Susan CurtisIn June 1975, Susan Curtis journeyed to Provo, Utah, where she attended a youth conference at Brigham Young University. On the first day of the two day event, the 15-year-old high school student left a formal banquet being held and walked back to her dormitory. It was the last time confirmed sighting of her. During his death row confessions, serial killer Ted Bundy admitted to the kidnapping and murder of Sue Curtis.
Born on May 18, 1960, to Larry Eugene and Marilyn Ruth, Susan Curtis, known as “Sue-Sue” to her family and friends, grew up in Bountiful, Utah. One of six siblings, Sue excelled at school and was considered an honor student at her high school. She enjoyed athletics, and played volleyball and baseball, while also playing on the school’s basketball and track teams.
During the Summer of 1975, Sue was about to go into her sophomore year at Woods Cross High School, however her home life was unhappy and she had a history of running away. After going missing for several days, she would always return home. She suffered with her mental health and on a few different occasions, attempted suicide.
Over the course an unknown period of time, Sue was the victim of ongoing sexual assault at the hands of a former coach and physical education teacher by the name of William ‘Bill’ Lugo, who taught at South Davis Junior High School. The week before Sue went missing, she and Lugo ran away together.
The teenager was even flown by Lugo to Phoenix, where he put her up in a hotel room. They were eventually tracked down after Sue had a pregnancy scare, the results of which were accidentally sent to the parents of her friend, alerting them to her predicament. Arrested, Lugo was ordered to stay way from Curtis.
He was charged initially with the most serious charge of rape, but pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of unlawful sexual intercourse. Lugo’s lawyer said he had suffered a just punishment over the loss of his accreditation as a teacher, excommunication from his church, and being shunned by friends and associates, and so should be allowed probation.
However, District Court Judge Thornley K. Swan decided to hand down the maximum jail sentence allowed by law, telling Lugo, “because of the public trust you held and violated, this court is required to impose a jail sentence upon you.” In July 1975, the month after Susan’s disappearance, Lugo was sentenced to a year in prison.
The whole experience had been traumatizing for Sue, with abuse she suffered at the hands of Bill Lugo only adding to her behavioral health issues. As a result she was having problems getting along with her family, and so during the summer before she went missing, Sue was spending much of her time at a friend’s house in Centerville, which is a suburb community north of Bountiful.
Susan Curtis was picked up by her older sister Barbara on June 24, 1975, during an attempt to reconcile the teenager with her family. Her parents her hoping to bring their “Sue-Sue” back home, and to the end they registered her for a two-day Latter Day Saints conference at Brigham Young University.
The two sister, together with a friend, Lynette Stringer, rode their bikes 50 miles from Bountiful to Provo on June 26, 1975. Along the way they met at the Orchard Stake building in north Salt Lake City with others from Bountiful’s ‘Orchard Youth Ward’, and they all rode together to the conference.
Along the way, Sue reportedly complained numerous time of stomach issues, and told her sister she was feeling suicidal. They completed their journey sometime during the mid-morning the following day, and were given their rooms and settled in. Sue Curtis was staying in a second story room in the all female dormitory.
She originally was going sharing a room with Lynette in Merrill Hall in the Helaman Halls, while her sister Barbara was staying nearby in room 2118. On the first day of there conference, a formal banquet had been arranged for the early evening, that was held at the Wilkinson Student Center.
After Sue had eaten dinner there, she became worried about the food becoming stuck in her new braces, and so told her friends she was going to walk the short journey, roughly a quarter of a mile, back to her room to brush her teeth. She told one friend she would return in a few minutes. This was around 7:00pm, and was the last time she was seen.
The walk back to her room should have taken no more than thirteen minutes, and when she failed to show up, Barbara Curtis went looking for her sister. Arriving at Sue’s room, she found her toothbrush was still dry, and she began to worry her sister never made it back to her room. At first she suspected Sue had gotten lost, considering she was not familiar with the campus at Brigham Young.
Barbara reported her missing to the Brigham Young University police, which in turn notified all other agencies including the Provo Police, Utah County Sheriff, Utah Highway Patrol, and Orem Police Departments. Officers soon arrived at the campus, and made a search of the room as part of the initial investigation.
All of her clothes, money, and personal possessions were left behind, including $21 in a jewelry box on the dresser. There were also a pair of jeans and some other clothes folded and hanging up in the closet, as well as several pairs of her shoes. A ring and pendant, that Sue would never have left behind were also found.
A search of the campus produced no sign of Susan Curtis, and no witnesses had seen the teenager during the time she left the conference to walk back to her room. At the time of her disappearance, Sue was described as 5’7” tall, weighed 120 pounds, had hazel eyes, and brown hair that she wore long and parted down the middle.
