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What Happened to Jodi Huisentruit? The News Anchor Who Vanished Without a Trace
Something happened to Jodi Huisentruit. Exactly what remains a mystery.
The 27-year-old from Long Prairie, Minn., had landed in Mason City, Iowa, the latest of several stops on her broadcast-journalist path from market to increasingly bigger market. She was a morning anchor at KIMT-TV, serving north central Iowa and southeastern Minnesota, and was up before dawn every day in time for Daybreak at 6 a.m. She aspired to go national one day.
"She wanted to be famous," childhood friend Kim Feist told 48 Hours in 2018.
On June 27, 1995, DayBreak producer Amy Kuns called Huisentruit at home shortly after 4 a.m. to see why she wasn't at work yet, as she was usually there closer to 3 a.m.
"I called her twice. I talked to her and woke her up that first time," Kuns remembered in a 2011 interview with WFLA news anchor Josh Benson, who co-founded FindJodi.com with journalist Gary Peterson in 2003. "The second time, it just rang and rang. I don't remember the times. I had obviously woken her up. She asked what time it was. I told her. She said she'd be right in."
Kuns told Benson to check the police report for the exact time she called but, if her memory served, it was 4:10 a.m.
Kyndell Harkness/Minneapolis Star Tribune via ZUMA Wire
Kuns is the last person known to have spoken to Huisentruit before the aspiring national news anchor disappeared into thin air.
And yet she obviously didn't disappear into thin air.
Jodi was declared dead on May 14, 2001, but, to this day, no body or any other physical trace of her has ever been found.
ABC News Studios' new three-part docuseries Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit, premiering on Hulu July 15, delves into the now 30-year-old case that grows colder every day.
Who was Jodi Huisentruit?
"I think the first word that always comes to my mind is effervescent," KIMT evening news anchor Robin Wolfram, Huisentruit's closest friend at the station, told 48 Hours in 2018. "And people would often describe her as bubbly."
Added KIMT news director Doug Merbach, who hired Huisentruit, "Kind of a bright light in the morning to get people started for the day."
Huisentruit's older sister JoAnn Nathe told Omaha, Neb.-based WOWT, "I couldn't have had a better kid sister. She tried to motivate me. 'What are your goals?' That makes me stronger. It's a nightmare...not knowing where she is. We were hoping to find her in the first few months."
Their mother Imogene "so wanted to find Jodi," Nathe said, but she died in December 2014 at 91.
Steve Kagan/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
"It really is a very sad story, it is really poignant," 48 Hours correspondent Jim Axelrod told Inside Edition ahead of its 2018 episode about the unsolved mystery. "This summer she would have turned 50 and you get that sense that, oh my goodness, she's frozen forever at 27. What happened?"
Caroline Lowe, another contributor to FindJodi, was on the crime beat for WCCO-TV in Minneapolis-St. Paul when Huisentruit vanished.
"Jodi was a Minnesota gal who had a dream of going to the Twin Cities someday where I worked," Lowe told NBC Bay Area in May 2017. "We very possibly would have worked together if things had taken a different turn."
She left WCCO in 2015 after 35 years to be the news manager at KSBY-TV in San Luis Obispo, Calif., but didn't leave Jodi behind.
"Once I met her sister and met her family you feel a connection that you can't walk away from," Lowe said. "I just stayed with it over the years, did follow up stories."
Among the journalists in the region who took the case to heart was Beth Bednar, a veteran reporter and anchor at KAAL-TV in southeast Minnesota when Huisentruit went missing. Peterson, who retired from FindJodi.com in January 2020 after almost 17 years of working on the site, was her news director.
"I couldn't believe that anyone would go after a well-known, visible individual in the news business," Bednar told the Elk River Star News in 2012. Some years after Peterson first suggested she write a book about the case, she started on what would become 2009's Dead Air: The Disappearance of Jodi Huisentruit.
"No one wanted to talk about Jodi Huisentruit," Bednar recalled. "I hit road block after road block and doors were even shut in my face."
