The Nearly Forgotten Murder of Susan Poupart: Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest

00:03 For years, if you drove along Highway 47 in northern Wisconsin, you would pass the same billboard. On it was a photograph of a young woman with dark hair and a big, beautiful smile. Her name was Susan Pupar, but everyone who knew her called her Susie. For the people who lived there, Susie's face became part of their daily commute. They passed her on their way into town and again on their way home. Her own children passed her, her friend's pastor, and sometimes along the way there was a good chance the people who knew exactly what happened to her passed her to. Because beneath Susie's photograph were the words, murdered May 20th, 1990.

00:46 And below that, a message meant for someone in this small community. Her family deserves better, and somebody knows. The billboard stayed there year after year through northern Wisconsin winters and hot summers until eventually the colors began to. disappear. The background faded, the words became harder to read, and little by little, Susie's face faded to. Until the woman whose murder the billboard was supposed to keep people from forgetting, was herself becoming difficult to see. But Susie's family never forgot her, and more than three decades after she disappeared into the forests of northern Wisconsin, they are still waiting for the person who knows what happened to finally speak. Welcome.

01:32 to National Park After Dark. Hello everyone and welcome back to National Park After Dark. My name is Danielle. And I'm Cassie. And we're doing a Wisconsin story today, which is cool because we got a lot of people up in Wisconsin that really like us because they sold out one of our tour stops. This is your weekly reminder. We're going on tour very, very soon.

02:13 Yes. And we're going to be in Wisconsin very, very soon, which is exciting. If you want to grab tickets, there are still some available in some places. You can check it out in our show notes or go to NPADPodcast.com. And we have our full tour on there and you can browse through to see which city you want to see us in. Well, so unsolved case today. Yeah. It is. And this is definitely, this is a true crime case.

02:39 And this is one that I saw on our recommended to do. So I thought it was a good one to cover. And I thought, I really wanted to cover this one because there's not a lot of answers. And her family is still very, very actively looking for answers. So I just figure getting the word out, getting more ears to hear it is always helpful. I haven't heard a breath about this, probably because, you know, we grew up on the East Coast around the time. It seems like this was unfolding in the 90s. So I am looking forward to learning more about it.

03:14 Perfect. Well, let's just dive into it. 29-year-old Susan Pupar was a petite, dark-haired woman who was Ojibway and a member of the Locke du Flombo band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Affectionately known to her family and friends as Susie spelled with a Z, she was beautiful, strong-willed, and outspoken, but she also had a deeply creative side. Susie had studied art and sculpture at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, a time in her life when it felt like. the possibilities ahead of her were endless. Susie was already a young mother when she went to Santa Fe. While she was there, she became pregnant with her second child, Alexandria, and her boyfriend convinced her to leave school and move in with him in his home state of New Hampshire.

04:00 Things there were difficult. His family never really welcomed Susie and were prejudiced against her because she was Ojibwe. And eventually, her relationship with her boyfriend became abusive. So Susie left with her children and came home to Wisconsin. where her parents, siblings, and extended family still lived. By the spring of 1990, Susie was raising two children on her own, two-year-old Alexandria and eight-year-old Jared. She had a home on the reservation and was working as a waitress at the tribal casino. While life wasn't easy, she loved being the mom.

04:35 At night, she would lay Jared's clothes out neatly for school the next morning, usually a button-down shirt, dress pants, and nice shoes. She loved rubbing noses with their kids, making them. laugh and took pride in caring for them. That caring side of Susie extended beyond her family too. If someone she knew was struggling, she would show up to watch their kids, help clean their house, or just sit with them so they weren't alone. But being a single mom wasn't easy and opportunities to get away for a night and let loose with friends didn't come around very often. So when a friend's brother was getting ready to leave for the military and everyone was getting together for a going

05:11 away party one night in late May, Susie was excited to go. She shared her home with her sister Dawn, who could stay with Alexandria and Jared for the night, giving Susie a rare chance to go out with friends without having to worry about her kids. As Susie was getting ready to leave that night, though, her mom had a bad feeling. She got up from the couch, walked over to her daughter, and held out her hands. I've got a bad feeling, her mom told her. I don't think you should go. Stay home hang out with us instead. Her mom begged her not to leave, but Susie had been looking forward to this night. Her kids were safe with family and she was just going out with friends for a few hours. So Susie kissed her children goodbye. A friend picked her up and she waved to her family as they drove away.

