Susan Ann Wickersham was born on November 21, 1955 to Roy and Sharon Wickersham of 905 SE Roosevelt Ave in Bend, Oregon. “Susie” (as she was called by family and friends) was 5’3” tall, weighed 110 pounds, and had medium length blonde hair. One of three children, at the time she disappeared Susan was 17 years old and had just completed her junior year at Bend High School. Family and friends described her as “a likable young lady with a bubbly, outgoing personality.”

In 1973, Bend, Oregon had a population of approximately 37,000* people and contained only one high school, and (for the most part) its residents were trusting and everyone residing there felt safe. At that time in the 1970’s hitchhiking was common (and legal), as people believed in the goodness of others. At roughly 11:30 PM on Wednesday July 11th, 1973, Susan dropped the family car off at the Sage Room Restaurant where her mother was employed after joyriding around town with a girlfriend (some conflicting reports say she was at a party with friends). Sharon let Susan borrow the vehicle on the condition that she return it before her shift ended. The restaurant has since closed but was located at 855 NW Wall Street in Bend, OR. Mrs. Wickersham asked her daughter if she wanted to sit and wait with her until the restaurant closed and they could drive home together, but Susan said she was going to hitch a ride with friends across the street in front of the Owl Pharmacy. When they didn’t show up she decided to trek the two miles home. Susan was last seen walking away from the drug store toward the intersection of Wall and Franklin streets wearing a ‘brown car coat,’ white slacks, white shoes and a blue and white checkered shirt; she was carrying a brown handbag.

After Susan never came home that summer night, the Wickersham family became frantic with worry and traveled all over Bend in hopes to locate their daughter. They showed anyone willing to look her picture, begging for any information they may know about what may have happened the night she disappeared. Police said that disappearances among young people at the time were a “dime a dozen” and theorized that she took off but would “turn up soon.” Mr. and Mrs. Wickersham immediately suspected foul play and told law enforcement that Susan didn’t runaway and would never leave voluntarily: she had a steady job and no problems in her personal or family life. Unfortunately they didn’t agree and suspected the teen ran away from home. In the months following Wickersham’s disappearance, police received multiple reports of possible sightings of her: former Bend Police Chief Emil Moen said they received calls that she was seen in Vancouver, Klamath Falls, Portland, and Bend. Most of these reports were from people who had seen girls that they felt looked like Susan. Two of them said she was in Klamath Falls a few days after Wickersham disappeared; another report was given by a salesman who said he recognized her as a girl he saw eating breakfast at a restaurant in Klamath Falls after he saw a story about Susan on the news. A Bend woman said that she spoke with a girl fitting Wickersham’s description at a bus stop in Klamath Falls. All reports lead to nothing. Wickershams little sister Rhonda McMurran said that “the police tried to tell them she had run away. I just don’t think they took it real seriously at the time. We knew better.” … “I just knew she was gone, but you still have to hold hope.” The family knew deep down that something bad had happened to their Susan. Because at first they weren’t taken seriously, the Wickersham family feels that law enforcement lost valuable time and evidence in the first few years after she disappeared. The police however claim that’s not true at all, and they did follow up on multiple leads and claim they made a real effort to locate her.

Denice Blake was at the Sage Room Restaurant waitressing the night Susan disappeared in 1973 and told police she remembers seeing her childhood friend briefly when she stopped in to return her mothers car. In 2015, Denice told KTVZ: “It was just a sunny ordinary day. This was Bend, Oregon in 1973, stuff like that didn’t happen here. I worked at the Sage Room Restaurant with (Susan’s) mom. She came in that day and we said ‘hi’ and exchanged greetings. A couple minutes later, I was waiting on a table and I saw her standing across the street in front of what was then the Owl Pharmacy, and the next time I happened to look out the window, she was gone.” A different eyewitness claimed to have seen Wickersham near the Tower Theater a little later on in the night.

