Is Susan Walsh still alive? A new Investigative Discovery program, part of their Disappeared series, has a lot of film footage of Susan that would lead you to believe it’s so. I’ve studied Susan Walsh’s multi-faceted case a great deal before, but learned something new from the ID special. One revelation I walk away with is that possible explanations as to her vanishing act are wrought with complexity and impenetrable veils of obfuscation, that collide in the face of logic.
Well, I’ve known that all along, but the ID special underscores the mysteries to the tee, while applying a slightly different emphasis. If you’ll view the Unsolved Mysteries (with a trench-coated Robert Stack as your dapper host) feature once again, which was much closer to the event in question (July 16, 1996), you’ll see just what I mean. One item that was a little odd, is that Melissa Hines (Susan’s best friend) claims to have seen (on Unsolved Mysteries) the missing Susan Walsh once driving away with a man in a car.
This unusual sighting was noticeably absent in the ID show. Had Melissa changed her mind about seeing Susan, after the passing of years (16 years since Susan disappeared)? Furthermore, Melissa is skeptical about a woman in Newark, New Jersey who claims that Susan lived with her for two weeks, while turning tricks on the streets of Newark. And yet these two sightings are complementary.
Unsolved Mysteries gives more credence to the vampire cult research that Susan was involved in. Could there be a connection to her penetration into the coveted secrets of these vampire clubs? Susan was a ruthless investigative reporter, and would stop at nothing to get at the core of where the facts were leading her. Her role as an aspiring writer was given more reinforcement in Unsolved Mysteries also.
Well, ID did spend quite a bit of time on Susan’s writing career, so maybe I’m unfair in my assessments? And yet a larger portion of time was spent looking at Susan’s job as a stripper. Actually, it can be observed, her career as a writer and a stripper were merged into one and the same entity. Susan played a large role in the research and preparation of James Ridgeway’s (he helped in launching Susan’s writing career at The Village Voice) book Red Light, which probes the sex industry.
But a problem with this, is that Ms. Walsh is featured herself in Red Light as a dancer who is vulnerable to a clientele of shady characters, one of which may have been stalking her. There are mirrors reflecting and refracting here! This is where the complexity enters the picture. The narcissism of Susan’s research against revelations that she was undone by the very dark forces that she was probing as an undercover reporter.
Couple this ‘Room of Mirrors’ with the unfortunate information she had fallen off the wagon and was drinking and drugging again, after 11 years of sobriety. This is significant. Did Susan leave her red-bricked home in Nutley, New Jersey one muggy July afternoon so she could turn tricks to support a new found drug habit? Or was a pizza man across the street from a pay phone she frequently used, correct in saying he saw her return to the red-brick building she called home?
Both theories can’t be right! And why was the month of July pulled out of her personal calendar, where she seemed to keep a diary of her day to day activities? The loose ends in Susan Walsh’s unsolved disappearance only increase exponentially with each new piece of information investigator’s give us. Someone please publish all her writings! This will help.