05:59 It was the last time Alexandria and Jared would ever see their mom. As Susie and her friend drove away that night, they traveled through a place her people had called home for generations. Locque du Flambeau sits among the thick forest and countless lakes of northern Wisconsin. The reservation covers roughly 107 square miles, much of it dotted with lakes, rivers, and wetlands, and for the Ojibwe, who settled here centuries ago, those waters were at the center of life. Even the name Lock du Flambo tells part of that story. It means Lake of the Torches in French, a name given to the Ojibwe banned by early French

06:37 fur traders who watched them fish at night from canoes. In the darkness, fishermen carried torches out onto the lake using the firelight to illuminate the water as they speared fish. The night Susie said goodbye to her children, she partied with her friends into the wee morning hours. The party was at a house on Makwa Street, not far from her home, and somewhere around 20 to 30 people had gathered there that night. For a few hours, Susie got exactly what she had been looking forward to. She drank, laughed, and spent time with friends, but by around 4 o'clock in the morning, she was tired and ready to go home. So she started asking around for a ride. At some point, Susie ended up outside near a Buick with two younger men who had also been at the party. 19-year-old Joe Cobb and

07:24 18-year-old Robert Elm. Exactly how she got into that car would later become one of the first disagreements in the case. Some witnesses say Susie climbed into the Buick willingly. Others claimed they saw her being forced into the vehicle. Whatever happened once that Eweick pulled away, Susie never made it home. At first, no one immediately assumed the worst. Susie had been out late before, and some of her friends thought maybe she'd stayed with someone or decided to go somewhere else for the day. But her sister, Don, knew that didn't feel right. When Susie didn't come home or call, she knew something bad had happened. She knew that she wouldn't go somewhere and then, not at the very least, call in to check with her children. After two days on

08:09 May 22nd, Don reported her sister missing. At the time, the area didn't have its own tribal police department, so the case fell to the Villis County Sheriff's Office. In those first hours, investigators didn't know if they were dealing with a crime at all. They had been told Susie had been drinking at a party, and with the trails cutting through the thick woods around Lockeduflambo, there was a possibility that she had tried to walk home and gotten lost or hurt along the way. So they started searching. Sheriff Deputy, fire department personnel and volunteers spread out on foot covering a large area around the reservation. The search continued into the next day, and on May 23rd, the Civil Air Patrol joined in,

08:51 looking from above while searchers continued working through the woods below. For four or five days, they looked for some trace of Susie, hoping that somewhere out there they would find her alive. At the same time, investigators started retracing her night. They canvassed the reservation and began dragging down the people who had been at the party. They had discovered that there was around 20 to 30 of them there, and the investigators tried to speak with everyone they could identify. However, piecing those final hours together was messy. Since the party involved drinking, memories were fuzzy and some accounts contradicted others. But the more people investigators talked to, the clearer one part of Susie's night became. She had left with Joe Cobb and Robert Elm. When

09:34 investigators questioned the two men, they didn't deny it. They admitted Susie had been in their Buick and said they had intended to give her a ride home. But according to Joe and Robert, somewhere along the way, an argument broke out. They said they stopped the car and let Susie out in front of the old Lockedoflombo Elementary School. If that was true, Susie should have been standing outside the school sometime around 4 o'clock that morning. However, there was a problem with this version of events that confused investigators because the school wasn't in the direction of Susie's house. Susie lived on Little Pines Road north of the party. The school was just about half a mile south. If Joe and Robert had gotten into the Buick intending to take Susie home, they should have

10:22 headed north. Instead, by their own account, they had driven her in the opposite direction and then left her there alone in the middle of the night. And after that, according to them, they had to no idea what had happened to her. Investigators didn't believe they were getting the whole story, but there was only so much they could do. Susie was still considered a missing person, but there was no crime scene and there was no physical evidence showing that anything had happened to her inside that Buick. So while her family continued searching the forest and swamps, investigators kept their

10:53 attention on the last people known to have seen her. But the days stretched into weeks with no sign of her. Over the next several months, Joe and Robert remained at the center of the investigation. Both young men were planning to enlist in the Navy, which suddenly gave investigators a limited amount of time to work with them before they potentially left Wisconsin. They eventually convinced both men to take polygraph tests, although Joe apparently dragged his feet about actually showing up for this. When he finally took the test, the results were inconclusive.

11:27 Robert's test, however, was more concerning. According to investigators, his results indicated deception when he was questioned about Susie's disappearance. And of course, we know that lie detector tests are not admissible in court, and there's a lot of problems with them. But I do think it's interesting that one would completely flag deception. After Roberts Polygraph, Villis County investigator Joe Fath drove him home himself. It was a long enough drive for Fath to hope that maybe outside the formality of a interrogation room with just the two of them sitting in the car, Robert might finally open up. Fath tried talking to him, hoping Robert would give him something, even if it was only enough

12:11 information to tell Susie's family where to find her. But Robert never did. Not long afterward, he left with Wisconsin for Navy boot camp. Meanwhile, Susie's family kept looking. The first large-scale search had lasted only a matter of days, but her family search stretched through the summer and into the fall. They went back into the woods again and again, walking through thick forest and cedar swamps hoping to find anything that could explain where Susie had gone. As the months passed, though, their frustration with the investigation grew. By November, Susie had been missing for six months. Then, on Thanksgiving Day, November 22nd, 1990, a group of deer hunters were deep in the Chihuamigan Nicolay National Forest, roughly 12 miles from Susie's home.

