CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – “It’s like standing in a crowd of people and waiting for her to call out your name,” Ann Marie Miley said. For almost three decades, Miley had been waiting and listening for her sister, Susan Lund, to call out her name.
If you’ve driven down College Street toward downtown recently, or ventured down the 41A Bypass, you may have seen a billboard on the side of the road with a woman’s face and large text asking, “What happened to Susan Lund?” These billboards are two of six put up in Clarksville to rally the community for answers – answers that are over 30 years old.
The disappearance
It was Christmas Eve 1992, and a seemingly normal day was about to turn into an evening that would change the Lund family forever.
At 7:30 p.m., Susan Lund, who was around three months pregnant, left her home on Harrier Court, just off Jack Miller Boulevard, on foot to go buy some groceries, according to Leaf-Chronicle newspaper archives from the time. Her daughter Crystal Lund, who was 4 years old, begged her mom to go to the store with her, but she was told no, she told Clarksville Now.
But the grocery store had closed early on Christmas Eve, and Susan never returned.
Crystal, now 35, recalled getting up early the next morning with her brother and getting into the Christmas presents, not knowing that their mother hadn’t come home. Their father, Paul Lund, came downstairs upset that the children had already gotten into the presents.
That’s when everyone realized something was wrong, and Paul Lund called the police to report his wife missing.
Susan Lund remained missing for 29 years, but how she died remains a mystery to this day.
The search
At the time, Spc. Paul Lund was a soldier assigned to the 311th Military Intelligence Battalion. The couple had lived in Clarksville for only around two to three months at the time of Susan’s disappearance, and a police report stated she may have been upset over their financial situation.
Laurah Norton, author of Lay Them to Rest, a book about identifying Susan Lund, told Clarksville Now that the Lund family didn’t have a car and had to rely on friends to take them on grocery store runs, and to take Paul to work on Fort Campbell.
After two weeks of searching, CPD abandoned their search for Susan because, they said, there were multiple sightings of her in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. But they kept her listed as a missing person. Two months after her disappearance, Paul alleged that his wife was kidnapped, and he said the night she went missing, Susan was carrying her checkbook but had not written any checks.
Perhaps the strongest lead that police investigators found in the months that followed Susan’s disappearance was a woman in Alabama claiming to be Susan Lund. According to a Leaf-Chronicle article on Aug. 13, 1993, “She recently talked with an Alabama state trooper in the town where she now apparently lives.” At the time, the woman told TBI agent Jeff Puckett that she was the woman reported missing and “she did not want to be bothered.”
Her family eventually went to Alabama to confirm this woman’s identity. Miley, Susan’s sister, told Clarksville Now, “They (police) went there and decided on their own that that was Susan. My parents decided they wanted to go there and see if that was Susan, and they did, and it wasn’t her.”
She said that she and her family tried for years to get the case reopened after debunking the woman’s false claim.
Remains identified
On Jan. 27, 1993, one month after Susan went missing, two young girls found the head of a white woman on the side of a wooded roadway in Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park near Benton, Illinois – an almost three-hour drive northwest of Clarksville. The remains were labeled “Ina Jane Doe,” and the woman’s identity was unknown for 29 years.
In February 2021, Dr. Amy Michael approached Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois to offer a reexamination of the remains using updated forensic methods, with Norton collaborating on the reanalysis. A DNA profile was provided to Redgrave, a genealogy company, who then uploaded the data file to GEDmatch in February 2022.
Redgrave’s genealogy team arrived at a potential match within a day, then found out that Lund had been reported missing, with no date of death. The potential ID was passed to law enforcement, who then followed up with family members of Susan Lund. A DNA sample was provided by a sibling for direct comparison.
On March 6, 2022, it was confirmed that Ina Jane Doe was Susan Lund.
Around the time that Susan was identified, Crystal learned that several campers and hikers who were at Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park during the timeframe that the remains were discovered, reported seeing a headless body in the lake. To her knowledge, no one has followed up on these reports and searched the water.
