Cold Case Files - Viciously Murdered

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

When Susan Schwarz is found shot to death in her apartment in 1979, police suspect a robbery gone wrong. Thirty-two years pass before a witness emerges to reveal a much darker motive and bring justice to Susan’s Killer. Cook Unity: - Go to Cookunity.com/COLD or enter code COLD before checkout for 50% off your first week! Homes.com: We’ve done your homework. Hydrow: Head over to Hydrow.com and use code COLDCASE to save up to $475 off your Hydrow Pro Rower Progressive: Progressive.com  

Hi, cold case listeners. I'm Marisa Pinson. And before we get into this week's episode, I just wanted to remind you that episodes of Cold Case Files, as well as the A&E Classic Podcast, I Survived, American Justice, and City Confidential are all available ad free on the new A&E Crime and Investigation channel on Apple Podcasts and Apple Plus for just $4.99 a month

or $39.99 a year. And now on onto the show. The following episode contains disturbing accounts of physical and sexual violence. Listener discretion is advised. I didn't understand. My sister Sue was viciously murdered. Why? Why?

I don't think I've ever seen anything so hurtful. There was nothing that we could do. There just weren't any good leads. I found it extremely frustrating. I felt that I should have done more. The questions were always there in my mind. There was a murder that bore many similarities to Sue's murder. Just a little bit of information and that's all we needed.

Hope meant finding who did it to her. That person was still out there, maybe harming other people. There are over 100,000 cold cases in America. Only about 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. It's October 22nd, 1979, in Alderwood Manor, Washington. Ken Christensen is a former detective with the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office. I was a Snohomish County deputy sheriff assigned to the detective division.

I was contacted by the dispatcher. They were requesting that I respond to an address in the Alderwood area regarding a homicide and that they needed somebody to process the crime scene for fingerprints. Susan Schwartz's boyfriend arrives home after a day at work to find the 24-year-old woman dead on the floor. The house was off the main road. It wasn't very large. The home looked very tidy, very well kept. But there was a body in the bathroom, a female subject. Her hands were tied behind her back

with what appeared to be some type of electrical cord. She was nude, and she appeared to have a gunshot wound to her head. Jim Scharf is a former detective with the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office. There was a pillow next to her head that had blood on it and a bullet hole shot through it. And there was blood on the floor and all over her face.

She had a black bra wrapped around her face like a gag. There were 22 caliber shell casings that were laying on the floor there. It appeared that she'd been shot in the head execution style after she'd been tied up. So it was a horrific crime. Maybe she had interrupted a burglar. It didn't make any sense because most burglars run when they're confronted by somebody.

As police process the house, the carp carpet seemed to offer up some possible clues. This was plush carpeting, and you could see that there were distinctive prints of two different sizes, a smaller one and a larger one. She was barefooted, so there was no barefoot prints that were on the carpet. We had two different suspects that we were looking at. So it could have been possible that it was two of them that were together when the murder

happened. I processed everything that I could possibly think of in hopes of finding some latent fingerprints. I processed the cabinet that the stereo was on. It appeared that whatever was touched was taken. There were some things on the kitchen table, but they didn't appear to have been disturbed. A lot of times burglars will go up and they'll put their hands on a window shading the window so that they can see inside the house. But I was able to find nothing. Friends say Susan Schwartz was a free spirit and a role model to her little sister Valerie Rau. I thought she was just the coolest kid on the block.

She was so stylish and pretty. My sister was barely five feet tall, so she would wear these gigantic platform shoes and she would hem her pants all the way down to the ground so you couldn't even see her feet underneath all of her clothing. She had the most beautiful reddish auburn hair and if she would have just let it curl naturally, it would have just been gorgeous. But no, the straight hair was the thing in those days. Everybody had it down to their waist and it had to be straight, perfectly straight to be cool. So she would go through this incredible braiding process and rubber band wrapping process on down her hair at night time to try to make it straight.