13:02 The forest stretches across more than 1.5 million acres of northern Wisconsin, a massive landscape of hardwood and pine forests, lakes, wetlands, and remote stretches of backcountry. In late November, much of that landscape is cold, wet and dense, and away from the roads, thick cedar swamps can make traveling through it slow and difficult. It was Wisconsin's deer season, and the men had spent the the day in the area at the Cedar Swamp about 100 yards off a forest road. They were getting ready to leave when something brightly colored among the brush and logging debris caught their attention. It was a red and black nylon jacket. It matched the jacket Susie had been wearing when she disappeared six

13:44 months earlier, one she had borrowed from a friend before heading out that night. As the men moved closer, they began noticing other things scattered around the area, including a purse and a tribal identification card. It belonged to Susie. Then, among the debris, they saw part of a human jawbone. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. The hunters stopped what they were doing and left the area largely undisturbed before contacting authorities. When investigators arrived, they realized they were dealing with a scene that had been exposed to Wisconsin weather and scavenging wildlife. The remains had been concealed beneath a large

14:42 pile of brush and logging debris, and investigators found plastic bags and duct tape among them, suggesting the body had been wrapped or otherwise deliberately concealed before being left there. Animals had dug through the pile and got into the remains, leaving tooth marks on some of the bones and disturbing the scene. Clothing found nearby appeared to have been deliberately set aside rather than pulled from the body by animals. Very little remained for investigators to recover. For nearly six days, investigators worked their way

15:15 through the Cedar Swamp with cadaver dogs, carefully searching the ground for bones, clothing, and anything else that might help them understand what had happened there. They recovered jeans, a shirt, a bra, and underwear, along with trash bags and duct tape. They also collected soda cans, chip bags, a piece of white mattress padding, deer hair, and other debris from around the site. Despite nearly a week of searching, investigators recovered only a small amount of human remains, many of them small bones from the fingers and toes. Most of the skeleton was never found, including much of the skull.

15:51 What they did have was part of the lower jaw, and that gave investigators something they could compare against dental records. The red and black jacket, the purse, and tribal identification card had already given investigators a strong suspicion about whose remains they had found, but they needed to know for certain. Susie's dental records confirmed that the job only found was hers. Six months after she disappeared, Susan Pupar had finally been found. With Susie's death officially ruled a homicide, investigators turned their attention back to Joe Cobb and Robert Elm, the last two people. known to have been with her. Robert had already left Wisconsin for Navy boot camp in Pensacola, Florida, so investigators traveled there to question him again. Joe had also left the area and was working in a popcorn factory in Illinois. This time, Joe added a new detail to his story, telling investigators

16:46 that after he and Robert dropped Susie off, they went back to his mother's house for a beer before Robert went home. Investigators were suspicious of why that detail hadn't come up during his earlier interviews, but neither man changed the most important part of their story. They insisted that they had left Susie alive at the school and had no idea how she ended up dead in the forest. As investigators continued interviewing people who had been at the party, another name began popping up. Francis Fritz Schumann, Robert Elm's 22-year-old cousin. Francis had also been at the party that night, although witnesses did not place him in the Buick when Susie left with Joe and Robert. But people in the community were beginning to tell investigators that Francis may have become involved sometime afterwards.

17:38 Investigators also went through everything recovered from the forest looking for something that could connect the scene to one of their suspects. The garbage bags were consistent with bags sold on the reservation, but that did little to narrow things down. A shard of plastic initially looked promising because they wondered whether it might have broken off a suspect's vehicle, only to discover it came from logging equipment. Even strands of deer hair recovered at the scene seemed like they might offer a lead when investigators realized they had also collected deer hair from one suspect's vehicle. The two samples were sent to a laboratory in Alabama for comparison, but before testing could be completed, a hurricane destroyed the laboratory and all the evidence along with it. Oh, shoot. Like, what is the chances of that happening? I know.

18:26 I know. And just a quick question, I don't know if it matters or not in the long run, but the guy who added that other detail, Joe, was he the one that had the flag on his lie detector test? Or was it Robert? It was Robert that flagged on the lie detector test. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. With that, Susie's family was left to bury her without knowing.

