Mary and Susanne "Susie" Reker (2 of Hearts, Minnesota) Part 1
2023-07-12 00:32:23
For years, some law enforcement agencies have replaced the faces of traditional playing card decks with images of missing and murdered people and distributed those cards in prisons hoping inmates would come forward with information needed to crack these cold cases wide open. Now, audiochuck is dealing you in. Each week, we will be working with investigators and family members to bring you the details of some of the coldest cases from around the country in hopes that someone listening can finally bring these victims the justice they deserve.
Our card this week is Mary and Suzanne Raker, the two of hearts from Minnesota, on Labor Day of 1974, less than 24 hours before 15-year-old Mary was to start her sophomore year of high school. She told her parents she needed to make a quick shopping trip to pick up some last-minute school supplies and a winter coat. Her younger sister, 12-year-old Suzanne, tagged along and they waved goodbye to their father when they left. On a day so ordinary, it never crossed his mind that that would be the last time he'd see his two daughters alive. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is the death.
Everything looks different in hindsight. Moments you want to rewind, pause and do differently, or moments that you just wish you'd paid more attention to. Because maybe they meant something, maybe you could have seen something or prevented something. Eighty-seven-year-old Rita Raker has spent almost 50 years now examining a few weeks of 1974.
In hindsight, there was something bothering her 15-year-old daughter, Mary, but she couldn't get her to say what. And I don't know if you've tried talking to a 15-year-old lately, but it wasn't any easier back then. And with a house and a husband and five other kids to care for, the best Rita could do was remind Mary that she was there for her. Things seemed to be looking up, though.
It was Labor Day, and Mary seemed excited about leaving that evening to go back to high school. Roughly 45 minutes away from their St. Cloud home in Little Falls, Minnesota. She was returning for the second year, and she loved spending the week there, spreading her wings, having some independence, and then coming home to her family on the weekends. Her Carpool was going to pick her up at 4 p..m. So when Mary asked if she and her two.
Kids could go shopping. Rita was a little hesitant. She reminded Mary that she just went shopping a few days ago. Plus, she wanted the girls to help with some yard work before Mary left. But Mary seemed insistent, almost pleading and urgent, so Rita agreed.
At first, all three of the girls were planning on going shopping. And for some reason, our Betsy, who was between Mary and Sue, decided that she'd stay home and she wasn't even sure why. She just kind of got the feeling that they'd rather go by themselves. And generally, our Betsy and Susie were the two who were always together, so that was kind of unusual that Susie happened to be with.
According to Robert M. Dudley's book, Cold Cases of Stearns County, Minnesota. The girls left just after 11 a..m, and Rita went about her day doing chores alongside her husband when at some point, the family's home phone rang. On the other end was the person set to carpool Mary to school. Later, something had come up and they were going to have to get going later than they had planned.
They'd pick Mary up at 7 instead of 4, which was even better. That'd give Mary more than enough time to help out around the house before she left. Just as quickly as that call had come in, Rita forgot all about it. The day had zoomed by and before she knew it, 3 o'clock had come and gone.
Rita was watching the clock by this time, I mean, she had been clear with the girls about when they needed to be home. With every minute that ticked by, her, motherly, frustration grew, but at a certain point, a new feeling washed over Rita.
I just remember starting our evening meal and just being really concerned about it, and it wasn't until shortly before 5 o'clock. Somehow, at that point, I remembered that that phone call had come and the girls knew they had to be home.
In an instant, Rita stopped everything and sprang into action. She began calling neighbors and friends, anyone she could think of, to see if people had seen her girls. But no one she reached out to had seen them recently. By now, the whole family was frantic, they knew something was terribly wrong.
This wasn't like their girls, and they weren't about to just sit around and wait. So, while Rita stayed with the three of their kids, her husband, Fred and their eldest son went down to the police department to report Mary and Susie missing. But right away, Fred and his son were met with an apathetic ear.
I just remember my husband coming home and saying that whoever was at the desk just commented on two more runaway girls.
A report was taken, but police weren't out looking for the girls just yet. That was left up to their family and a few good friends who rallied around them in their time of need.
Around 10 o'clock, a friend of ours, who was a surgeon here in town, called my husband and he said, I can't sleep either, I can't look for them. So they drove around town and stopped in a number of places that were open and just asked if the girls had been seen any place.
But it was more of the same. No one had any idea where the girls were or who they could be with. It made for a long, sleepless night. Not just for Fred and Rita, but for all four of their other kids, who, even at their young ages, understood the gravity of what was happening.