She would take her bangs and pull them down and tape them to her head at night before she went to sleep. So she would, you would hear her in the bathrooms in the morning ripping that tape off, rip, ow, rip, ow. And'd have these red marks on her forehead after she would come out of the bathroom. And they'd slowly fade throughout breakfast and go away. But every morning, she'd have those bangs taped to her forehead. She was quiet and kind.

She took time to listen to me. Even though I was a lot younger than her, she never made fun of my ideas or my thoughts. That was a really big thing. She made friends, but not a lot of people in her actual inner circle, I don't think. Very private person. And she had her friend, Karen.

Karen Smith is Susan's best friend. I was a freshman, and Sue was a sophomore at the high school. We didn't know each other. We were in a class and I turned around in my chair and started talking. And she just kind of sat there and looked at me because she was kind of like shocked. We didn't know each other. I don't know why I did it, but pretty soon we just began hanging out and we just began hanging out.

And we just started to be best friends. She was very logical, where I was just out there. And she was very intelligent. She used to walk around with a book in her hand or a thesaurus. She loved to develop her vocabulary. We just enjoyed doing things, you know, like sometimes dressing up and modeling and taking pictures of each other. And we had fun.

We used to have a saying, let no man come between us. Nothing came between us. She was always willing to give what you needed to make things better. When this terrible thing happened to my sister, I was 13 years old. We were starting to develop more friendship despite just being sisters because I wasn't just that bratty little kid. We actually could talk about stuff that we did have in common. So it was nice.

It was nice. I was at school, and they came to my class and took me to the office. They didn't tell me anything. Then my mom came, and we went and got my brother, and we went home. She took us in and sat us down in the living room and she was trying to explain to us that Sue was gone and we didn't understand what gone meant, that she said that she had been killed

and I was just in shock. I think I just sat there crying. Our family was just devastated, numb. They were really numb with shock. As police scour Susan's home, something feels off. There was no ransacking. It just didn't feel right. Burglars don't go in there and shoot somebody to steal $150 worth of stereo equipment. It's pretty unusual to have a homicide occur during the commission of a burglary.

So it was a real puzzling case. After being at the crime scene, there was no doubt in my mind that it wasn't a burglary. I don't think I've ever seen anything so depressing and so hurtful as to see a naked woman bound up with a gag stuffed in her mouth and shot in the head. I couldn't, I can't fathom it. It was an execution. She was killed by somebody that she knew. The feelings that I had, it was just overwhelming terror and shock, anger, and the ever-present why.

Why? Why would someone do that to her? For a 13-year-old kid that just kind of shut me down for a while,year-old kid that just kind of shut me down for a while. Our family was just destroyed. Whoever the killer was, was comfortable enough to walk up to the house, tie her up, put a gag in her mouth, and shoot her.

Detectives begin to question witnesses. They start with a man who found Susan's body, her boyfriend Bill Hassler. Sue was everything to Bill. I mean, he just worshiped her entirely. He was very much a loner. He didn't have a lot of male friends or anything. Patrick Vanderwaist is a former detective with the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office.

You had to look at the boyfriend first. It's his boyfriend, Bill Hassler. He was very emotional, very upset when they talked to him about what happened when he came home and found her. That poor guy, he was just like a zombie. I've never seen anyone so devastated. Despite Bill's shock and sadness, investigators can't rule him out just yet. They interview neighbors about what they saw and heard earlier that day.

There was a person that heard what sounded like a squealing noise around 945 in the morning coming from the area of Sue's house. They didn't think much of it at the time. You know, if that squealing noise was when Sue was shot, it does give a time frame when the murder happened. Sue's boyfriend, Bill Hassler, had an alibi for the day. We did know at that time that he was at work, so his alibi panned out. So he was ruled out.

While police searched for leads, the medical examiner conducts Susan's autopsy. The cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds to her head. There's also lacerations to her head. The lacerations meant that it appears that she was attacked first, hit in the head, maybe would have dazed her. That would have led the person to be able to take control and then tie her up.