18:51 how she had been killed or who was responsible. Because so little of her had been recovered, what was placed inside her casket was only a small bag containing the bones investigators had found, along with a dress. Jared and Alexandria were protected from those details as children. Jared wouldn't see a photograph of what had actually been buried until he was in his late 20s, when he finally understood just how little of his mother had been returned to them. Susie was laid to rest at Memorial Cemetery in Lock de Flombo. And after that, the case began to stall. Two years into the investigation, little had changed, and much of the physical evidence collected

19:33 from the forest still hadn't even been submitted for forensic testing. DNA technology was only beginning to enter criminal investigations at the time, and evidence that might be incredibly valuable today was instead stored away. As Susie's children grew older, they were. would come to understand that their mother's story was not an isolated one. When Susie was murdered in 1990, there was no national missing and murdered indigenous people movement, as we've seen more recently, there was no national day of awareness, or a coordinated federal response, and certainly no social media or families could push the names and faces of missing women into public view.

20:14 Even understanding how many indigenous people were disappearing or being murdered was difficult because the data was incomplete, inconsistent, and scattered between tribal, local, state, and federal agencies. Today, we have a much clearer picture, and the numbers are staggering. On some reservations, Native women are murdered at rates more than 10 times the national average. Homicide is roughly the third leading cause of death for indigenous girls and women between the ages of 10 and 24, and more than half of indigenous women, 56% have experienced sexual violence and their lifetime. And Native people continue to disappear at alarming rates. In 224 alone, 10,248 missing person entries involving American Indian and Alaska Native people were made in the FBI's National

21:06 Crime Information Center. More than 5,600 of those entries involved women and girls. I do think it's important to also mention that that number doesn't represent 10,248 individual people. because someone who disappears can be entered multiple times, but by the end of that year, 1,540 native people were still actively listed as missing. And even those numbers don't tell the whole story. While law enforcement is required to enter missing people under the age of 21 into the national database, there is no equivalent federal requirement for every missing adult, meaning some disappearances never make it into the statistics at all.

21:49 So while we have these numbers, in reality, those numbers are actually probably much higher. Okay, got it. For decades, Native families and advocates have argued that the crisis has been made worse by problems within the systems meant to respond to these cases, including jurisdiction, complications, limited resources, gaps in data collection, and poor communication between the tribal, local state, and federal agencies. Those problems have contributed to cases falling through the cracks and families. waiting for years, sometimes decades for answers. And like many stories of the disappeared, Susie's case quickly went dormant. For years, the police gave up trying to prove that the three men had killed her. Jared was only eight years old when Susie disappeared, and for a long time,

22:38 he refused to believe that she was dead. At one point, his uncle tried to tell him that his mom wasn't coming home, but he wouldn't accept it. Even when police showed him Susie's purse, and necklace and asked him to confirm that they belonged to her. He resisted. In his mind, helping them identified those things meant helping prove that his mother was dead, and Jared didn't want to prove that to them at all. He wanted them to keep looking for her and for them to bring her home. So instead, he held on to the version of his mother that he knew. Susie taking him out into the woods to snare rabbits, Susie bringing him and his cousins to the swimming pool where all the kids would pile on top of her, wrestling and laughing in the water. Those were the memories Jared had of his mom. His little sister,

23:24 Alex, had far fewer. She had only been two when Susie disappeared, and as the years passed, Jared struggled with the fact that his sister barely had any memories of their mother at all. Losing Susie also meant losing the stability she had created for the children. Jared and Alex were eventually separated and sent to live in different homes, sometimes with relatives and at other times in the foster care system. Jared had described families receiving money to care for them but spending it elsewhere, leaving the kids without the support the money was intended to provide. By the time they reached their teenage years, both siblings experienced periods of homelessness, sleeping on couches and floors wherever someone would let them stay, and at times living out of a car. As Jared got older, he began hearing more about the men his family and investigator suspected in his mother's murder. By the time he was around 13, people on the reservation would point out Joe Cobb, Robert Elm, and Francis Fritz Schumann to him in public.

24:24 He was also hearing more disturbing stories about what people believed had happened that night. One theory that circulated in the community was that the men had made sexual advances towards Susie and when she refused and fought back. she was raped and killed. Jared later said, we've always heard that her beauty got our mom killed. Since she wouldn't be with them willingly, they had to kill her. For Jared, the story wasn't difficult to believe. He knew his mother had been someone who stood up for herself. She was tough, opinionated, and had survived an abusive relationship before. But these were still stories being passed around the community, not something investigators had been able to prove. And the men Jared was hearing them about had never been charged.

