In December of 1994, Melissa Witt disappeared from the Fort Smith Bowling World parking lot.
Reports show police found her vehicle and signs of a struggle. Six weeks after the beautiful 19-year-old disappeared, two trappers found her nude, lifeless body about sixty miles away near Turner Bend in the Ozark National Forest.
The 1994 murder remains unsolved but not for a lack of suspects.
Police questioned a man who had committed murder in the next town over, but he had a solid alibi. Another suspect had been posing as a police officer not far from the bowling alley, but he was also cleared.
Area sex offenders were looked at and ruled out, as well as a Texas man that was serving time on death row and has since been executed. The investigation has been exhaustive, but it remains unsolved.
Oddly enough, there is another case that is almost identical to Melissa Witt's abduction and murder: The case of Alana "Laney" Gwinner.
Laney Gwinner disappeared from Gilmore Bowling Lanes in Fairfield Ohio just after 12:30 am on Wednesday Dec. 10, 1997.
Earlier that day she had passed a college exam that guaranteed her an associates degree in business. She had much to celebrate and much to look forward to.
Life was good.
At approximately 12:35 am she telephoned her boyfriend who lived less than two miles from the Gilmore Bowling Lanes to say that she was on her way. She never arrived.
Laney, like Melissa, simply disappeared from the parking lot of a bowling alley.
No witnesses. No security cameras. Nothing.
The only difference was that Laney's black Honda Del Sol , license tag # AKP-3607, was nowhere to be found and has yet to be located.
Thirty one days later on January 11, 1998, Laney’s body surfaced in the Ohio River near Warsaw Kentucky nearly 60 miles from where she had disappeared. Laney had been strangled.
Investigators believe that Gwinner , like Witt, was most likely accosted in the bowling alley's parking lot, killed and put in her car, which was then rolled into the Ohio or Miami rivers from a slope or embankment. It is believed that Gwinner most likely rejected the advances of her killer.
It’s hard to say if the Witt and Gwinner cases are related, but the similarities in the cases are too numerous to ignore:
1) Young, beautiful women 2) College students 3) Abducted from a bowling alley parking lot 4) Abducted in the month of December 5) Lifeless bodies recovered 50 and 60 miles away from the abduction site in secluded/wooded areas. 6) Both women were strangled. (News reports state that Gwinner was strangled or suffocated).
Are these cases connected? Anything is possible – but I definitely believe it warrants further investigation.
If you have any information about the murder of Laney Gwinner, Melissa Witt, or information that could tie these two murders together, please contact us immediately at whokilledmissywitt@gmail.com
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