I don't think we got hardly any sleep at all that night, our whole family, our bedrooms are on the upper story of our house. I remember we had one of these fold-out Davenports and we set that up. And my husband and I slept on that, and the kids slept in sleeping bags all around us. Because we were just so scared, we didn't even want to go upstairs to our bedrooms, and by morning, all four of the other kids were in bed with us.
It was scary, so we knew, knowing our girls, that something was seriously wrong.
By morning, which would have been September 3rd, police were at least willing to send out a statewide broadcast to other departments about the missing girls. They asked Rita and Fred for pictures of the girls and they began asking around. Even though feelings within the department were still mixed in the early days as to whether they might just show up on their own, or whether there were even kids to look for.
We were so traumatized during that time, we tried to get a search party going and just weren't able to do it. Because back then it was like you had to prove that you even had children.
As unbelievable as this seems, it was the world Rita was living in. Feeling like you gotta prove you have a kid, prove they're worth looking for and then we'll see what we can do. So she tried over and over, all the while begging and pleading for them to understand how serious this was. For a brief moment that day, police thought they were right, and Rita didn't care who was right.
She was safe because they had talked to a bus station attendant who looked at a photo of the girls and said, Yeah. I sold them. Tickets to Little Falls, they were with a group of other girls. Now, remember, Little Falls is where Mary was going to school? So the place itself made enough sense, though. Why Mary would skip out on her Carpool and take nothing with her? Except a sister who didn't go to that school wasn't adding up. But this was seemingly all the proof police needed to call it quits, Theory confirmed. But it certainly wasn't enough for the Rakers. They immediately made the roughly 45-minute drive to Mary's school, where they found the girls who bought the bus tickets from St.
Cloud to little falls. But none of them were Mary or Susie. They took this news back to police, but to their dismay, though, maybe not to their surprise, they were still met with pretty much the same response. Rita and Fred felt completely alone.
Sergeant Brian Bolig, who's been on the case since late 2016, says Rita's feelings are valid.
I don't think it was treated as seriously as it should have been. Because I think at the time, law enforcement believed they were going to come home. And then when they didn't return home, then people started getting bad feelings and some things were being done. As far as OK, maybe this isn't a runaway situation.
So if they didn't run away, then what happened? How could two young girls just fall off the face of the earth without a trace? Over the coming weeks, police tried to answer that question by tracing the girls last movements. They learned that shortly before noon, the girls were seen at Shopko Department store by the manager, who was familiar with them. Now. The manager didn't interact with them or notice any strange behavior.
And from all accounts, the girls were alone. Officers weren't sure exactly what time they left the shopko, but they were able to place the girls at another local store called Zayers, sometime between 1 and 2.30 p..m. The best comparison I can make to Zayers is that it was kind of like 1974's Super Target. They had everything you'd expect from most department stores, but there was also a grocery section as well as, like, a little food court. And the food court is actually where one of the rakers neighbors was standing when he saw the girls come in the front door.
It was this guy named Jacob Younger. Some old newspaper accounts say that he had a short interaction with the two as he stood in the food court area. But Sergeant Bollig can't recall if this is accurate. He thinks they may have spoken and Jacob might have even offered them a ride home, but if so, the girls clearly didn't take him up on it.
Jacob said that the last he saw the girls, they were walking off in the direction of the grocery section, even though that section was closed for Labor Day. It was the same direction you'd walk in to get to the section of the store that had winter coats. Which was, after all, one of the reasons Mary said that she needed to go shopping back in 77. The Minneapolis Star reported that Jacob was one of the people who helped Rita and Fred look for their daughters. He told the newspaper that he burned tank after tank of gas, driving all around, looking for any sign of them. Jacob's sighting of the girls is one of the last that police would 100 confirm as legitimate.
And maybe that haunted him, but really, I think what haunted him more was what he heard Susie say just as the girls were walking away.
The exact words that Susie uttered to her older sister Mary have been lost to Jacob Younger's memory. But the sentiment of what he heard was burned into his brain immediately, according to the Minneapolis Star, Susie told her sister. Something to the effect of I don't want to go with that man, I don't like him, or let's not, I don't like that man.
Jacob went on to say that he remembered these details so clearly because he finished eating shortly after. And when he left the store, he saw a quote-unquote, nervous-acting man in a blue chevy impala outside. To him, it seemed almost like this guy was waiting for someone, maybe those someones were Mary and Susie. I mean, it made him so uneasy that he actually sat in his car just watching this guy.