AP Photo/Rodney White
"I never expected there to be an atmosphere of denial and a culture of resistance to solving the murder of this young woman," Bednar continued, "and after I encountered it, I was hooked—I knew I had to write this book and work on solving this case. There was just something unnatural about the situation that begged to be explained."
But at times it also felt as if the entirety of Mason City was in mourning.
On the first anniversary of Huisentruit's disappearance, 27 yellow balloons were released over the municipal pool, along with four white balloons that represented her and three other missing people. And on the 20-year anniversary in 2015 there was a walk—"Finishing Jodi's Journey"—from Riverside Friends Church, near her apartment complex, to the KIMT office.
FindJodi arranged for four billboards in Mason City to go up on what would've been her 50th birthday, June 5, 2018, sporting signs with Huisentruit's picture and the message: "Somebody knows something... is it YOU?"
Steve Kagan/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
What happened the day Jodi Huisentruit disappeared?
When Huisentruit still wasn't at work by 5:30 a.m., DayBreak producer Kuns called and got Jodi's home answering machine. At 6 a.m., Kuns still wasn't particularly alarmed, assuming Jodi had gone back to sleep. At the worst, she thought, perhaps Jodi had fallen in the shower. She ended up filling in for her on the hour-long Daybreak.
At 7 a.m. someone at the station called police to request a welfare check on Huisentruit.
"My first gut reaction was just to be mad," Kuns told the Pioneer Press in 2015. "I'm like, 'Where the hell is she?'…Never in a million years did I envision abduction."
Those who were closest to Huisentruit didn't recall anything being off with her. The biggest problem, her sister Nathe recalled to 48 Hours, was that Jodi was "definitely too trusting." Even years before social media was around to share up-close-and-personal details and pictures with millions of strangers, Nathe worried that her sister was "revealing too much maybe, of what she did day-to-day" on the air.
Steve Kagan/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
When police arrived at Huisentruit's apartment complex, they found signs of a struggle in the parking lot near her red Mazda Miata.
A pair of red high heels, a hairdryer, earrings and a can of hairspray were on the ground, along with her bent car key—which looked as if it could have been in the lock and she hung tightly to it as someone tried to pull her away. A partial palm print that didn't belong to her was found on the car. Neighbors remembered hearing a scream shortly after 4 a.m., and some recalled seeing a white van with its parking lights on in the lot.
There would later be questions about whether mistakes were made in processing the scene.
A friend of Huisentruit's alleged that police didn't immediately tape off the scene around her car, which could have resulted in potential evidence being contaminated or overlooked. And the Miata was returned to her parents after a few months in police custody.
"I’m not going to sit here and second guess decisions made by officers in the field 25 years ago about what they did," Mason City Police Chief Jeff Brinkley told ABC 6 News in 2022. "I will tell you that I don’t believe that any of them probably thought we’d still be working this case today."
Meanwhile, the search was extensive as K-9 units combed the area, including the banks of the Winnebago River, and Huisentruit's disappearance became the lead story on her own station, first reported by her friend Wolfram. State investigators and the FBI ultimately joined the case, as well.
On June 30, 1995, the case escalated from a missing person investigation to an abduction.
"I just pray that whoever has her out there, if they'll just, you know, she's so sweet and good," her sister Nathe pleaded into the cameras in 1995. "She'd never hurt anyone. Just let her go."
Yellow ribbons sprang up all over town as residents rallied for the search, making T-shirts, bumper stickers and missing posters.
"People here have a real connection with the local media," Lt. Rich Jensen told the Pioneer Press. "They would turn on the news, in the morning or at noon, and there she was. They didn't know her personally, but they knew her."
Is the disappearance of Jodi Huisentruit still an open case?
"If you're a kidnapper, there are a lot of possibilities that you should have gotten caught," Mason City Police Officer Terrance Prochaska, who took over the case in 2010, told WOWT-TV's Brian Mastre, who anchored the evening news at KIMT when Huisentruit was there. "In an apartment complex, there are a lot of windows facing out...what a risky place to abduct someone. So you think maybe it was someone who knew her?"