Even though she was naked, there was no signs of a sexual assault. Susan's murder leaves her family shocked and terrified. Having Sue so viciously murdered in her own home robbed me of every bit of security that I think I had ever had as a kid because home should always be safe. I was terrified that something was going to happen. I couldn't wrap my head around someone coming into her house and doing that to her. Home wasn't safe anymore. Police shift their focus to question Karen Smith, Susan's best friend, who recently separated from her abusive husband, Gregory Johnson.

The police asked me if I knew anybody that might have something against Sue. My husband, Greg, didn't like Sue because he thought that she was trying to break us up. She didn't particularly like Greg. She just thought that he was basically an abusive type person. She didn't trust him. And she would let me know about that. Eventually, he started feeling it.

He spent most of his time trying to keep me away from her because he knew that she knew what he was doing and what he was doing was wrong in being physically violent with me. The detective did go and talk to Gregory Johnson. He was cooperative. They asked him what he was on the day of the murder, and he said he was fishing.

Detectives tracked down the people he was fishing with. And, you know, memory's not that great, so the people weren't able to really verify he was there or not there. I think he remained a person of interest, but then there's really nothing else to indicate that Greg was involved. As police struggle to find answers,

Susan's 13-year-old sister takes on a grim task. I actually was asked by Bill personally to come and take out my sister's possessions. He couldn't do it. It was not a crime scene any longer at that point, but I knew I was looking at the place where she died and at the footsteps of the people that walked through her blood as they went through her house.

So it was terrible. It was absolutely terrible. I will never, ever get rid of that memory ever. I can't. That was outstays in my brain forever. Never, ever forget that memory. For months, detectives search for Susan's killer, but without a motive or any suspects, the case stalls.

I find it extremely frustrating. There's a point at which you've run out all of your leads, you've checked with everybody and you simply can't do anything else, and it becomes inactive. I was calling the police on a regular basis there for a while, but it went cold pretty quickly. I'd say within the first six months,

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nearly six and a half years after Susan's murder. In 1986, there was a murder in Seattle that bore many similarities to Sue's murder. The victim was Molly McClure, and she was lying on her stomach. She had her hands tied behind her back with an electrical cord. There was a gag in her mouth. She had injuries to her head.

Police zero in on the suspect. Sherwood Knight lives in the building and has a criminal record. — Sherwood Knight had been arrested for the murder. — He killed her very much similar to the way Sue was killed. — Because of the similarities, the same person could have been responsible. — This man could have done it. Detectives tried to figure out if it could be related to Susan Shor's murder because the MO was very similar. Lisa Paul is a former senior deputy prosecutor

for Snohomish County. In Molly's case, she was sexually assaulted and Susan was not. But the other similarity between the two was that Sherwood Knight knew both of the women. Police are surprised to learn that Sherwood Knight has a connection to Susan Schwartz. Knight turns out to be the half-brother of Gregory Johnson, the estranged, abusive husband of Susan's best friend, Karen. Sherwood was familiar with Susan because she kind of traveled in the same circles

as his half-brother, as Gregory Johnson. Sherwood Knight was always nice to me. We called him Cave. When I found out that Cave had murdered that woman, it didn't make any sense to me. Why would he do that? What did she do to him? We found out the connection between Sherwood Knight

and Greg Johnson being half brothers, and that Greg Johnson was married to Karen, who was Susan's best friend. We wanted to interview him that day. Snohomish detectives track down Gregory Johnson and find him in prison doing time for robbery. It was not the first time he had been behind bars. And Johnson has a story to tell that he says took place on the

day of Susan Schwartz's murder. He says, I was with my brother, Sherwood, I was driving him around with a couple other guys looking for a place to burglarize. And we pulled into this driveway and the three of them went in and they came out of the house and Sherwood had a gun in his hand and he says, we better not get caught for this one. And later on that night, I was watching the news on TV and they said that Suzan Shores was murdered. Johnson implicates Sherwood Knight,

but the word of a convicted criminal alone isn't enough to charge him. Sherwood Knight was in jail because of Molly McClure's murder. He had an attorney, so he could not be interviewed about Sue's case. Even though it seemed important, there wasn't a lot to go on with Sue's case. There was still a lack of evidence. In 1986, Sherwood Knight was convicted of a rape and murder of Molly McClure.

