The Girl From Wahoo

0:10The murder of Mary Kay Hesse has been on the minds of the people of Wahoo, Nebraska for 56 years now.

0:22I remember being about nine years old out in the front yard. My mom came out and said, hey, get in this house right now. A girl in Wahoo has been murdered. And I remember that plain as day. It didn't happen that often in Nebraska. Murders were rare. Mary Kay Hesse was a 17-year-old high school student from Wahoo, Nebraska, who was a Killed by stabbing in 1969. The Mary Kay Hesse case is unique because of how many people have tried to solve it, and they just hit brick walls right and left. I'm Bob Frank. Back in 1999, I was a sergeant in charge of the Nebraska State Patrol Cold Case Unit.

1:15She was running. You could see the struggle. The blood on the ground and the footprint showed there was a struggle in this area. Her shoe and another spot of blood was found, and then her body. I'm hoping the integrity of the evidence is still there, as far as it's not too old to test, as far as DNA. We're hoping after 30 years we can pull a fingerprint off those books. The purse was found at the crime scene. This stuff has been in here for the last 30 years. Rabbit's foot with a key and a nail clipper on it. Better be dead sure than... ...thans sure dead. Kind of ironic, isn't it? With the makeup, the pencils, the handkerchiefs, the Kleenexes, just your normal 17-year-old's purse.

2:05I have one prime suspect. What I'll say right now is he knows who did it or he was there. I can't positively say he did it yet. What did you learn about what the connection was between him and Mary Kay? Through reports that we had, they were both at the Wigwam Cafe about the same time. How long did you end up working this case? We probably stayed on it for about a year. Did you think, well, I couldn't make any more headway here. it's never going to be solved. Well, it got to the point where working with a grant, we had X amount of funds to expend per case, and we had reached our maximum. It was one that I really wanted to solve for the community, but it just didn't turn out that way.

2:53My name is Ted Green, and I was the criminal investigator for the Saunders County Attorney's Office. Her body was found where, roughly? That's roughly right here. From here in the ditch. Yep, laying. Yep. When you're first assigned this case, did you think, well, I'm the guy. I'm going to solve this. I'm going to get the answer. No, but I don't let go. I won't give up. And I was putting this puzzle back together. What happened after more than 50 years in this case? The puzzle came together. You finally got a full puzzle with all the pieces in place.

3:38Natalie Morales reports, the girl from Wahoo.

3:46Mary Kay Hessey's unsolved murder hung over this community for five decades. It needed to be resolved. I look at this as the case where the community lost its innocence, where people were told, we're not going into Wahoo, you're not going out alone. Jennifer Jochum, Saunders County Attorney, and Richard Register, Deputy County Attorney, worked on what is believed to be the longest unsolved cold case in Nebraska history, the 1969 murder of 17-year-old Mary Kay Hesse, a high school junior. It was very well-known. A murder, especially of this nature, is not common for this area. This right here is what Wahoo is really known for, right?

4:42I mean, cow country, corn country. It hasn't changed much. Ted Green was the criminal investigator for the Saunders County Attorney's Office. He started working on the case in 2015. So this was the high school here. So on that day, she had just finished her. Walked home and she started walking north here on Linden Street. Memories of Mary Kay Hesse's murder loom large in this small town. This black and white footage was filmed by a local television station shortly after the murder. Much of Wahoo looks like it did on March 25, 1969, when Mary Kay Hesse never made it home after school. So the last place that she was seen was here on the corner.

5:37That evening, Mary Kay's parents reported her missing. and the community came out in force to search for her. So they had Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, church groups, school groups, and the Wahoo Police Department and Sheriff's Office all searching for her. Nothing was found until close to midnight when a farmer spotted Mary Kay's school books and purse stacked neatly on a road near his field. Inside the books was her name, and so he brought the books into Wahoo and ran into the police that were searching for her. They all went back to where the books were found, and they found her body lying in a ditch on the side of the road.

6:23Not far from Mary Kay's bloodied body, investigators discovered her shoes in the road, tire tracks from a car, and shoe prints potentially from the killer. And how had she died? Well, in a horrible way, she was chased down. The footprints, which were preserved by the ground freezing, showed that she got out of the vehicle and she ran, and you could tell by the strides that she was really trying to escape. And then near where her body's found, there's a pool of blood. She's laying there, discarded like trash. Investigators photographed the scene, measured and made a cast of that shoe print, and sent Mary Kay's body for an autopsy.