Her ears were pierced and she had just gotten braces the previous month. She was last seen wearing a full-length, yellow evening gown and high heels, which she would have found difficulty wearing while walking long distances. This description was distributed to all police departments that were involved in the search.
Owing to Sue’s habit of running away, many in law enforcement believed this to be the case, and there appeared to be no immediate urgency in investigating her disappearance as an abduction. As a result her case was only covered sparingly by local press. It fell to the BYU Campus Police and the Provo Police Departments to investigate the disappearance.
There were few witnesses to Sue’s last known movements, and few came forward to report seeing her about town and on campus. One eye-witness, a professor, told police he had seen Sue wearing a blue knit top and faded jeans, attempting to sell a textbook in the back of his class. He insisted this happened four days after she went missing, but could not positively identify her from a picture.
Other reports stated that witnesses saw a young girl matching Sue’s appearance hitchhiking in several different areas, including Orem, the Provo and Spanish Fork, as well as the ‘Y-mountain’, where one person reported seeing her hiking to the east of the Woods Cross football field. None of these sightings were ever confirmed as being Susan Curtis.
At the time of her disappearance, Susan Curtis was seeing a social counselor with whom she talked about her mental health issues. The social counselor had shared with her father that she had concerns about possible suicidal tendencies. One of the many incidents that contributed to her worries, was the abuse she suffered at the hands of Bill Lugo.
He quickly became the chief suspect in the case, and was polygraphed by Dan Clark, the lead detective in Sue’s disappearance. Although he agreed to the examination, it was determined to be biased and was deemed inadmissible. Many years later, Lugo was questioned by Lieutenant Lemmon, who asked him if he had killed Sue Curtis, to which he replied “No.”
There was never any concrete evidence connection Lugo to the case, and as a result he was cleared. In their desperation, the Curtis family hired several psychics in an attempt to find out what happened to their daughter, but nothing came of this. It wouldn’t be long before another suspect came under police suspicion.
Around the time of the disappearance of Susan Curtis, other young women and girls went missing in Utah. This rash of missing women began when Nancy Wilcox vanished on October 2, 1974. That same month Melissa Smith and Laura Aime also seemed to have either run away of, more worryingly, had met with foul play.
The following month saw Carol DaRonch survive a kidnapping at the hands of a man impersonating a police officer, and another, Debi Kent, go missing later that same day. After Kent’s disappearance, other women were reported missing from Idaho and Colorado. The body of one victim, Caryn Campbell, was found after several weeks.
Police were uncertain if these crimes were the work of a single perpetrator or unrelated instances. Sue Curtis was the sixth young woman to go missing from Utah, and detectives suspected that her case could be connected to the other disappearances. In August 1975, there was a break in the case when a suspect was arrested.
On the evening of August 16, 1975, Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward pulled over a speeding driver who was seen without headlights in an unfamiliar tan Volkswagen Beetle. When the driver attempted to flee, the officer followed in pursuit until the car pulled into a gas station. The driver, Ted Bundy, explained he was lost in the subdivision, and had been trying to get home after leaving the Redwood Drive-In after seeing the Towering Inferno but lost his way.
When more officers arrived on the scene, they conducted a search of Bundy’s vehicle, and found several items in a duffle bag in the trunk. These included, a crowbar, a flashlight, gloves, rope, a ski-mask, strips of cloth, large green plastic bags, a screwdriver, wire, a pantyhose mask and a pair of handcuffs.
Asked why he had such a strange assortment of items in his possession, Bundy explained he was a law student and was studying how to arrest criminals. Suspecting that Bundy was in possession of burglary tools, he was arrested, but later released due to a lack of evidence. However, detectives soon began to connect Ted Bundy with the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch.
One piece of evidence appeared to connect Bundy to the crime. When investigators checked the handcuffs found in his car, they were the same brand as those found on DaRonch’s wrist after her escape. Similarly, the crowbar found in Ted Bundy’s murder kit was the same as the one used to threaten DaRonch back in November 1974.
The fact that Bundy’s car was the same as the one used by DaRonch’s kidnapper meant police were sure they had the perpetrator. However, if they were to charge Bundy, they needed more evidence, and so conducted a search of his Utah apartment. The student was found to be in possession of maps and brochures.
These were from the areas where several of the women went missing. Arrested for the attempted kidnapping, Bundy was also being investigated by detectives in Washington over a series of disappearances of young women. When his Bundy sold his Volkswagen Beetle, police found the buyer and impounded it, so they could carry out a thorough forensic search.
This uncovered several hairs, despite Bundy’s attempts to clean it, which were tested and found to belong to Caryn Campbell, while others were believed to be “microscopically indistinguishable” from those of Melissa Smith and Carol DaRonch. After he was picked out of a line-up by DaRonch, Bundy was charged with her kidnapping, and went to trial.