25:10 That meant Jared grew up hearing that these were the men believed to have raped and killed his mother and then see them or members of their families walking around the same community of where he lived. Every time I saw those guys, I would flip out, he later said. I used to drink, party, and fight when I was young. And the hostility went both ways. Jared says members of the men's families would taunt him and on one occasion, one one of their children yelled at him on the street, my dad didn't kill your mom.

25:41 Even when Jared and Alex tried to find some kind of healing by attending traditional ceremonies on the reservation, there was always the possibility that they would come face to face with the men they believed were responsible for their mother's death. Eventually, they began leaving their own community and traveling long distances just to practice their traditional ways without having to worry about running into them. which I just like that kind of broke my heart, you know, hearing about her kids having to see these people and these rumors that are going around. And it feels very much that the community knows what happened, what happened, but the police have never been able to prove it. So they just have to live among it.

26:25 Right. Like it doesn't seem like they are making, the three men are making any sort of effort to, if they truly didn't do it. It feels like it would be an opportunity would have presented itself at some point in time for them to try and reach out to the children. And I don't know, maybe I'm just like having like a utopian mindset, but like where everything is just like, I don't know, goes best case scenario. But like if they truly did not do it, I feel like at some point, you know, they would have reached out and been like, you know, we're not sure what happened. but, and I know it looks bad, but we truly didn't do it and we're going to try everything we can to work with the police and help them and da-da-da. But, like, clearly it feels like they got away with murder and they're just not going to, they're just, they don't care, you know. And they're just like, not flaunting it, but just being like, yeah, well, you know.

27:23 Yeah. And the fact that there's rumors going around feels like, you know, I feel like you can't always trust rumors, but I feel like with rumors there's always a, like, little bit of truth and it's coming from somewhere, which feels like at some point they were telling people what happened that night. And that's how it got someone had to have known for this rumor to start spreading. So I agree. It feels like they're kind of just like walking around the community brazen being like, I'm free. Yeah. Yeah. And then meanwhile, her kids have to see them. See and suffer and just, you know, have to face them day and day out. And I don't know again if you're going to get to this, but I know when you were talking about how her remains were discovered and that only part of them were, is that, are they thinking that that's due to just animal scavenging and just natural mechanisms?

28:22 Or are they thinking that only part of her body was dumped there with her clothes? I think it's a big question mark. I think it's kind of both. you know, because animals had got into her body and had a lot of these like toes and stuff that they had found, it sounds like, were kind of spread into other areas, probably from animals. And they were never able to uncover anything else. And her skull wasn't there.

28:49 So it's really hard to determine what had happened or how she had even died. So I think that's a big question mark, which is part of why finding out who did it and could give answers would be really important because otherwise the evidence is kind of truly, truly lost. Mm-hmm. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Well, as Jared got older, he was able to turn his life around. He found a good job working for a tribal economic support program and was eventually elected to the Lock DeFlombo Tribal Council. Alex began building a life of her own too.

29:44 She had five sons and settled into life as a stay-at-home mom, keeping pieces of Susie close, even though she had so few memories of her. On a shelf in her home, she kept one of her mother's ceramic vases, shaped like a native man wearing a headdress and wrapped in a colorful blanket. In a community as small as theirs, though, there were constant reminders of what had happened. Alex lived very close to the house where the going away party had been held that night. Every time she drove past it, she was reminded that decades had passed and her mother still hadn't gotten justice. What made that even harder was watching the three men suspected in Susie's murder continue to have encounters with law enforcement.

30:27 Over the years, Joe Cobb, Robert Elm, and Francis Schumann were arrested in connection with other crimes, including violence against women, drugs and assault. Okay. Well, sorry. I'm not saying like that that equals they're guilty of murder, but there's a pattern there. And it's pretty indicative. Yeah. Yeah.

30:51 It's not like, hey, we truly, it's just like we were the last. Yes, we were at this party with her. Yes, we were the last people seen with her. But something else happened to her. It's like, actually we're really bad men. We already thought you were guilty. We already thought something was suss about your story and now you've continued to live the rest of your life with a pattern of violence. And violence against women.

31:17 And you're not convincing anybody of anything. And of course, for Alex, it was really painful to think about the women who were hurt in the years after her mother died. She couldn't help wondering whether some of that violence could have been prevented if the people responsible for Susie's murder had been held accountable. So it was like the justice system is really failing. They failed Susie, but now they're failing all these other women that these men are able to hurt because they're not in prison. All three men spent periods of time away from lock to flambo, but eventually they returned to the community. So getting people in the community to speak openly about what they knew was really difficult. There was a fear that if someone gave investigators information and the men weren't arrested or convicted, that person or someone they loved. could face retaliation. That fear existed alongside a much longer history of distrust between

32:12 indigenous communities and law enforcement. For generations, government authorities and police helped enforce policies that remove native children from their families and sent them to boarding schools, where many experienced abuse and were prevented from speaking their languages or practicing their cultures. Indigenous people continue to experience violence at the hands of law enforcement today. In 2024, American Indian and Alaskan native people were more than three times as likely as white people to be killed by police. So for some people in the community, going to law enforcement for help meant putting their trust in a system they had very real reasons not to trust. Even if there were people in the area who knew more about what happened to Susie than they were willing to say, coming forward wasn't necessarily as easy as telling the police what they knew.

