MINNEAPOLIS — For the first time, video of missing news anchor Jodi Huisentruit’s last birthday party has been made public. It was featured throughout Oxygen’s “Up and Vanished,” about Huisentruit’s disappearance, which premiered Saturday.
The FBI and Mason City Police both declined to release the video to KARE 11 News, calling it evidence in an open investigation.
In “Up and Vanished,” a group of on-camera producers call retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente, whom they say “did his own investigation years ago and shared it with the Mason City Police Department.”
Clemente told the producers he and other renowned profilers John Douglas and James Fitzgerald watched the video, and noticed Jodi’s friend John Vansice.
“Every time Jodi would dance or spend time with another guy, John would have laser focus on Jodi and whoever she was talking to. He had a really evil look in his eyes like he was really pissed off,” Clemente said.
Clemente went on to add, “I actually put together a prosecutor report in which I build the case for John Vansice having committed this crime.”
Vansice was questioned several times by police but was never arrested and never charged.
Vansice has long said he showed Jodi the birthday party video at his house the night before she disappeared, potentially making him the last person to see her alive.
“If we’re saying John’s guilty just based off his facial expressions, that doesn’t cut mustard with me,” said LaDonna Woodford, who lives in the Twin Cities.
Woodford is Vansice’s alibi from the morning Jodi disappeared, and has been publicly defending him in recent years. She says she went for a walk with Vansice from 6:45 to 7:45 a.m., very shortly after Jodi disappeared.
The Up and Vanished show attacked Woodford’s story and timeline, which Woodford has told under oath to a grand jury.
“I haven't changed my story. The reason why, is I'm not lying,” Woodford said.
Woodford says programs that concentrate on Vansice don't us any closer to the truth.
“They weren't really doing something for the good of Jodi to find her,” Woodford said.
KARE 11 News reached out to John Vansice and his wife Jane, and they gave this statement: "Once the identities of the guilty parties are exposed from behind the veil of obscurity they are hiding behind, we will sit alongside Jodi's family at their sentencing."
