NEED TO KNOW
- A new docuseries streaming on Hulu takes a deeper look at the 1995 disappearance of local Iowa television news anchor Jodi Huisentruit
- Huisentruit has never been found, and her suspected abductor has never been identified
- The new three-part docuseries begins streaming July 15 on Hulu
It’s been more than 30 years since news anchor Jodi Huisentruit went missing on her way to work at an Iowa TV station. And as family members and former coworkers still search for answers, a new ABC News docuseries pegged to the anniversary of her suspected kidnapping provides a deeper look at what happened three decades ago in Mason City, Iowa.
PEOPLE has the exclusive first look at ABC News’ new series, Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit, which begins streaming July 15 on Hulu.
The three-part docuseries includes more than 20 new interviews with family members, detectives, witnesses, and friends of Huisentruit, who was 27 at the time she went missing. ABC News says in a press release the series also promises “never-before-seen material and new, groundbreaking information” about the case.
“An exploration of the power of persistence, public memory, and journalism, Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit breathes new life into one of the country’s most haunting unsolved mysteries,” the network says.
Huisentruit was on her way to work the morning of June 27, 1995, when she vanished. At first, according to the new docuseries, investigators didn’t immediately suspect foul play — until discovering evidence at the scene of her disappearance that showed she had been attacked.
“Things went from we’re just looking for somebody missing to we’re looking for somebody that was abducted,” a Mason City Police Department officer tells ABC News in the series’ trailer.
Authorities continued investigating Huisentruit’s disappearance for decades. A search warrant unsealed this past April revealed that investigators placed a GPS tracker on a friend’s car in 1999 and on the friend’s pickup truck in 2013, according to CBS News. The same friend — who later became a person of interest in Huisentruit’s disappearance but has never been charged with a crime — had been with the local TV news anchor the night before she vanished.
Investigators also caught a break in 2022, when an ABC 20/20 episode on Huisentruit’s disappearance led a witness to reach out to the Mason City Police Department and share information she kept secret for more than two decades, as the network highlights in the new trailer for its docuseries.
“My information just fit in there too much,” the witness shares in a clip from the new trailer. “You know that burning gut feeling that you get? I couldn’t let it go.”
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But despite the search, Huisentruit’s body was never discovered and her killer was never identified.
On the 30th anniversary of Huisentruit’s disappearance in late June, an online group dedicated to finding the truth about what happened to the television news anchor shared a statement demanding the person responsible come forward and explain what happened.
“[Thirty] years. It’s time,” the group Find Jodi said, according to CBS. “Don’t make Jodi Huisentruit’s family and friends wait another year for you to come forward. They need answers and justice.”
Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit, a three-part docuseries from ABC News Studios, premieres exclusively on Hulu on Tuesday, July 15.
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