The Girl from Wahoo | Full Episode | Forensic Files

♪♪ -The murder of Mary Kay Hesse has been on the minds of the people of Wahoo, Nebraska,
for 56 years now. I remember being about nine years old out in the front yard. My mom came out and said, "Hey, get in this house right now.
A girl in Wahoo has been murdered." And I remember that plain as day. It didn't happen that often in Nebraska.
Murders were rare. Mary Kay Hesse was a 17-year-old high school student from Wahoo,
Nebraska, who was killed by stabbing in 1969. The Mary Kay Hesse case is unique because of
how many people have tried to solve it, and they just hit brick walls right and left.
I'm Bob Frank. Back in 1999, I was a sergeant in charge of the Nebraska State Patrol Cold Case Unit.
♪♪ She was running. You could see the struggle, the blood on the ground, and the footprint showed there was a struggle in this area.
Her shoe and another spot of blood was found. And then her body. I'm hoping the integrity of the evidence is still there.
As far as it's not too old to test. As far as DNA, we're hoping after 30 years, we can pull a fingerprint off those books.
The purse was found at the crime scene. This stuff has been in here for the last 30 years.
Rabbit's foot with a key and a nail clipper on it. -Better be dead sure than sure dead.
Kind of ironic, isn't it? -With the makeup, the pencils, the handkerchiefs, the Kleenexes, just your normal 17-year-old's purse.
I have one prime suspect. What I'll say right now is he knows who did it, or he was there.
I can't positively say he did it yet. -What did you learn about what the connection was
between him and Mary Kay? -Through reports that we had, they were both at the Wigwam Cafe about the same time.
-How long did you end up working this case? -We probably stayed on it for about a year.
-Did you think, well, I couldn't make any more headway here. It's it's never going to be solved.
-Well, it got to the point where, working with a grant, we had X-amount of funds to expend per case,
and we had reached our maximum. It was one that I really wanted to solve for the community,
but it just didn't turn out that way. -My name is Ted Green, and I was the criminal investigator
for the Saunders County Attorney's Office. -Her body was found where, roughly? -That's roughly right here. -Around here in the ditch.
-Yeah. -When you're first assigned this case, did you think, well, I'm the guy, I'm going to solve this.
I'm going to get the answer. -No. -No, but I don't let go. I won't give up. And I was putting this puzzle back together.
-What happened after more than 50 years, in this case? -The puzzle came together.
You finally got a full puzzle with all the pieces in place. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Mary Kay Hesse's unsolved murder hung over this community
for five decades. It needed to be resolved. -I look at this as the case where the community lost its innocence,
where people were told, "We're not going into Wahoo, you're not going out alone."
-Jennifer Joakim, Saunders, County attorney, and Richard Register, deputy county attorney,
worked on what is believed to be the longest unsolved cold case in Nebraska history.
The 1969 murder of 17-year-old Mary Kay Hesse, a high school junior. -It was a very well known --
A murder, especially of this nature, is not common for this area. -This right here is what Wahoo is really known for, right?
-Yeah. -I mean -- cow country. -It's rural cattle. -Corn country. -It hasn't changed much.
-Ted Green was the criminal investigator for the Saunders County Attorney's Office.
He started working on the case in 2015. -So this was the high school here. -So on that day, she had just finished.
-Walked home and she started walking north here on Linden Street. -Memories of Mary Kay Hesse's murder
loom large in this small town. This black and white footage was filmed by a local television station shortly after the murder.
Much of Wahoo looks like it did on March 25th, 1969, when Mary Kay Hesse never made it home after school.
-So the last place that she was seen was here on the corner. -That evening, Mary Kay's parents reported her missing,
and the community came out in force to search for her. -So they had Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, church groups,
school groups, and the Wahoo Police Department and Sheriff's office all searching for her.
-Nothing was found until close to midnight, when a farmer spotted Mary Kay's schoolbooks and purse
stacked neatly on a road near his field. -Inside the books was her name, and so he brought the books into Wahoo
and ran into the police that were searching for her. They all went back to where the books were found,
and they found her body lying in a ditch on the side of the road. -Not far from Mary Kay's bloodied body,
investigators discovered her shoes in the road, tire tracks from a car, and shoe prints, potentially from the killer.
