In the summer of 1975, 15-year-old Susan Curtis, a White female, traveled from her home in Bountiful, Utah, to attend a youth conference at Brigham Young University in Provo. An athletic teenager, she and her sister had ridden their bicycles the 50 miles to the event. On the evening of June 27, the first day of the conference, Susan attended a formal banquet.
Concerned about food getting stuck in her new braces, she left her friends to walk the short distance back to her dormitory to brush her teeth. She was never seen again.
When Susan failed to return, her sister grew worried and reported her missing. An initial search of her dorm room revealed that her personal belongings, including her money, were untouched. Crucially, her toothbrush was found dry, suggesting she never made it back to her room. Due to a history of running away, authorities initially considered the possibility that she had left voluntarily. There were a few unconfirmed sightings of a girl matching her description in the days that followed, but these leads went nowhere. The investigation took a more serious turn as days turned into weeks with no word from the cheerful and outgoing high school student, known to her friends and family as "Sue-Sue."
Early in the investigation, suspicion fell on a former junior high school coach who had been involved in an inappropriate relationship with Susan. The man had previously been arrested for unlawful sexual intercourse with the teenager and was ordered to stay away from her. He was questioned by police, but was ultimately cleared as a suspect in her disappearance. For years, Susan's case grew cold, one of several unsolved disappearances of young women in Utah at the time, leaving her family with no answers. The case remained a painful mystery, with no significant leads or suspects for over a decade.
A breakthrough of the most chilling kind came years later from a Florida death row inmate. In the final moments before his execution in 1989, serial killer Ted Bundy confessed to the kidnapping and murder of Susan Curtis. He claimed he had abducted her from the BYU campus that night in 1975. In a last-minute, tape-recorded confession, Bundy provided investigators with a location along a highway near Price, Utah, where he alleged he had buried her body. Despite his detailed directions, extensive searches of the area yielded no trace of Susan. Her remains have never been recovered, and although Bundy is the prime suspect, her case officially remains unsolved.
