She Vanished From A Shopping Plaza, Leaving Behind Her Broken Nails And Dinner Spilled On The Ground
On Christmas Eve in 2002, Mari Ann Fowler vanished from a shopping plaza in Port Allen, Louisiana. More than two decades later, her disappearance is still unsolved.
Investigators have long suspected that the serial killer Derrick Todd Lee was the culprit, but there has never been enough evidence to prove it.
Mari Ann Fowler was 65 years old when she disappeared. She was a former assistant superintendent with the Louisiana Department of Education.
She was known for being intelligent, warm, and kind. However, she faced difficulty in her personal life.
Her husband, Jerry Fowler, a former Louisiana Elections Commissioner, was serving a federal prison sentence in Texas for being involved in a bribery scandal. Mari Ann made regular trips to visit him.
On December 24, 2002, she headed out to see Jerry in prison. She planned to stop in Lake Charles to spend the night with family and then continue on to Texas the next day.
That evening, Mari Ann stopped at a Subway sandwich shop off the highway. She went inside to order her food and left the restaurant with her meal.
However, she never made it back to her vehicle. The employees inside the restaurant noticed that her car was still in the parking lot long after she had left with her order, so they decided to investigate.
When they stepped outside, they discovered Mari Ann’s purse on the ground. Most of the contents were scattered, along with her keys and several broken acrylic fingernails.
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Her food was also spilled across the asphalt. The scene suggested that a violent struggle had taken place, and Mari Ann had fought hard.
Surveillance footage from a nearby liquor store showed a dark-colored pickup truck parked next to Mari Ann’s car. A man was seen grabbing her before the truck drove off.
Mari Ann’s disappearance occurred during a time when a string of unsolved murders in South Louisiana gripped the region with fear.
Authorities suspected that Derrick Todd Lee, who became known as the Baton Rouge Serial Killer, was involved in Mari Ann’s abduction.
Lee was eventually convicted of murdering several women between 1998 and 2003. He usually targeted women who were alone and left their bodies in places where they would be found.
However, Mari Ann’s body was never located, which made her case an outlier. This prevented prosecutors from charging Lee with the crime.
There was plenty of circumstantial evidence that pointed toward Lee, such as he drove a maroon pickup truck and sold it days after police warned the public about a vehicle matching that description.
Additionally, his cell phone pinged near Port Allen right before Mari Ann was abducted, and a book of hers was found in the area.
Lee also had no alibi for Christmas Eve. He did not return home until sometime after four in the morning. No DNA was recovered from the scene, and authorities hit a dead end.
In 2004, Mari Ann was declared legally dead, and her loved ones held a memorial service for her in 2005.
In 2016, Derrick Todd Lee died of heart disease while awaiting execution. He never confessed to killing Mari Ann. To this day, her family still waits for answers.
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