And how had she died? -Well, in a horrible way. She was chased down. The footprints, which were preserved
by the ground freezing, showed that she got out of the vehicle, and she ran. And you could tell by the strides
that she was really trying to escape. And then, near where her body was found, there was -- there's a pool of blood.
She's laying there discarded like trash. -Investigators photographed the scene, measured and made a cast of that shoe print,
and sent Mary Kay's body for an autopsy. It was determined that Mary Kay had been beaten
and was stabbed to death, leaving 14 wounds. No knife was found at the scene. -She has a pretty good mark on her jaw where she was punched,
and the stab wounds come after that. -Stabbing somebody 14 times, though. What did that tell you about the nature of the crime?
-Rage. Rage. -Was she sexually assaulted? -No. No. But I believe she understood.
That's probably where it was going to head. -The investigation was initially handled
by various law enforcement departments. Mary Kay's clothing was sent to the FBI to J. Edgar Hoover's attention before the days of DNA testing
to see if anything could be learned. Investigators questioned people around town
about the day of the murder. A witness reported seeing Mary Kay that day at around 5 p.m.,
getting into a car that had two men at that street corner. In those early days and weeks, did you think,
"Oh, they're going to they're going to find whoever did this?" -Yeah. Yeah. -Oh, yeah.
-Mark Miller and Kathy Tull are Mary Kay's cousins. These are some of Mary Kay's personal belongings, right?
-This is her 4H. -Was she proud of what she did at the 4H? -Look how tiny she was. -Yeah.
Kathy was 9, and Mark 8, when they learned Mary Kay had been murdered. -She's the oldest of us cousins,
so she always looked out for all of us. -She was a 17-year-old girl, full of life.
-Kathy recalls being picked up early from school the day Mary Kay's body was found.
-And they told us we had to come to Wahoo. -Kathy's family drove to her cousin's home.
When they got there, Kathy saw and heard Mary Kay's mom, Dorothy. -When we went in, it was just --
You could hear her wailing. It's the kind of pain you feel across the room. -And at the time, did they tell you how she was found,
or was that too much to tell the cousins? The kids? -I think we heard it. -When they told us -- Then it was on the news.
-The family and the community could not understand why Mary Kay had been targeted.
There were no answers, just fear. -And I remember thinking, "I'm scared." -Everything changed.
What our parents allowed us to go do. -You didn't have the freedoms that you had before.
-We lost so many different things because of it. Our parents wanting to overprotect us.
-But being overprotective did not ensure safety. Mary Kay's parents, especially her father,
had always been very watchful and careful with their daughter. -She had a very strict father, and she was shy.
She very much wanted to fit in, and there was a group of girls that would put makeup on her at the beginning of the day
and change her clothes out so she would fit in socially. And then at the end of the school, she changed back.
She wanted to be a part of the crowd. -Mary Kay was trying to participate in school activities, practicing baton twirling,
hoping to be a majorette. Part of fitting in for Mary Kay also involved trying to get a date
for an upcoming school dance. Mary Kay had even written this letter to another cousin,
asking him to be her date. "Will you go to the Sadie Hawkins Dance with me? I just wanted a date."
And so she would take her cousin. This was March 18th, 1969. So just a week before she died.
-Investigators thought that perhaps the pressure to find a date and fit in led the usually shy Mary Kay to get into that car
with the men at that street corner. -I think she was so naive. She had no clue that something bad could happen to her.
-She just wanted to get a boy to go to the dance with her. And unfortunately, the dance she went to was her death.
♪♪ -Ted Green, formerly the investigator for the Saunders County Attorney's Office,
believes the two men, who picked up 17-year-old Mary Kay Hesse on March 25th, 1969,
were driving here to an area known locally as The Grove. -Natural parking and party spot.
So, kids coming down this way, there were two things in mind, either partying or hooking up?
