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The Unsolved Murder of Susan “Su” Taraskiewicz

April 30, 2024·49 min·5 clips

The Christmas tie-in barely behaves. Amy and Mark circle the room, the briefcase, and the diary until the case finally clicks into place. Then Sue comes into focus: 27, from the Boston area, working at Northwest Airlines at Logan Airport, still living at home with her mother. The Snoopy detail lands with a thud. It is sweet for a second, then awful, because Marlene has kept that room waiting after Sue's murder. Marlene feels loved in this episode, not treated like a side note. Amy and Mark keep coming back to her, especially the way she could not go into Sue's room until around Christmas 1993, roughly 15 months after the murder. They wobble on the timeline, then find the sad point anyway: grief can hold a room exactly where the worst thing left it. The notebooks become the uneasy center of the conversation. Sue had been writing things down. That might protect you later, or it might make everything feel more exposed. Mark stays practical about it. Amy agrees, then pulls the conversation back to the line that matters: whatever Sue had done or not done, nobody deserved this. The banter keeps popping in, because it is Amy and Mark, but the case keeps yanking them back to Sue and to the way fear can wreck a person's sense of safety. They admit what they do not know. They question what the segment leaves out and push back on flattening the whole thing into simple bullying. Then the show wanders again, with Ronda Hinson, a dog, a cocktail, and people reaching out. That messiness is part of the texture. Under the jokes and corrections, this is an episode about a young woman turned into clues, and a mother forced to open the room she had survived by avoiding.

As heard by us

A warm true-crime recap that keeps Susan and the people around her at the center.

This episode stays close to Susan Taraskiewicz as a person, which gives the true-crime story some weight. It moves through her Boston-area background, her job at Northwest Airlines at Logan Airport, and the small details that make her feel real.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want two friends talking through an Unsolved Mysteries case with a Christmas-tie-in diary clue.

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