Mysterious Disappearance of TV News Anchor Jodi Huisentruit 30 Years Ago - Crime Week Continues | Ep. 1220

0:00Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

0:12Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show and Crime Week because nothing says Christmas like true crime. The disappearance of Iowa news anchor Jodi Hoosentrout has remained one of the nation's most haunting unsolved cases for more than 30 years. This happened just a few years before I got into news and I remember finding this whole thing just so awful, so chilling. She was just a couple of years older than I was, and she seemingly disappeared into thin air. In the early morning hours of June 27, 1995, think of where you were. I was graduating from law school, and she was making her name in news.

0:50She was running late for her early morning shift at KIMT-TV when she vanished from the parking lot of her apartment complex. Her belongings, left scattered near her car suggested an abduction. No other trace of her has ever been found. It's a case that has captivated the public and inspired many to continue following the tragic mystery even some 30 years later. There's an active Facebook page and community run by Jodi's family. It's facebook.com slash hope for the numeral for Jodi, J-O-D-I. There's a website, findjodi.com run by journalists who continue to continue to share her story. You can find information about the disappearance and leave tips.

1:35And another person who has spent years examining this case is private investigator Steve Ridge. He's a persistent voice pushing for answers and he joins me next. Let's be honest. America can still be a dangerous place and you cannot afford to wait for help when you need it. Sure, you could use a firearm, but in today's America, defending yourself with deadly force can have legal consequences. According to FBI data, 99.9 % of all altercations do not require lethal force. And that's exactly why so many are turning to Burna. Burna is proudly American, hand-assembled in Fort Wayne, Indiana. These less lethal self-defense launchers are trusted by hundreds of government agencies, law enforcement departments, and private security companies.

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2:57Thanks for having me. So tell us a little bit about Jodi, who she was. This happened to her when she was in Iowa, but where was she from? What was she like? Well, she was from Minnesota, but she had an incredible amount of natural talent that manifested itself in a relatively short period of time. She began as an intern in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she was for about a year. And then she returned to Alexandria, Minnesota to work at a local TV station there. And then eventually my company helped relocate her to Mason City, K-I-M-T, where we were coaching her on air ability and trying to eliminate some of that Minnesotan accent, if you will, to make her appeal broader.

3:47So what role were you in at the time? What, what, what? I'm sorry. What was your job at the time? OK, at that time, I was actually running Frank Maggett Associates, which was the largest media research and consulting firm in the United States. And I was with that company for 37 years. I knew of the case of Jody the whole time. But I until I semi retired, I was not in a position really to actively investigate this full time. So she sent the resume tape in. You saw the resume tape and decided, does this person have a future here? And the answer in Iowa was, yeah, this is a good place for her right now.

4:31Absolutely. And so her resume tape was very good for the limited amount of experience that she had. And I later came across that same resume tape when I was moving some materials. I still have it on the shelf over here. which I keep as a reminder. It's got her little business card on it, you know, with her name. And as you know, early in television, I mean, you do your own editing. I mean, you edit your own highlights. And so sure enough, I mean, she had edited that tape and I still had it when I began digging into the case. So I did share it with the Mason City Police Department and eventually the FBI and state police.

5:17So she's up and coming. She's young. She's making it. She's paying her dues, as most reporters do, going to the smaller markets, and you hope to work your way up. And she was doing well. She was the morning news anchor, 6 a.m. show. And one day she was supposed to go in for her early morning show, and she normally got to the newsroom around 3 a.m., which is standard for people who are doing the first thing in the morning, that shift. And she didn't she wasn't there by 4 a.m. And one of her colleagues called her apartment and she did answer. She was home. She had overslept. She's like, I'll be right there.

