A 15-year-old missing Queens girl whose body was finally identified more than 40 years after it was found is believed to have been murdered and buried in the ground a couple of years before her corpse was tossed into a Long Island dumpster, police said Thursday.
The long-unidentified Jane Doe who turned out to be Susan Mann disappeared from her Hollis home in May of 1980. Her body was found in November 1982 in a Freeport dumpster but not identified until recently.
Her body was exhumed — again — this time by investigators collecting her DNA and clues that eventually led to her identification.
”Our investigation believes that she was moved, that she was possibly buried … and then moved to this location in ‘82,” said Capt. Stephen Fitzpatrick, commander of the Nassau County Police Department’s homicide squad. “Keep that in mind that she might have been somewhere else and killed many years earlier, and then, for some reason, it was necessary to move the body and dump it into the dumpster.”
After she was laid to rest as a Jane Doe, another 40 years passed before her body was unearthed in the wake of new DNA advancements.
But finally establishing Susan’s identity solved only half the mystery. Detectives are still trying to figure out who killed her and why.
“We never give up,” Fitzpatrick said. “There’s no cold case. There are open cases. So we never give up on any of our cases.”
Fitzpatrick said evidence suggested that the body had been buried before being moved to the dumpster.
“You’ve all seen the movie ‘Goodfellas,’” he said. “And what happened in that movie? They started building on a certain property and putting condos or houses and now they had to move their murder victim and put them somewhere else. That could be exactly what happened here.”
Susan left home on her bicycle on May 17, 1980, in search of a pocketbook that had been stolen from her earlier in the day that belonged to her older sister, Debra, according to a Daily News article at the time.
When her body was found, she was wearing a gold heart-shaped locket with a “K” in the center, a gold chain with an opal and a gold-colored sweater, cops said.
Fitzpatrick said Thursday the jewelry was a gift from her grandmother. He said he did not know what the “K” stood for.
Cops are offering a $25,000 reward for tips that lead to an arrest in the case.