33:04 Between their distrust of them and then their fear of these men who are really violent, it's very possible that people have just been staying quiet. However, there was one very public reminder of Susie that no one in Lockedoflombo could easily avoid. By 2007, a large billboard bearing Susie's face stood along Highway 47, the main route between the reservation and the nearby town. It read, Susie Pupar, murdered Mesaoogh, 20th, 1990, and beneath her photograph, her family deserves better and somebody knows,

33:41 followed by contact information for investigators. The billboard was meant to keep Susie's case visible and encourage anyone who knew something to finally come forward. And to some extent, it worked. Investigators continued receiving information about Susie's murder years after it went up, with tips still coming in as late as 2016. but none of them provided what police needed to finally solve the case. At one point, it was vandalized and burned, only to be replaced, and year after year, Susie's face remained along the highway.

34:18 Eventually, decades of northern Wisconsin weather took its toll. The colors faded until the sign was nearly white, and Susie's face was barely visible anymore. Investigators, however, didn't stop trying to force the case forward. In the 1990s and then again in 2007, they turned to something available under Wisconsin law called a John Doe proceeding. Unlike a trial, a John Doe hearing can be used before anyone has been charged with a crime. A judge can subpoena witnesses, question them under oath, and examine evidence in an attempt to determine whether there is enough information to move a criminal case forward. For investigators who believed people knew more about Susie's murder than they were saying, it offered another one. way to get answers, but once again, the hearings led nowhere. In 2007, Joe Cobb, Robert Elm,

35:09 and Francis Schumann were all subpoenaed. Francis invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to answer questions. Robert arrived without an attorney, and the judge would not allow him to be questioned without legal representation. Joe Cobb never showed up at all. So even after hauling the three men back into the legal system 17 years after Susie's murder, investigators were left essentially where they had started. They still believe these men knew what happened to her, but they couldn't get the testimony or physical evidence they needed to prove it. In 2014, investigators sent another group of items out for testing,

35:49 including Susie's clothing, the garbage bags, found with her remains, beer cans, and a cutting from the piece of a mattress pad recovered at the scene. This time, they also submitted oral swabs from Joe Cobb, Robert Elm, and Francis Schumann, so that if the lab developed a usable DNA profile, investigators would have something to compare it against. This time, the lab did find something. On Susie's green underwear was a tiny amount of male DNA. For years, Susie had been widely reported as having been sexually assaulted before, she was murdered, but investigators have since acknowledged that they could never prove that part of

36:28 the story from Susie's remains. There wasn't enough of her body recovered for pathologists to determine whether she had been sexually assaulted, and the male DNA found in 2014 was an incredibly small amount, not enough to develop a profile or determine who it belonged to. So while sexual assault has long been part of the story surrounding Susie's murder, exactly what happened to her that night has never been established forensically. In 2018, Cody Remick joined the Villis County Sheriff's Office and eventually took over Susie's cold case around 2023. By then, more than three decades had passed since her murder, and Remick was looking at the same pieces of evidence investigators had carefully saved all of those years earlier. The difference was what

37:17 laboratories could now do with them. New methods had become capable of recovering and analyzing amounts of DNA that would have been essentially useless even a decade earlier. Around the same time, Susie's case was also beginning to receive renewed attention outside of law enforcement. In 2021, the team behind crime junkie was investigating the unsolved murder of another indigenous woman, Reese Pocan, when they came across Susie's case and several others with disturbing similarities. That eventually grew into a years-long investigation by Audiochuck, whose team worked with local and federal law enforcement while continuing to dig into Susie's murder. That connection ended up giving investigators something they badly needed, which was money. Remick learned that crime junkie host Ashley Flowers and Britt Proet had created a nonprofit called Season of Justice,

38:13 which provides grants specifically to help law enforcement agencies paid for individuals. advance DNA testing and cold cases. The Villis County Sheriff's Office applied and received funding to take another look at Susie's evidence. In August, 24, some of the evidence was sent back to a state crime lab, this time to be examined using a technique called MVAC. The easiest way to picture it is almost like a tiny wet vacuum for DNA. A sterile solution is sprayed over the surface of a piece of evidence and immediately vacuum back up, allowing scientists to collect microscopic amounts of biological material that older swabbing techniques might have missed. Investigators hoped it could recover more of that male DNA previously detected on Susie's clothing.

