Investigator Jack Frost, now with the Liberty County, Georgia, district attorney's office, was one of the first detectives called to the scene of a swamp in south Georgia on Dec. 2, 2022.
Investigator Jack Frost: Down here is where the hunters had discovered the torso of a female in the ditch. …
Investigator Jack Frost: The hunters had seen a knife and a tote and some wipes back there.
Detectives recovered a razor-sharp Milwaukee brand knife, a plastic storage tub with what looked like traces of blood, and wipes.
Erin Moriarty: Do you think whoever brought her out here had to know this area?
Investigator Jack Frost: That would be a … safe assumption because it's so desolate.
It would take five days until Frost found the rest of her body. Authorities said it appeared the woman had defensive wounds.
Laurie Baio is an assistant district attorney with the Atlantic Judicial Circuit.
Laurie Baio: There's no one that winds up dismembered in the woods that's not a — a victim of homicide.
Who is the woman found in the swamp?
Investigators from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation released two sketches.
Laurie Baio: There were hundreds and hundreds of calls and leads that came in through the forensic sketches that were published from civilians calling in.
One call came from a woman 500 miles away in Virginia — Heather Thomas.
Heather Thomas: I was like, whoa, wait a minute. Like, that looks like Mindi.
Laurie Baio: Heather Thomas turned out as one of the people that recognized the photograph and said this could be Mindi.
Heather recognized Mindi because Mindi was married to Heather's ex-husband, Nick Kassotis, a Naval officer — a lawyer in JAG, the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps.
Nick had traveled the globe and was deployed to Iraq. He served in Italy and the Pentagon. He dealt with sensitive cases involving Afghanistan.
Heather Thomas: He definitely had an air about him of — of confidence, of, you know, reassurance, but never in an egotistical way. Cause you could sort of pick that out from a mile away.
Heather and Nick got married in 2009.
Erin Moriarty: Was he wearing a uniform?
Heather Thomas: Yes, he was in his uniform. I was in — I had two different dresses. It was a very big deal. … It was a — it was a happy day.
Heather Thomas: He had a lot of friends, and he just knew everyone, and he had a very outgoing personality and just was a talker and loved to read and just was — it was very different than kind of how I — I was.
Things started out well. But eventually, after six years, their marriage faded.
Heather Thomas: I felt like we had grown apart. … I felt like he was my best friend, but at the same time, like, didn't have the romance.
Nick Kassotis bounced back quickly. That same year, he started dating Mindi. She was working as a legal secretary in Washington D.C.
Angela Wynn: Mindi was the consummate romantic for a while there, right?
Angela Wynn and Morgan Paddock were longtime friends of Mindi. Angela says Mindi met Nick on a dating app.
Angela Wynn: When she finally did meet him, that was just her fairy-tale ending, coming to fruition.
Heather Thomas: He told me all about it. He was so excited that they met and I was excited for him.
Nick and Mindi married in 2016. Her friends say the couple soon started looking for a home and planning a family.
Angela Wynn: That's one of the things that, that she wanted, she wanted to have kids.
Morgan Paddock: We both were on her podcast.
MINDI KASSOTIS (podcast): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the "Compelling Women" podcast.
Morgan Paddock: She just wanted to find the stories of women and elevate them.
MINDI KASSOTIS (podcast): I'm Mindi, your host, and I'm really excited to share with you another thought-provoking interview with a different compelling woman.
Mindi and Nick's life seemed good. After leaving active duty, he was still practicing law.
Angela Wynn: I was so happy that she was so in love and just so enamored and ready to move on to that next phase of her life.
But her friends say Mindi's life began taking some strange turns.
Morgan Paddock: She once told me, Morgan, if you knew everything that was going on, like this is something that would be like a best-selling novel or — a best-selling movie.
Mindi and Nick started moving around a lot, living in three different states. She rarely saw her friends, they say, and was so worried about security, she started communicating through the encrypted Signal app.