5:54And that, as far as we know, that other than her abductor, that was the last person to ever speak with Jody. That's right. That's exactly right. So what happened? She didn't show up in the newsroom. She said, I'll be right there. She leaves at 4 a.m. or she gets called at 4 a.m., but she doesn't show up. And then they sent somebody back to go check on her. And it wasn't until around seven, my understanding is that they got there. And that's when they found this chaotic scene outside of her apartment building. Well, that's right. I mean, obviously, this abduction happened about 430 and they really weren't on the scene until closer to 730.

6:29The fact of the matter is, I am now 100 percent convinced that Jodi actually had an overnight guest. And there's been a lot of speculation about that. and I don't want to cast any aspersions here because it was I think a very innocent invitation she lived on a up a high flight of stairs on a second floor and I'm certain that she was entertaining her guests with drinks would have been 10 you know after 10 o 'clock at night and I'm sure she simply offered the couch which she did have at the ready there for that gentleman to spend the night. And then I can quickly tell you that I believe what happened is her phone rang around four o 'clock and it awakened them both.

7:15I think she went into the restroom and after going to the bathroom, I think she got in the shower. I think the guest went in the bathroom and raised the toilet seat, which is the way it was left, used the toilet and headed down to the parking lot. So you think he used the toilet and then left because we there was evidence from the beginning that there were two wine glasses on her counter, like next to each other. And there was a fair amount of food in the apartment and the toilet seat was up. So there's been speculation over the years about whether there had been somebody staying overnight. But her bed was made.

7:53She could have just made her bed in the morning like many people do. Do we have a theory of who that was, Steve? Well, actually, I do. I think it's one of two people, neither of whom have taken a lie detector test and neither of whom, you know, have come clean. And there are some reasons why they might not want to have that information be known. But I think at this juncture, they have an obligation really to help solve this crime. because I think that what happened is they went down to the parking lot to, you know, scurry out of there. And by the way, when this individual got in their little sports car and drove out of the parking lot, they nearly hit an early morning jogger who reported the whole incident.

8:41And I think what happened was they went down to the parking lot and there was a gentleman waiting down there that exchanged words with this individual and told them basically to get the hell out of here and don't ever come back. And you think that individual is the one who took Jody. You're not you're not suggesting the person who hurt Jody is the person who was in her apartment. That's correct. I'm just more than certain of it. And I've confirmed this with so many angles and little minute distinction of information that I think it's so crystal clear now that I actually think, you know, if I could work with somebody like you, I think we could have a circumstantial case built and ready to go in short order.

9:25But that's not going to happen in Mesa City, Iowa. Wait, you have a circumstantial case that she had a man in the apartment that night or that you know who the killer is? That I know who the killer is. Yes. Oh, well, that's bigger than knowing who the man is. All right. Hold on, because we're definitely going to get to that. OK, did she she was dating, dating, seeing friends with John? Is it Van Syce? That's correct. John Van Sight was a very affable corn seed salesman, 22 years older than Jody, who moved to town. He owned a water ski boat. He loved to drink in the bars and celebrate and buy drinks for all Jody and her friends.

10:11And they met fairly early on after he was divorced and moved to town. And they hung out a lot together. And it was very innocent for the most part. I mean, Jody had no interest in him, really. And but she enjoyed being with him. He was fun. He was entertaining. And he bought all the drinks. The there's a documentary out about Jody's case on Hulu right now. It's called Her Last Broadcast, the abduction of Jody Husentroup. And they talk about John and how police did, of course, consider him as a possible person of interest when this thing first broke. Here's a little of that from the documentary in SOT 54.

10:58Detectives approach this man. His name is John Van Syce. It just throws out there that he has this videotape of a birthday party. And I know that the officers initially were confused. They wrote about this. What does that have to do with anything? one videotape. He says, I am friends with Jody and I was just with her last night watching a videotape. This is the first encounter we really had with anybody that knew Jody other than her own employees at work. But John Van Syce consistently denied involvement. He died last December and he took polygraph tests prior to his death, which I presume led nowhere because he was never arrested.

