A new person of interest has been revealed in the baffling cold case of Iowa news anchor Jodi Huisentruit, who vanished from her home on a summer morning over 30 years ago.
Brad Millerbernd, the ex-husband of Huisentruit’s childhood best friend Patty Niemeyer, was investigated by Iowa police after tips came in suggesting he might be connected to the 1995 suspected abduction, according to the Daily Mail.
Millerbernd lived about three hours away from Huisentruit’s Mason City apartment when she vanished, and his ex-wife told filmmakers in a newly released documentary that he perfectly matched never-before-seen police suspect sketches.
“I see Brad Millerbernd,” Niemeyer said in the ABC News documentary, “Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit.” “That is him to a T.”
Millerbernd has denied any involvement in the suspected abduction, and been “very cooperative” with investigators, the documentary noted.
Huisentruit was 27 years old when she called into work around 4 a.m. on June 27, 1995, to say she was running late.
But by 6 a.m. she never showed up and the morning’s broadcast went ahead without her. When she still hadn’t been heard from hours later, police went to her apartment and found signs of a struggle strewn across the parking lot.
Her car keys were found bent on the ground near her car, while a blow dryer, a high-heel shoe and hair spray were lying abandoned nearby, according to PEOPLE.
“Things went from we’re just looking for somebody missing to we’re looking for somebody that was abducted,” an officer from the Mason City Police Department said in the documentary.
But those searches proved fruitless, and aside from a palm print found on a light pole in the parking lot, little to no evidence left by the perp was ever recovered.
By 2001 Huisentruit hadn’t been found, and she was officially declared dead. And three decades after she vanished, no sign of her has turned up — and no suspects have ever been named.
But on the 10 year anniversary of Huisentruit’s disappearance, Niemeyer told filmmakers that her ex-husband called her after years without contact to say “Do you realize what day it is?”
The call “freaked” her out, and she was left with a sinking feeling her ex could be behind the disappearance.
“You know that burning gut feeling that you get? I couldn’t let it go,” she said.
Millerbernd and Niemeyer divorced in June 1994 — just four days before Huisentruit went missing, a detail investigators said was compelling in the documentary.
And Niemeyer recalled that Millerbernd seemed to be fixated on the young reporter during their marriage, often bringing her up and asking what she was doing.
“That always bothered me,” she said, but explained that she told herself “Oh, it’s nothing.”
But in 2017 she called police to report her suspicions, and after she followed up several years later police reached out to Millerbernd for questioning.
They learned that Millerbernd had dinner with Huisentruit the fall before she vanished — and that he called her weeks before the abduction.
“Coincidences happen,” MCPD Detective Terrance Prochaska said in the documentary, “But this one, there’s a lot stacked up in June for sure.”
Millerbernd also drove a white van similar to one witnesses said they saw lurking around Huisentruit’s apartment the morning she disappeared.
Nevertheless, Millerbernd was never named a suspect and he has denied any connection to Huisentruit’s abduction.
Police also noted he was “very cooperative” — despite appearing “shaken” and “dazed” at points during the questioning — and even agreed to provide DNA samples and take a polygraph test.
The only other prominent person of interest in the disappearance was John Vansice, a friend of Huisentruit who had been hanging out with her at her apartment the night before.
He also denied any involvement in her death.
“Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit” premiers on Hulu on July 15.
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