-Or hooking up. Those are the two things on everybody's mind. -Green's theory of the crime
is that when Mary Kay realized the men's intentions, she fled the car, and one of the men ran after her,
eventually stabbing her to death. But people who knew Mary Kay wondered why she got in the car
with the two men. -She wouldn't get into a car with somebody that she didn't know.
She knew these guys. -Working that theory, investigators in 1969 questioned males in town,
especially ones who could have crossed paths with Mary Kay. They used what was then a brand
new crime-solving tool, polygraphs. -They polygraphed virtually the entire male population
of both the schools. I mean, can you imagine the uproar would happen today? And they were looking for that as their silver bullet.
-One of the people polygraphed and questioned a few days after the murder was this man, Joseph Ambroz,
22 years old at the time. Ambroz had been seen weeks before the murder talking to
Mary Kay around town. They both frequented this restaurant, the Wigwam Cafe, which still stands today.
Ambroz stood out as he was new to town. Investigators learned he was on parole after having been convicted of forgery
and escaping from custody. -He wrote a $10 bad check with his buddy up in Wayne, Nebraska.
They get stopped for that, and they escape this little county jail up there, and they catch up in California and bring them all the way back.
-Ambroz served about three years and then moved to Wahoo. -And he's out on parole.
He's got a job. He's working at a packing plant. -It's a slaughterhouse. -Yeah, slaughterhouse.
And she knew him. -Authorities say they learned that Ambroz was known to mingle with high school girls
and had a reputation for having a temper. He also drove the type of car similar to this one
that someone said they saw near the crime scene. -A local resident had seen two cars leave that night.
One car was a white over red '56 Chevy. The second car was a white over blue '56 Chevy
with two dark-haired males in it, driving it at a high rate of speed. Ambroz drove that white over blue.
He's a person of interest. -Ambroz denied any involvement in the murder, and his polygraph seemed to support that.
Ambroz said he had an alibi that the night of the murder, he was hanging out at various locations
with his friend Wayne Greaser, who was also questioned and polygraphed. -Wayne Greaser was just that wannabe kid
who was just fooling around Ambroz. And so he's -- he says he's with him. -But while being questioned,
Ambroz did speak about things, says Ted Green, that got him in trouble with the law,
and he was immediately sent to jail. -He blows his parole right in the pre-polygraph interview.
He violates it, says "I'm buying booze for minors. I'm having sex with minors." So he's booked parole violation.
-But not for Mary Kay's murder. Why did this case not move along further at the time?
-That's -- That's a very good question. -Follow up in the initial investigation,
Prosecutors say, seemed to be lacking within experience a factor. Cars were not checked for blood and suspects shoe sizes
were not compared to the shoe prints found at the scene. -This was the beginning of the State patrol
because before that they just gave tickets for speeding. And so these people were thrown
into this new investigative unit. -There were other agencies involved, and it didn't seem like there was really a lead investigator.
-And they were just relying on those polygraphs. -For decades, the case sat cold.
-After seeing the pictures and going through the case, you can visualize it. I mean, everything's the same after 30 years.
It's all the same. Nothing has changed. -Then, 30 years later, in 1999, with the creation
of the Nebraska State Patrol Cold Case Unit, Mary Kay's murder was getting attention again
and 48 Hours cameras followed Sergeant Bob Frank as he worked the case. -Her body was found right in here.
And that's where we're at right here. -And we spoke with Frank again in 2025, now retired from the State Patrol.
-One thing about doing cold cases, you find is that stories grow, stories change.
And so, you know, trying to separate truth from fiction is sometimes difficult. -To try to get to the truth,
Frank, in 1999, scoured the old case reports. He noticed that Joseph Ambroz and Wayne Greaser,
the men who were each other's alibis, kept coming up in witness statements. -I started talking to other people
who had been told by these two individuals that they had done this homicide. -Greaser had died by suicide in 1977.
Ambroz was long out of jail, having served a year and a half for that parole violation
after Mary Kay's murder, he had moved around and worked as a truck driver. Bob Frank knew at some point he would want to talk to Ambroz,
but first wanted to take a new look at the old evidence. In '99 now, are you hoping you're going to get some sort of DNA?
