Susan Walsh left home one day in July 1996 to make a phone call, but she didn’t come back when she said she would.
This made the police look for her for a long time, but there wasn’t much evidence to help them figure out what happened. Susan’s case is one of the ones shown on the Paramount+ show “Never Seen Again.” So, if you want to know what happened to her and what’s going on with the case right now, here’s what we know.
What Did Susan Walsh Do?
Susan Walsh was born in February 1960, and she grew up in a family from the middle class. After high school, she went to a state university in New Jersey to study English and Communications. At the time, the person who wanted to be a journalist wrote for the college newspaper. Sometime in 1984, he or she graduated. Susan worked as an exotic dancer on and off so she could pay for her Master’s degree at New York University. She had also worked as a journalist intern for The Village Voice.
On July 16, 1996, Susan, who was 36 at the time, gave her 11-year-old son David to Mark Walsh, who was no longer her husband. They both lived in Nutley, New Jersey, in the same apartment building. Reports said that she was supposed to go to a payphone nearby to make a call and meet someone. Mark, on the other hand, didn’t remember seeing Susan leave the house, and she didn’t come back. So, her family reported her missing right away, and the police started a desperate search for her.
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Is she still alive or has she died?
Nobody had seen Susan Walsh make the call, and there was no record of a call going out from that payphone. It looked like she had just disappeared into thin air. Things had been getting better for Susan in the time before that. She wrote an article for The Village Voice that said Russian gangsters were controlling immigrant women and forcing them to do sex work.
Susan’s behavior began to change at some point after the article came out. Floyd Merchant, her father, said that she thought there were two contracts out there to kill her, and she had started drinking again after being sober for more than ten years. It was also said that Susan took Xanax and stopped taking her bipolar disorder medicine. Reports say that she was getting more and more paranoid and that she told her friends that she was being stalked and that the mob was after her.
Susan had also been doing research for a book about how dirty the sex industry was. At a publisher’s party in June 1996, James Ridgeway, co-author of the book “Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry,” remembered that Susan’s wrists were wrapped in bandages because he was worried about her drug and alcohol use. Even with all of this information, though, the police didn’t know much about where Susan was.
Some reports said that Susan might be part of an underground vampire subculture in New York City, New York. This was based on an article she wrote for The Village Voice. At the time, she was supposedly following up on a tip from James that hospitals in the area were losing blood. People in the subcultures were also said to have drunk human blood. Reports say that Susan became very involved in that subculture, which caused her work to lose its objectivity. The editors also didn’t print her piece on the same subject. But there was nothing that tied Susan’s disappearance to it in a clear way.
Mark was never thought to be a suspect, but there were different stories about whether or not he let the police do forensic testing at Susan’s apartment. The police only found that the page for July had been torn out of her calendar. Over time, the police have said that they didn’t think her death had anything to do with the Russian mob. Family members have said that she would never leave her son behind, and since her things were still at home, it doesn’t seem likely that she left on her own.
In 2006, the police said they were looking for new leads. One of Susan’s ex-boyfriends, Christian Pepo, said that her other ex, Billy Walker, had been stalking and bothering her before she went missing. Christian said Susan had a recording of Billy saying he would kill her and that she had a plan to get rid of him. As of 2009, the case was still open, and the police had not ruled out the possibility that Susan was still alive. Arthur Merchant, who is her half-brother, sued the Nutley Police Department in September 2020 to get information about the investigation. Before that, her dad had hired a private investigator to look into what was going on.
Early years
On February 18, 1960, Susan Young gave birth to Susan Walsh. She wanted to be a poet since she was a child. [needs citation] Walsh studied English and writing at William Paterson University, where she also worked as a reporter for the school newspaper. Walsh worked as a stripper and an erotic dancer on and off to help pay for her college. Even though she had problems with drug abuse and alcoholism, she got her bachelor’s degree from college in 1988 and then worked as a writer for engineering and business publications. Later, she got a job writing for Screw magazine.
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Disappearance
Walsh moved out of the apartment building she shared with her son in Nutley, New Jersey, on July 16, 1996. Her ex-husband, Mark, lived below them. Walsh had left to run errands and talk on the phone at a payphone across the street, leaving her son with his father for now. That was the last time anyone saw Walsh. At the time she went missing, she was halfway through a Master’s program in English at New York University. She was also working as a freelance journalist and doing different jobs as a stripper to support herself and her son. When she went missing, her friends were worried that she had gone back to using drugs again, even though she had been clean for 11 years.
Investigation
Police were able to rule out Walsh’s ex-husband as a person who might have taken her away. Later, it was found that the page for the whole month of July 1996 on Walsh’s calendar in her apartment was missing. Even though police didn’t have much to go on in their search for Walsh, there were rumors that her disappearance might have something to do with the investigative journalism she was doing at the time.
Walsh had written a detailed article for The Village Voice about a strip club ring in which members of the Russian mafia were allegedly forcing young girls to work in the sex industry. Walsh also looked into an underground vampire community in New York City after writing this article, but the newspaper didn’t run the story because it thought Walsh’s writing on the subject wasn’t fair. In the end, police were unable to find a link between Walsh’s disappearance and either article she worked on. During her time writing for the Voice, Walsh became friends with the journalist James Ridgeway. Ridgeway called Walsh his “most reliable” writer.
At the time, Walsh had also been in a movie called Stripped, which was made by her friend Jill Morley and was about women who worked in the sex industry. Walsh talked about having a “stalker” in a group interview for the film that was taped on July 14, 1996, two days before she went missing. She had also worked as a go-go dancer for a German documentary crew that was making a movie about Russian immigrants who became go-go dancers. Shortly before she went missing, the BBC was also making a documentary about the same topic. Walsh’s last job was helping Ridgeway and Sylvia Plachy with their book Red Light: Inside the Sex Industry. Walsh was the main researcher for the book, and she also sent in photos and personal writings about a month before she went missing.
In 2006, The New York Post published an article that said Walsh had told one of her ex-boyfriends that another of her ex-boyfriends was stalking her. The article also said that Walsh’s husband, Mark, had refused to let police do forensic testing at their home.
Biography
Susan A. Walsh, MD, runs the Yale Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) Program and is an emergency medicine doctor for children. When a child comes to the emergency room, she tells the parents, “I promise we’ll take great care of your child. Ask as many questions as you need to feel good about our care.”
One of the most memorable cases for Dr. Walsh was when a 5-year-old girl with dysrythmia, or an irregular heartbeat, was brought to the emergency room. “She came in gray and dead. We were able to check on her and treat her with a shock that got her blood flowing again. Within minutes, she was awake and healthy again, says Dr. Walsh.
Dr. Walsh is an associate clinical professor of pediatrics (emergency medicine) and of emergency medicine at Yale School of Medicine. He is also a leading instructor of simulation training, in which doctors in training or already working learn and practice emergency and other skills on manikins. She specialized in pediatric emergency medicine because “as a parent and a doctor, I am driven to help sick or hurt children and their families through a crisis.”