39:01 Another newer tool called forensic-grade genome sequencing, or FGGS, can take very small or degraded DNA samples and sequence far more genetic information than traditional forensic testing. The hope is that even evidence that has been sitting in storage since 1990 might finally produce a usable genetic profile. In 2022, the Bureau of Indian Affairs launched Operation Spirit Return through its missing and murdered unit, specifically to bring advanced forensic testing to cold cases involving indigenous people. As a part of that program, the BIA awarded the forensic DNA company Othrim, a $1 million

39:42 dollar contract to use FGGS on cases that had been sitting unsolved for years. By 2025, Susie's case was receiving assistance through that effort as well. Okay, hold on. Pause. You just said so much. A lot of dates, a lot of times, a lot of things. No. Well, yeah, you just said a lot. First thing, Othrum, I think, was the same company that got involved with. the mostly harmless case. Oh, really? I believe. I believe.

40:17 Are they... Interesting. Yeah, I don't know. Just a note. I could be wrong, but it sounds very familiar. And number two, it is just like so cool to hear of another podcast that is like in our realm. Like Ashley Flowers doesn't know who we are, but we know who Ashley Flowers is. And to see her build and her team, her Brit and her whole team just build something that's not only

40:49 so wildly successful, but also impactful and making a difference. Like that's the definition of putting your money where your mouth is and supporting causes that you truly care about. And I know a lot of people have mixed feelings about true crime shows that, you know, some people criticize them for being exploitative and making money off of other people's tragedies. And I think that this is a perfect example of being like, hey, we're not solely, like, we care about this stuff. We're not just doing it because it's fun to talk about. There is a lot of reasons of why we're invested in this and we're giving back in this monumental way. Like, I just think that's so

41:37 impressive and I think that like I'm not a true like I don't think I can call myself a crime a crime junkie like I don't listen every single week but I'm obviously familiar enough to know that they're just so amazing and I was unaware that they had this foundation but I'm also not surprised because yeah she has given back in so many different ways and has grown in so many different ways I just think it's so cool to see like, hey, we have all of this money and resources now that we can contribute and give back into the causes that we genuinely care about and have spent so much time, you know, researching and speaking about. Yeah.

42:22 And to think that like maybe someday, and again, I could be off base here. I'm not sure if they've like had a direct like because of our. donations or our efforts or, you know, just speaking about a case, we have put like the final pieces in that was needed to propel this case into a, you know, a conclusion or like get real answers. I'm not sure. But just to have that as a possibility is something to be really proud of, I think. I want to look it up because I feel like I know that I've seen that they do a lot of work with missing people in unsolved cases and things like that. And I believe that they have helped solve some. It's just so cool. It's just like really cool because I mean,

43:11 on our little side of the street over here, I know that we're really proud of the money that we are able to raise and donate to different national park related projects and nonprofits and efforts and things like that. But yeah, it's like, it just feels really big. Yeah, one of the first things that I look on here is it says after crime junkie covered the 1981 murder of Father Patrick Ryan, listeners of the show looked into the case, made noise about untested idle evidence, and helped push forward findings that ultimately led to Rayo's being declared innocent. So it sounds like someone was. Yeah, just like, so cool. Yeah, just making an impact. Well, crime junkie wasn't the only one making waves on this case. In the summer of 2024, a retired

44:01 Chicago architect named Ron Carlson became interested in the case as well. Ron frequently vacationed around Loctaflombo and had driven past Susie's billboard for years, watching as her photograph slowly faded until the sign was almost completely white, and it bothered him. In retirement, Ron had created a YouTube channel called Faces of the Forgotten, where he travels to cemeteries and tells the stories of people buried there. The whole purpose of the project, he says, is to recognize people who have passed on long ago and, as of today, are mostly forgotten. Well, writing this down. Jodding this down really quickly. Faces of the forgotten. Forgotten. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I know when I saw that, I was like,

44:49 Danielle either knows about this or she wants to know about it. Or I want to be him. So. One of those things. Yeah. So obviously a really noble thing to be doing. But when Ron learned more about Susie, he didn't just feature her story on his channel. He actually tracked down her children, Alex and Jared, and offered $10,000 of his own money to help pay for additional DNA testing. In addition to that, years earlier in 2011, Susie's photograph had been placed on a special deck of cold case playing cards distributed. inside Wisconsin's jails and prisons. Instead of kings and queens, the cards featured the faces of peoples whose murders or disappearances remained unsolved, with the hope that someone sitting in jail might recognize a name or a face and finally share what they know. Susie became the seven of spades. Then in February, 2025, Ashley Flowers featured Susie's card on her podcast, The Deck. a show built entirely around the cases featured on these cold case playing cards. By that point, Audio Chuck had already spent years looking into Susie's case alongside

