My Sunday, July 10, column in The Gazette deals with a new book about the disappearance of Jodi Huisentruit, the former KIMT morning anchorwoman who disappeared during the early morning hours of June 27, 1995, when she would have been going to work. Huisentruit was a KGAN-CBS2 television reporter in Iowa City in the earlier 1990s.

The book is “Dead Air”, written by former television anchorwoman Beth Bednar. Bednar is a Minneapolis seminar trainer and professional speaker who formerly was an anchorwoman at KAAL television in Austin, Minn.

Her book explores the many questions whose answers may shed light on Huisentruit's assumed death at the age of 27. Huisentruit was declared legally dead in 2001 after years of investigation into what happened to her. Sadly, too many questions remain unanswered, which Bednar admits in the book. Bednar is up front about presenting equal parts fact and speculation.

KIMT and KAAL are in the same television market. Bednar spent a few years as a weather announcer at KAAL before becoming a well-respected news anchorwoman at the station.

I was interested in Bednar's book for a several reasons, which I state in my newspaper column: I knew Huisentruit when she worked in Iowa City for KGAN and I was a Gazette bureau chief there. I covered more than a dozen murder stories while a reporter but Huisentruit is the only murder victim I've known personally.

Also, I worked with Bednar in the late 1970s at the Austin television station and wanted to see what a friend from so far back had written.

The most interesting part of the book for me is when Bednar zeroes in on people known to have been destructive in Huisentruit's life, and Bednar's chilling recounting of known events from the morning Huisentruit disappeared. Some of the book's speculation left me unsettled, though, as I was more interested in answers. But answers in this case are elusive.

Here are some links for more about Huisentruit's disappearance, and cold cases in general:

Closing the book on cold cases (Gazette columnist Jennifer Hemmingsen about Eastern Iowa cold cases in general)