala, and it didn't take police long to find it.

At 2.30 a.m., Diane's car was discovered abandoned in a laundromat parking lot in East Point, about 15 minutes from her job. When police got out to take a closer look, they saw blood leaking down on the ground coming from the trunk, and there was a trail of blood behind the car said to be nine feet long. They managed to get the trunk open and found Diane. She was dead inside. Her body was wedged in a small space between the spare tire and some cooking utensils. She was fully clothed except for her shoes, which were found inside the car on the back seat.

A medical examiner would describe her death as brutal and clearly the result of homicide. Her cause of death was attributed to a combination of strangulation, likely with a thin cord and bludgeoning. A kerchief or a woman's bow tie that belonged to Diane was found stuffed down her throat. There was no sign of sexual assault. Diane's car was parked directly under a large no parking sign. The keys were in the ignition. Investigators ruled out robbery as a motive because Diane was still wearing her diamond engagement ring. Her purse was in the trunk next to her body, which was next to a couple's cookbook.

Nothing seemed to be missing. A closer examination of Diane's clothes. clothing revealed that the bottoms of her panty hose were dirty. Investigators believed she had walked through some kind of dust or dirt with no shoes on at some point before she was killed. About 15 minutes after Diane's body was discovered, a car was stolen a block away. Investigators wondered if this was her killer fling. But if the car was ever tracked down, we couldn't find an article about him. Police found witnesses that reported seeing Diane's car parked in the spot where it was found about four to six hours before it was located.

Sometime between 8.10 p.m. and 9.30. Confusing the situation was that witnesses came forward hours later and reported seeing two men driving her car at about 3 to 4 a.m. But since police had already found the car at that point, it was believed that the witnesses had just seen a similar car. And there's no doubt more if that this was a brutal murder. I mean, you know, you described how Diane was found in the trunk. This blood trail that was said to have been nine feet long is quite a visual. She was strangled and bludgeoned to death. But there was no sign of sexual assault, no robbery.

So when you get into the area of motive, What are you left with? Yeah, I think when police can find a motive, they have a clear trail to go down. You know, if she had been undressed and there were signs of sexual assault, they could go down that avenue. If, you know, her purse was gone and her ring was missing from her finger, they could go down that avenue. But I think they were left with a real, you know, conundrum of what avenue do we go down here? Because there's no real motive on the surface. and maybe that means this was some kind of beef that somebody had with her and they just wanted

you know to kill her and that was it. Detectives talked to people closest to Diane and learned that she was known to drive with all of her doors locked fearing that someone could jump into her car when she was stopped at a red light when investigators found her car with her body in the trunk. The passenger door was still locked. So it seemed possible that whoever had dropped her car, car at that location had only got in and out of the driver's side. The question was, how had they gained entry into her car with her being so cautious? One theory was that her killer, wherever he encountered

Diane, snuck up behind her as she was getting in the car, perhaps with a weapon, and forced her to slide over into the passenger side, and then later made her get out through the driver's side. As police dug, they quickly learned that there were a lot of similarities and connections between Diane's case and to the case of Mary Shotwell Little. One of the things that they learned early on was that Diane had taken over Mary's position after she went missing, even sitting at her desk. But there were other very interesting connections between the two women. It was learned by police that not only did both women sit at the same desk, they lived with the same roommate, a woman named Sandra Green Webb. She was one of the women Diane had lived with before moving in with her sister. And reportedly, sometime before she got married, Mary Shotwell Little had also lived with her.

This Sandra Webb was part of a bank social circle that included other women named Judith Brownlee and Sandra Fleming. And both Diane and Mary were friendly with this group of women. So there's a lot of strange stuff going on here. But it gets even more strange because just days before her murder, Diane received. roses at work. So when you hear something like this more, you're like, whoa, right? Both women got flowers before they went missing, but investigators through good police work were able to track down who sent them to Diane. It turned out that it was a family that she babysat for, not an anonymous sender or a stalker. If Mary also babysat for the same family, this connection has never been

discovered or revealed publicly. So we have to work with the information that the roses were sent by different people, likely for very different reasons. Other troubling possible connections surfaced. Diane had reportedly told her friends that she assisted in some way with the investigation into Mary's disappearance. According to free republic.com, her best friend said that Diane claimed to be working undercover for investigators and that she had told her, quote, They want me to work with them so we can close this case. If this is true, did she know a little bit too much or get close to something? There's no official record linking Diane to the investigation,

but she wouldn't be the first undercover operative or criminal informant to be kept off the books, nor the first to be killed. The fact that she was transferred to Mary's department, took over her old desk, moved in with her old roommates. It does almost feel like she was trying to learn more about Mary in a very purposeful way. almost like she was on an undercover mission. In Mary's case, we mentioned that there was an investigation into some type of sex work situation happening at the bank.