Knight gets life without parole, but since detectives can't connect him to Susan's murder, her case goes cold. Until February 2005, 25 years after Susan's murder. I kept wishing, I kept wanting for the person to be caught, but I think I lost hope that it would ever happen, because it just went on for so long. I mean, so long. I had given up hope of ever finding out who did that

to my sister, to Sue. Snohomish County formed the cold case team in February of 2005. November of that year, Gary Schwartz told us that his sister, Susan, had been murdered in 1979, and he wanted us to work on that case. Detective Van Der Weyst and I went through all the evidence and had it sent off for DNA testing,

because there was no such thing as DNA back in 1979. The police collected, I think, almost 100 items of evidence from the scene. And there is invariably some DNA that's going to be found. The only DNA that came back matched Susan Shor's. We didn't have any other different profiles. There was no forensic evidence that helped determine who committed this crime. There was nothing. It's now July 13, 2008, 28 years and nine months after Susan's murder, when a phone

call to Susan's friend Karen, from the mother of Gregory Johnson and Sherwood Knight, adds a new mystery to the case. Over the years, I kept contact with Greg's mom. She was the grandmother of my son. We were talking on the phone and she said, I got this letter from Cave or Sherwood and I'm going to mail it to you. Sherwood Knight is a half brother to Gregory Johnson. It was from Caveira Gregg saying, you were supposed to help me out while I'm in prison.

If you don't help me out within two weeks, I'm going to spill the beans on you and let you see what it's been like for me all these years. Sherwood Knight had some medical issues. He didn't want to die in prison. He wrote a letter kind of saying, you know, you better come up with some money for an attorney so that I can pursue my case,

or I'm gonna tell the crime that you committed. The letter was interesting because it kind of was cryptic. It didn't really say exactly what it was talking about. It would have been something really bad. Greg was a very, very terrible person. He was abusive to me from when we got married. He's vicious. I think in the back of my mind, I felt that it had something to do with Sue, Sue's murder.

I didn't know what to do with the letter. I was like shocked, first of all. I just put the letter to the side for six months because I was a little bit fearful. Greg was violent, quite violent. I came across the letter again six months later, and I decided, you know, I have to do something with this letter. So that's when I decided to mail it to the Snohomish County detectives. I just didn't want the responsibility of having that letter.

There wasn't much to go on with the letter because it was very vague. It didn't specify what Sherwood was talking about when he talked about the secret. The letter did bring Sherwood Knight and Greg Johnson to the top of the list of the possible suspects. Knight's letter to his half-brother Gregory Johnson doesn't solve the case, but it reminds Karen of all the support Susan gave her 20 years earlier when she was struggling in an abusive marriage to Johnson. Sue would tell me you don't deserve this Karen you need to get out you can have a better life. Sue helped me leave the first time. Her friend Karen had stayed with her for a couple of weeks before she was finally able to make the arrangements to get away from Greg Johnson. She got me out of there.

She helped me pack. My son, Greg Jr., was six months old when she helped me leave. Greg was so angry that Sue helped me leave him. Two and a half years later, when I found out that Sue was shot, I immediately went back to Washington for the funeral. I called Greg. We actually started to get back together. You have this daydream, this Cinderella dream in the back of your head that he's going to change, but the abuse just continues on. I left Greg for good around 87 or 88. That was the last time I talked to Greg.

Detectives refused to give up on finding Susan's killer. In 2009, they try an innovative tactic hoping to jumpstart the case. Our detective in Florida had put out a deck of cold case playing cards and put them into the prisons. And they'd solved more than a half a dozen cases. So if I can put a different homicide on each card with a picture of the victim and put them into the prisons, then they're gonna play these cards and be familiar with these cases that they're reading.

