28 Mar 2025

How to Solve a Murder: Part Three

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 begin at the beginning, here are Part One and Part Two.

It’s a cheap trick to dangle the promise of information and then not follow through—one I made use of myself in this story, when I revealed that the late Jim Ridgeway, Susan Walsh’s editor at The Village Voice, had told me who killed her and where her body was buried. I promise I will share the private investigator’s transcripts that Jim advised me to look at to corroborate what he was saying. I’m also going to upload all the police records I gathered, in case you want to go through them—maybe you’ll find something I missed.

For now, though, I want to walk you through some of the police’s original theories about what happened to Susan, theories they spent a lot of time and energy pursuing. Taken together, they tell a broader story about misogyny, and explain why this case was never solved.

Theory one: Susan Walsh disappeared voluntarily

The very last time that we know for certain that Susan was alive was at 12:01 p.m. on July 16, 1996, when she made a two-minute call to radio journalist Sandy Tolan about her scheduled appearance to talk on the air about Red Light, Jim Ridgeway’s recently published book on the sex industry. Susan had worked on the book as a researcher and thought that this might be her big break, the thing that would propel her out of the world of sex work and dancing (which she was both addicted to and loathed) and into the world of writing.

After that call, there is no solid evidence that Susan ever left the house, as her ex-husband told the police she had, to make a call from a payphone down the road. There’s even less evidence to suggest that she just ran off to start a new life, because she took absolutely nothing with her. Not her keys, not her wallet, not her pager, not the cigarettes she was hooked on.