On January 20, 1976, Susans remains were discovered about three to five miles south of Bend in the Deschutes River Woods; I read conflicting reports that said a man scouring the area for firewood stumbled upon them and others that said “a logger near a truck weigh station close to Highway 97 found her remains near a cinder pit.” With the body were some “personal items” and scraps of clothing that helped identify her. Like most other cases involving a “dump site” in a remote location, forest creatures had scattered Wickersham’s bones all over the area. Her skull had a bullet hole behind the right ear with no exit wound, and because of this police feel that she most likely met her demise from a small caliber weapon (possibly a .22 pistol). Portland Deputy State Medical Examiner Larry Lewman determined that the bones were there for “probably two years or more” and were those of an individual in their late teens/early 20’s (but had no idea if the skeleton belonged to a male or female). Because Susan’s dental records couldn’t be located (for unknown reasons), Bend law enforcement had to mail the skull to her former dentist, Dr. David Mason (who moved to Stewart, British Columbia to treat Eskimos) in hopes he could ID his former patients teeth from memory. Dr. Lewman said that “we’re depending on memory. There are some distinctive dental characteristics (residual baby teeth, impacted wisdom teeth) which he (Mason) might remember.” Thankfully Dr. Davis did remember because he was able to confirm that the skull belonged to Wickersham as he “recognized the dental work as his own.” Former Deschutes County District Attorney Mike Dugan said that “there was no doubt that she was dead, there’s no question she met death by a homicidal act, so it became a whodunit.”

Unfortunately the amount of evidence found with Susans remains was next to nothing and the case once again went cold. To this day law enforcement has an unnamed person of interest in mind but unfortunately not enough evidence to prosecute them. In 2004 (one source said it was 2005), the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office assembled their ‘Cold Case Team,’ which consists of veteran law enforcement whose mission is to investigate cases that have long gone nowhere and still remain unsolved. According to a 2011 article published in the Bend Bulletin, “the squad consists of four retired law enforcement officials who volunteer about 20 hours each week poring over binders filled with information on unsolved crimes. And it’s Wickersham’s long-unsolved case that sparked the start of the cold case squad.” They are hoping for members of the public to come forward and help provide new information to help link the suspect to Susan’s murder. On September 12, 2006, the Cold Case Squad joined forces with a FBI crime scene processing team from Portland that included 15 volunteers from the sheriff’s office search and rescue unit. Together they searched an area near Knott and Scalehouse Roads in hopes to collect new evidence related to Wickersham’s case (however they didn’t come up with much).

In July 1973, Ted Bundy was in between jobs: from November 1972 to April 1973 he worked for the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission helping draft the state’s new hitchhiking laws (ironically he also wrote a rape-prevention pamphlet). He remained unemployed until September 1973 when he was the assistant to the Washington State Republican chairman. The ‘FBI Multi-Agency Team Report 1992‘ has no record of Teds whereabouts on 7.11.1973 (although he was in Olympia the day before and after). Bundy was in between schooling at the time as well: later on in the year he enrolled in the of University of Puget Sound’s Law School in Tacoma (that endeavor didn’t last long). He was also in a long-term relationship with Liz Kloepfer at the time as well. The drive from the Rogers Rooming House in Seattle where Ted was residing at the time to the Sage Room Restaurant in Bend was a bit over six hours, one way (or roughly 330ish miles). Receipts put him in Seattle the day before and after but in my opinion, Ted definitely could have made that trip easily with no issues. and what if he bought gas in cash (so there was no real paper trail)? Now, I know I’m not a cop or criminologist. I know that none of Bundy’s victims suffered from gunshot wounds BUT (and I’m just throwing this out there): in a 2022 interview with People magazine, Carol DaRonch said Ted “brandished a gun” when he attempted to kidnap her in 1975 in Utah. Did Bundy experiment with alternative methods aside from a crowbar and strangulation? In my article about the homicides of Susan Davis and Elizabeth Perry (also known as the New Jersey Parkway Murders), I wrote about how the two girls were vacationing at the Jersey Shore Memorial Day weekend in 1969 and were stabbed to death shortly after they departed for home. Were these early murders ones Bundy committed before he honed and “perfected” his technique? The human body contains a shockingly large amount of blood; was stabbing and shooting too “messy” for Ted, which is why he never returned to these methods again (that we know of anyways)? We do know he carried an extra set of clothes in his car with him at all times in case of emergencies. Personally, I do think this case is a bit of a stretch and poor Miss. Wickersham was most likely murdered by someone else. I don’t think she is a victim of Ted Bundy.

