There is absolutely nothing that can convince me the story wasn’t written based on my own true adventure in 1965. I had told it many times and Daddy, at the City Barber Shop, had at least two customers who were connected to Hollywood and Nashville’s Music Row.
It was big news for a long time that on October 14, 1965, Atlanta’s Mary Shotwell Little disappeared from Lenox Square, and to this day, this case has remained unsolved.*
A little while passed and this story was still “hot” so two of my best buds, Lynn and Loretta, and I made up our minds that we were going to help with the search. And we were absolutely convinced we would find her.
Since our neighborhood had only recently been built, there were still a lot of woods behind Loretta’s house (across the street from mine) stretching to I-20 and the Fairburn Road exit. (In those days, I-20 ended at the next exit which was at Hwy 5.)
We took sandwiches, water-filled Batman canteens and other things we thought we might need for the trek. It was a long, sometimes not fun day, but still, it was an adventure.
We did find something oddly out of place that I reported to my family at the dinner table that night: recently discarded, very white, clean ladies slip and panties.
Since nothing came of it and the story became old News that Miss Shotwell had not been found, we forgot about that day for many years. Well, I can’t say we forgot about it; we just didn’t talk about it anymore.
Mother and Daddy were fairly protective of us kids, and one way was they didn’t tell us things they thought would make us worry or be scared. I didn’t know until I was an adult that Daddy had reported this information to the Sheriff’s Department. When they failed to respond, he even called them a second time and asked if they were going to investigate what we found in the woods close to our house. After the second call with no response, he dropped it.
I can’t help but wonder what might have happened in this Cold Case had they done their job and investigated.
* I just confirmed via Google that the Mary Shotwell Little case is still an open case for the Atlanta Police Department. There are many stories that try to contradict this, but the official record is still that this is an open Cold Case. Click here for a 2023 article about it.