11:37Has he been ruled out? I mean, obviously he's deceased now, but was he ruled out? Well, he wasn't. Because he was in her life. He definitely seemed like he was into her. Here's a bit more on John from the documentary. Again, this is on Hulu and it's called Her Last Broadcast, The Abduction of Jodi Husentrout. John Van Syce has always been considered a person of interest in this case because she is like super close to John. She's been such a big part of my life here lately and she just makes me feel so good and feel great about things. That's Jodi. You can't help but love that woman. You just can't help but love her.

12:16I thought it was very odd and so did a lot of other people that he spent so much time with Jodi and he was so much older than her. Do you know, are you going to, are you prepared to reveal the identity of the man who was in her apartment overnight, the one who drove away in a sports car? Well, because it's two individuals, I think it's important that I not name either one of them, but they are both people who she knew very well, had gotten to know and had been friends with. So it would have been very logical and appropriate for them to have possibly had drinks in her apartment and then for him to be awakened suddenly at four o 'clock and then depart.

12:54So you're saying when you say because it's two individuals, do you mean two individuals who might have been there or what do you mean? I mean, it's one of two. OK, so pinpointing which one was there, while important, is less important. The fact that whichever one it was, when they descended those stairs and went into the parking lot, there was a gentleman waiting to confront her. And I'm quite confident that I know who that was. Who? Well, I had narrowed it down originally to four people, and then I had narrowed it to two people. And now I believe that I've eliminated that second person, but I'm not prepared to name names today.

13:42I'm sharing way more with you than has ever been shared publicly, but I'm very confident that I know who her abductor was at this point. If I give you four names, will you tell me whether it's one of them? Well, you can try. Okay. The four names I'm going to throw out there are John Vanceese, Tony Jackson, Christopher Revac, and Brad Miller-Burned. Yes, I can tell you that I would eliminate three of those for sure, But you are not listing some of the names that were in my final four. Only one, John Van Syce, was in my final four. So those other names, while interesting, and there's some reason for them to have been suspected, they were not involved.

14:38And Tony Jackson I know very well. I've been to see him in prison multiple times. I've been up and down, you know, through the whole thing. I'm convinced he was not, even though he's a three-time convicted rapist, he was not responsible for Jody's demise. Three-time convicted rapist who lived just two blocks away from Jody's apartment. No charges ever resulted against him, but obviously convicted rapist living two blocks away would have to be on the short list of people they'd look at. So you're saying you don't that was a dead lead. Tony Jackson went nowhere. This Christopher Ravak was charged with second degree murder in connection with the March 2007 killing.

15:24So two years later. Well, sorry, 12 years later of Renee Williams, a 36 year old mother of three. Ravak died by suicide in a Missouri jail cell in 2009, the day after he was charges were filed against him. and he had a girlfriend who once lived very close to Jody's apartment in a unit reportedly shared with John Van Cease. So this guy's got a girlfriend who lives right by Jody and he was charged with second degree murder of a 36 year old woman and then he killed himself when he got arrested. But you don't you don't think it's him? No, I pretty conclusively have ruled him out. All right. Now, the man you said you've you he was not on your list either.

16:10Is this Brad Miller burned? And the documentary on Hulu spends a fair amount of time on this guy. They talk to Brad's ex-wife, who's not a fan. And her name is Patty Niemeyer. And she called the cops on her ex-husband, Brad, whom she married in a mass ceremony at the Mall of America, which is never a good sign for a lasting marriage. and indeed their marriage didn't work. But here she is in a soundbite from the doc, Sot55. Red always talked about Jodi. He always would ask, what's she doing, where she's at? Why do you always care where she's at? That always bothered me, but I guess I was naive and I'm like, oh, it's nothing.