7:09It was determined that Mary Kay had been beaten and was stabbed to death, leaving 14 wounds. No knife was found at the scene. She has a pretty good mark on her jaw where she was punched, and the stab wounds come after that. Stabbing somebody 14 times, though, what did that tell you about the nature of the crime? Rage. Rage. Was she sexually assaulted? No. No. But I believe she understood that's probably where it was going to head. The investigation was initially handled by various law enforcement departments. Mary Kay's clothing was sent to the FBI, to J. Edgar Hoover's attention, before the days of DNA testing, to see if anything could be learned.

8:01Investigators questioned people around town about the day of the murder. A witness reported seeing Mary Kay that day at around 5 p.m. getting into a car that had two men at that street corner. In those early days and weeks, did you think, oh, they're going to find whoever did this? Oh, yeah. Mark Miller and Kathy Toll are Mary Kay's cousins. These are some of Mary Kay's personal belongings, right? This is her 4-H. Was she proud of what she did at the 4-H? Look how tiny she was. Kathy was 9 and Mark 8 when they learned Mary Kay had been murdered. She's the oldest of those cousins, so she always looked out for all of us.

8:46She was a 17-year-old girl full of life. Kathy recalls being picked up early from school the day Mary Kay's body was found. And they told us we had to come to Wallyville. Kathy's family drove to her cousin's home. When they got there, Kathy saw and heard Mary Kay's mom, Dorothy. When we went in, it was just, you could hear her wailing. It's the kind of pain you feel across the room. And at the time, did they tell you how she was found, or was that too much to tell the cousins, the kids? I think we heard it. When they told us then, it was on the news. The family and the community could not understand why Mary Kay had been targeted.

9:34There were no answers, just fear. And I remember thinking, I'm scared. Everything changed. What our parents allowed us to go do. You didn't have the freedoms that you had before. We lost so many different things because of it. Our parents wanting to overprotect us. But being overprotective did not ensure safety. Mary Kay's parents, especially her father, had always been very watchful and careful with their daughter. She had a very strict father, and she was shy. She very much wanted to fit in. And there was a group of girls that would put makeup on her at the beginning of the day and change her clothes out so she would fit in socially.

10:23And then at the end of the school, she changed back. She wanted to be a part of the crowd. Mary Kay was trying to participate in school activities, practicing baton twirling, hoping to be a majorette. Part of fitting in for Mary Kay also involved trying to get a date for an upcoming school dance. Mary Kay had even written this letter to another cousin, asking him to be her date. When you go to the Sadie Hawkins dance with me, I just wanted a date. And so she would take her cousin. This was March 18th, 1969, so just a week before she died. Investigators thought that perhaps the pressure to find a date and fit in led the usually shy Mary Kay to get into that car with the men at that street corner.

11:15I think she was so naive she had no clue that something bad could happen to her. She just wanted to get a boy to go to the dance with her. And unfortunately, the dance she went to was her dad.

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12:18Ted Green, formerly the investigator for the Saunders County Attorney's Office, believes the two men who picked up 17-year-old Mary Kay Hessey on March 25, 1969, were driving here to an area known locally as The Grove. Natural parking and party spot. So kids coming down this way, there were two things in mind, either partying or hooking up? Or hooking up. Those are the two things on everybody's mind. Green's theory of the crime is that when Mary Kay realized the men's intentions, she fled the car and one of the men ran after her, eventually stabbing her to death. But people who knew Mary Kay wondered why she got in the car with the two men.

13:05She wouldn't get into a car with somebody that she didn't know. She knew these guys. Working that theory, investigators in 1969 questioned males in town, especially ones who could have crossed paths with Mary Kay. They used what was then a brand new crime-solving tool, polygraphs. They polygraphed virtually the entire male population of both the schools. I mean, can you imagine the uproar would happen today? And they were looking for that as their silver bullet. One of the people polygraphed and questioned a few days after the murder was this man, Joseph Ambrose, 22 years old at the time. Ambrose had been seen weeks before the murder talking to Mary Kay around town.

