At Witt's End

She was nineteen years old. She was going to surprise her mother at a bowling alley. She never made it through the door.

On December 1, 1994, Melissa "Missy" Witt drove to Bowling World in Fort Smith, Arkansas, where her mother's bowling league was playing. In the parking lot, someone struck her, dragged her across the pavement, and put her in a car. A trail of blood marked where she had been. Her keys were on the ground. She was gone.

Forty-three days later, two trappers hunting in the Ozark National Forest found her naked body on a logging trail near a headstone-shaped rock, fifty miles from where she disappeared. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted. Her clothes, her shoes, her jewelry - and the Mickey Mouse watch she wore every day - had been taken by her killer. None of those items has ever been found.

At Witt's End tells the complete story of one of Arkansas's most haunting unsolved murders: who Missy Witt was, what happened on December 1, 1994, the forty-three-day search, the two main suspects (Charles Ray Vines, who died in 2019 with his DNA found near the body site; and a man named only in Missy's diary whose old roommate reported seeing her Mickey Mouse watch in his room after her death), the untested 1995 crime scene evidence revealed by the 2024 Hulu docuseries, and why - thirty years later - the case has never been closer to resolution.

If you have information, please contact the Fort Smith Police Department at (479) 709-5100 or whokilledmissywitt.com.

At Witt's End is Book 2 in the Ozark Crime series.