Nineteen-year-old Melissa Witt was abducted, then murdered on her way to an Arkansas bowling alley to surprise her mother in December 1994. Nearly 30 years later, her killer has still not been apprehended.
Investigators would find blood and signs of an apparent struggle in the Fort Smith Bowling World parking lot and in Witt’s abandoned car. A set of keys belonging to the teen had been left behind.
“She was running low on money, she was going to come out and have her mother buy her a hamburger,” JC Rider, a retired Fort Smith Police Department detective who was the lead investigator in the case, told THV11 in 2021.
“The trail led from the back of her car over to where the bad guy’s car was parked,” Rider said.
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Her naked body was discovered by trappers six weeks later, 50 miles away on a logging trail in the Ozark National Forest. She had been strangled and robbed of her shoes, clothing, jewelry and even her Mickey Mouse watch.
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Witt’s murder and the subsequent investigation into her disappearance — including never-before-seen interviews and footage — are the subject of the new Hulu docuseries “At Witt’s End – The Hunt for a Killer,” which debuted Tuesday.
“She was an ambassador to her college, which meant the college had her go and recruit students because they wanted students like her. You know, she worked after school. She was already a hard worker. She had big dreams for her life,” Charlene Shirk, a former reporter at KFSM-CBS who reported on Witt’s case, said in the documentary.
“You know, she went to meet her mom at bowling, at a bowling church league. It’s everything we’re told to do as young people, you know, get a good education, work hard, have a good close relationship with your parents, and be a good kid.”
Three decades later, the Fort Smith, Crawford County, Sebastian County and Van Buren police departments are still working alongside the FBI to find Witt’s killer.
The series also follows detectives as they investigate “a local serial killer’s reign of terror through a small-town Arkansas community before and after Melissa went missing,” according to a Hulu press release.
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Charles Ray Vines — known as the River Valley Killer — raped and stabbed two elderly women to death in nearby Arkansas counties in the 1990s, according to authorities, and was caught after attacking a 16-year-old girl in 2000. The girl’s stepfather tried to beat him to death after finding him in the midst of the attack, but was stopped by arriving sheriff’s deputies, according to KNWA.
FBI agents directed their investigation toward Vines as they tried to solve Witt’s case in 2019.
“There was a lady had emailed a detective,” FBI agent Rob Allen said in the documentary. “She worked with Charlie Vines’ mother, and Charlie Vines sometimes would show up to his mother’s work, and this witness reported that she saw him wearing a bowling league shirt of some sort.”
Vines even drew maps of the Ozark Mountain area, and had completed a work order within an 8-minute drive of where Witt’s body was discovered, police told the filmmakers.
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During their investigation, police used K9’s to reexamine the site where Witt was found — and uncovered a mattress cover and cigarette filter with Vines’ DNA at one location nearby. It was the same Cambridge-brand cigarette filter that was located where Witt’s body was found, Allen said.
But Vines, who died in September 2019, was ill and unconscious when those leads were discovered, and could not speak to detectives from multiple departments who tried to interview him, according to the documentary.
Vines isn’t the only lead in the teen’s mysterious killing. Author LaDonna Humphrey, who has written three books on the case and worked on her own documentary, “Uneven Ground: The Melissa Witt Story,” has her own theory.
Humphrey believes that a man with whom Witt had a romantic relationship and wrote about in her diary — who authorities have not named — killed her.
“It’s not somebody that was 10 years older than her,” Humphrey told Newsweek, also guessing that the unnamed man had a criminal history but is not currently behind bars.
Although her documentary went in a “different direction,” the author said, she told the outlet she is “really excited and hopeful” that the new release will “bring more eyes and more awareness to Melissa’s case.”