On the back, it says that crime stoppers will pay you a reward if you call in a tip. The hope was that somebody, in looking at these cards, would be willing to come forward. The cases that I thought were the most innocent victims, I tried to put them on the aces and the face cards. So we put Susan Schwartz on the Queen of Hearts. When the deck came out, I was going through and saw that she was the Queen of Hearts. It was so fitting because she was such a tiny, sweet, just big-hearted person. So it was

perfect. I cried. It's now April 15, 2011, 31 years and seven months after Susan's murder. In 2011, Sherwood Knight was thinking about his own situation. He had been playing cards with the other inmates with these cold case cards, and he noticed the picture of Susan. Sherwood Knight, who was serving a life sentence, said that he had information about who killed Sue Shores. He told us that on the day that Susan Shores was murdered, he was down fishing on the pier, and Greg Johnson, his half-brother, drove up. Greg had told him that, hey, if the police come asking

about me, tell them that I was fishing with you on this day. Sherwood said that he asked him why, and Greg responded, because I killed Sue. Sherwood said he was pretty shocked, and he could see in the car that there was a girl sitting in the front seat. If Greg had just killed Susan, maybe this girl was with him and might know something. The police knew that Gregory Johnson had a girlfriend, but that was new information to

them. We need to figure out who that girl was. Locating and talking to Greg's girlfriend would be crucial. It gave us a lot of hope that we were now on the right track. I thought it was going to be the break in the case. When Sherwood Knight told us that the girlfriend was sitting in the car when Greg was telling him that he killed Susan, we felt that this girlfriend was our prime witness.

We identified her. We had located an address in the Seattle area. We were gonna go and see if she had any information. If the ex-girlfriend, known as M.M., is willing to talk to police, she might have vital testimony about the case. We immediately drove to her address to attempt to talk with her.

We arrived. She put her dogs away to talk with her. We arrived. She put her dogs away. She had three or four dogs. We sat down in the dining room. She was totally willing to talk about her relationship with Greg Johnson that lasted quite a while. She confirmed that when she was 17 that she was in a relationship with Greg,

that he was physically abusive to her. He choked her, he beat her up. She was afraid of him, but she was also afraid to leave him. She gave no indication that she had any knowledge that Greg had done any harm to Sue. After the interview, we explained to her and said, hey listen, in the crime scene there were some smaller footprints.

So we'd like to get a DNA sample just to rule you out. When I asked her about the DNA, I could see her behavior change. I could see her get defensive, pulling her legs up close to her on the chair, and I could see that get defensive, pulling her legs up close to her on the chair, and I could see that she truly seemed to be afraid. She knew something, and she said she didn't want to get involved. And she got up from the chair and said she had to put her dog out. She gets up and she walks around the table behind me. So I got up behind her and I said,

you were there, weren't you? And as she turns over her shoulder, she whispers to me, I was there. And then she says it again, I was there. And she just kind of melts into my chest. And I just give her a big hug and I said, it's okay. It's okay. She'd been holding this secret for 32 years and now it was going to be exposed and you

could see that it was just crushing her. The witness, M.M., begins to describe what happened on that terrible day. Greg said he needed to go for a ride to see somebody. So she got in the car, they pulled up to a house, he went inside, and then he came back out and said, there's somebody in the shower, you need to come with me. So she went to the house. She observed that there was a woman taking a shower

because the bathroom door was open. Greg directed her to grab some things out of the house and bring it back to the car. She did that. She was sitting there by herself. When he didn't come out immediately behind her, M.M. decided, I wonder if he's in there going to rape her because she's nude in the shower, in the shower, she's in the shower.

And then, a little later, in the shower, in the shower, she's in the shower. And then, a little later, in the shower, in the shower, she's in the shower.

And then, a little later, in the shower, in the shower, she's in the shower. And then, a little later, in the shower, in the shower, she's in the shower.

And then, a little later, in the shower, in the shower, in the shower, in the shower, in the shower, in the shower doing in my house? Get out of here. You're not supposed to be here. Leave me alone. And Greg starts beating her with the pistol that he has out in his hand. He pulls her out of the bathtub and ends up forcing her down

onto the floor. And he uses this electrical cord to tie her hands behind her back. And she's face down on the floor. The girlfriend ends up watching Greg put a pillow over Susan's head, putting the gun up to the side of her head and pulling the trigger. At that point, he looks up and he sees his girlfriend is in the house and witnessing what he just did.

