17 Apr 2025

How to Solve a Murder: Part Five

by Arwa Mahdawi

In July 1996, 36-year-old Susan Walsh supposedly left her house in New Jersey and never came back. She is presumed dead but a body has never been found. This is Part Three of a series on my five-year investigation into her unsolved disappearance.

To catch up, here are Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.

On average 140 women or girls are killed every day by someone in their own family; one woman is killed every ten minutes by someone in their closest circle. Sixty percent of all female homicides are committed by an intimate partner or a family member.

These are recent statistics—gender-based violence wasn’t systematically tracked until the late 2000s—but it was a similar story in 1996. If a woman was killed, chances are the husband or boyfriend did it.

There were several intimate partner suspects in the case of Susan Walsh: a live-in ex-husband, Mark Walsh; a live-in boyfriend, Christian Pepo; and an obsessed ex-boyfriend, William (“Billy”) Walker. She was a dancer, and there were also men in her orbit who were fixated on her. Two days before her disappearance she’d been hanging out with her friend Jill Morley, who was making a documentary called Stripped about dancers who were trying to get out of the industry. In the footage from that day Susan is sitting around a table with other dancers chain-smoking when her beeper suddenly goes off.