And this is where my mind goes. After talking about Diane's murder, I mean, how can you not wonder, right? If there was some connection to this investigation or some other shady activity, where the motive was to silence both women. Mary and Diane didn't exactly work in the area of the bank that would reveal any kind of fraud or money laundering. They were essentially human resources secretaries. They might know information about employees at the bank

or be privy to some information about people, but did they have the type of information that could get them killed? And just like Mary Shotwell, little who was said to be paranoid about something prior to disappearing. Shortly before Diane's murder, she too started acting paranoid and fearful. But of what? We don't know. So police had connections linking the two victims to each other, and they certainly explored them. And in fact, even today on sites like Reddit and WebSloos, people still point to these

connections. The first being the bank, and the second being the roommate that they both live with. but it seems police made no headway going down either path. Some people suspected Sandra Green, the roommate, who lived with both Mary and Diane, of being involved in both cases, but could it be that she's connected to the person that did this to Mary and Diane, and she doesn't have any knowledge of what they did? Was there someone at the bank that had issues with both women and targeted them? Or is it at all possible that both women working at the same place, ensuring the same roommate, is totally coincidence and their cases are not connected.

And I think it is possible in the sense that, you know, almost anything is possible. But is it likely, right? You know, I measure things in terms of how plausible or how likely they are. It just seems very strange to me that there is not some type of connection, but obviously it is possible. And to me, I mean, Atlanta, I don't know what the population was back in the late 60s, but I'm guessing several hundred thousand, over a million. But for two people in that kind of population to share the same job, same desk, and same roommate, and then both of them wind up dead or missing,

to me, that's just too much to be a coincidence. Well, especially when you add in the layer of this investigation of some sex work ring at the back. If we didn't know about that, I would say, okay, maybe it's more possible, more likely that there's not a connection, but I keep being drawn back to that. One interesting thing that came to life was that at some point after Mary Shotwell Little went missing, her mom asked detectives to stop looking for her, something many people find very odd, was this because she was grieving and she had accepted that her daughter was dead and just wanted to move on. Was there something more to this request? Detective C.J. Strickland told the free public.com that he,

always wondered why Mary's mom said she didn't want the investigation into her daughter's disappearance pursued any further. This is fed into the idea that Mary faked her disappearance. But there's no convincing motive for this to be what happened. She was newly married. She seemed happy. Had she done all of this to get away from her husband? Or did she have some secret that she was worried about? And if she did fake her own disappearance, how does that Does that factor in or does it factor in for the woman who took over at her job getting murdered? Unfortunately, after nearly 60 years, the physical evidence from both cases seems to have been lost and can't be tested with today's tools and technology. However, one of the few surviving case files contains a statement from a potential eyewitness.

In 1966, the FBI interviewed a Georgia State prison inmate who claimed to have information on Mary's disappearance. This inmate, Larry Sturgle, who had been convicted of murder, claimed to not only know one of the men who abducted Mary, but that he saw her being held captive in a home in Mount Holly, North Carolina, weeks after her disappearance. He said the two men were each paid $5,000 to abduct her, but he didn't know who paid them or what the motive was. Sturgel claimed that a man named Gerald Mason,

who was one of the men involved. According to Sturgle, a second man whose name isn't mentioned suddenly stabbed Mary. When she looked out the window of the car, they were riding it. According to Sturgle, Mason showed him an area behind the Atlanta Municipal Airport, where they had buried her body. Sturgle described the house he saw Mary tied up in as having a large rock near it, and he said he could hear the whistle of a train.

As interesting as this information was, it doesn't seem like anything came from it. We don't know if police acted on this information. were searched the area for Mary's body. In 2003, Mason was arrested for the murders of two police officers in California in 1957. He was also suspected of attacking four teenagers, tying them up, and sexually assaulting one of the young girls. If he was capable of overpowering four people, it's not hard to imagine he could have abducted Mary or killed Diane. And the information coming from this inmate, right? Larry Stardle, it's interesting, but it doesn't seem as though anything really, you know, came from it.

