It’s been 30 years since Jodi Huisentruit vanished in the early morning darkness, never to be seen or heard from again.

Running late to her shift at KIMT-TV in Mason City, Iowa, on June 27, 1995, the 27-year-old anchor was abducted from the parking lot of her apartment complex sometime after 4 a.m.

The questions of who took Huisentruit and why continue to haunt her loved ones. Unfortunately, answers seem no closer today than they did three decades ago, with law enforcement’s search at a seeming dead end.

Leads have been scarce, and no arrests have ever been made. Huisentruit was declared legally dead in May 2001.

The most recent development in the investigation occurred this April when an Iowa court partially unsealed a 2017 search warrant related to a long-standing person of interest, Huisentruit’s friend John Vansice, but the documents did not provide any new information.

For Huisentruit’s best friend, Tammy Baker, the years of silence have proved a heavy burden. She told the Daily Mail the weight of not knowing what happened to Huisentruit drove her, reluctantly, to seek comfort in the cosmic.

Months after her friend’s disappearance, the self-described paranormal skeptic turned to a psychic in the hopes of finding closure.

‘I was willing to try anything,’ said Baker. ‘I sent her a pair of earrings Jodi had given me, and we did a reading over the phone. I thought she was just going to say, “This might be what happened.” I didn’t realize she was a medium who claimed to communicate with the dead.’

What followed, Baker said, was an experience unlike anything she expected.

‘She said Jodi didn’t speak, but she was showing her things that I’d understand.’

The psychic told Baker she could see Huisentruit standing by a body of water, with dead trees rising from the surface, somewhere north of Mason City. There were apple trees nearby and a pumpkin patch.

Huisentruit, she said, was ‘under some things,’ but the setting was peaceful.

Baker, who no longer lives in the area, is unsure if any such place exists – but she wondered if the scene described could hold clues as to where Huisentruit’s remains might be found.

She has never told police about the psychic’s claims, but does have the notes from their conversation in storage.

‘She told me Jodi was happy,’ Baker added. ‘She also told me that Jodi was learning to bake bread, which is something she always wanted to do.’

Baker said she never believed in the supernatural and remained skeptical during the conversation – until they began relating a series of intimate details specific to the friends’ relationship.

Those left her shaken.

‘She mentioned Jodi laughing and holding out a neatly folded washcloth, which is just… you had to be there. Jodi always crumpled up her washcloths, and I’d tease her about it. It was one of those silly things. No one would know that.’

Another vision hit Baker even harder.

The psychic described Jodi holding up a pair of pajamas with a disapproving expression. Baker took the image to be a reference to a private joke they’d shared during a weekend trip away together.

‘On that trip, I forgot to bring a T-shirt or something to sleep in, so I just wore a pair of thong underwear,’ recounted Baker. ‘I woke up to Jodi looking at me, pointing at my bare butt, and she said, “That is not what I want to see first thing in the morning!” And we both laughed.

‘But the psychic told me, “she’s got a stern look on her face, she’s holding up a pair of pajamas as if they’re supposed to be for you.”

‘I’ve never told anyone else that story. But it was like Jodi was letting me know this was really her, and that she’s still there, teasing me… it really made me feel at peace.’

Baker spent the last two weekends of Huisentruit’s life by her side.

The pair, along with a group of friends, had spent the weekend before her disappearance in Iowa City, carousing and waterskiing on a boat owned by Vansice, then 49.

Vansice, a recent divorcee, lived close to Huisentruit and even named his boat The Jodi after her.

Nothing about Vancise seemed to be inappropriate during that trip, she said.

In fact, Baker said she never saw anything in Vansice’s behavior that gave her any cause for concern.

The only odd interaction she could recall came two weeks earlier, when the three were out drinking and an admirer who recognized Huisentruit from TV approached her to dance and was too ‘touchy-feely’ for Vansice’s liking.

‘The guy was being a little forward… so [Vansice] got a bit belligerent, but he wasn’t attacking the guy or screaming, he was just upset about how forward he was being,’ she said.

Insinuations would later be made that Vansice had unreciprocated romantic feelings for the much-younger Huisentruit.

Just before she vanished, Baker quizzed Huisentruit on the nature of her relationship with Vansice, asking her directly if they were more than just friends – Huisentruit promised nothing was going on. 

‘I asked him the same question,’ Baker said. ‘And he said he thought of her as a daughter, and he wanted to protect her.’

Baker and Huisentruit returned to Mason City on June 25, 1995.

The following day, Jodi participated in a charity tournament at a local golf club, along with her boss, Doug Merbach.