Found guilty, he was sentenced to between one and fifteen years in prison. However, this was only the beginning of his legal troubles, and he soon found himself extradited to Colorado to face charges for the murder of Caryn Campbell. Held at the Pitkin County Courthouse, Bundy orchestrated a daring escape, but was recaptured several days later.
Taken back to Glenwood Springs, he attempted a second escape, this time succeeding. He made his way to Florida, where he went under an assumed name and attempted to stay undetected. In January 1978, two students at the Chi Omega Sorority House were murdered and two others severely injured by an intruder.
Bundy was added to the FBI most wanted list and became a prime suspect in the slayings at Chi Omega. In February, 12-year-old Kimberley Leach was murdered. Four days later, Ted Bundy was arrested and charged with the Chi Omega murders and killing of Kimberley Leach. Bundy was sentenced to death for these crimes in two separate trials, and was incarcerated on death row and Florida’s Raiford prison.
During his time of death row, Ted Bundy consistently professed his innocence, despite the overwhelming evidence that he was a serial killer responsible for the murders of many young women from Washington, Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Florida. Some detectives suspected he might be responsible for as many as 100 murders.
With his execution date stayed and then rescheduled numerous times, Bundy was fast running out of time when a confirmed execution date of January 24, 1989, was announced. In those last hours, Bundy decided to confess in a desperate effort to stay his execution, hoping that the sharing of details of unsolved murders would prolong his life.
Less than an hour before his execution, Bundy confessed to Florida State Prison Superintendent Thomas Barton that he killed Susan Curtis, who was his last confirmed victim before his arrest in 1975. Other women went missing after, namely Sandra Weaver, Nancy-Perry-Baird, Shelley Robertson, and Debbie Smith, however Bundy never admitted these crimes.
The typical ploy used by Bundy to abduct his victims involved the use of a plaster cast on his arm or leg in an attempt to appear handicapped and harmless. He would then request help from an unsuspecting student, who readily accepted to carry his books to his tan Volkswagen Beetle. There he would incapacitate them with a blow to the head from a hidden crowbar, before handcuffing and placing them inside.
Bundy then drove his unconscious victim to a secluded area, where he engaged in rape and murder. He would then indulge in necrophilia with the body, something he confessed to doing multiple times with victims remains, until decomposition prevented him doing anything further. In some cases he removed the head and took it back to his apartment. It is possible, Bundy committed these acts with Susan Curtis after her abduction.
When pressed for her whereabouts, Bundy offered up information on the location of her remains and how investigators could find it. He said he dumped her body 5-10 miles south of Price, right before the Green River, and that he ‘turned left on a side road’ and after about a quarter of a mile took another left. He said he then drove roughly 200 yards down that dirt road, before dumping her remains about 50 yards off of it, to the left.
During the same confessions, Bundy admitted to the murder of Denise Oliverson in Colorado, and Nancy Wilcox, Deb Kent, Melissa Smith and Laura Ann Aime, as well as three other unidentified victims in Utah. He had previously confessed to cutting the heads off some victims and keeping them at his Utah apartment.
He also revealed to his lawyer, Polly Nelson, that when Utah police searched his apartment, they failed to check the utility room, where he had hidden some of the most depraved evidence of his crimes. There, in a box, the killer had kept a collection of Polaroids of his victims, which he later destroyed.
After the execution of Ted Bundy, the Curtis family became aware, along with the rest of Americans, that their daughter had been the victim of a serial killer. After fourteen long years, they finally had answers about what happened to their child. But without the location of her remains, they could never get complete closure.
After all that time had passed, there was little hope that anything would be found in the area Bundy indicated had been Sue’s resting place. It was likely that her body was dispersed around the area by wildlife, meaning the likelihood of finding anything being almost impossible after such a long passage of time.
Any planned search efforts were postponed after Bundy’s execution until the Spring of 1989, owing to the cold weather and snowy conditions. A search team, headed by the Salt Lake County and the Carbon County Sheriff’s departments, made up of volunteers, combed the area looking for any trace of Curtis.
The use of cadaver dogs was deemed necessary because of the often deep layer of snow that still covered the area. There was hope that the use of metal detectors might pick up the location of her braces, however this only yielded pieces of scrap metal, beer cans, and shell casings. Ultimately, the search uncovered no remains.
In a desperate attempt to find answers, the Curtis family sought the help of numerous psychics and mediums, while cold case detectives used helicopters to scour the fields and hills in their recovery efforts. But every attempt failed to find a trace of Susan Curtis, and as a result she remains a missing person.
In the hopes of one day identifying her remains, DNA swabs were taken from her parents, Marilyn and Larry Curtis by Lieutenant Lemmon. Like so many of Ted Bundy’s victims, the remains of Susan Curtis have never been found, and despite the many efforts by law enforcement, her final resting place endures as the final unsolved piece of this tragic case.
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