She was seen driving into a snowstorm with an unidentified man and has never been heard from since.
Susan Swedell was an A-grade student in high school and had gone on to study psychology and languages at the University of Wisconsin. Due to overwhelming homesickness, she decided to drop out after a couple of semesters and move back to Lake Elmo with her mother Cathy, and sister Christine. Cathy had split acrimoniously from the girls’ father when they were small, and since then the three were .
Susan quickly settled back into Lake Elmo, and found herself a couple of part-time jobs at the local mall in Oak Park Heights, working at the Body & Soul boutique in the mornings, and Kmart in the afternoons and evenings.
She has been described as slightly introverted and naïve in nature, but with a fun-loving side to her personality too. Susan had a small group of friends who lived nearby, and she was involved in her local community through the Christ Lutheran Church and amateur acting group.
The weeks leading up to Susan going missing
Susan had been in a relationship with a younger boy but they had recently broken up. Her sister Christine remembers her being depressed after the split and withdrawing into herself for a spell.
Eventually, Susan bounced back and she and her sister began going out dancing at Bumpers a junior disco near to where they lived. Susan did meet a number of boys and may have met up with one of them at her home.
Susan had also been a regular on teenage chat lines where you could socialize with people from all over the country. This was a popular thing for young people to do in the 80s before the prevalence of the internet. You could talk with up to eight or nine people on the line at one time, and as a result of this, she had the names and numbers of boys written on post-it notes all around her room. Susan loved using the chatlines, but they were costly and she had racked up a huge phone bill of 300 dollars in a matter of weeks.
She spoke to her mother briefly about a man called Dale who worked as a stripper and promised her mother she would introduce him. It’s unknown where she ever met Dale in person, or what his age was.
She had been receiving a lot of phone calls from a male at her work, so much so that the manager at Kmart had given her a warning about it.
January 19th, 1988 The Day of the disappearance
The weather was terrible and blizzards were forecast so Susan was a little jittery about driving as she was afraid of storms. She dressed for work in her red pantsuit, grabbed her purse and said goodbye to her mother. There was nothing unusual about the day at that point.
Susan worked her Kmart shift until 9.00 pm — despite the weather. She received several phone calls that day from a man called Dale. Around 4.00 pm she called her sister and they discussed which movie they would watch together that night.
Her work colleagues found it odd that she changed from her pantsuit into a flimsy skirt and headed out into the snow without a coat.
The next time anybody saw Susan she was driving the family’s 1975 maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass into a gas station around a mile from home just after 9 pm. The attendant at the gas station noticed her get out of her car and talk to a tall sandy-haired man who had driven in just behind her. The attendant said they seemed like they were comfortable talking to each other.
The man filled his car with gas and they came into the shop, and Susan asked if she could park her car in the gas station court as it was overheating. They drove off together into the blizzard, traveling westward toward Susan’s home.
Police sketch of the man Susan was last seen with
Back home, Cathy and Christine were becoming distraught as the hours passed and there was still no sign of Susan. The blizzard was raging and the whiteout meant they couldn’t even see more than a few feet outside of the window, so they were naturally fearful of Susan out there alone.
Cathy called the sheriff’s office around 11. pm and they agreed to send out a search party to look for Susan but found no sign of her on the roads. In the early hours of the next day, the sheriff’s deputy discovered her car still parked at the gas station but the place was all locked up. He noticed her purse, driver’s license, and eyeglasses were all inside the vehicle.
The Day After Susan Vanishes
The police spoke to the gas station attendant the next day. She was able to give them a description of the man Susan was with and a general description of the car he drove. She said he was around 6 foot and in his early twenties with long brown hair and a five o’clock shadow. She felt that Susan had gone willingly with the man and that he drove a light-colored two-door muscle car which was in good condition but looked dirty.
The police thought Susan had run away, so no forensic examination was carried out on the car or the items within it at the time of her disappearance.
Cathy went to the gas station to pick up the car and noticed that it was overheating so she sent it to a local mechanic. In a revelation that chilled Cathy to the bone, he confirmed that it was overheating due to the radiator having been completely drained, and said that the petcock had been loosened, and most likely done deliberately. If this was true it meant that Susan’s car would have been deliberately targeted by someone in order to make it malfunction.
An intruder in the house?
A week after Susan vanished, Cathy and Christine returned to work and school respectively. They were both still in shock but Cathy felt it important to regain some normality. Christine was first home when school finished and she went to get the house key from the shelf on the porch, but it wasn’t in the usual place. Eventually, she found it on the opposite side of the shelf.
Once inside the house, Christine instantly was hit with a pungent sweet smell she didn’t recognize. (she now thinks this may have been marijuana). Although she had a strange feeling that something was different in the house she carried on into the kitchen, and immediately noticed a pile of dishes in the sink, which should not have been there. She was sure of this, as she was the last to leave in the morning and had placed her dish and cup in the sink earlier.
Feeling scared, she called her mom Cathy and asked her to leave work early. Once home, the two of them systematically began combing the house for anything else out of place. Everything was as it should be until Cathy noticed something bizarre in Susan’s room. It was the red pantsuit that her daughter had worn on the day she vanished, scrunched in a ball, and carelessly shoved under the bed. They had searched the house earlier in the week and nothing had been under Susan’s bed then.
Since that day, there has never been any more evidence unearthed relating to Susan’s disappearance. The police did reach out to several people who had contact with Susan and interviewed a couple of the men she knew several times but there are no strong leads although they now agree with the family that it was most likely foul play.
Theories surrounding the case
Susan ran away: The police initially believed she was a runaway as she appeared to know the man she left the gas station with. The reappearance of the red pantsuit and the dirty dishes could be viewed as evidence of Susan coming back to her home. However, her paycheck wasn’t cashed and she left her bag, glasses, and driver’s license behind. She was near-sighted so would have needed those glasses to see. If she had gone of her own accord she would have been in touch with her family by now, given how close she was to them.
Susan was harmed by someone she knew: This theory would fit with some of the recent events in Susan’s life. She was meeting a lot of new people at Bumpers and on the chat lines and there were names of random boys scribbled on bits of paper in her room. Her boyfriend and the boy she met at Bumper’s both had solid alibis but no trace of Dale was ever found.
Susan was harmed by a stranger: It’s possible Susan was targeted by a stranger who may have seen her around Lake Elmo. She would have been easy to track through her work routine. This may explain why the petcock had been loosened in anticipation of Susan breaking down. A charming stranger may have been able to persuade Susan that she would be safe to take a ride home with them.
Age-progressed picture of Susan: Washington County Sheriff’s Office
A $25,000 reward is offered in the case. Anyone with information about Swedell’s disappearance is asked to call 651–430–7850.
Although there have been attempts by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office to reinvigorate the case over the years, there are still no answers.
If you have any thoughts on this case, please leave them in the comments.
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