Chasing Evil in America's Heartland

On a warm afternoon in March 1969, 17-year-old Mary Kay Heese — a shy, gentle girl who wanted only to be accepted — was last seen alive. Hours later, her body was found in a roadside ditch. The case would go cold for more than fifty years.

Chasing Evil in America's Heartland strips away decades of finger-pointing, speculation, and misinformation to tell the fullest account yet of what happened to Mary Kay. Weaving public record together with new witness testimony and evidence never before made public, it lays bare a small Nebraska town unraveled by fear and suspicion — the secrets it kept, the killer who walked free for decades, and the investigators who refused to give up. More than five decades later, one of the oldest cold cases in the nation was finally brought to a close.

Leesa Zalesky has been an award-winning investigative journalist, freelance writer, and author for thirty years. A retired newspaper reporter, she devoted years to this story — tracing birth, death, and court records, sitting with witnesses, grand jurors, and Mary Kay's classmates, and patiently reconstructing the fifty years of history woven through the case. More than a chronicle of a crime, her work gave Mary Kay a voice long after the world had moved on, and gave an entire community the honest accounting it had waited decades to receive.

Ted Green is a retired law-enforcement officer who carried the Mary Kay Heese case through to its resolution. Where others had let the trail grow cold, he refused to look away — chasing down aging leads, re-examining long-buried evidence, and following the truth wherever it led, no matter how many years stood in the way. His perseverance, firsthand insight, and unwavering pursuit of justice were the driving force behind both the closing of the case and the writing of this book. For Ted, the badge was always about one promise: to protect and serve, and to make sure Mary Kay was never forgotten.

Together, their work did far more than fill in the missing pages of a decades-old mystery. It brought a measure of peace to a family that had waited a lifetime, and reminded a community that one life — Mary Kay's — always mattered. Chasing Evil in America's Heartland stands as a testament to their persistence, and to the belief that it is never too late for the truth.