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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. In the quiet town of Antioch, California, 14-year-old Susie had big dreams. She was an honors student at Antioch Junior High School with a bright future ahead of her.
One night, her older sister needed help babysitting, and Susie was excited about watching her two young nieces. The next morning, as the sun rose over Antioch, Susie's older sister returned home, but Susie was nowhere to be found. Weeks later, a grim discovery would send shockwaves throughout the town, as a naked body was found floating in the river, with two burning questions on everyone's mind. Why and who?
This is Forensic Tales, episode number 197, The Murder of Suzanne Bombardier. ♪♪ ♪♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases, conduct in-depth fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. You can support my work in two simple ways. Become a valued patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales and leave a positive review.
Before we get to the episode, we've got one new Patreon supporter to thank, and that is Justin B. Thank you so much, Justin, for supporting the show. Now, let's get to this week's episode. At 14 years old, Suzanne Bombadier, better known as Susie, was just beginning her life. She was an honor roll student at Antioch Junior High School in Antioch, California, a large city east of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California.
In 1980, Susie was thinking about trying out for her school's cheerleader squad. And if there was anyone who could make the cut, it was Susie. Her friends described her as always being well-mannered, kind, and studious. She had big, bright eyes, a bigger smile, and long blonde hair. She was bubbly with a wonderful sense of humor. And in June of 1980, Susie was excited to start her summer break from school.
But Susie's summer was cut short. On Sunday, June 22nd, Susie's older sister, Stephanie, asked Susie to babysit her two young daughters while she went to work. And Susie happily agreed. She loved to babysit her nieces and planned to sew some clothes for their Barbies, make them dinner, and then get them ready for bed. So that night, Susie brought a sewing machine and a sleeping bag over to her older sister's apartment.
and Stephanie left to work a late night shift at the local Mexican food restaurant. After work, Stephanie had plans to go to a friend's party, so she told Susie she was going to be home late. Stephanie arrived back home at 4 o'clock in the morning. She was a little bit surprised she didn't see Susie, but she knew it was super late, so she figured Susie and her two daughters, who were 5 and 6, were already asleep.
So without thinking twice, Stephanie turned off all the lights and went straight to bed. The following day, Stephanie woke up and started making breakfast. Susie and her daughter's favorite, pancakes. Her daughters came into the kitchen as she was cooking, but Susie didn't. Stephanie then told her daughters to go down the hall and wake up their auntie Susie because breakfast was almost ready. So the girls went to get their favorite aunt.
But a few minutes later, they came back screaming. They couldn't find Susie. She wasn't in the bedroom. They couldn't find her anywhere. Stephanie looked everywhere throughout the apartment, but she couldn't find her either. Although this was entirely out of character for her younger sister, Stephanie tried not to panic. She didn't want to assume the worst. So her first thought was that maybe Susie decided to walk home the night before.
Maybe, just maybe, she tucked the girls in for bed but decided to go home afterward. She had never done that before, but it was the only theory that really made any sense. But after calling her parents and finding out that Susie didn't walk home that night and she wasn't at any of the neighbors' houses, Stephanie decided to call the police. The first thing the police wanted to know was what Stephanie knew about Susie's last known whereabouts.
Stephanie told detectives that she had asked her younger sister to come over to the apartment that night so that she could babysit her two young children. Susie regularly watched the kids for her big sister and she loved it. She said the last time she saw Susie was the night before around 7.30 or 8 p.m. when Susie dropped off clothes at her restaurant where she was working. Since she was planning to go to a party after work, she needed a change of clothes.
so Susie was the one to stop by the restaurant and bring them to her. After that, Susie was supposed to return to the apartment where she babysat the kids. After Stephanie talked to the police, this is what Stephanie's two young kids told them about what happened. According to them, Susie was at the apartment with them all night.