-Something. ♪♪ -So here's the evidence bag. By 1999, when Sergeant Bob Frank led the Nebraska State Patrol's
Cold Case Unit, advances had been made in forensic science that were not available.
In 1969, when Mary Kay Hesse was murdered. 48 hours cameras filmed Frank going through Mary Kay's
belongings as he looked for DNA and fingerprints. Among the items tested were Mary Kay's schoolbooks found stacked at the scene.
-We're hoping for prints to come off. It's been 30 years. -The theory was that Mary Kay left the books
and her purse in the car. The killer noticed the items and, not wanting to be linked to her belongings, dumped them.
-So we know it was probably the suspect that that put those books on the road. What we were looking for there
was any type of fingerprint evidence. -A fingerprint examiner worked to find and lift prints off the school books,
including one titled "Building a Successful Marriage." Were there any fingerprints that came forward?
-No. No. That's what we really had him concentrate on -- were these gloves. -She was wearing these at the time, wasn't she?
-Yes. We were looking for somebody else's blood on those gloves. -They also tested Mary Kay's clothing.
-These clothes were cut off at the autopsy. When I see this, it just motivates me more.
I mean, it's -- it's something you want to solve. It's something you want to get closure on.
I -- Tell you the truth, when I put this out and laid it out, the first thing I thought of
was Mrs. Hesse... Frank spoke several times with Mary Kay's mother, Dorothy, over the course of his investigation.
-That's when she started to high school. -48 Hours spoke with her as well in 1999.
-I don't think it'll be solved. I really don't. It's gone all these many years, and I just --
I've just given up hope. -Hope would be diminished again when the forensic testing led nowhere.
Still, Joseph Ambroz and Wayne Greaser remained at the top of Frank's suspect list.
In May 1999, Frank decided to question people who knew Ambroz and Greaser around the time of the murder
and had been named in prior police reports. -That's why I went two guys in there.
So one guy can really watch how these guys are reacting to the questions being asked of them.
-The thought was the passage of time might make someone more forthcoming, and the investigators took several steps to try
to help that along. -We created an atmosphere to where it appeared we were a full-fledged task force
looking at this case. -If he's giving you a hard time. -In fact, there was no designated Hesse task force,
nor was it getting hot. It was just one of the measures taken by Frank and his team
as they tried to see if anyone would give new information. -I wrote their names down on the board
and some numbers behind those names, which don't really have any relevancy either.
-Investigator Jay Peterson. -But it's just going to get them to thinking that we know a heck of a lot more about them
than perhaps we actually do. -They also tried to make the setting a bit uncomfortable
for those being interviewed. -You grease the table down, too? -Yeah. What we did was
we took a bottle of furniture polish, we waxed the table, we waxed these chairs.
So when they sit down, they're not going to be able to get into a comfort zone. So keep them on edge a little bit,
and hopefully that'll get them talking a little bit too. -We put electronic devices in to record in the room.
We let these people know when we brought them in that they were going to be monitored constantly.
-But despite all those efforts, nothing usable was learned. -We had people telling us that Wayne Greaser told us this,
Joe Ambroz told us this, but it was all hearsay evidence. You know, we didn't have that witness that was there
or, you know, knew the facts directly. -So Frank decided it was time to interview Joseph Ambroz himself.
-We will just go see what we can get by knocking on the door. Let's do it. -In September 1999,
Frank traveled to Orange Park, Florida, where Ambroz was living. Working with local law enforcement,
Frank went to Ambroz's home, where he answered the door. -You Mr. Ambroz? -Yes, sir.
-And willingly went to be questioned at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
-Ambroz said on the day of the murder. He got off work around 5:30, went home and then went to a club until closing time.
Unlike his previous interview, where his now deceased friend Wayne Greaser was his alibi,
he did not mention being with Greaser. -Frank also asked many questions about Ambroz's job
at a slaughterhouse. -Since Mary Kay was stabbed to death, Ambroz was asked about his access to knives.
-Ambroz was adamant he had nothing to do with Mary Kay's murder. Even when Frank implied they found someone's
DNA at the scene. -Despite Ambroz's cooperation, Frank found several things suspicious.
