The Terrifying Case of Susan Lund

This case takes place in the USA in the year 1992. Meet Susan Hope Lond. Susan was 25 years old at the time of her disappearance. She was a devoted wife and the mother of three young children. Susan had married her high school sweetheart, Paul Lund. She became a stay-at-home mother, caring for their children, who were all under 6 years old in late 1992.

Family members later noted that Susan was about 3 months pregnant with what would have been her fourth child when she went missing. Those who knew her described her as kind-hearted and also especially passionate about animals. Susan’s sister, Anne, later recalled:

“She would always bring home stray puppies and kittens. She would come home with the most flea bitten dogs and try and give them a better life.”

Susan even dreamed of one day becoming a veterary technician or a veterinarian so she could work with animals every single day. She had put that ambition into raising her young family, but she never lost her habit of rescuing creatures in need.

In the fall of 1992, the Lond family had moved to the Claxville area for Paul’s military assignment at Fort Campbell. People who knew them were well aware that the family was going through some financial pressure in late 1992. But then again, most families do have these pressures. By all available accounts, Susan was a devoted mother who gave no indication that she planned to leave her family or disappear to begin a new life elsewhere.

So, what followed was entirely unforeseen. On the 24th of December 1992, Susan left her home in Clarksville, Tennessee to walk to a nearby grocery store. At the time, she was about 3 months pregnant. According to her family, she had planned to bake a pumpkin pie for Christmas dinner the following day, which was the reason for her trip to the store.

It was around 7:30 p.m. Her 4-year-old daughter begged to go with her, but Susan didn’t want to take her along for what she thought would be a short errand, so she put on her coat, her shoes, and off she went. But Susan never returned home that night. By the next morning, Christmas Day, her family obviously realized that something was horrifically wrong.

When her husband Paul awoke, he looked through the entire house for his wife. He was mystified as to her whereabouts. Because it was Christmas, he tried not to scare or alarm the children, but inevitably he had to report it to the police. Officers soon arrived at the home. They asked some questions and launched an initial search.

At first, they treated it as a missing person’s case. Multiple law enforcement agencies became quickly involved. These included the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, called the TBI for short. The TBI searched the area, too, and interviewed acquaintances and locals over the following days. Despite these efforts, Susan was not found immediately.

This was worrying for the family, as the first few days of a missing person’s case are crucial to the outcome. About 2 weeks later, on the 8th of January 1993, authorities decided to suspend active ground searches after several people reported sightings of Susan in a nearby town.

This didn’t make any sense to the family, but the investigators treated those sightings as credible. They just believed that Susan left town on her own accord. As a result, they scaled back their search efforts. Susan remained officially listed as a missing person, but there were no solid leads for the police to pursue in the following weeks.

On the 24th of February, 1993, roughly 2 months after Susan disappeared, her husband went back to the police and insisted that he believed that she had been kidnapped. The husband pointed out to officers that Susan had been carrying her checkbook when she left on Christmas Eve, but she had never written any checks or accessed their bank accounts after she left.

He argued that this was evidence that she didn’t run away to start a new life. Rather, something sinister must have happened to her. But nothing was done. Months passed before something truly strange happened. In mid- August of 1993, the case took a bizarre turn when a woman in Alabama came forward claiming to be Susan. According to a report in the Leaf Chronicle newspaper at the time, this woman told an Alabama state trooper and a TBI agent that she was Susan.

She said that she didn’t want to be bothered. Local authorities initially accepted the Alabama woman’s story. They believed that Susan had resurfaced and wanted no further contact. Investigators treated the missing person case as solved and they ceased active investigation. In fact, around August of 1993, the Claxville Police Department took one step further and they officially closed Susan’s missing person file completely.

Yet still, Susan’s family just didn’t believe it. Her parents and siblings personally traveled to Alabama to meet the woman who claimed to be Susan. They quickly confirmed that she was not their missing Susan at all. So, they informed law enforcement of the mistaken identity. But by then, the investigation had been badly derailed.

And despite the family’s please, the case was not immediately reopened. So, like many investigations throughout the ’90s, the police made a mess of the investigation afterwards. Shockingly, for years, Susan remained officially missing, but not actively investigated by police. And in the absence of any official investigation, rumors filled the void.

Some people in town spread false stories that Susan had run off with another man or gotten involved with drugs. Her sisters vehemently rejected those claims as she never had a proclivity for such things and her siblings believed that she would never abandon her family. It was extremely stressful to think that their sister had met her end by foul play and it was never given the due diligence required from the authorities or the due empathy from the people in town.

With no new evidence and no credible sightings, Susan’s case went cold as the years went by. It would be decades before investigators uncovered the truth behind her disappearance. But it would be in 1993 that something was discovered. On the 27th of January 1993, the severed head of an adult white woman was found in the remote section of Wayne Fitzgerald State Park in Jefferson County, Illinois.

Two young girls had stumbled upon the grizzly remains of a decomposing head. It was lying in the brush alongside a park road. The two young girls were of course deeply traumatized, but immediately they reported it to the authorities. A post-mortem examination revealed that the victim had shoulderlength red brownish hair, but her identity could not be determined from the head alone.

Forensic anthropologists examined the skull and they estimated that the unknown woman was approximately 30 to 50 years old at the time of her death. They also noted some unusual skeletal features. The woman appeared to suffer from a condition known as rhyneck. This is a condition that would have caused her head to tilt to one side due to old neck muscle injuries.

