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She Vanished Overnight: Who Killed Connie Ruddy?
The young military wife was killed 25 years ago, but her family still hopes for answers.
The loved ones of a young woman who disappeared in Iowa a quarter of a century ago have said they still hope to learn the truth about what happened to her and to be able to bury her remains properly.
Connie Marie Ruddy was last seen by her sister at her Ida Grove home on Saturday February 8th 1997. She was a housewife and had lived there with her husband Shad for around two years, although he was in the Army and stationed in Washington state. The couple are thought to have been going through a divorce at the time.
The couple also had two children: a two-year-old daughter and a three-month old son, to whom Connie was a loving and devoted mother.
Mysterious circumstances
Connie’s sister bade her goodbye at around 11:00 PM that Saturday night and nothing appeared to be amiss. The children were in bed and nothing that was reported gave her cause for concern.
However, when a friend of Connie’s stopped by the house on Monday morning (February 10th), the situation had changed considerably. The children were alone in the property and there was no sign of their mother. Her car was still there, as was her purse.
A search was immediately launched for the missing woman. Her family knew something was terribly wrong, as she would never have abandoned her children in that way.
However, there was no sign of Connie whatsoever. No one had any leads and there had been no sightings of the 21-year-old. It was as though she had vanished.
“We’ve got a big fat zero here. Most questions I have to respond with ‘I don’t know, I don’t know’,” said Ida County Sheriff Dave Jensen in an interview with the Sioux City Journal around a week after Connie went missing.
A sombre discovery
The case was cold by August 31st 1997, when a man went wandering along a sandbar in Crawford County on the lookout for fossils. However, what he found was far more disturbing: a human jawbone.