They said they had a lot of fun together, especially because Susie let them stay up way past their bedtime that night, like probably any babysitter or auntie would do. The kids then said they remembered Susie was wearing her nightgown when she put them to bed that night. So they thought that she was going to go to bed too. And that was the last time they ever saw her. The police decided to look into the phone records at the apartment to see if they could find anything.
Maybe Susie had made a phone call or two, or maybe someone had called the apartment. That's when detectives discovered that Susie was on the phone with a friend around 1.30 a.m., so they knew she was still at the apartment at that time. When the police spoke with Susie's friend, she said everything seemed fine. It was a completely normal conversation, and Susie seemed happy.
At the end of the phone call, Susie said she was planning to head to bed. So the friend said goodnight, and that was it. At this point, the Antioch police had a reasonable timeline to work with. They know Susie was on the phone with a friend until 1.30 a.m., and her older sister Stephanie got home from the party around 4 a.m. So there was a two-and-a-half-hour gap when Susie could have gone missing. But where?
The police found several clues suggesting Susie didn't simply leave the apartment on her own or decided to run away. For starters, all of her personal items were still inside the apartment. So if she decided to leave or run away, she didn't bring anything with her, which seemed strange. Wouldn't she bring her stuff if she planned to walk home? Her purse or her wallet? Even her shoes were still inside the apartment.
According to her mom and stepfather, Susie was a good and responsible girl. She would never just leave her nieces at home by themselves when she was supposed to be watching them. There was just no way. So the only other explanation that made any sense was that Susie had been kidnapped. But here's the troubling part. There weren't any signs of forced entry in Stephanie's apartment.
So that meant she might have known the person and let them inside because Susie was a responsible kid. She wouldn't have opened the front door just for anyone, especially not early in the morning like that. It had to have been someone that she knew. Over the next five days, the police and Susie's family searched around the clock for her. As each day passed, hope began to fade.
In any missing child case, it's a race against the clock. The more time passes after a child goes missing, the higher the chances of something bad happening. So every day that passed, the family's worry grew even more. The police had little leads to go on, if any. The only thing that they knew was that Susie was at her older sister's apartment babysitting her nieces. That was it.
The two girls inside the apartment with Susie didn't hear anything that night, and neither did any of Stephanie's neighbors. No one recalled hearing or seeing anything suspicious. It was like Susie simply vanished. News finally came in, but it wasn't good. What could have happened to Susie? Did she choose to run away, or was she taken against her will? The eerie part? No signs of forced entry.
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For a limited time, you can get 15% off your entire first order at HappyMammoth.com. Just use the code TAILS at checkout. That's HappyMammoth.com and use code TAILS for 15% off today. Five days into the search, a fisherman found the nude body of a young teenage girl floating in the San Juan Quine River near the Antioch Bridge.
a spot about 97 miles away from the apartment and 60 miles east of San Francisco. A few days later, the police confirmed through dental records that the body was that of missing 14-year-old Susie. On top of having her nude body thrown into the river, Susie had been sexually assaulted and stabbed once in the chest. The stab wound was so deep that it penetrated her heart.
Based on the condition of her body, the medical examiner theorized that she had been in the water for several days before she was discovered. So this meant she was probably killed shortly after being kidnapped and had likely been in the river anywhere from three to four days. Now that's common for these types of cases. Usually when a young child is kidnapped, they are killed within the first 24 hours or so.
It's unusual for a child to be kidnapped and then held captive somewhere. Most suspects who set out to kidnap a child do something to them within the first few hours. That's why the first few hours are so important. And Susie's case was no different. The police theorized that she was likely assaulted and killed shortly after she was kidnapped from her sister's apartment and then driven 97 miles away to that bridge.
But who? Was it someone Susie knew, or was she tricked? The police were able to collect a small amount of foreign DNA from Susie's body since she had been sexually assaulted. But because this happened in 1980, there wasn't much the Antioch police could do with the DNA. It didn't match anyone in their limited DNA database. So all they could really do was store it in evidence and move on.
