It was the strangest disappearance in the history of the city. It frightened the public, embarrassed the politicians, baffled the best investigators. And it left the young woman's loved ones broken-hearted. Police and FBI agents always held to their initial hunch, that Little had been kidnapped and murdered. But they never found a body, never focused on a strong suspect, and most vexing of all, never came up with a coherent theory of what had happened.
Conspiracies normally follow a pattern, and so do crimes of opportunity and crimes of passion.
But the Little disappearance seemed to defy such rules of logic. It was in a class by itself. Back in the mid-1960s, some of the legendary masters of the whodunit were still writing best sellers. There is no evidence that anyone ever brought the Little case to the attention of Agatha Christie, or Rex Stout, or John Dickson Carr. But if any of these writers had heard of it, one can only guess that they would have been tempted to turn it into a novel.