Tuesday marks 28th anniversary of abducted Iowa TV journalist

By Joe Vigil

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    LAS VEGAS, Nevada (KVVU) — FOX5 anchor and reporter Joe Vigil received a horrible phone call while working at a television station in Oklahoma in 1995. A friend of his in Iowa told him something “bad” happened to his friend Jodi Huisentruit. Twenty-eight years later, her abduction case remains unsolved.

Tuesday marks 28 years since someone abducted Huisentruit, a TV news journalist in Mason City, Iowa.

Huisentruit was running late for work on June 27, 1995, when a staff member called her. Huisentruit said she would be right in, but never made it to work. Someone abducted her as she walked to her car in her apartment complex parking lot. The case remains unsolved with no arrests in her death or disappearance. Huisentruit was declared deceased in 2001.

After being created in 2004, the volunteer group findjodi.com continues to search for answers to Huisentruit’s disappearance. The group has done extensive research about the case and talked to many people over the years, hoping to get answers about Jodi’s case and find her.

“The anniversary of Jodi’s disappearance is tough for the people that knew her and her family. Of course, the whole month of June with her birthday being in June as well,” said Scott Fuller, team member with findjodi.com.

Fuller and team member Caroline Lowe recently sent me an email, along with others who knew Huisentruit, reminding us of the anniversary and an event for her being held in Mason City on Tuesday.

“28 years later our role, I think, is just to remind people that the case is still open and it’s unsolved and someone has some information they need to come forward to police,” said Fuller.

Vigil went to college with Huisentruit at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota in the late 1980′s. He worked together with Huisentruit on news and entertainment shows through the school’s Mass Communications program. They spent hours shooting video, editing and writing stories about campus activities and events. Huisentruit was fun and funny, with a bright smile, but was also very serious about journalism and a journalist’s role to inform people. If our news and entertainment material wasn’t perfect, Huisentruit would insist they continue working until it was perfect.

After graduation they crossed paths in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the early 1990′s, while working for KGAN TV. Huisentruit worked for the station’s Iowa City bureau while Vigil worked in a bureau in Dubuque, Iowa, on the Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin border.

Fuller, Lowe and others who are searching for Huisentruit hope news coverage of the 28-year anniversary will bring some light to who Huisentruit was and what she meant to people who knew her.

The group also hopes the coverage will motivate someone to come forward with information on what happened to Huisentruit.

“Basically, what we say Joe this week over and over is, if you think you know something, just make sure that somebody knows,” said Fuller.

Fuller urges anyone with information about Jodi to contact the Mason City, Iowa Police Department, any law enforcement agency or findjodi.com

You can find contact information and read more about Jodi’s life at findjodi.com. There, you will also have access to several podcasts.

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