After a while of him not doing much and the girls not coming out, Jacob took off. But that wasn't the last that police heard of this mystery man. Another Minneapolis Star article reported that two other witnesses put a similar man in the store, but in the same department as Mary at the same time. Like Rita, I imagine Jacob is plagued by hindsight. What could have would have been if he jumped up and followed the girls? Asked Susie what she meant. Made them go home with him, maybe called their parents, or waited in his car just a little longer till they came out of the store.
And Rita probably thought about that, too, as days agonizingly turned into weeks.
As the world seemed to be moving on, kids were going back to school, adults were going to work and mowing their lawns. Time stood still for the Rakers. None of this made any sense to them. Why would this happen to their family?
Was there somebody who hated us or hated the kids, or somebody in the neighborhood, or who would we even suspect? And we couldn't come up with anybody? We were just a young family, raising six kids and trying to educate them.
So Rita was left to pick apart every last word and action in the time leading up to the girls disappearance. And it was mostly Mary's actions that stuck out to her. Because Susie, or Sweet Sue, as the family affectionately called her, was still just a little kid. I know parents never know everything, but that summer, 12-year-old Susie was still into dolls. But Mary, something was going on with Mary.
Mary was acting different that summer, and the month prior to her disappearance, something appeared to be bothering her, according to family.
This shift in Mary happened over the summer while she was spending a great deal of time at her grandparents house in Luxembourg. Rita tried getting Mary to talk to her about what was going on, but she just wouldn't. Though it seemed like Mary might have been trying to reach out to other people in her life. In Robert M. Dudley's book, he says that Mary tried going to a teacher to talk about some problems she was having.
It's not clear, based on the information provided, when exactly this happened. But what is clear is that Mary never got to connect with a teacher to tell them what was going on. Same can be said for her friend Anne Kinney, the one Mary had gone shopping with a few days before Labor Day. She said that when they'd been out together, Mary was trying to say something about a thing that was bothering her. But either she hadn't gotten to it, or Anne was so caught up in her own stuff that she didn't register it because she had no memory of what that thing was. But make no mistake, there was a thing. And we know this because sometime in the weeks after the girls went missing, a page from her diary was found.
It was the last entry she ever made, written just a short time before Labor Day, and what was written on it was terrifying.
I can't remember the exact quote, but I'll get real close Mary was talking about. I have reasons to fear for my life, I believe. She said she'd give her stuffed animals to one of her sisters. And then, if I am killed, please find that justice is done. And that's obviously from a 15-year-old girl.
It's not common, it's not something that a young girl would write.
According to the Star Tribune, the exact quote is, Should I die? I ask that my stuffed animals go to my sister. If I am murdered, find my killer and see that justice is done. I have a few reasons to fear for my life and what I ask is important.
You know, we have a life rule. Over on my other show, Crime Junkie, if you have a secret, tell someone.
And clearly, Mary was trying to give some context, and I'm sure part of her, at 15, thought she'd be silly for adding more context. Because when you're that age, you're invincible. And even if you're scared, somewhere in the back of your mind, you think that bad things can never happen to you. But they can. So clearly, there was someone Mary feared.
The question became who and was she going to meet that person on September 2nd? Both the Raker family and later police developed a theory that, yes. The girls were going to meet up with someone that day, someone they knew. And when I say they really, everyone thought it was Mary.
She was older into boys, and when her mom thought back on how insistent she was on going shopping again, even though she had just done so a couple days before. Well, now, Rita thought she understood why. Rita also came to learn from her other daughter, Betsy, that Mary had snuck out of the house before to meet someone. Possibly to someone's, but even Betsy didn't know who they were. And despite everyone in town talking about the case and rumors flying around right and left, no one came forward to say that they had been with the girls on Labor Day the night before for a secret midnight rendezvous. Which just made the Rakers all the more certain that whoever they were, they knew where Mary and Susie were. A week turned into 10 days, which turned into 14, and then 20..
Rita says it was all a blur. They were trying their best, but there were no resources for parents of missing children back then. I mean, they tried doing their own searches, tried contacting radio stations, tried anything they could, but so much of what they had to do was wait, just wait for a knock on the door. That, by some miracle, would be their daughter's returning home, or someone with the worst news a parent can ever receive. According to Robert M. Dudley's book, 26 days after Mary and Susie left their home, the knock the Rakers got on their door was the latter.
Our pastor showed up at the back door and he was just, he looked so shaken up that he could hardly talk. And he told us that a body had been found and Susie had been found because she was left on top of the quarry. So that's how we found out.