Susie was buried at the Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Lafayette. Hundreds of people attended her funeral. People that didn't even know Susie were there, including some of the police officers investigating the case. What happened to Susie was tragic. One day, she's thinking about cheerleader tryouts at her junior high school. And the next, she's brutally kidnapped and killed. Of course, all murders are awful.
But Susie's was different for many people in this Northern California town, and they were desperate to find out answers and to find the killer. Over the weeks and months, the police questioned hundreds of people. Everyone who knew Susie was questioned. Everyone who knew her older sister Stephanie and their family was brought in.
especially since the police couldn't shake the feeling that Susie knew her killer. Otherwise, she would have never opened the door. So the police hoped that by speaking with everyone who knew Susie and her family, they could come up with a good list of potential suspects. And they did. Many people were eliminated through alibis or other reasons. But initially, the police did have a few suspects in mind.
but they could never find anything specific to tie any particular suspect to the murder. They didn't have any forensic or DNA evidence, or really anything else. So although a few people were initially considered, no one was ever arrested or charged. The police even considered different serial killers who had passed through the area, including Henry Lee Lucas.
Henry Lee Lucas, also known as the Confession Killer, murdered at least three women, including his own mother. After he was arrested, he claimed to have murdered over 250 more. But it's unclear exactly how many women he did kill, or if he was simply trying to brag about himself as a serial killer. But like the other suspects, Henry Lee Lucas was cleared in Susie's murder.
No solid physical evidence was linking him to the case. Despite everyone's best efforts and all the police interviews, Susie's case eventually turned cold. For the next several decades, the circumstances surrounding her kidnapping and murder remained a mystery. Susie's murder profoundly impacted everyone, including her two nieces that she babysat that night.
One of them, who grew up to become an adult and a mother herself years later, said that she wouldn't allow her son to spend the night at anyone's house because she wasn't sure what would happen to him if he did. Susie's case was never forgotten or pushed aside. If any new type of testing or technology came along and could be used in her case, the police tried it.
but they never got any solid leads from the new testing. That is, until 2013. In 2013, Jennifer Kathleen Gibson, an author from nearby Lafayette, had been visiting her grandmother's grave at the Queen of Heaven Cemetery when she came across Susie's.
When she looked at the grave, Jennifer realized that Susie had died the same month that her grandmother did. So she became curious about what happened to her. As an author with a naturally curious personality, Jennifer started doing her own research about the case. She wrote about it on her website, Defrosting Cold Cases.
Little did she know that she was becoming the catalyst to help unite the people who would reopen Susie's case. Jennifer's post about Susie's case on her website sparked the attention of two retired Antioch police officers who had once worked the case. They quickly found themselves drawn back to Susie's investigation. Like so many others, these two retired police officers had been completely haunted by the case.
Although they had tried their hand to solve it, they never could. So they were determined to rewrite history. After weeks of pressuring the department to reopen Susie's case, their persistence paid off. In 2015, investigators went back to Susie's old case file. They specifically looked at what they believed was the most important piece of evidence, the foreign DNA.
Although they couldn't do much with it back in 1980, they knew that the entire world of DNA testing had come a long way by 2015. So this was going to be their best chance at uncovering new leads. So in 2015, DNA samples from the case were sent to the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office forensic lab to see if they could generate a profile.
San Mateo was one of the best and most equipped crime labs to test this type of DNA, but everyone would be forced to wait. The challenging process of creating a DNA profile from the sample took two long years, but the long wait was well worth it. In 2017, they got a hit.
After three long decades of waiting, there's a glimmer of hope in the chilling case of Susie. But will this crucial breakthrough bring answers or lead to yet another dead end? Can the family finally find closure? We'll be right back. The Antioch police were notified that the DNA profile got a hit from CODIS, the National DNA Database. Their hit was Mitchell Lynn Bacon.