On April 19, 2022 a Reddit user suggested that Wickersham may be the victim of John Arthur Ackroyd. Born on October 3, 1949, Ackroyd was raised in the small logging town of Sweet Home, Oregon (a little over 2 hours away from where Susan was last seen); in 1977 he started working for the Oregon state highway department along US Route 20. That same year, he sexually assaulted Marlene Gabrielson and in 1978 he abducted and murdered Kaye Turner (with the “help” of an accomplice, Roger Dale Beck). Ackroyd’s stepdaughter Rachanda Pickle went missing in 1990 and he was officially charged with her murder in 2013 (he pleaded no contest). He is also suspected of killing Sheila Swanson and Melissa Sanders in 1992 in Lincoln County, Oregon. ‘The Oregonian’ newspaper further alleges he was involved in the murders of several additional women. Despite Ackroyd’s shady history, it was determined that he was stationed oversees in the Army between 1969 and 1976 so he couldn’t have been responsible for Susan’s death. He died on December 30, 2016.

For former Deschutes County Sheriff’s Captain Marc Mills, Susan’s case was personal. The two were classmates at Bend High School, and said that “Susan was happy, free-spirited. We would occasionally be at the same lunch table. It was sad when Susan went missing, and a shock when the town learned how she died. It was disturbing for our Class of 1974.” … “It was one of the first things I wanted to do, was pick this file up as a young detective, the youngest detective at the time. This is one of the cases I really, truly wanted to have closure.” Mills said it was upsetting for everyone in the community when Wickersham went missing, and a horrible shock when everyone learned how she died: “it was disturbing for our Class of 1974. It’s disheartening. Of course, a lot of my classmates had hope, had hope in me.” He said that detectives are “only a clue or two away from cracking the case, but the clock is ticking.” The cold case team uses the 1974 Bend High School yearbook in their interviews to help “jog memories and spark conversation” when trying to obtain new information about Susan. In 2022 former Deschutes County District Attorney Mike Dugan told KTVZ news that “it’s more of a case of a lack of concrete proof than a lack of a theory,” and that “they absolutely believed they knew who did it. The cold case unit came and tried to get us to do a prosecution. My chief deputy district attorney and I reviewed what they had and said, ‘we still don’t have enough’.”

It’s speculated that Susan’s disappearance could be linked to Rita Jolly from West Linn, OR and Vicki Lynn Hollar from Eugene, OR. Jolly vanished on June 29, 1973 while out on a nightly walk and Hollar disappeared while leaving her job at Bon Marche (she was employed there as a seamstress) on August 20, 1973. Unlike Susan, both girls haven’t been recovered. As I said earlier, I don’t think Bundy killed Wickersham but I do think he murdered Jolly and Hollar.

Rhonda said that Susan is never far from her thoughts, “probably because we never had closure. I couldn’t even imagine then that it would take this long to solve.” She hopes that one day she will learn why Susan was taken from them, saying “someday, I’d like to look the guy in the eye and say, ‘Why’d you do this?’ She was just a nice person. You think of all those things that could have been, and all the people who loved her.”

Despite her case being cold for many years, Bend police as well as Susans loved ones still think they have a pretty good idea who is responsible for her murder; they hope one day they’ll come up with enough evidence to be able to make an arrest. Rhonda thinks that she has a good idea who the killer is, saying: “it’s probably going to surprise many of us, and it’s probably going to surprise how close in proximity they were to a number of us in Bend community.” In 2015, Captain Mills said he still holds onto hope that Wickersham’s killer will be caught, and has a message for anyone that knows something but is holding back: “you’re 42 years older. You’re probably near the end of your life. Put some things in motion… at least in the event of your death, so investigators at the sheriff’s office can put this case to rest, and give what family is left closure.” Sadly both of Susan’s parents died before police were able to solve their daughters murder: Mr. Wickersham passed away in 1993 and Mrs. Wickersham in 2006.

* I’ve had numerous residents of Bend reach out to tell me they feel this number is wrong. I would know nothing about that, I pulled that figure off the website ‘oregon.reaproject.org.’

An article on Susan Wickersham published by The Bulletin on September 19, 1973.