Like Ambroz's explanation for giving different versions of where he was at the time of the murder.
-And there was that shoe print found at the scene, which was the same size that Ambroz wears.
-Frank also asked Ambroz about a report from 1972 before Wayne Greaser died, in which a friend of Greaser informed authorities Greaser
had confessed to him that he and Ambroz drove Mary Kay to the field, and that it was Ambroz who killed her.
When Frank brought it up, Ambroz got agitated. -After the interview, Ambroz gave his blood for DNA testing
and submitted to another polygraph. Nothing incriminating was found at his house,
and his DNA did not match any found on Mary Kay's items. -We presented what we had to the county attorney at the time,
and he just felt there was not enough to even take it forward. -In 2000, Frank stopped working the case,
but held out hope that one day something would be found. -We needed something to to drive this case forward.
♪♪ -What exactly happened in this field in 1969 was still a mystery when Ted Green, in 2015,
then the investigator for the Saunders County Attorney's Office, started looking into Mary Kay Hesse's murder.
-Was putting this puzzle back together. -He had collected reports from all the different agencies
that worked the case over the years. He found memos and statements that had never been filed.
-Then I started going through the list of names and all those volumes and re-interviewing.
And so I was able to start tracking down individuals. -Green says one of those people told him
that Ambroz had seen Mary Kay, not just at that cafe they frequented, but also around town,
and that Ambroz told him he wanted to have sex with Mary Kay. -He says, well, "Mary Kay was up in her driveway
twirling her baton," and he had made the comment that, "Yeah, the suspect told me he wanted to do her."
-Green, like Frank, focused his investigation on Joseph Ambroz. Green says another person told him he had seen Ambroz and Wayne Greaser
arguing that night. -They got into a fight that very night about some girl, and this guy's coming forward
and saying this fight occurred, and nobody paid attention to him. -Green also re-interviewed a coworker of Ambroz
who said Ambroz told him after the murder that, quote, "I can do six months, but I can't do life," for Green.
This was Ambroz's motive. Green theorized that Ambroz could deal with serving six months for a parole violation,
but not more for attempting to sexually assault Mary Kay. -He knows he's going back.
It's not a place he wants to go. -So you believe he killed her because he was trying to make sure --
-He was going to, yeah. She -- -She didn't report him. -Yeah. -Green was frustrated with the initial investigations
lack of follow up. Especially disturbing to him was that Joseph Ambroz's car, that looked similar to this, was long gone
and had never been examined. -Why wasn't this in those reports? These are basic questions I was asking.
-While Green worked the case, this man, Josh Eberhardt, a friend of Kathy Tull, Mary Kay's cousin,
wanted to bring attention to the decades old murder that continued to haunt the family.
-The way that I could feel their pain when I spoke with them. I couldn't let it go.
I knew I wanted to help them somehow. -That help came in 2019 when Josh, with the assistance of Kathy,
set up a Facebook page tip line. -And I started writing the post for this page, and I was trying to pull at the heartstrings of the community.
"Dear Mary Kay, 50 years have come and gone since someone took you from us all. I sit here at my computer every day working
to find justice for you." -Josh hoped the post might jog people's memories. Tips came in that went nowhere.
But then... -Somebody came forward with a really big tip. -The tip involved a reservoir not far from the murder scene.
The person had heard stories about men taking apart a car that looked like the one Joseph Ambroz drove
and pushing the car into the water shortly after Mary Kay's murder. -We heard the words white over blue '50 Chevy,
so we knew it was important enough to pass to Ted, and he took it from there. -Ted Green also thought it was important.
He always wondered what happened to the car witnesses reported seeing Mary Kay get into.
A car he believed belonged to Joseph Ambroz. -You think it's the Chevy that's in that lake?
-Yeah. They got rid of the car. -There's blood on it. It was a murder scene. -It was a murder scene.
I think the murder weapon's there also. -So Green tried to determine what was at the bottom
of that reservoir. It was a process seen here that went on for about five years,
including having a portion dredged. -And we started coming up with bits and pieces of weird steel.
-But he needed to come up with more. -Civilian divers cracking cold cases. -Then Green saw a YouTube video
from an underwater search and recovery dive team called "Adventures with Purpose."
