10 Jul 2025

How to Solve a Murder: Part Seven

by Arwa Mahdawi

The picture of Susan above was taken by photographer Sylvia Plachy and was featured in Red Light, the book by Jim Ridgeway about the sex industry that Susan contributed to. This photocopy was in the police files.

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.

To catch up on the story, here are Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four , Part Five, and Part Six.

This is the final instalment of my series looking at the disappearance of Susan Walsh, but it’s not an ending. I wish I could give you a victim and a villain neatly wrapped up with a bow on top. But this is someone’s messy, complicated life, not a tightly-plotted thriller.

There is no evidence that Susan ever left the building after making phone calls in her ex-husband Mark Walsh’s apartment on the morning she went missing. Notes, records and conversations with Lt. Steve Rogers, the Nutley detective who was brought in to reexamine the case in 2000, indicate that he believes Mark to have been the culprit.

Mark didn’t want to speak to me for this piece, so I wasn’t able to get a first-hand idea of what he is like. But I spoke to Christian Pepo, Susan’s boyfriend, at length; he suffers from some mental health issues which have caused erratic behaviour, and he is still deeply upset about Susan. I can’t imagine a situation where he knew what happened to Susan and was able to keep it secret from the police. As for Susan’s son, David? His wife emailed me after I got in contact in 2022 to say he doesn’t want to be contacted at all.

Even if Rogers’s theory is the one he found the most likely, it is still just a theory, leaving plenty of reasonable doubt and a thousand more unanswered questions. Disposing of a body is not a simple task, for example. How could Mark have gotten Susan into his van, and then buried her, without anyone seeing him? Remember that Christian Pepo and David Walsh (Susan’s young son) were in the house too. Christian may have been asleep and David might have been watching TV, oblivious, but that seems like a stretch, too.