MELISSA "Missy" WITT - 19 yo (1994) - Fort Smith AR

A local cold case will get national attention today as “America’s Most Wanted,” airs an episode profiling a few of the show’s popular cases, an associate producer said.

About eight minutes of the hour-long show will be dedicated to examining the unsolved kidnapping and homicide of 19-year-old Melissa “Missy” Witt. She disappeared from a parking lot of a Fort Smith business on Dec. 1, 1994.

The episode is scheduled to air 8 p.m. on the Fox network, said Diana Nolan, an associate producer with “America’s Most Wanted.”

“This is kind of a look back at what the case was and we’re hoping that someone can come forward and give us those leads that we still haven’t received,” Nolan said.

She added that good tips came in when the show aired in November, but more tips are needed.

Witt, a college student, was abducted from the parking lot of Bowling World on Dec. 1, 1994, according to police.

She traveled to Bowling World to meet her mother, Mary Ann Witt, who bowled in a league there.

She never made it inside.

Someone found Witt’s car keys in the parking lot the night she disappeared and turned them in to the bowling alley. A small amount of blood was found
on the keys, according to police.

Three days later, Witt’s vehicle was found in the bowling alley’s parking lot.

Her body was discovered by a hunter about six weeks later on Jan. 13, 1995,
in a wooded area at Turner Bend in Franklin County. Authorities have
interviewed more than 300 potential suspects in the case.

The show is featuring four to six cases where John Walsh was on location during filming.

“This one John Walsh felt a special affinity to because he is the father of a murdered child and he really connected with Missy’s mother,” Nolan said. “He wanted to make sure that we keep the public eye focused on this case and hopefully get the tips that the cops need to solve it.”

Witt’s mother, Mary Ann Witt, 73, said in a phone interview on Friday that authorities have not learned anything new on the case because many of the leads that have come in are the same old “rumors” that floated around regarding Fort Coffee, Okla.

However, Mary Ann Witt still remains hopeful nearly 15 years after her daughter went missing.

“We just don’t know,” Mary Ann Witt said. “Maybe this time there will just be one that happens to be the one. I’m just hoping that something will break through.”

DNA collected in the Witt case was delivered last year to a Texas lab for further examination. The Fox network show teamed up with a lab at the University of North Texas to help get the evidence in the case into a DNA database.

So far, detectives have not received any promising results.

“They (lab officials) are just wanting to be as thorough as possible when they examine it,” Nolan said. “The DNA is so old and there are a variety of different samples. They are just wanting to really take care and examine it.”

Body Of Girl Found 15 Years Ago Today

Jan. 13, 2010

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 10:07 AM CST

Today marks the 15-year anniversary of the day local, state and federal authorities converged on a wooded area in the Ozark National Forest in the Turner Bend community of Franklin County where the body of a young female was discovered.

Melissa “Missy” Witt’s body was discovered on Jan. 13, 1995, — more than six weeks after she disappeared from the parking lot of Bowling World, 6100 S. 36th St., on Dec. 1, 1994.
Witt was a 19-year-old Westark Community College student when she disappeared from the parking lot. Her white 1995 Mitsubishi Mirage was located in the northwest corner of the parking lot on Dec. 3.

She had driven there Dec. 1 for dinner with her mother, who played in a bowling league.

The Arkansas State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Fort Smith Police Department have open cases on the abduction and homicide.

Dale Best, a retired major with the Arkansas State Police, recently said authorities received a call from Franklin County Sheriff Kenneth Ross on Jan. 13, 1995, and were told the body of a young female had been found by hunters in the area.

While he knew the possibility of finding Witt alive more than 48 hours after she disappeared was statistically low, Best, as other investigators did, hoped to find her alive and reunite her with her family and friends.

“We tried everything we could think of,” Best said.

Police contacted Russian authorities for satellite images of the bowling alley and the forest area where Witt was located, said Jay C. Rider, a retired captain with the Fort Smith Police Department.

Law enforcement officers figured Russia would have the images because Fort Chaffee was in close proximity and that would be an area they would have kept under surveillance.

There were satellite images, but not at the particular times for which law enforcement needed them, Rider said.

Video cameras set up at the site where Witt’s body was found captured images of people, vehicles and license plate numbers in the days following the discovery, Best said.

Interview after interview after interview. Several hundred leads exhausted.

“That case was really depressing because you want to resolve a case no matter what,” said Best, who still thinks about the case every few days. “Whoever did this is a creep. He’s a worthless S.O.B.”

As the years go by, the case has changed hands many times at the Fort Smith Police Department. Detective Tammy DeMier was assigned to Witt’s cold case several months ago.

“We still have leads,” DeMier said. “People will still call in kind of sporadically.”

She has followed up leads — most recently one of them leading her to Pine Bluff in the days after the case was profiled on “America’s Most Wanted.”

But again, nothing.

DeMier is spending every spare moment when she is not working new cases trying to gather everything on the Witt case and organize it in one place so that if there has been something overlooked, she will find it.

Evidence in the case has been analyzed at the Arkansas State Crime Lab, a North Texas University lab and the FBI. DeMier is gathering those reports to determine if anything else in the case can be analyzed.

Mary Ann Witt, 74, hopes that she will see her daughter’s killer brought to justice.

Not a day goes by that Witt doesn’t see someone who reminds her of her only child. It might be a show on television about missing persons or just random memories that pop up and cause tears to well up in her eyes.

“She will forever be alive in my heart,” said Witt.

Recently, Witt wrote down what she remembers most about her daughter.

She misses seeing her daughter with big curlers in her hair, talking excitedly on the telephone to a friend. Missy would call her mom from work and say, “Hi, mom, what’s for dinner?” She also misses their lunch dates on days when Missy would pick her up from work or after church on Sundays.

“She was a ray of sunshine from the day she was born,” said Mary Ann Witt. “I hurt every time I go to a mall because she loved to shop, and I still see things I would love to buy for her. Every beautiful day or (bit of) happiness I enjoy is tinged with an ache because my heart says she should be enjoying this.”

Mary Ann Witt believes if God assigned her daughter a job in heaven, it would most likely be as part of the greeting committee.

She would say, “Hello. My name is Melissa. Welcome to heaven,” Mary Ann Witt said.

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