Twenty-nine-year-old Mary Ann Plett was a real estate agent at Graham Realty Ltd. in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and was married with two children. On September 15th, 1971, she took a client out to look at acreage outside of Edmonton. The man was in his forties, had a low, rough voice, and gave his name as James Cooper; he told Mary Ann that he worked in Winnipeg but was interested in buying property around Edmonton.
Mary Ann Plett never returned from her appointment with James Cooper. Though the area of the prospective property was searched, no trace of her was found, and police had no luck locating the mysterious James Cooper either.
Two days after Mary Ann vanished, authorities found her abandoned vehicle in a used-car lot. It was locked, and inside officers found two small bloodstains and a crumpled wig that had belonged to Mary Ann. Of the woman herself, however, there was still no sign.
Searches for her had to be called off for the winter, though a hunter found her briefcase in the woods off a lumber road about a hundred miles from where she had disappeared. More of her things, including a hair curler, some of her real estate papers, and a can opener, were found stashed underneath a log about two and a half miles from where the briefcase was discovered.
Once the spring thaw began, the search started up again. On April 14th, two workers digging a drainage ditch found Mary Ann’s clothing discarded in the Fort Assiniboine area, and five days after that, her skull and several more of her bones were recovered by police dogs not far from the site where her briefcase had been dumped.
Because her body was skeletonized, an autopsy revealed nothing about her cause of death. Investigators interviewed several suspects, including a man who was believed to be connected to the murders of several other Alberta women. There was also speculation that Mary Ann had been the victim of a possible serial killer thought to be responsible for the slayings of seven hitchhikers.
The man who called himself James Cooper was, of course, also a person of interest, as he was the last known person to have seen Mary Ann Plett alive and very well might have killed her. This individual, unfortunately, has never been identified.
In a tragic coda to the case, Mary Ann’s husband Jake, who remarried after his first wife’s death, was killed in a plane crash along with his second wife in 1978.
The Mary Ann Plett case remains cold.
Crime Immemorial 