PommyMommy
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From the link:
Nineteen-year-old Susan Swedell loved singing in the choir and playing hand bells at Christ Lutheran Church in Lake Elmo. She liked acting, listening to Simon & Garfunkel and chatting with boys. Her favorite movies were “The Sound of Music” and “Chariots of Fire.” She thought Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” was the greatest song in the world. She spoke Spanish, studied psychology and worked two jobs.
And then she was gone.
When Swedell had not arrived home by 11 p.m. on that Tuesday night, her mother and sister called the sheriff’s office to request that deputies search for her car — a 1975 maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass — in ditches between Kmart and the house they rented in downtown Lake Elmo.
Investigators didn’t learn until the next day that she had left the gas station with a man.
The gas-station attendant said Swedell pulled up to the station around 9:30 p.m., followed by a “light-colored older model car with sport wheels that was in good shape, but dirty,” said Troy Ackerknecht, a detective with the sheriff’s office.
A police sketch of the man last seen with Susan Swedell, 19, of Lake Elmo, on Jan. 19, 1988.
The man was described as slim, 6 feet to 6 feet 2 inches tall, with long sandy-brown hair and a three- to four-day beard growth. He was wearing a leather jacket.
Swedell and the man talked for a few minutes, and then Swedell came into the station and said she was having car problems, Ellickson said. “She asked if she could leave her car at the station. The attendant said, ‘Well, they’re going to plow here. You’ll need to move it.’ She moved it, and they left westbound on Highway 5.”
Swedell was wearing a short skirt and sweater and no coat or boots, according to police reports. Her manager at Kmart told police that at the end of her shift Swedell changed out of the red pants outfit she had worn to work. “He made a comment that she wasn’t dressed appropriately for the blizzard,” Ackerknecht said.
When police searched her car the next day, they found her glasses, driver’s license and purse.
In the weeks before she disappeared, Susan Swedell had been using telephone chat lines to talk to boys, racking up a bill of more than $300, Kathy Swedell said.
Co-workers at Kmart reported that Swedell, a graduate of Stillwater Area High School, had been receiving numerous calls at work from a man. She also continued to talk to an ex-boyfriend and had reportedly made plans to see him the night she disappeared, but he called to cancel because of the weather.
A week after Susan disappeared, Kathy Swedell returned to her job as principal secretary for the University of Minnesota math department, and Christine Swedell went back to school.
When Christine got home from school that afternoon, she couldn’t find the key to get in the house.
Christine Swedell, left with her mom, Kathy, shows a picture of Susan Swedell, who disappeared in 1988. (Jean Pieri / Pioneer Press)
“We normally kept it on a shelf, right next to the door, underneath something — that’s just the way it was in Lake Elmo,” Christine Swedell said. “I was looking all over for it. I couldn’t get into the house. It was locked. That was the key. I didn’t have an extra.”
She eventually located it under a box in a back corner of the shelf. When she entered the house, she said, she “felt like someone had been there.”
There were dirty dishes in the sink that hadn’t been there in the morning, and there was a “peculiar” smell of smoke, she said.
“It smelled of something sweet,” she said. “I’ve never done drugs or had a drink, but … it was very strong. People say it might have been marijuana, but I didn’t know. I didn’t touch anything. I didn’t go upstairs. I just called Mom. Of course, it felt like forever until she got home. I was freaking out.”
Later that night, Christine found the red outfit that Susan had worn to work on the day she disappeared; it had been balled up and jammed under Susan’s bed.
None of her daughter’s personal items, including clothing, makeup or grooming products, were taken, but “somebody had been there,” Kathy Swedell said.
“We were really surprised no one came to check out dishes or get fingerprints,” she said. “They came out after we had already washed the dishes."
Earlier this year, Washington County investigators took to the BCA the red pants that Swedell was wearing before she disappeared, to have them tested. Although the pants had been washed several times and Christine Swedell had worn them in the years since her sister’s disappearance, authorities wanted to make sure they checked that box, Ellickson said.
