Earlier this year, the Mason County Sheriff’s Office announced they were tracking down new leads in the 1993 killing of Scottville teen Melissa Simmons.
She was last seen alive in June of 1993.
“Scottville is an area where the kids walk to school every day,” Mason County Sheriff Kim Cole said. “It is Norman Rockwell’s America. To have a 15-year-old girl just go missing and then be found murdered, days later. It’s everything that is wrong in our country. When you put it into a small community, it just amplifies it, because those things aren’t supposed to happen here, and they’re not supposed to happen in Scottville, Michigan.”
For 32 years, a mystery has hung over the tiny Mason County community of Scottville.
It was June of 1993 when 15-year-old Melissa Simmons was last seen walking to the town’s Wesco gas station.
Her father, Al, recalled what happened next in a 2009 interview with 9&10 News.
“We figured she was staying overnight at a friend’s house or whoever, but it didn’t happen that way,” Al said.
Melissa’s body was found several days later in the Pere Marquette River, not far from the Indian Bridge.
Detectives have worked ever since to try and find who may have killed Melissa.
Recently, Mason County Sheriff Kim Cole asked two new investigators to look at the case and it didn’t take them long to find something that pointed them towards new leads.
“It was a sample of clothing that was taken that the detectives thought, you know, maybe we should send this in and at least have it looked at and see if there isn’t something more there. And it appeared that there was. And since then, we’ve had a couple other labs reach out and say, you know, we would like to look at this and see if we can’t do, a, like a family history off that, see if we can’t develop a family history,” explained Cole.
The decision was also made to exhume Melissa’s body.
“That was a decision that was not taken lightly. And we didn’t do anything without Melissa’s family approving it and being on board with it. One of the reasons I wanted to look at exhuming Melissa’s body was if there was this piece of evidence, potential DNA, is there something on her that perhaps was missed? I mean, things happen, right? And, we went in, and the folks at W-MED did what they do best, and we’re in the process of analyzing some additional samples, and we’ll see if it pans out,” said Cole.
Sheriff Cole now believes investigators may be closer than they’ve ever been to figuring out who took the life of the girl who will be forever fifteen in the hearts and minds of those who knew and loved her.
“She was very, very easy to get along with, and to top it off, she was a grade A student in school,” said Al Simmons in 2009.