But the name Mitchell Bakem was a complete surprise. Not because they didn't know who he was. No, they actually did know who Bakem was. He was one of the first people that they had interviewed three decades earlier. As it turns out, Bakem had dated Susie's older sister, Stephanie, way before the murder occurred. So when the police were looking for potential suspects, they had brought him in and questioned him.
But when they did, he had an alibi. He told the police he was nowhere near Stephanie's Hudson Court apartment complex the night that Susie was kidnapped. He said he was with his aunt at the Sand Hill Bar between Brentwood and Oakley and that she would be more than happy to vouch for him.
He told the police that after leaving there around 2 o'clock in the morning, he went to a grocery store at Lone Tree Road and Highway 4 before heading home for the night. When the police questioned Stephanie about Bacon, she said that she had met him on a date with another guy. Even though Bacon clearly saw that she was on a date with someone else, he had approached her and asked her out.
She said she agreed, she said yes, and that they went on about three dates together. But after the third date, she said she realized he wasn't her type and she told him that she didn't want to see him anymore. In fact, she said that she thought he was just plain boring. But Bakem saw things a little bit differently. He was truly into Stephanie and wanted to continue to see her.
He wanted to date her so bad that he even started showing up at the Mexican food restaurant where she worked, trying to ask her out on another date. But Stephanie kept saying no. She just wasn't interested. She wanted him to go away and stop bothering her. But he wasn't the type of guy to take no for an answer. Bakem told Stephanie that he had found a house for them to live in together.
But when Stephanie said she still wasn't interested, he kept calling her phone at the apartment and leaving nonstop messages. He was practically begging her to go out with him. At one point during this time, he even showed up at her Hudson Court apartment after one of her co-workers gave him her address. So he knew where she lived.
In 1980, shortly after Susie's murder, Bacon agreed to take a polygraph test at the Antioch police station. Even though the polygraph test results were inconclusive, he was cleared as a potential suspect. Detectives had no solid physical evidence linking him to the case. He was simply the creepy ex-boyfriend. But there's so much more to this story than Bacon simply dating Susie's older sister.
He also had a criminal record the size of a phone book, including charges of rape and assault. Many of these charges came long before Susie's murder. In 1973, he was arrested in Mountain View and convicted the following year of second-degree burglary, sodomy, and assault with intent to commit murder. In this incident, he raped and stabbed a woman nearly to death.
She somehow managed to survive the attack and later identified him. After he was identified and arrested, he was sentenced to the incredibly broad sentence of five years to life in prison. After his release from prison, he allegedly told a reporter this, quote, I tried to kill her, but my heart really wasn't in it.
If I do it again, I'd be facing life in prison under the three strikes law. And I have a lot of family and friends who are watching me and making sure I don't slip up. I hope and pray that I don't. And the people around me, they keep an eye on me. End quote. In 1981, he was arrested again in Sacramento County and later convicted of first degree burglary, robbery, rape and sodomy.
This time, he was sentenced to 24 years. In the 1990s, Bacon moved to Brentwood, the town over from Antioch. But the residents of Brentwood weren't too thrilled that someone like Bacon wanted to live there. They had heard about his previous arrests and attacks on women, and they just didn't want him living in their backyards. So at that point, Bacon made another statement to the media.
He told reporters that he understood why people would be scared of him, and he understood why they might not want someone like him living in their neighborhood. But he assured everyone that he would never hurt a child. According to Bacon, quote, and this is directly from him, child molesters are different because they hurt kids, and kids can't fight back, end quote.
Bacon was once again convicted in 2002 for failing to properly register as a sex offender in Contra Costa County and sentenced to four years in prison. Since he was already a convicted sex offender, he was required, under California law, to keep his record, including his address, updated with the state.
As soon as the police in Antioch heard the DNA in Susie's case got a hit in CODIS to Mitchell Bakem, they performed additional DNA testing. They needed to make sure that Bakem really was their guy. DNA match? Check.
