White/Caucasian, female, age 23, Sue Luna left her home life in the Matanuska–Susitna Valley and worked as a dancer in Anchorage in May 1982, telling those close to her that she had lined up a $300 “date” after meeting a man through the nightlife scene. On May 26, 1982, the day recorded as her death in Palmer, Alaska, she went to meet that man near Alice's 210 Café and vanished. Four days later, her sister, Roberta Moorehead, reported the 23-year-old missing to Anchorage police, describing her in detail and relaying that planned meeting for cash. The date, the arranged rendezvous, and the swift realization by her family that something was wrong became the first threads investigators could follow.
The investigation would later connect the 23-year-old to a pattern of missing women around Anchorage and the Knik River area. Nearly two years after she disappeared, search teams working with state troopers recovered human remains from a gravesite east of the Old Knik River bridge. On April 27, 1984, those remains were identified as the 23-year-old by dental records, bringing a measure of certainty to what her family already feared. The location matched a series of marked burial sites that authorities were beginning to uncover, each adding grim context to the 23-year-old's fate.
Arrests and suspects emerged as investigators closed in on Robert Hansen, a local baker whose double life had turned Anchorage into a hunting ground. He was arrested in 1983 after a surviving witness helped crack the case, and in 1984 he led authorities to numerous gravesites—including the one where the 23-year-old was found—before pleading guilty to multiple murders. Public records and contemporary accounts list the 23-year-old among Hansen's known victims, situating her disappearance and death within the series he later admitted to.
Even stripped of the larger case, the 23-year-old's story is stark in its particulars: a planned meeting for quick money, a last sighting near a familiar Anchorage diner, a missing-person report filed by a worried sister, and, at last, an identification from a river valley that had quietly become a graveyard. The official memorializing of her loss fixes the date as May 26, 1982, in Palmer, and the subsequent recovery and identification in 1984 tie her death to the broader investigation that ended with Hansen's conviction. In the end, the record holds a through-line—from the promise of $300 to the arrest of a serial killer—binding the 23-year-old's life and death to one of Alaska's darkest criminal chapters.