The organization is primarily focused on searching underwater for missing persons.
-Called them up and said, "This is an active, ongoing investigation. We don't have a body in here.
I'm looking for evidence." And they agreed to do it. -Two-tone piece of fiber, two different colors.
A piece of metal. Same metal we've been pulling up. -We pulled up more and more metal.
We also pulled up fiber consistent with the color of the interior of the car we're looking for.
-Still, though, they could not prove the metal and fiber were from a car. To determine anything more,
the reservoir would need to be drained, which was not feasible. If the reservoir couldn't provide more clues,
Green and the county attorney thought perhaps Mary Kay herself could. In 2024, the decision was made to have her body exhumed
and perform another autopsy. -The first autopsy was not a quality autopsy, or at least by today's standards.
Obviously it's science, things evolve. -But first, the family had to consent. Green and Kathy Tull had been in close contact
through the course of his investigation. Kathy was always pushing to learn more,
so she gave her permission to have Mary Kay's body exhumed. -It was -- It was hard.
I, uh -- Anything that maybe would give the answers we were looking for. But it was a hard choice.
-But what kind of answers could be found from a body that had been buried for more than 50 years?
-We didn't know what we were going to find. -Mary Kay had been buried for 55 years
when her casket was lifted out of the ground to perform another autopsy. Remarkably, say prosecutors,
her body was well preserved, allowing a pathologist to learn more about her knife wounds.
-The second autopsy was extremely valuable. It added clarity to the manner of killing.
-According to investigators, the manner in which Mary Kay was stabbed was consistent with
how slaughterhouse workers are taught to kill animals. -The angle exactly how her body was showed in the autopsy
is exactly how they were told to do it. -For Ted Green, it was another piece of the puzzle
tying Joseph Ambroz, who had worked on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse, to Mary Kay's murder.
There was also that shoe print at the murder scene, a size nine and a half. -And he wore nine and a half shoe,
and that's the size shoe that was there. -But it was more than just the size. Green says it was also the pattern of the print.
It matched a prison-issue shoe that Ambroz, on parole at the time of Mary Kay's murder,
could have been wearing. -So these little consistencies are starting to add up. -At what point, though, do you feel you have enough
that you can then go to the county attorney's office and say, "I think I've got a pretty good case here."
-It was his interview. -In 2021, Green interviewed Ambroz, traveling to Ohio, where he was living.
According to Green, people told him they had seen blood on Ambroz's car around the time of the murder.
Green says when he asked Ambroz about this, he admitted there was blood on his car
because he ran over a deer or rabbit. -He said that blood is on the left rear fender.
-The back, the back fender. -You don't hit a deer or a rabbit on the left rear fender
and put blood on that. And he admitted the blood was there the night of the homicide.
-Green believed Ambroz pinned Mary Kay on the car trunk, and the blood was hers from those 14 stab wounds.
In 2023, Green presented his investigation's findings to the county attorney. The witness statements, the shoeprint evidence,
Ambroz's interview. Prosecutors knew it would be a challenging case. The murder weapon was never found,
nor was there DNA evidence connecting Ambroz to the killing. But they also knew time was running out.
-We were getting to a point that 55, 56 years ago this occurred. So we're starting to lose witnesses.
So the decision was made to take it before the grand jury. -The grand jury quickly indicted Joseph Ambroz
for the first-degree murder of Mary Kay Hesse. The then 77-year-old was arrested on November 18th, 2024,
in Oklahoma, where he was living. Ambroz was then extradited to Nebraska. -Thrilled to death. I was thrilled to death
that finally, finally, Mary Kay will have justice. -For Mary Kay's family, the arrest was gratifying, especially for Kathy.
She had promised Mary Kay's mother, Dorothy, who died in 2007, that she would fight for justice and not forget Mary Kay.
-This is Aunt Dorothy asking for us to continue to search for whatever happened to Mary Kay.
I didn't want to let her down. I told her that I would not stop. That I would continue.
-Kathy and Mark were preparing themselves to finally have some answers to 56 years of questions about what happened to Mary Kay.