Unfortunately, you see that quite a lot, right? In cold cases, inmates are, I think, all the time trying to overhear, learn about information that they could possibly use as leverage to maybe shorten their time in prison. Who doesn't want to do that? But that obviously results in a lot of bad information. Yeah, I think if you're the police, you have to hear this guy out. But at the same time, how serious do you take him?

He's a convicted murderer, you know, probably not someone who's trustworthy. And for all we know, maybe he's got a beef against this other guy and wants him to take the fall forward. So, you know, unfortunately, it's interesting information that you just don't know if there's anything to do it. But then again, no doubt that this Gerald Mason guy was not a good individual. Ray Pate, a former detective with the Atlanta Police Department, made it his mission to try and solve the two cases, which he did believe were connected. He was never assigned the cases while he was with the department. But after retirement, the death of his wife, and experiencing a stroke that disabled him, he threw himself into the cases. He told WSBTV, I sit here all day, an old man, and this thing fascinated me.

and I got addicted to it. Pate came to believe that Mary had been killed in Mount Holly, North Carolina. Unfortunately, Pate died in 2019. Without ever seeing a resolution in the cases, before his death, he told the Charlotte Observer, after I'm gone, I hope somebody else takes the ball and rolls with it. Well, people have taken up the ball on online forums and on podcasts like ours, but sadly, the disappearance

of Mary Shotwell Little and the murder of Diane Shields are both unsolved to this day. And morph as we wrap this case up, it is an extremely fascinating one, right? These two intertwined cases. And for a number of different reasons. You know, we say intertwined because it's hard to think that they're not somehow connected.

If not, it would be the most unbelievable coincidence. But without knowing the details of the connection, you know, that's the mystery. And it's those type of mysteries that fuel, right? People on sites like Reddit, web sluice, you know, these are the types of cases that people can really get lost in, dig into, and spend a lot of time on. And I see why because there is so much going on here. I'm still stuck on this investigation into a potential sex work ring at a bank in Georgia. Because that seems so strange to me.

And then you have two women who worked at the bank, one who disappears, one who is known to have been killed. I just think there's something to that. Yeah, I think if you're the police, you have to walk a very, you know, fine line between saying, okay, this, this is too much to be a coincidence. And then they, they dive down, you know, the rabbit hole. This is 100% two connected cases. And that, you know, sort of gives them, you know, blinders to where they're looking for anything that ties the cases together. And the other side of the coin is maybe they're not. Despite the crazy set of circumstances that link the two women, maybe their crimes are not related.

So if they pursue that one angle that they're related, but they're actually not, that makes it harder to ultimately solve. But you can see why so many people think they probably are, right? One took over for the other. They both worked at the same bank. They both live with the same roommates at one time. It's hard not to think that, you know, something like maybe seeing or hearing something they shouldn't have about something shady going on at the bank was part of this. But then you also have, you know, with Mary the calls, the roses, which make it seem as though she was targeted by maybe an old flame and abducted. and taken and killed in North Carolina.

So I just don't know, man. I'd love to know the truth. Yeah. Yeah, I'm with you. It's very fascinating. And I'm sort of torn because I feel like there's definitely a connection to that bank or that roommate of some sort. But on the other hand, you marry being seen back in North Carolina in her, you know, in the city she lived in with these, these men.

And that's kind of strange because that makes me all of a sudden think, well, maybe the truth lies back in North Carolina someplace. And it's not connected to the bank or this roommate. So I don't know what the thing. I just know that this is a real head scratcher. It definitely is. But that's it for our episode on Mary Shotwell Little and Diane Shields. As always, if you love the show but haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out, leave us a rating, a review. also keep telling your friends, word of mouth about the podcast, really helps us out.

If you want to find us on social media, we're on every major platform. Just search for Criminology Podcast on your favorites. And for news about the show, old episodes and more, head over to our website, Criminology Podcast.com. And if you want to join a discussion about the podcast and the cases we discuss, head over to Facebook and search for the Criminology podcast discussion and fans group. So that's it for another episode of Criminology. but Morph and I will be back with all of you next Saturday night with a brand new episode. So until then, for Mike, we'll talk to you next week.