A daughter’s doubt
Paul passed away Feb. 3, 2020, two years before Susan’s remains were identified, leaving Crystal with many unanswered questions.
“I don’t want to blame my dad, but there are stories about my dad and how he treated my mom, and some things don’t make sense to me,” Crystal told Clarksville Now. “Like why my grandmother and my uncle came so fast, and why we all got brand new bed sheets and blankets.”
Though Crystal was only a child at the time, she remembers that her grandmother and uncle had shown up at Harrier Court quickly, coming in from Disputanta, Virginia. The first thing the everyone did when her grandmother and uncle arrived was get brand new linens for all of the beds.
DON’T MISS A STORY: Click here to sign up for our free weekly email newsletter
A couple of months after her mother’s disappearance, Crystal said, they moved to Virginia. Not long after their move, Paul left. Crystal said she could recall her dad wasn’t around much, which lines up with initial news reports stating that Paul was slated to go to Korea. With their mom and dad gone, the Lund children went to live with their paternal grandparents.
Crystal said her paternal grandmother wasn’t the biggest fan of Susan, and she told her horrible things about her mother that she didn’t believe. “They would tell me that she was with another man,” Crystal said. “They would say things like, ‘She allowed him to molest you, Crystal.’ I don’t remember any of that.”
She recalled that one time her dad told her out that the way she was treated was because she reminded them so much of her mom.
“As a kid, I remember thinking every woman with red hair was my mom. I was with my cousin at a pool one time, and I remember walking up to her and asking, ‘Hey, are you my mom?’ I was determined to find her.”
That determination eventually turned to anger at her missing mom. “I had a lot of bitterness and anger toward her when I was in my teenage years,” Crystal said. “I went through moments when I missed her and wanted to find her. But I still had a lot of anger because I thought she just up and left.”
When Crystal was a teenager, her much-older cousin told her he had seen Paul choke Susan and slam her on the hood of a car out of anger. When Susan’s remains were identified, she contacted this same cousin again to inform him, and he told her the “exact same story.”
According to Crystal, during Paul’s military service he was a heavy alcoholic.
Who was Susan Lund?
Miley told Clarksville Now that her sister loved animals, ever since she was a little girl. “She was always bringing home a stray puppy or kitten,” Miley said. “She would come home with the most flea-bitten dog.”
Susan had found so many animals that their parents told her to stop, as they couldn’t afford to take care of any more pets.
Crystal said one of her earliest and perhaps fondest memories of her mother was when Susan rescued a kitten and gave it to her. “From what I heard, my mom was a tomboy – didn’t care about getting dirty, I guess,” Crystal laughed. “She crawled under this dirty shed and got me my first kitten, named Baby.”
Crystal also remembered that her mom liked taking the kids on walks to get ice cream and play with other military children in the neighborhood.
After Susan Lund disappeared, whenever there were visitors over, Crystal would point out the picture of her mother and say, “She’ll be back soon.” That day never came.
Timeline
Here is a timeline of events surrounding Susan Lund’s disappearance.
- Dec. 24, 1992: Susan Lund disappears during trip to grocery store.
- Jan. 8, 1993: Clarksville Police Department ends active search.
- Jan. 27, 1993: Remains of “Ina Jane Doe” discovered at Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park.
- Feb. 24, 1993: Paul Lund alleges his wife was kidnapped.
- June 1993: Susan’s due date for her fourth child.
- Aug. 13, 1993: Alabama woman claims to be Susan Lund. Later that year, family visits and determines she isn’t Susan.
- Feb. 3, 2020: Paul Lund dies.
- Feb. 3, 2022: Samples of Ina Jane Doe’s remains re-examined using new DNA testing.
- March 6, 2022: “Ina Jane Doe” confirmed to be Susan Lund.
There is a $10,000 reward for information on the death of Susan Lund. Any tips regarding the case should be directed to either the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois, CPD Cold Case Detective Keenan Carlton at 931-648-0656 ext. 5172, or call 618-242-8477 (TIPS).