There were pretrial hearings where Ambroz appeared frail and on oxygen. Months passed, and then in July of 2025,
Kathy and Mark got news they were not expecting. A plea deal had been reached, not for first-degree murder as charged,
but for conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. As part of the deal, Ambroz pleaded no contest,
which meant he did not have to give any details about the murder. -The family never got the chance to say no.
-Kathy and Mark say they weren't consulted about the deal, which also named the deceased Wayne Griesser,
as the other person conspiring to kill Mary Kay. It was a blow to Kathy and Mark and to Ted Green.
-There's no justice for Mary Kay. There's no justice for the family. -And no answer. -And no answer.
-In an email to 48 Hours, Joseph Ambroz's attorney stated that Mr. Ambroz maintains his innocence.
Due to Mr. Ambroz's age, he states he took the plea bargain due to his health issues,
since he may not have lived until trial to try to clear his name. -He gets off. "I didn't do it." Really?
I'm sorry. If you're going to fold like that. I laid my keys on the table and walked out two minutes after he pled.
I retired right then and there. -I understand with some folks the plea deal wasn't particularly appealing.
-County Attorney Jennifer Joakim knew there would be backlash for accepting the plea deal.
But she also felt as they proceeded to trial, the case was only getting weaker. -You know, you have to look at the odds
of even getting to trial. -There were chain of custody issues with the evidence going through so many hands over the years,
and with some witnesses dead, testimony could be deemed inadmissible. It was leaving them uncertain
the case could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. -We had to analyze the case and the evidence.
It was important to get the conviction. -But since Mary Kay's murder occurred in 1969,
sentencing guidelines from then would have to be used. A conviction of conspiracy to murder in 1969
carried only two years of prison time. -We're bound to use those statutes as they existed at that time.
-Oh, I'm angry. I'm plain angry. -On August 27th, 2025, just before formal sentencing was to occur,
we spoke with Kathy and Mark. They already knew the maximum sentence that could be imposed was two years.
-We all know this isn't justice. -His thing was he didn't want to die in jail. He didn't want to die in prison.
Mary Kay didn't want to die that day, either. -At sentencing, Kathy and Mark addressed the court.
-Joseph Ambroz chose to say nothing. -Due to Nebraska's good time sentencing reduction law,
Joseph Ambroz's sentence was cut in half with time served. He was released on November 15th, 2025.
-He got all these years to live, and Mary Kay never had the chance to live. -For Mary Kay Hesse's family, the quest for justice
after more than 50 years remains elusive. -She didn't deserve this at all. She was a 17-year-old girl full of life.

A girl is murdered in Wahoo, Nebraska. More than 50 years later, the clues that led to an arrest. "48 Hours" correspondent Natalie Morales reports. This episode aired on Feb. 14, 2026. Watch more full episodes of "48 Hours" on Pluto TV.

True crime. Real justice. "48 Hours" investigates the most intriguing crime and justice cases that touch on all areas of the human experience including greed and passion. "48 Hours," which premiered in 1988, has developed a rich history of original reporting and impact journalism that has helped exonerate wrongly convicted people, caused cold cases to be reopened and solved, and along the way changed lives.

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Brief Summary

The murder of Mary Kay Hesse remains haunting; Joseph Ambroz was indicted decades later but received a plea deal, leaving justice unfulfilled.

Key points

The Murder of Mary Kay Hesse. Mary Kay Hesse, a 17-year-old high school student, was murdered in 1969, shocking her small town.
The Investigation's Challenges. Investigators faced numerous obstacles, including a lack of forensic technology and leads.
Decades of Unsolved Mystery. For over 50 years, the murder case remained cold, haunting the community of Wahoo, Nebraska.
Theories of the Crime. Ted Green believes Mary Kay was lured into a dangerous situation by someone she knew.
The Search for Evidence. In 1999, advances in forensic science reignited hopes for solving the cold case.
The Exhumation of Mary Kay. Mary Kay's body is exhumed for a second autopsy, revealing crucial evidence.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Better be dead sure than sure dead.

1:53WatchFeb 20, 2026

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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