13:52They both frequented this restaurant, the Wigwam Cafe, which still stands today. Ambrose stood out as he was new to town. Investigators learned he was on parole after having been convicted of forgery and escaping from custody. He wrote a$10 bad check with his buddy up in Wayne, Nebraska. They get stopped for that and they escape this little county jail up there and they catch up in California and bring him all the way back. Ambrose served about three years and then moved to Wahoo. And he's out on parole. He's got a job. He's working at a packing plant. So a slaughterhouse. Yeah, slaughterhouse.

14:39And she knew him. Authorities say they learned that Ambrose was known to mingle with high school girls and had a reputation for having a temper. He also drove the type of car, similar to this one, that someone said they saw near the crime scene. A local resident had seen two cars leave that night. One car was a white-over-red 56 Chevy. The second car was a white-over-blue 56 Chevy with two dark-haired males in it driving at a high rate of speed. Ambrose drove that white-over-blue. He's a person of interest. Ambrose denied any involvement in the murder, and his polygraph seemed to support that.

15:27Ambrose said he had an alibi, that the night of the murder, he was hanging out at various locations with his friend Wayne Greaser, who was also questioned and polygraphed. Wayne Greaser was just that wannabe kid who was just following around Ambrose. And so he says he's with him. But while being questioned, Ambrose did speak about things, says Ted Green, that got him in trouble with the law, and he was immediately sent to jail. He blows his parole right in the pre-polygraph interview. He violates. It says, I'm buying booze for minors. I'm having sex with minors. So he's booked parole violation.

16:07But not for Mary Kay's murder. Why did this case not move along further at the time? That's a very good question. Follow-up in the initial investigation, prosecutors say, seemed to be lacking, with an experience a factor. Cars were not checked for blood, and suspect's shoe sizes were not compared to the shoe prints found at the scene. This was the beginning of the state patrol, because before that they just gave tickets for speeding, and so these people were thrown into this new investigative unit. There were other agencies involved, and it didn't seem like there was really a lead investigator.

16:47And they were just relying on those polygraphs. For decades, the case sat cold. After seeing the pictures and going through the case, you can visualize it. I mean, everything's the same. After 30 years, it's all the same. Nothing has changed. Then, 30 years later, in 1999, with the creation of the Nebraska State Patrol Cold Case Unit, Mary Kay's murder was getting attention again. and 48 Hours cameras followed Sergeant Bob Frank as he worked the case. Her body was found right in here, and that's where we're at, right here. And we spoke with Frank again in 2025, now retired from the state patrol.

17:32One thing about doing cold cases you find is that stories grow, stories change. And so, you know, trying to separate truth from fiction is sometimes difficult. To try to get to the truth, Frank, in 1999, scoured the old case reports. He noticed that Joseph Ambrose and Wayne Greaser, the men who were each other's alibis, kept coming up in witness statements. I started talking to other people who had been told by these two individuals that they had done this homicide. Greaser had died by suicide in 1977. Ambrose was long out of jail, having served a year and a half for that parole violation after Mary Kay's murder.

18:19He had moved around and worked as a truck driver. Bob Frank knew at some point he would want to talk to Ambrose, but first wanted to take a new look at the old evidence.

18:34In 99 now, are you hoping you're going to get some sort of DNA? Something.

18:54So here's the evidence bag. By 1999, when Sergeant Bob Frank led the Nebraska State Patrol's Cold Case Unit, advances had been made in forensic science that were not available in 1969, when Mary Kay Hessey was murdered. 48 Hours cameras filmed Frank going through Mary Kay's belongings as he looked for DNA and fingerprints. Among the items tested were Mary Kay's school books, found stacked at the scene. We're hoping for prints to come off. It's been 30 years. The theory was that Mary Kay left the books and her purse in the car. The killer noticed the items and, not wanting to be linked to her belongings, dumped them.

19:39So we know it was probably the suspect that put those books on the road. What we were looking for there was any type of fingerprint evidence. A fingerprint examiner worked to find and lift prints off the school books, including one titled, Building a Successful Marriage. Were there any fingerprints that came forward? No. That's what we really had him concentrate on were these gloves. She was wearing these at the time, wasn't she? We were looking for somebody else's blood on those gloves. They also tested Mary Kay's clothing. These clothes were cut off at the autopsy. When I see this, it just motivates me more.

