Could a convicted killer be responsible for this college student's death? On March 2, 1973, 19-year-old Susan McLaughlin, a student at UC Berkeley, set out to visit her family in El Dorado County, California. She took a Greyhound bus from Berkeley, making it to the bus depot in Sacramento, but was never seen alive again by her loved ones. McLaughlin had planned a weekend visit and was carrying a backpack, which was later found abandoned alongside Highway 50 between Sacramento and South Lake Tahoe.
On March 5, she was reported missing by both her mother and her boyfriend when she did not arrive as expected.
A week later, on March 10, 1973, McLaughlin's half-naked body was discovered by tourists in a remote area near Highway 50, east of the small town of Kyburz. Investigators determined that she had been brutally attacked, sexually assaulted, and murdered. The location where her body was found was about 100 yards off the highway, in a secluded area, which led detectives to believe that she had been targeted in a violent attack soon after arriving in El Dorado County.
Bryan Lee Gelenaw, a man known as the "Bus Stop Rapist," was later identified as a person of interest in McLaughlin's murder. Gelenaw was notorious for kidnapping and raping young women at knife point in the Pacific Northwest around the same time as Susan's death. He had also been arrested for kidnapping and raping three women in El Dorado County just days after McLaughlin's body was discovered. Though Gelenaw initially provided an alibi for the time of McLaughlin's murder, Cold Case investigators began to question its validity decades later. In 2017, DNA was collected from Gelenaw to compare with evidence found on McLaughlin's clothing. Investigators believed that the similarities between Gelenaw's previous victims and McLaughlin's case warranted further scrutiny, but the outcome of the DNA testing has not been publicly disclosed.
Despite new leads and advanced forensic techniques, the murder of Susan McLaughlin remains unsolved. Her case is one of many cold cases in El Dorado County that has seen renewed investigation efforts in recent years, as investigators continue to search for answers and bring justice to the victims and their families.