And he shoots Susan two more times and then tells his girlfriend, that's what happens to people that mess with me. Don't you ever tell anybody what you saw or I will kill you and I will kill your mother. She took that threat very seriously and really thought that at any time as she came forward that he would track her down.

I'm hanging on every word that she's telling us. We were just so fortunate to have that. I was excited to sit there and have somebody as an eyewitness. It was just a great feeling. There was no doubt in our mind that she was telling us the truth. We were ecstatic.

We knew it was enough to get Greg. Our next step was to go track him down. I was just thrilled that we had found somebody that was an eyewitness, which is very rare. We knew that this one witness was enough to put Greg away for this murder. I was eager to go track down Greg. Are you stuck in a mealtime rut, exhausted from endless cooking and planning? I know I often am,

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We saw him coming up the street, and he's eating some popcorn, just kind of casual, carefree. Greg was cooperative. He agreed to talk with us. We sat in the car interviewing him, but he would not admit any involvement in the murder. So Pat told him, you're free to admit any involvement in the murder.

So Pat told him, you're free to leave if you want to leave. And Greg kind of was nonchalant about it, and he really didn't start walking away. So I got out of the car and told him that he was under arrest for killing Susan Schwartz, and I put my handcuffs on him. My brother called me to tell me that there had been an arrest. I think the first thing that really hit me when I received the news initially is that overwhelming sense of relief. Because there was always that fear that that person was still out there, maybe harming

other people. Initially we charged Gregory Johnson with first degree murder. This particular case, having occurred, what, 30 years earlier, I started to kind of worry because of the age of it. Are all the witnesses going to be alive? Are they all going to remember? Is there any evidence which has been lost? The prosecution faces a tough decision.

Go to trial or offer Gregory Johnson a plea deal. It made me think that a sure thing, without having to put the victim's family through what's a very traumatic experience, was the right thing to do. And so he engaged in plea negotiations with his attorney. Anytime you go to trial, there's always the unknown. It only takes one person of a jury to have doubt. Gregory Johnson pled guilty to a second degree murder charge.

Our recommendation was 298 months, which is almost 25 years. The judge did follow that during the sentencing. I wanted him in there for life. I didn't want to do any kind of a plea deal, but we didn't really have a choice. The evidence just, it wasn't there. And he could have ended up walking away. In a brutal murder like what happened to Susan Schwartz,

I don't think justice has ever served. I don't think there's any sentence that can make it right, that can provide justice. But I felt at the end of the day that Gregory Johnson got an appropriate sentence. Gregory Johnson pleads guilty, but he never accepts personal responsibility for killing Susan Schwartz. During the sentencing, he blamed Susan for what he called meddling in his relationship, when really she was just being a compassionate friend. He showed no remorse for

having killed her. She was meddling in his business. She was best friends with your wife, who you were beating on. She wasn't meddling, she was being a friend. I never imagined that Greg was capable of murder. That used to make me feel guilty that I'd ever introduced him to Sue. Now it just makes me mad. I believe she was killed

for the simple fact of helping her friend. And that's what this whole thing comes down to. And that makes it even worse for me. I am still really conflicted about the witness. Yes, I am first and foremost grateful to her, but I'm also frustrated with the witness because of the fact that it literally took us almost 32 years to get the information that we needed.

If you have information, tell somebody, let people know so that families like mine don't have to wonder for decades and decades who did this horrible thing to their family. I just, I really wish we'd gotten the information sooner, a lot sooner. Sue is special. She was just a good person,

and we just don't have that many good people in this world anymore. She just died too young. She didn't have a chance. We don't know what things she could have done, and we never will. Because somebody decided to take that away from us. I miss her.

I miss what could have been. I'm sorry that this happened to you. I wish I could take it back. I love you. And I'll never stop loving you. like Frasier. And re-watch cult classics like Higher Learning. Whether you're in the mood to solve a little crime before bedtime with NCIS or Tracker. Or curl up with a surefire hit like Forrest Gump. Pluto TV has thousands of movies and shows all for free. Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.