Or, he added, "What if it was someone who was lurking around apartments looking for prey?"
They still cross-referenced Jane Doe remains for Huisentruit, Prochaska told Mastre in 2015. And a few tips still came in every month.
"We have her DNA, her fingerprints and her dental records," Prochaska said. "We have the sources here to rule out these types of leads and we get a significant amount of them."
"Basically, all my free time is following up on this case," he added. "What caused her to sleep in that day? What caused her to answer the phone and rush into work? What was she doing the night before? We all want to know the fine details. We know where she was at. She was golfing. She had driven home and made a phone call to her friend. Those are facts. But it's that gray area in between that we don't understand."
Steve Kagan/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
Chief Brinkley reiterated on 48 Hours in 2018, "We have never closed the case. It's never been a closed case for us. It's been an active investigation since it happened."
He added, "I'm not ready to quit yet."
With the 20th anniversary of her disappearance approaching, Mason City Police Lt. Jensen predicted an influx of tips. "It's like any anniversary—it stirs people's emotions," he told the Pioneer Press in 2015. "We're waiting for the call. We're hoping that there will be a day we're in the courtroom, and somebody will be held accountable."
What did Jodi Huisentruit do before she disappeared?
Jodi's family let a local station film inside her apartment after she disappeared. There were no obvious signs of a struggle. There were dishes in the sink, an empty Pepsi can lay on its side on the kitchen table amid piles of work papers and an unset clock flashed 12:00 on the VCR. Her answering machine showed a new message forever unheard.
"I still remember all of the cards they found in Jodi's apartment. They were birthday cards. I think there were 50 of them and we're reading through them," Doug Jasa, an Iowa private investigator hired by a Minnesota P.I. employed by Jodi's family, told WOWT. "People had written very nice notes in the birthday cards."
After work on Monday, June 26, 1995, Jodi played in a Chamber of Commerce golf tournament, where, according to witnesses, she mentioned she'd been getting some crank phone calls and was thinking of changing her number or going to police.
She spent part of that evening at the home of her friend John Vansice, who, according to police, came forward as the last person to see Huisentruit alive. He said they watched video he shot at the surprise party he threw for Jodi's birthday earlier that month.
"She was like a daughter to me, she was just like my own child," Vansice, who was 22 years older than Huisentruit, said in a 1995 interview with KIMT. "I treated her like my own child."
The weekend before she disappeared, he said, they had taken his boat—which he called Jodi—out water-skiing with some other friends.
Vansice, who passed a lie detector test early on and was never named as a suspect, denied knowing anything about what ultimately happened to Jodi, though that didn't stop speculation from raging.
He eventually left the area and moved to Arizona, where he was still living when 48 Hours' Axelrod knocked on his door in 2018. Vansice, then 72, refused to comment.
Back in 1995, however, Vansice did talk to 48 Hours—down by the dock, where he kept his boat—when the CBS show covered the investigation in Mason City, and he said he believed Jodi was "alive somewhere. I just hope she's not hurt. I hope she's OK and I hope she can come back soon."
He also said, "She wouldn't want us to sit around home and cry and sob; she'd want us to be out having fun 'cause that was her."
"Is her," added their friend Ani Kruse. "It is her," Vansice corrected himself.
Vansice's friend LaDonna Woodford told 48 Hours in 2018 that she called him at 6 a.m. on the day Huisentruit disappeared and it sounded as if he had been sleeping. They went on a walk, as they regularly did, and he didn't seem anxious or otherwise unlike himself, Woodford said, calling it "almost impossible" to fathom he did anything to Huisentruit.
In March 2017, search warrants were issued for the GPS on two vehicles linked to Vansice, a 1999 Honda Civic and a 2013 GMC 1500—the most significant development in the case in decades.
