Jodi Huisentruit grew up in Long Prairie, Minnesota, where she was a state champion golfer in high school, and after a degree from St. Cloud State and a spell as a flight attendant she worked her way through small-market television in Iowa and Minnesota. By the summer of 1995 she was 27 and the morning anchor at KIMT, the CBS station in Mason City, Iowa, a town of about 28,000. Her alarm-clock job meant being at the station before 4 am to present the early show. On June 27 she never arrived, and three decades of searching have not found her.
What happened
At about 4:10 that Tuesday morning her producer, noticing she was late, phoned her apartment. Huisentruit answered, said she had overslept and promised to be right there. She did not come. The producer anchored the show herself, further calls went unanswered, and shortly after 7 am station staff called the Mason City police.
Officers found the scene in the parking lot of her apartment building. Her red Mazda Miata, a car she was in the process of buying, sat in the lot. Scattered on the pavement around it were a pair of red high heels, a blow dryer, a can of hairspray and earrings, and her car key was bent. Investigators read the marks on the ground as signs that someone had seized her as she reached the car and dragged her away. A partial palm print was recovered at the scene, but it has never been matched to anyone. Neighbors told police they had heard a scream sometime between 4 and 5 am, and at least one said a white van had been idling in the lot around that time.
The investigation
Mason City police, later joined by the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, worked the case intensively, and over the years officers and private investigators have conducted more than a thousand interviews. Her family hired private detectives in the fall of 1995; the case appeared on America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries, and a televised meeting between her relatives and three psychics became the pilot for a series about psychic detectives. In May 1996 about a hundred volunteers walked the countryside of Cerro Gordo County, flagging anything suspicious for police to examine. Nothing of value turned up. Her family had her declared legally dead in 2001.
The case has also attracted distractions. In 2006 a woman told authorities she had watched Huisentruit being killed as a teenager, then admitted the story was false; she was convicted of filing a false report, which remains the only conviction connected to the case. In 2008 photocopies of Huisentruit’s private journal arrived anonymously at the local newspaper; the sender proved to be the wife of a retired police chief who had kept a copy, and the pages held nothing useful. Remains found anywhere in the region have repeatedly been checked against her and ruled out.
The explanations
Nobody seriously doubts that she was abducted; the open questions are by whom and where she was taken. Over the years police, reporters and private investigators have looked at a series of persons of interest, from people she knew to strangers with violent records, and documentaries have aired their own theories. Police have never named a suspect, and none of those individuals has been charged. In 2003 a group of journalists and retired officers set up FindJodi.com to keep the case public and collect tips, and it has remained the main clearinghouse for leads.
Where it stands
In 2024 Mason City investigators followed a tip to Winsted, Minnesota, and searched land there; they returned in November 2025 to check ground that had been inaccessible on the first visit and found nothing of significance. In June 2025, on the thirtieth anniversary, Police Chief Jeff Brinkley said the department had never stopped pursuing leads and was confident the case would be solved. A Hulu series that July drew fresh attention, and a private investigator who had raised a reward for information leading to her remains to $100,000 said in June 2026 that he had passed his findings about a possible suspect to the state’s criminal investigators. No arrest has followed, and the case remains open with Mason City police and the Iowa DCI.