The quarry where Susie was found was just west, right outside of St. Cloud. You can't get to the area now. But back in the 70s, quarries like this, even if they weren't technically public venues, were visited by locals and used as swimming holes. On this particular Saturday, what would have been September 28th, 1974, two teenage boys were rock climbing when they came across the decomposing body of Susie Raker.
Susie was covered by surrounding brush. And, according to the Minneapolis star, aside from her glasses and her white cotton drill jacket, both of which were lying nearby, she was fully clothed. Sergeant Bollig theorizes that the boys would have likely had to either find a pay phone or physically go down to the police station to report what they found. However, the police were alerted, law enforcement headed to the quarry and began taking in the scene. Even with the severity of her decomposition, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that this was Susie Raker. The clothing she was wearing was exactly what she wore out of her house the morning of September 2nd.
And there were only two missing young girls from St. Cloud at the moment that everyone was looking for. So you can imagine everyone's first thought once they knew this was Susie, Where's Mary?
When combing the scene around Susie's body, law enforcement noticed some clothing on the ledge of the quarry. Kind of like leading into the waters below, almost as though someone had tried to toss them into the water. It's a steep drop-down, maybe 30 40 feet, if I had to guess. Based on an old black-and-white picture we have on the website, you can actually take a look for yourself at thedeckpodcast..com. But the clothing they were seeing wasn't Susie Raker, which, to investigators, could only mean one thing.
And then that began the water search, and then Mary was found 40 feet below the water in the quarry.
According to the Minneapolis star, because of the near-freezing water, Mary Raker's preserved body stood in stark contrast to her younger sister's. Along with the items of hers that had been tossed into the water or caught on the cliffside. Were the mangled sweater that she was wearing, a single shoe on her foot, and the watch adorned around her wrist. Which was quite literally frozen in time at 325, a physical representation down to the second of when time stopped moving forward for the Raker family. Now, Sergeant Bollig is quick to clarify that they can't prove that the watch stopped at the time Mary went into the water. It's possible, but it is also possible that it stopped at 325 in the morning the day before, or even months before. It might not have even been working when she put it on that day.
Though, in this situation, I wonder if Occam's razor might apply. When both girls were examined, it was found that they each died from multiple stab wounds. Mary was stabbed six times, while Susie had over twice that amount. That Minneapolis star piece from September of 77 reported that neither girl showed any sign of defensive wounds. But that's a fact that Sergeant Bollig wouldn't comment on today.
But he would discuss the findings related to sexual assault or really lack thereof.
We don't have any evidence to say that they were, and we also don't have any evidence to say that they weren't. Part of the issue of that is due to decomposition, so we can't rule it out.
As far as other physical evidence went.
There was very little evidence, physical evidence recovered from the scene. And unfortunately, in my research, September of 1974 was a very wet and rainy month, so they were out in the elements for close to a whole month. Which is not conducive to evidence preservation.
Even if there was evidence found, who would be responsible for it, it turns out to be a simple question, with a very, very messy answer. Because the girls were reported missing within city limits, meaning that their case was with the St. Cloud PD, well, the quarry wasn't within their limits.
Their sheriff's office got involved when the bodies were discovered because the bodies were found outside city limits, which then turned into the sheriff's office jurisdiction.
And this is on top of the fact that things were already a hot mess before the jurisdictional issues.
Back in 1974, the sheriff was dying of cancer when this happened, and it was in the hospital dying of cancer when this occurred. And the St. Cloud Police chief had recently either retired or quit or whatever and was out away at training. So I believe the highest ranking person at the St.
Cloud Police part of the time was possibly a captain that was in town. And it was an election year for the sheriff's office, and the incumbent sheriff was obviously not going to be running because he was not healthy. To add even more convoluted mess to this. Back then, when a new sheriff would get elected, people would get fired and his buddies would get hired type situation, which is not how it is now.
So in case you got a little lost in that, like I did the first couple of times through, you had St. Cloud P.D. where the girls went missing. The Stearns County Sheriff's Office, who had jurisdiction over where the murders were likely committed and where the bodies were found. Then the sheriff's office reported to the Stearns County District Attorney, who had its own investigator. And it wasn't long before the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was brought in to assist, making them the fourth agency to have an active hand in the case. All of this is on top of a hospitalized sheriff.
Extremist turnover and a healthy amount of old man egos. If we're applying OCCam's razor to the question of Mary's watch, then I think it's fair we apply Murphy's law to how this case fell. Victim to circumstance and political agendas, Mary and Susie deserved better. If there was a single face of the investigation early on, it was Lawrence Kritzik with the sheriff's office.
