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In August of 1965, Mary Shotwell-Little seemed to have just about everything a young southern girl could want.  An attractive 25-year-old girl, she was getting married to Roy Little.  She had a good job working as a secretary at a bank in Atlanta, Georgia.  To top it off, she drove a new Mercury Comet.  From the outside, it looked like life was going just about as well as any young woman could hope for.

Six weeks after their wedding, Roy, a bank examiner, had to go out of town to attend training for his position.  While he was gone, on October 14th, Mary went grocery shopping after work and then to the Lennox Square Shopping Mall where she met a co-worker for dinner at the Piccadilly Cafeteria.  The Piccadilly was part of a restaurant chain primarily located in the south that catered to folks looking for good food at a fair price in a family atmosphere.  The two probably talked about the transition into married life and the bright future ahead, as well as whatever gossip might be taking place at the bank.

At around 8:00 PM, after saying goodbye to her friend, she walked out of the mall and headed to her Mercury Comet coupe.  She was never seen again.

When Mary didn’t show up for work, friends reported her to the police as being missing.  When contacted, the security guard at the mall initially told the police her Comet could not be found anywhere in the parking lot.  However, later when the police arrived to do a search for the car of their own, it was found in the same place she’d parked it the day before.  Oddly, they noted that the car had a layer of red dirt covering it, as though it had been driven down country roads getting covered in the dust it kicked up.

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Searching the interior of the Comet, the police discovered a stocking that had been cut with a knife and a pair of women’s underwear.  There were small amounts of blood on the undergarments, as well as other surfaces inside the Mercury coupe, along with the outside handle of the door.  Testing later proved the samples to be Mary’s blood.  Oddly, due to the relatively small amounts of blood discovered, local police quickly surmised that the crime scene may have been staged.  This was despite the fact that there was also a fingerprint in the blood on the steering wheel that could never be identified.

The deeper the police went into the investigation, the more odd the details they discovered became.  They discovered that Mary’s credit card had been used twice since she disappeared, both times in North Carolina, both times to purchase gas for the Comet.  When they interviewed employees where those purchases were made, in both cases they told police they remembered seeing a woman who matched May’s description and who appeared to have blood on her head and legs.  They recalled her being with two middle-aged men.  They seemed to be guiding her in what she could say.  It was never made clear why, in either case, did the clerks think the situation was strange enough to notify the police of the alarming situations they’d encountered.

Further complicating the investigation, police discovered that the license plates on the Mercury were not the ones registered to the car from Georgia; they were North Carolina plates that had been stolen from another car.  Investigators were led to the conclusion that Mary was abducted in the mall parking lot, driven some distance away by her captors, possibly sexually assaulted before being murdered, and her body dumped in some location that has never been discovered, even all these years later.  Then, the Mercury Comet was returned to the very same location she had parked it when meeting her friend for dinner.

In the nearly 60 years that have gone by since the beautiful girl went missing, theories have abounded as to what actually happened.  One of the stranger scenarios that was offered was that she was part of a lesbian sex scandal taking place at the same time in the bank where she worked.  Police discovered a series of strange phone calls she received in the weeks prior to her disappearance.  A coworker recalled hearing her tell someone on the phone that she was now a married woman and could no longer visit them.  Those leads never panned out into any substantial evidence.

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Around Fort Stockton, folks remember a woman showing up sometime in late 1965 or early 1966 that seemed to vaguely resemble Mary Shotwell-Little.  Some swear she had an apartment at the Alamo Arms and was seen being squired around on the arm of Franklin Danbury.  Others recall that the woman eventually ended up driving a 1966 Mercury Park Lane convertible around town.  “I remember it being blood red with a white interior,” Trixie tells anyone whoever asks.  “Wouldn’t be a damn bit surprised if Franklin didn’t buy her the damn thing.  It’d be just like him.”  That’s probably just jealousy talking.  No one ever purchased Trixie in return for her talents.  Or even dinner.

Gus, over at the ESSO station swears up and down, “She used to come in to fill-up once or twice a week.  I’d spend extra time working on her windshield, just to enjoy the view.  She was pretty as a Georgia peach, and had a smooth-as-honey Georgia accent to match.”  

No one doubts the recollections of either Trixie or Gus, though we all acknowledge they’re both prone to crawl up a tree to exaggerate things when they could just as easily stay on the ground and have a good story to tell.  Enough folks saw the pretty young thing to validate their observations.  Was it Mary Shotwell-Little, or just some other random wayward southern belle looking for love or to break the monotony in a new Mercury?  Franklin Danbury never talked about the women he squirred around town.  He was far too discreet for that.  And there were way too many of them to keep track of.

Was Mary the victim of untold violence at the hands of murderers that were never caught?  Or, tired of the slow pace of southern life in the sixties and disillusioned with married life already, did she stage her own disappearance in a case that will probably never be solved?

Lucinda would be the first to tell you she hopes it’s the former rather than the latter.  But then, she’s always been pulled in the direction of the heroine that gets her way, lives an unconventional life, and leaves behind more questions than answers.  And she’s always been partial to old Mercurys.  She loves the underdog.

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