20:20I mean, it's something you want to solve. It's something you want to get closure on. I tell you the truth, when I put this out and laid it out, the first thing I thought of was Mrs. Hesse. Frank spoke several times with Mary Kay's mother, Dorothy, over the course of his investigation. That's when she started the high school. 48 Hours spoke with her as well in 1999. I don't think it'll be solved. I really don't. It's gone all these many years, and I've just given up hope. Hope would be diminished again when the forensic testing led nowhere. Still, Joseph Ambrose and Wayne Greaser remained at the top of Frank's suspect list.

21:03In May 1999, Frank decided to question people who knew Ambrose and Greaser around the time of the murder that had been named in prior police reports. That's why I want two guys in there, so one guy can really watch how these guys are reacting to the questions being asked them. The thought was the passage of time might make someone more forthcoming, and the investigators took several steps to try to help that along. We created an atmosphere to where it appeared we were a full-fledged task force looking at this case. If he's giving you a hard time. In fact, there was no designated HESI task force, nor was it getting hot.

21:45It was just one of the measures taken by Frank and his team as they tried to see if anyone would give new information. I wrote their names down on the board and some numbers behind those names, which don't really have any relevancy either. investigator Jay Peterson. But it's just going to get them to thinking that we know a heck of a lot more about them than perhaps we actually do. They also tried to make the setting a bit uncomfortable for those being interviewed. Did you grease the table down too? Yeah. What we did was we took a bottle of furniture polish, we waxed the table, we waxed these chairs, so when they sit down they're not going to be able to get into a comfort zone.

22:24So keep them on edge a little bit and And hopefully that'll get him talking a little bit too. We put electronic devices in to record in the room. We let these people know when we brought them in that they were going to be monitored constantly. But despite all those efforts, nothing usable was learned. We had people telling us that Wayne Greaser told us this. Joe Ambrose told us this, but it was all hearsay evidence. We didn't have that witness that was there or knew the facts directly. So Frank decided it was time to interview Joseph Ambrose himself. We will just go see what we can get by knocking on the door.

23:04Let's do it. In September 1999, Frank traveled to Orange Park, Florida, where Ambrose was living. Working with local law enforcement, Frank went to Ambrose's home, where he answered the door. You Mr. Ambrose? Yes, sir. And willingly went to be questioned at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Recall for me what you did that night. I mean, you've been questioned about it before. No. So tell me what you did. Ambrose said on the day of the murder, he got off work around 5.30, went home, and then went to a club until closing time. Unlike his previous interview, where his now-deceased friend Wayne Greaser was his alibi, he did not mention being with Greaser.

23:50But you had said in interview reports, and I have those interview reports, that you were with Wayne. It's possible. It's been a long time. It's possible. I was with him. Frank also asked many questions about Ambrose's job at a slaughterhouse. I worked on a kill floor. Kill floor? Yeah. Since Mary Kay was stabbed to death, Ambrose was asked about his access to knives. Was there a special type of instrument you had to use for that, or was it just a regular knife? No, I had, I think, like three different knives. Ambrose was adamant he had nothing to do with Mary Kay's murder, even when Frank implied they found someone's DNA at the scene.

24:30We have a wonderful thing called DNA and we're gonna be able to show who she struggled with.

24:39Again, you know, we have all this little bits of information here and there that fit together that you were there. Not necessarily that you did it, but that you were there when it happened. Okay? Well, that's yet to be proven. I mean, I wasn't there. Like I said, I had nothing to do with it. And you're free to take blood, anything you want. Despite Ambrose's cooperation, Frank found several things suspicious, like Ambrose's explanation for giving different versions of where he was at the time of the murder. Well, I don't remember everything. The reports here indicate a size 9 1⁄2 shoe at the scene.

25:15And there was that shoe print found at the scene, which was the same size that Ambrose wears. You got a nine and a half shoe. Okay, another coincidence. Okay. Frank also asked Ambrose about a report from 1972 before Wayne Greaser died in which a friend of Greaser informed authorities Greaser had confessed to him that he and Ambrose drove Mary Kay to the field and that it was Ambrose who killed her. When Frank brought it up, Ambrose got agitated. I had nothing to do with it. I don't know what Grisha was saying, and that's all I got to say. After the interview, Ambrose gave his blood for DNA testing and submitted to another polygraph.

25:57Nothing incriminating was found at his house, and his DNA did not match any found on Mary Kay's items. We presented what we had to the county attorney at the time, and he just felt there was not enough to even take it forward. In 2000, Frank stopped working the case, but held out hope that one day something would be found. We needed something to drive this case forward.

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