He and his officers scour the quarry meticulously, looking for any evidence, particularly the murder weapon. Divers were even brought in early on to look in the water for the type of knife thought to have been used, but to no avail.
Our officers never recovered a murder weapon.
While searches were being conducted, the girls case got more and more coverage on the local news, and additional tips started pouring in. One I found very interesting was from a guy that was posted up at a local tavern on Labor Day, according to his recollection, around 2 p...m. This whole group of people piles into the bar. It's this older dude, and I say, older, but only in comparison. Because the guy's best guess was that this older dude was like 28. But this 28-year-old dude was with a teenage boy and two young girls.
So they walk in and then this whole flock of almost a dozen teenagers comes in behind them. In 74, things were a little more loosey-goosey. So it seems like if you were underage, you could go into the bar, you just couldn't drink. So anyway, this guy who's sitting at the bar says he sees this older guy who gets a beer. He's chatting up a girl that he thinks is one of the Raker sisters, and actually, he says he knows it was the Raker sisters. Because one of the girls was wearing an army jacket with their last name spelled out right on the front, he said The girl in the jacket was laughing and having a good time, but the other girl, the younger one, was not into it.
He went on to say that after they hung out for a bit at the bar. They went to play foosball in this other room with all of the other teenagers. And the next time he clocked that room, everyone was gone now, Mary was wearing a Raker Army jacket that Labor Day, and authorities, even today, don't know how much of this story could be true. For starters, the guy who came forward didn't know the Rakers personally, so all he had to go on was that jacket. That didn't feel as concrete as, say, the neighbor who saw them in Zaire's.
But I imagine, for at least the briefest of moments, if not a little longer. They wondered, I mean, say, for argument's sake, this was Mary and Susie, who were with an older man and a teenage boy. Could this older man have been the same nervous-looking man that their neighbor saw waiting outside Zaire's with a blue chevy impala? And if they are one and the same? Was that who Susie was talking about when she said that she didn't want to go with that man? This lead could have been promising if there had been more people to corroborate it. Like any one of those dozen teenagers who was supposedly around them, playing foosball in the same room as them.
All of the years since, not a single one of those people have ever come forward. Maybe in the 70s, they didn't want to admit to being in a bar, maybe they were drinking, but they'd be adults now, parents of their own, maybe even grandparents. Surely that's not what's keeping them at bay, so maybe none of it's true.
Other people came forward with sightings of the girls supposedly walking into the quarry at around 3 o'clock. Some said alone, some said they were with a man, some say they were coming in from the south side, but others say the north. But somehow they all say the same time, which we know isn't possible, and some didn't even get the right quarry at all. Which has actually become an easy way for Sergeant Bollig to weed out legitimate tips from bogus ones. One lead they did seem to run at hard and fast was looking for the blue chevy Impala man that was at Zara's the same time as the girls.
Once they had a name of this guy, eyebrows raised when they learned that he allegedly had a record for some kind of sexual offense. Though the details around that are unclear. But as quickly as they got excited about their best and only lead, it fizzled out. The man provided an alibi that they were able to verify and he passed a polygraph, which was kind of the end-all be-all back then. So they moved on. Our reporting team tried to ask if investigators today have circled back to this guy since polygraphs no longer carry the same weight that they did back then.
But Sergeant Bollig didn't want to comment on this. It was hard not to become discouraged in the early days. But Lawrence Kritzik was front and center, reiterating to the public that they were going to keep giving it everything they had. But all they had was coming up short. And the Rakers felt alone and in the dark. As to why no progress was being made, 74 slipped by into 75 and then 76..
And at the two-year mark, Fred Raker wasn't shy about his feelings. His words were recounted in Dudley's book, "'Two years. Yet. We know no more, or very little more, than we did when our girls were killed. The authorities seem to be at a standstill. Sometimes it even seems like we must convince them anything ever happened. I think they should start fresh and try to find the person who killed our girls. End quote.
In hindsight, Fred's words are haunting. Because just weeks after making that statement, investigators would be starting fresh with a whole new investigation involving another teenage St Cloud girl.
They went in the store, kidnapped her, drove her out to a gravel pit near Luxembourg, stabbed her, covered her in brush and left her for dead.
This second case marks the beginning of a new chapter in the Raker investigation, one that leads a winding path past a priest, a serial killer, a deathbed confession and a local who may have been more closely intertwined with the Raker case than anyone today ever realized. All of that is next week on the deck.
The Deck is an audiochuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast..com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? No.
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