An update in the case of missing Cobb County, Georgia dentist, Melanie Nadler Litt: A brief Saturday night report from 11 Alive in Atlanta indicates Cobb police say “no foul play” was involved in her disappearance.
From that, it’s easy to conclude they think she had a hand in her disappearance. That she chose to drop off the grid somehow. This can make for a very high-profile news story, but it’s rare for someone who wants to disappear to do it in a way that might raise an alarm.
That said, medical professionals—usually highly intelligent people with a surplus of drive and energy—sometimes face serious mental health issues. And in dentistry, women suffer more than men. One recent study concluded:
Equally high levels of depression and anxiety in dentists were found both before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic, with a significant percentage of moderate to severe depression and anxiety. Female dentists reported a higher prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms than their male colleagues.
It’s anecdotal, but a veteran Websleuths poster in a thread about Dr. Nadler’s disappearance wrote the following late Saturday in response to an earlier post linking to a typically overheated UK Daily Mail article:
I have just returned from an event where several of the people there know the couple pretty well. Apologies, but I don’t feel comfortable sharing what was (a) opinion and (b) secondhand information, but it did give pause and reason to think that LE seems to think she left voluntarily. And I have not heard anything about a trip overseas. Not sure the Daily Mail is the best source.
The Mail did report that Dr. Nadler “was scheduled to leave Wednesday morning with her husband for a trip to Japan.” But that’s the kind of detail that feels like it reveals a lot when it just opens new and likely fruitless paths of speculation—a British tabloid specialty.
In the past I often took police statements at face value, but if I’ve learned one thing in twenty-plus years of doing this, it’s that police officers see statements about investigations as tools to clear the way for the work they think they need to do, so the truth can be expendable—though they do still try to avoid lying outright for deniability purposes. Still, Cobb County is part of the Atlanta Metro, meaning it’s no Podunk PD. They have resources to handle potentially high-profile cases like the disappearance of a pretty, well-liked dentist. They may have solid evidence to conclude Dr. Melanie Nadler Litt intended to disappear somehow.
True crime media and enduring police procedurals like the various versions of Law & Order can be informative, but they’ve also produced an entire generation of crime fact and fiction consumers who leap to what they see as an unassailable conclusion when a woman disappears: The husband/boyfriend/sometimes girlfriend did it.
Math is on the side of this assumption. A 2021 study found that “[of] the estimated 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, data reported by law enforcement agencies indicate that 34% were killed by an intimate partner [...] By comparison, about 6% of the 17,970 males murdered that year were victims of intimate partner homicide.”
The problem is, leaping to that conclusion because we’ve all seen it play out repeatedly while bingeing on our favorite shows can lead to a double disaster for families where there was another reason entirely for someone going missing, inflicting additional emotional pain on people who are already bewildered or even grieving. If Lesley Litt had no part in his wife’s disappearance, it was wise of him to avoid appearing on TV, as some TikToker or YouTuber aiming for that ad rev or temporary hit of questionable fame would even now be parsing every frame of the clip for signs in body language or phrasing that he fits their idea of a killer partner.
I also used to kick myself when I’d begin covering a story like this only to find it was (possibly) a much more personal tragedy, because I would worry that I’d fallen prey to my own sensationalizing instincts—which I do have, and which have led me astray before. I see it differently now. It’s a net good to report such things, because if there are any questions as to whether a crime was committed, people should know something is going on.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see much more come out about Melanie Nadler Litt’s disappearance in the coming days, and I’ll update with more information when and if it becomes available.