This additional testing confirmed, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Bacon was the child molester who assaulted and murdered Susie four decades earlier. In December 2017, police detained Bacon outside his home on the 300 block of West Medill Street in Antioch. Believe it or not, he still lived just a few blocks away from where he kidnapped and murdered Susie.
When Susie's family learned about the arrest, they knew the police had their guy. That's because everything added up. Bacon knew Susie because he had been on a few dates with her older sister. So it wouldn't be surprising if he went over to the apartment that night and Susie opened the front door for him. This explains why the police didn't find any signs of forced entry. Susie knew him.
So when Susie's family learned about the arrest, it all made sense. And it felt even better knowing that they had the forensic evidence in the case. On February 8th, 2018, Bacon pled not guilty to all of the charges against him. So it would be another four years before his case went to trial in early 2022.
The prosecutor assigned to the case, Mary Knox, believes that Bacon went to Stephanie's apartment that night and somehow got inside. Maybe he knocked on the door and Susie let him in. Maybe he got in some other way. Based on everything Mary Knox and her prosecution team knew about Susie, she would have never left the apartment on her own that night. She wouldn't have left her two young nieces alone unless she had no other choice.
The prosecution believes Bakem used a five and a half inch long knife to threaten Susie and force her to leave the apartment to go to a secondary location. That's where he sexually assaulted her, stabbed her through the heart, and dumped her body off that bridge into the river. According to Mary Knox, the forensic evidence suggests he stabbed her to death during the sexual assault.
Bakem's defense lawyer, Cynthia Schofield, had a much different story. She admitted that there was likely sexual contact between her client, Bakem, and Susie. There was simply no way of denying that because of the forensic evidence. But she said the sexual contact may have happened after Susie's death.
She argued that Bakem could have had sex with Susie after she was already dead and that the DNA they found only proved that a sexual assault happened. It doesn't prove murder and it doesn't prove that Bakem was the one who killed her. Interesting theory, right? She also pointed to her belief that no evidence was found that a kidnapping occurred.
Like the prosecution and the police, she pointed to the fact that there were no signs of forced entry at the apartment. So according to her and Bacon's whole defense here is that the best the prosecution had in the case was a case of child sexual assault, nothing else. But the jury in the case wasn't buying it.
On March 15, 2022, they found Bacon guilty of Susie's murder over four decades earlier. They convicted him of murder in the first degree with special circumstances for the commission of the murder during the course of the burglary, kidnapping, and rape. In California, if someone is convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances, they're eligible for the death penalty.
But in Bakem's case, his life was spared. Instead of sentencing him to death, the jury sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole on June 27, 2022. Despite sentencing Bakem to life in prison, there are still so many unanswered questions. Like, why was a convicted serial rapist and attempted murderer ever be allowed to be released from prison?
At least one of these crimes happened years before Susie was killed. In that 1973 incident, he raped and almost killed a woman inside her apartment. But instead of spending the rest of his life in prison, he was paroled after serving basically a handful of years. If he had remained in custody like he should have, Susie's murder probably would have never happened.
Then there's the question of why Susie? Why did he target her? Was it to get back at her sister Stephanie for turning him down for future dates? And why that particular night? Had he been stalking Stephanie and knew that Susie and the girls were home alone that night? Finally, the biggest question of all, are there other victims out there?
At his sentencing hearing in June of 2022, prosecutors said Bakem allegedly confessed to a former cellmate that he, quote, raped and sliced sex workers across the country when he worked as a truck driver. Could there be any truth to what he said? Well, if you ask investigators in Northern California, the answer to that question is yes.
Right now, they are currently exploring the possibility that Bakem might have killed other women or young girls in the area, and they are working to try and link his DNA to other cold cases. Susie's murder was Antioch's oldest cold case murder solved through forensic genetic genealogy and the work of relentless investigators over the years.
The same technology used to capture her killer might also be used to identify other potential victims. We'll have to wait and see what else genetic genealogy and advanced DNA testing can uncover. To share your thoughts on the story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales.
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Not all stories have happy endings.