16:52When you look at these, what do you see? I see red and lumber. like that couldn't be a more perfect sketch that is that is she's sewing a composite sketch of the alleged perpetrator outside of jody's apartment that day to brad's ex-wife and she's saying it looks like brad but brad um he's revealed as a new person of interest in the documentary saying two different witnesses reported seeing a man acting quote strangely near her apartment complex in the early hours before her disappearance. And based on their descriptions, law enforcement created a composite sketch that does resemble him. He also reportedly owned a white Ford Econoline van, similar to the one witnesses say they saw near Jody's apartment building around the time she disappeared.

17:47That does dovetail with your own reporting that while maybe the person, the man who may have been in her apartment with her left in a small sports car, there was some sort of an interaction with a guy who was in the parking lot driving a van, a light-colored van. That's correct. And in fact, one other new nuance that I will share with you today is only recently, in recent days, I have interviewed at length a young woman who at the time was in her teens who lived in the apartment building adjacent to Jody's. And she and several of her apartment dwellers on the same hall heard a very loud noise, probably a scream, in the parking lot.

18:30And they came out into the hall and went to the end of the hall where a window overlooked the parking area. And they debated, based on the loud noise they heard, calling the police. And this was at 430. If they'd called the police, this thing would have been solved. They didn't. They went back to bed. And interestingly, this woman tells me that the following morning when she went out to retrieve her car, that her car was parked perpendicular directly across from Jody's car, and that a police officer on the scene told her in no uncertain terms that Jody put up a very good fight, that she was able to escape her attacker briefly, and weave between the vehicles that were parked in that lot, and it eventually was overcome and subdued.

19:25And that's different from the official story, right? Isn't the official story that she was grabbed and subdued immediately upon getting to her car? Yeah, that's what's been left out there, but I guess that's why you always keep digging. You know, Mason City is a town of 27 ,000 people. It's a small, you know, all-American town, you know, which, but it had a very, very dark underbelly, which was all the drug dealing, a lot of drug dealing of marijuana and cocaine. And eventually it was where Dustin Honkin, the one of two mass murderers who murdered victims in the area who had information on his drug dealing, He perfected meth so well that the government wasn't able to duplicate the high quality of that meth.

20:20And the government nicknamed it the rocket. So but do you think that the drug scene and crime scene had something to do with her abduction and presumed death? I don't directly, although I will say that I think there's one other mysterious component. And that is a very good friend of hers, Billy Pruin, a farmer who was, I believe he was murdered three months before she went missing. Originally, they said it was a suicide. Then they recharacterized it or reclassified it as undetermined. And I think the fact of the matter is it's pretty likely was a murder and it could have been drug related. So here's what I would say.

21:06I think there were people in the satellite or the orbit around Jody who were involved in drugs, and that's in no way to suggest that she was or had any interest. I mean, she, God love her, she loved her beer, and she could hold quite a bit, but I don't think that she was ever into drugs. In my experience, having known a lot of on-air people, if you are into drugs, it will come out sooner or later. It is very hard to maintain a drug addiction and be an on-air person. It's hard to do it with alcohol, too. So I don't know. There was absolutely not a hint of that in her case. So are you suggesting then that, well, let me ask it this way.

21:54Do you believe that her abductor knew her? Yes, absolutely. Yep. And she knew her abductor. Absolutely. And the two people that I had narrowed it down to both knew her as well. In fact, all four of them knew her. So without a doubt, the person who abducted her was somebody she knew well. So this wasn't a stalker type situation. Sadly, I've had this in my own life where a viewer develops a very bizarre and dangerous fixation with you and thinks you're in a romantic relationship when you're not, they can become obsessed. It can turn very dangerous. Then that was considered here, but you're saying that that was not, in your view, what happened here?

22:36Not a stranger, but I think just splitting hairs a little bit there, I do think it was somebody that was more than infatuated with her. I think this person genuinely was in love with her and would have liked to have made a life with her. It just wasn't in the cards. So that if that's the case, you're reporting that she was in her apartment with another man, someone other than this person the night before she was murdered, may provide a motive. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's I mean, to me, it's kind of an open and shut case. And I hate to say it that way. But you know, I've had seven years to work on this.