Evidence of a healed fracture in the skull suggested that she might have sustained head trauma in the past that led to this condition. The question remained whether the injury had occurred earlier in the woman’s life or whether it was inflicted at or around the time her head was severed. Pretty early on, the police publicized composite sketches of the victim which exaggerated her pronounced head tilt in hopes that someone somewhere would recognize her distinctive appearance.

They really doubled down on this feature. Despite these efforts, investigators weren’t able to identify the woman and they assigned her the placeholder name a Jane Doe. Local and state authorities distributed bulletins about the unidentified victim to other law enforcement agencies. They described her physical characteristics and the unique medical condition, but no matching missing person reports were found at the time.

An extensive search of the surrounding parkland did not yield any other body parts or any personal belongings. The manner of the death was clearly deemed a homicide given the decapitation, but how the woman was killed and why her remains were left in that location remained unknown. Investigators had no immediate suspect or leads to pursue in the Illinois case.

The unidentified murder victim’s case gradually went cold as all avenues to determine her identity or killer were exhausted. Unbeknownst to the authorities at the time, the missing person’s case of Susan Lond in Tennessee and the Jane Doe case in Illinois were tragically one in the same. But the two cases existed in isolation.

Tennessee authorities believed that Susan was alive and not a victim still, while Illinois authorities had a victim with no name, and neither side realized the overlap. And not to mention, no one in Illinois was notified about Susan’s case. By the mid ’90s, both investigations had gone completely cold. Still, Susan’s family never stopped looking for the answers they needed.

Her relatives continued to press law enforcement to revisit the case and make sure her story was not forgotten in the community. They distributed missing person’s flyers, spoke with the media, and later turned to social media in hopes of generating new tips. For many years, however, these efforts yielded no breakthrough.

In later years, as the family grew up and learned more, Susan’s own daughter, Crystal, grew skeptical of the initial investigation’s conclusions. She wondered if foul play might have occurred close to home. It was only in the 2020s, with new forensic technologies emerging that hopes for answers would return. By then, a number of cold case specialists had begun pushing to apply advanced DNA methods to unsolved cases like Susan’s.

It was this renewed interest in technology, especially forensic genetic genealogy that would finally unite the Tennessee and Illinois cases and reignite the investigation into Susan’s death. In February of 2021, the breakthrough began. Dr. Amy Michael, a forensic anthropologist at the University of New Hampshire, contacted the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and offered to re-examine the long cold Jane Doe case.

Dr. Michael had grown up in Illinois, and she was familiar with the unsolved 1993 decapitation. She wanted to solve it. With fresh eyes and modern techniques, she believed there was more that could be done. And so she teamed up with Laura Norton, a true crime author and researcher. Between them, they poured over the case records and reassessed the remains.

One of the first things they noticed was that the original composite sketch of the Jane Door was likely hindering the case. The old drawing had depicted an exaggerated neck deformity. This was a portrayal so striking that it may have discouraged recognition. In 2021, based on their research, they commissioned a new, more lifelike forensic sketch which showed how the woman likely appeared in life without an extreme head tilt.

The updated image was publicized in hopes that someone who knew the victim might finally make the connection. However, alongside the anthropological reanalysis, the sheriff’s office arranged for advanced DNA testing on the preserved remains. It was this that cracked the case. Portions of the victim’s skull were tested in a specialized laboratory.

By 2022, the profile was updated to a genetic genealogy database. Almost immediately, it produced a promising lead. Within just one day, they found potential family matches. They believed that the unknown victim was likely a member of the Mayanide or Lond family tree. Digging into the family connections, the team discovered the profile of a missing woman who fit the genetic criteria.

And of course, this was Susan Lond, the 25-year-old mother from Tennessee who had disappeared in 1992 and had never been found. This information was relayed to law enforcement, and investigators in Tennessee then contacted Susan’s relatives to obtain direct DNA samples for confirmation. One of Susan’s siblings provided a sample which was then compared to the Jane Doe’s DNA profile.

On the 6th of March 2022, it was officially confirmed that this Jane Doe was indeed Susan Lond. After 29 years of uncertainty, the anonymous homicide victim finally had a name. Susan’s family, who had never stopped searching for her, were notified. But there was still the question, who killed Susan and why? It is still unclear as to when and where Susan was actually killed and how her remains had ended up roughly 175 mi away from her home in rural southern Illinois.

Susan’s head was the only portion of her body ever recovered and the rest of her remains are still missing to this day. However, several campers reported seeing a headless body at a lake in Wayne Fitzgerald State Park around the same time that Susan’s head was found. But to date, no official search of the lake has ever uncovered any additional evidence.

Susan’s family have also grappled with suspicions close to home. In later interviews, Susan’s daughter Crystal voiced doubt about the circumstances on the night of her mother’s disappearance, pointing to some unsettling family memories. Crystal recalls the sudden replacement of the bedlininers in the house. This made her question her father’s actions.

However, her father died in 2020, and he was never charged in connection with her case. Also, investigators have never named any person of interest based on the available evidence. Some investigators believe that Susan may have been the victim of a chance encounter rather than someone she knew. Some investigators believe that the murder seems to be somewhat impulsive.

One theory is is that Susan’s life ended that night when she left her home after a chance encounter with someone who decided that day to kill her. But whoever did this carried her body hundreds of miles, cut it apart, and hid it in a remote place. It appears to be a cold and deliberate attempt to erase her existence entirely.

The only thing is decapitation is not a known modus operandi of any known murderers at the time operating in those states. The police have looked and looked, but nothing has come up. Over 30 years later, Susan’s loved ones and law enforcement are still seeking answers, holding out hope that someone somewhere will come forward with information to finally resolve the lingering questions and bring her killer or killers to justice.