Nothing of import was recovered, according to Mason City Police Chief Brinkley. He told FindJodi.com that the warrant was part of the ongoing investigation, saying "we continue to actively work" on the case.
Were there ever any suspects in Jodi Huisentruit's abduction?
Tony Jackson has been serving a life sentence since 1999 after being convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping and first-degree burglary in the Minneapolis area.
But he was living in Mason City on June 27, 1995, blocks away from where Huisentruit worked—as Lowe found out when she was reporting on his crimes.
"All that I can tell you about Jodi Huisentruit is that she has become a central part of my life since I've been incarcerated," Jackson, who has repeatedly denied harming Huisentruit, told ABC News' 20/20 in a 2021 interview from Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater. "It's been something that I've been, for many years, hoping will be resolved so that that stigma can be taken away from me so that I can rest."
And police said 26 years ago that he was not a suspect.
Lowe acknowledged to the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 2015, "We don't know if [Jackson] is involved. We, to this day, don't know, but if you think of a person living that close who is capable of very violent stuff, he had to be investigated."
When Lowe started looking into Huisentruit's disappearance for WCCO in 1998, jailhouse informant Dennis Goff told the reporter that Jackson told him—when they were both incarcerated in 1997— that he abducted an anchorwoman and killed her.
Jackson made a rap about it, Goff alleged. Reading from a piece of paper where he purportedly had jotted down the lyrics, Goff continued, "He said, 'She's a-stiffin' around Tiffin in pileage of silage in a bylow, low below...'"
In 1998, investigators headed to Tiffin, Iowa, which is about a 10-hour drive southeast of Mason City. Two of three cadaver dogs seemed to sense something near a farm silo, Lowe recalled on 48 Hours.
The State Crime Lab analyzed samples taken at the scene, but Mason City Police issued a statement in 1999 sharing that nothing they found implicated Jackson.
"After conducting a thorough investigation which included interviews, crime laboratory analysis, records review, and polygraph examination," Police said, "Tony Jackson is not considered, at this time, a viable suspect in the investigation."
Jackson reiterated to ABC News in 2021, "I did not kill Jodi Huisentruit or, in any way, had anything to do with whatever is going on with her demise."
Where is Jodi Huisentruit's family today?
"It’s just been a long road,” Nathe told ABC 6 News in 2022 ahead of the 25th anniversary of her sister's disappearance. “I try not to let it get to me so much but there is stress, there is no question.”
Nathe still held out hope that their family would find out what really happened to Huisentruit.
“Please come forward, it’s just been too long,” she said. “It’s not fair to her, she’s a good kid, we have to find her, we have to find her.
There are still no suspects or official persons of interest in Huisentruit's abduction. But friends, former co-workers, law enforcement and the still-curious gather regularly in Mason City to pay tribute to her, as they did on the 30th anniversary of her disappearance in 2025.
"Jodi lived her life as an optimist," her family said in a statement marking the tragic date, per FindJodi, "and she had a great passion for living life to the fullest. She was a bright light who made the world around her better just by being in it. Her kindness and heart were unmatched, and she had an innate ability to make those she met feel seen, heard, and valued. She had such a bright future ahead of her, and she should be here now living out her dreams."
The family also expressed disbelief she'd been gone for so long, noting it had been three decades of "pure anguish and torture dealing with the loss of our Jodi and trying to find answers to what happened to her 30 years ago today."
But so far, the truth has remained out of reach.
"They use that word closure a lot," Merbach, the news director who hired Huisentruit, told Omaha's WOWT-TV in 2015. "For Jodi's family, I don't think there's any such thing after having a wound fester for 20 years—how do you close that up immediately? Where I work in Mason City now—from my office—I can see the tree that we planted for Jodi. It's a reminder for me every day of what happened 20 years ago. It's still very close. It's still very fresh."
Also outside the station paying tribute to Huisentruit: A stone marker engraved with a golf ball and a TV camera.
(Originally published Dec. 22, 2018, at 3 a.m. PT)
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