Susan Walsh

Jul 17

"No, I do have a stalker."

Susan Walsh said those words in an interview just two days before she vanished. Her beeper had gone off mid-conversation, and she'd laughed it off at first — must be my stalker — before turning serious and admitting it wasn't a joke.

Two days later, the 36-year-old journalist walked out of her Nutley, New Jersey apartment to use a payphone. She never came back.

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The Reporter Who Went Undercover in Her Own Life

Susan Walsh wasn't an easy person to sum up in a headline, though plenty of outlets tried. She was a freelance journalist who wrote for The Village Voice. She was also, for years, an exotic dancer — a job she'd used to fund her writing and her education, and one that eventually became the subject she wrote about.

Her most explosive piece exposed the exploitation of young immigrant women inside New York strip clubs with alleged ties to the Russian mob. She had also spent months investigating New York City's underground vampire subculture, and had worked as the primary researcher on a book about the sex industry. A German documentary crew and the BBC were both developing projects around her reporting.

The work had made her enemies. She told her father she believed there were contracts out on her life, and she'd started drinking again after over eleven years of sobriety.

The Last Half Hour

On July 16, 1996, Susan left her 11-year-old son with her estranged husband, Mark. She told Mark she was stepping out to use a payphone and she'd be back in about thirty minutes.

No one saw her use the payphone. No one saw her at all that afternoon, and Susan Walsh was never seen again.

What Went Missing With Her

Over the course of the investigation, investigators discovered that an entire page was missing from Susan's calendar — the page covering the month of July 1996. Someone had removed it, and no one has ever explained who or why.

One of Susan’s friends came forward claiming she'd seen Susan get into a limousine about a month after she vanished. Police followed the lead, but it ultimately went nowhere.

Mark Walsh was never officially named a suspect, but a 2006 report revealed that he had refused to let investigators conduct forensic testing inside the apartment he'd shared with Susan both in 1996 and again in 2006.

Mob, Mental Health, or Something Else Entirely

In the years since Susan disappeared, theories about what happened to her have multiplied endlessly. Dancers in the clubs she'd investigated believed she'd been the target of an organized crime hit in retaliation for her reporting. Others believe her years of substance use, a diagnosed bipolar disorder, and a recent relapse into drinking may point toward something far more tragic and far less sinister than a hit. they believe that she may have taken her own life, or suffered some kind of breakdown that no one around her recognized in time.

And then there's the reason a lot of people have heard about Susan’s case in the first place: in the months before she vanished, Susan had become deeply embedded in an underground community of self-identified vampires in New York City, reporting a story that The Village Voice ultimately declined to run because editors felt she'd lost her objectivity. The tabloids seized on it. "Missing, Presumed Undead," one headline read.

Thirty years later

Susan's friend and fellow dancer-turned-filmmaker, Jill Morley, has spent decades trying to keep this case from disappearing the way Susan did. Morley is developing Seeking Susan, a documentary revisiting the investigation.

Susan's brother, Arthur Merchant, has never accepted the idea that his sister simply walked away. "She did not decide to freaking go off and not be coming back," he told a New Jersey newspaper in 2020.

Susan Walsh has now been missing for 30 years.

In our full episode, we dig into the investigation, the missing calendar page, the limousine, and the tangle of theories — from the criminal to the supernatural — that have surrounded this case since 1996. It's one of the strangest, most layered disappearances we've covered.

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Missing Person: Susan Walsh

Susan Walsh has been missing from Nutley, New Jersey since July 16, 1996. She is a white female with bleached blonde hair and blue eyes, 5'6" and approximately 110 pounds. She has pierced ears and a scar on her right wrist.

If you have information, contact the Nutley Police Department or the New Jersey State Police.