46:02 other unsolved murders of indigenous women in Wisconsin, so suddenly a case that had spent decades known mostly around Locked Flambo was being heard by people across the country. But even with all of that new attention and all the advances in DNA technology, the first round of new testing still wasn't enough. The initial samples failed to produce enough usable DNA to build a profile. For Alex, that wasn't a reason to stop. In 2024, she started her own fundraiser asking the public to help pay for additional testing on evidence that still hadn't been exhausted. Her goal was $10,000, but more than 160 people donated pushing past that total amount. And while all of this was happening, another piece of Susie's story was being given new life.

46:54 The Wisconsin Indigenous Riders, an all-native motorcycle group that raises awareness for missing and murdered indigenous people, had seen Susie's fading billboard and decided to take action. During their annual ride in June 2004, they raised money to replace it. And in March 2025, the old billboard finally came down and a brand new one, was put up in its place. This time, Susie's photograph was bright and clear again. Across the top and huge letters were the words, We need your help. Beneath it was her name, the date she was murdered,

47:31 and the contact information for anyone who might finally be ready to tell investigators what they know. In May 2025, the Loctaflombo Tribal Council announced a $25,000 award for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever killed Susie and her case remains an active investigation today. The people closest to Susie's case are still asking the community to talk. 35 years is a long time. People who are afraid to say something in 1990 may not be afraid anymore.

48:05 And investigators have stressed that even something that seems insignificant could be the detail they have been missing all of these years. So if you know anything about what happened to Susie Pupar on May 20th, 1990, there are several ways to reach investigators. You can call the Villis County Sheriff's Office at 715-479-4441, the Wisconsin Department of Justice at 608-266-1-221, or the Lockto-Flombo Tribal Police Department at 715-5-88-770. 1717. The Villis County Sheriff's Office also accepts anonymous tips through tip 411, so you do not have to give your name to share information. There is still actively that $25,000 reward being offered for information leading to the arrest. There is someone out there that knows what happens to her. There is still time for that person or people to finally tell the truth. And that is my story of the murder of Susan Pupar. Wow. Well, thanks for sharing it and keeping it circulated. I mean, I know that at the very top of this episode, I was like, wow, this happened a while ago. I am disconnected from it. I've never heard of it. And now I feel a little ashamed because it's like it's been actively, you know, over the last recent years. There's so many different efforts it feels like to keep it in the public's attention. And yeah, I've just, I've never heard of it. But I'm. really pleasantly surprised to see how many different groups of people have come together to keep it alive. You know, like everything from podcasters to law enforcement to the family to motorcycle groups.

49:59 You know, it's just, you know, that guy that is into cemeteries, you know, it's just like all of these different branches of people who feels like at first glance may not have a lot in common do and they care about Susie and they care about her family and want to get answers. Yeah. It's really, it's really promising to see how much attention has been brought to this case, especially because at the beginning, there was really not too much. You know, it was, it happened. It was kind of like shoved away. The families had no answers, had to live with it for so long of no one really caring outside of their small community. And now to see all of this attention, I think, brings hope that their mother will get justice and they will find out what

50:49 happened to her. And I think it also brings a lot of hope to any other families who are experiencing the same thing. You know, for a family that you might have lost your mom 35 years, 36 years ago, but that doesn't change how devastating it is. It's just the world seems to have moved on. And I think it's really promising for other people who might be experiencing something similar that there can be a resurgence in the case and that people do care and there are people out there willing to help. And it's just finding those resources and getting that attention.

51:22 Well, you've definitely done your part of spreading the word to a new group of people, including me. So thank you for covering it. and covering it so well, I feel like I have a good sense of who Susie was, which is always nice because I think a lot of times in true crime cases, that takes a backseat to either the crime or the supposed perpetrators or the circumstances around their death. I feel like you focused a lot more on who she was in life, which is lovely. Thank you.

51:59 That was definitely intentional. Well, thank you, everyone, for tuning in this week. We will hang out with you next time. In the meantime, enjoy the view. But watch you're back. Bye, everyone. Bye. Thanks for joining us for another episode. We hope you learn something new and have another location to put on your list. If you want more MPAD content, make sure to follow along with our adventures on all socials at National Park After Dark. For more stories just like this one with the added bonus of exclusive content, you can join us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. If you prefer to watch our episodes, head over to our YouTube channel. And if you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite listening platform.