23:14I have 190 files behind me here on the case. I've interviewed now over a thousand people and every little piece, I mean, you know, this as an attorney and as a journalist, that every little piece of the puzzle can be kept and you keep trying to refit it and put it together. And eventually you get a mosaic that makes a lot of sense. And I mean, I feel like I have this thing so nailed that I don't know what else to do. I want to back up a little bit because, you know, the audience is still a little lost on exactly how this went down. You in the documentary, which we're going to rely on here because it was very interesting and had a lot of good evidence.

23:56They interviewed the Mason City police sergeant. Here's what he said. He's on in the documentary describing the timeline, the morning of her disappearance, just to set the scene. Let's take a listen to it. Stop 51. At 713 a.m., the Mason City police receives a phone call from KINT to do a welfare check on Jody. We immediately dispatched an officer.

24:19When the officer arrived, they found a lot of her belongings were scattered across the parking lot. The mirror on her Mazda Beata was bent backwards. They found the car keys laying on the ground and the door key was bent. They started to walk between the cars. They started noticing more things. Her hair dryer. There's an earring over here and there's some paperwork here and red high-heeled shoes. You can see drag marks. We've got a problem. Jody's been dragged out of here. Immediately, radio's first supervisor and additional units showed up, and a perimeter's then set. So they knew right away when they got there, which wasn't until after 7, that she'd been abducted.

24:57They could see that she'd been dragged. There were drag marks, which were showing on camera here. And then they went inside the apartment and found some of the things that you and I are discussing. Let me roll that and start 52. So not only were just wine glasses found there, there was other dishes found there. There was multiple plates, items of food. Things were fingerprinted and things were photographed. That was what you did. Everything was fingerprinted. DNA was just super brand new then and it was basically unheard of in local law enforcement. Those chemicals that the fingerprint dust is compiled of contain bacteria which kills DNA.

25:35There was some on those services like touch DNA. Fingerprint dust is not good for touch DNA. Do we still have items that we haven't fingerprinted? Yes, we do. Do we plan to send those in? Absolutely. So no DNA was the biggest headline out of that. Absolutely. Whatever may have been there has been destroyed by the fingerprint dust that they unleashed. Because it was 1995, they didn't have, as he said, DNA analysis was in its infancy. Um, so although it was out there, I mean, we had just watched the OJ Simpson trial, which relied heavily on DNA analysis. So I'm not sure exactly why things wouldn't have been preserved or would have been entirely spoiled.

26:15All right. So what do you glean? What do you think is the most important piece of data from the crime scene? Well, I think that they do have more items from the crime scene than they have revealed. I think they're intentionally withholding what that information is because they think it could be derivative in nature if someone were to come forward. I think I have a sense of what that possibly is, but I'm quite certain they have more than they disclosed. Unfortunately, when they examined that automobile, because her key was found bent, laying on the ground, and the car door was locked, they only processed the exterior of the car.

27:02And then they towed the car and gave it back to her family before anyone ever had a chance to go in and process the interior of the car, which might have had some evidence. I mean, to assume that no one had been in the car is just I mean, it just doesn't make sense that you wouldn't process the entire vehicle. But they didn't. But this being 2000 or 1995, there wouldn't have been a bunch of surveillance cameras on every store and apartment complex and gas station. It was just a different time. We used to have privacy. We used to be able to wander around without being on camera all the time. No, no, you know, ring cameras on doorbells.

27:46Like, was there anything of use that we know of that that may have caught somebody on camera? No, absolutely not. I mean, I think every angle has been looked at and there just isn't anything. People have said this was somebody really clever. I think this was somebody that was simply lucky because, you know, she was attacked at 430 in the morning. A lot of noise was made. There had already been loud voices between two males arguing. The police were almost called. I think it's sheer brazen luck that this individual got away with this abduction. Do you believe that the man who did this to her is still alive?