Merbach previously told the Daily Mail he saw her sparingly at the event. They were golfing in different groups and only spoke for 30 seconds.

Their brief conversation ended with Merbach telling Huisentruit, ‘See you in the morning.’

Other attendees of the event would later tell FindJodi.com that Huisentruit had complained of receiving ‘nasty’ and ‘naughty’ calls from an unknown creep.

She didn’t appear bothered, they said, brushing them off as an inconvenience, but shared she was planning to change her phone number the next day.

However, eight months earlier, Huisentruit called Mason City Police Department to report a man in a white pick-up truck following her as she made her way to work on Oct. 8, 1994.

Her family said she had been left so shaken up by the experience that she started taking self-defense classes and was briefly provided a police escort.

Huisentruit returned home from the golf club at 8 p.m.

She called a friend who lived out of state at 8:24 p.m., but the friend’s husband answered. He told police she sounded cheerful and appeared to be her normal self.

Her movements for the remainder of the evening are not clear.

The only notch in the timeline was offered by Vansice, who told police Huisentruit stopped by his home that evening to watch a video of a surprise 27th birthday party he’d thrown for her weeks earlier.

‘We watched the tape and we chuckled, we laughed, we giggled,’ Vansice told KIMT of the meeting in 1995.

Huisentruit’s final sign of life came at 4 a.m. the following morning, when her producer, Amy Kuns, called to let her know she’d overslept for work.

A drowsy-sounding Huisentruit apologized for her tardiness and told Kuns she’d be at the station within 15 minutes.

Huisentruit never arrived. 

During the roughly 30 seconds it would’ve taken her to walk from her apartment to where her car was parked, she was attacked by an unknown assailant.

Police were called to conduct a welfare check after Huisentruit still hadn’t turned up to work by 7:13 a.m.

Outside, they found Huisentruit’s new red Mazda Miata in the parking lot. Strewn around it were several of her personal items, including a bent car key, a hairdryer and a pair of red heels.

Muddied drag marks and a partial palm print left on the car door indicated signs of a struggle. Several neighbors told investigators they heard a scream around 4:30 a.m., but nobody dialed 911.

Another neighbor reported seeing a white Ford Econoline van parked in front of Huisentruit’s apartment, facing the street.

‘I can’t think of anybody who would want to hurt her,’ shared Baker.

‘But my gut feeling has always been that it was someone who had become obsessed by watching her on TV.’

As the last known person to have seen her alive, Vansice quickly emerged as a person of interest.

In the immediate aftermath of her disappearance, he spoke often with the media, sharing how he viewed Huisentruit as being ‘like a daughter’ to him.

In an interview with CBS’s 48 Hours, Vansice said he believed she was still alive but repeatedly referred to her in the past tense.

Vansice agreed to take a polygraph test regarding his involvement in her disappearance – he passed. He also voluntarily supplied DNA, fingerprints and palm prints.

Despite his cooperation, it appears police have never been able to conclusively rule him out as a suspect.

Vansice was subpoenaed to appear in front of a grand jury in Iowa in 2017, for reasons that have never been disclosed.

Around the same time, a search warrant was served on Vansice, demanding examination of GPS data on two of his vehicles – but that search came up empty.

Vansice left Mason City not long after Huisentruit’s disappearance, stopped taking interviews and relocated to the West Coast.

Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he died in December 2024 and maintained his innocence until the end.

Baker doesn’t believe Vansice was involved in Huisentruit’s disappearance.

Others who knew and loved her are torn over his viability as a suspect.

On Friday, loved ones will gather in Mason City to commemorate the sombre milestone of 30 years since she was last seen.

The website FindJodi.com has released a new video, 30 Seconds, in the hope of raising awareness about the case and generating fresh leads.

Huisentruit’s niece, Kirsten Nathe, previously told the Daily Mail she continues to cling to hope that one day the truth of what happened to her beloved aunt will be known, however painful it might be.

Until then, she issued a direct appeal to Huisentruit’s killer, pleading with them to end her family’s suffering and help bring her home.

‘You can’t move on,’ Nathe told the Mail. ‘It’s always an open question that’s eating at you and haunting you, so it’s been a defining part of my life.’

Speaking hopefully to the killer, she said, ‘We’ve existed in this nightmare for too long, so find compassion in your heart to help us find the peace that we and Jodi desperately need.’

In a statement, Mason City Police Chief Jeff Brinkley said he hasn’t given up hope of solving the case either.

‘We still believe that [a resolution] can happen and are working to that end, and hope to at some point provide an answer to the family,’ said Brinkley.