WHO KILLED SUSAN?
ACADEMY PARK TEACHER’S DEATH HAUNTS FAMILY
If Missy Morrissey had to describe her sister in one word, it would be “cool.”
“There are so many things about her. She was just amazing,” said Morrissey, the older sister of beloved Academy Park High School teacher Susan Morrissey Ledyard, who was found murdered in the Brandywine River on July 23, 2019.
“I know people always speak well of the dead, but this is different – she was such a complex person and nobody was more interesting than she was,” said Morrissey. “People have told me so often – even people that weren’t that close to her, people that I know – that if they saw her at a party, they made a beeline for her because they knew it would be fun and interesting.”
Even from a young age, Morrissey said Ledyard was brilliant, funny and politically minded. She read things like Noam Chomsky and listened to the kind of music that doesn’t make it onto top 40 lists. She became a vegetarian at age 8 and remained that way for the rest of her life. She laughed full throated while slapping her knee and held long, engaging conversations via text messaging.
“Scary smart – just brilliant,” said Morrissey. “If you borrowed a book from her or if she gave you a book that she’d read, there would always be passages highlighted or underlined. I have never received a book from another person in my life that had anything highlighted or underlined. I have never done that myself. I’m not sure I ever received a book from Susan that wasn’t. She was just always learning.”
Morrissey said her sister was never reading less than two books at a time and fit perfectly into the role of the kind of teacher that leaves a lasting impact on her students, as exemplified by a recent meme one of them posted.
“It said ‘Did everybody have an English teacher that changed their life?’” said Morrissey. “All it said at the top was ‘Miss Morrissey,’ which was her name before she got married. That says it all to me. Most people have family and friends that miss them, but the amount of students that were able to relate to her and learn something from her that can’t now is something that I didn’t think of at the beginning. I didn’t think of the sheer number of students that won’t have the opportunity to have an English teacher who changed their life, but it’s been so amazing to find out how many of them there were.”
A Mystery on the Brandywine
Ledyard, 50, of Wilmington, was found dead at 7:29 a.m. along the Brandywine River by Northeast Boulevard in Wilmington. About an hour and a half later, Delaware State Police responded to Walkers Mill Road in the area of the Rising Sun Lane Bridge for a report of a suspicious vehicle. There, they found Ledyard’s black Honda Civic with her purse and cellphone still inside.
Delaware State Police detectives Dan Grassi and Amy Lloyd told reporters at a press conference in September that Ledyard was active on her cell phone until 2:54 a.m. the night she died. At 3:02 a.m., her 2016 Honda Civic pulled out of the driveway from her home in the 1100 block of Riverview Avenue and turned onto northbound Pennsylvania Avenue – the same route she took to get to work, according to Morrissey. Two minutes later, her car parked on Walkers Mill Road and the headlights went out.
Delaware State Police described Ledyard as a white female, 5 foot 4 inches tall, weighing 130 pounds, with shoulder-length brown hair. She was wearing a purple tank top on the morning of her death.
Grassi said investigators were able to pinpoint the Civic’s activity from surveillance cameras, but Morrissey noted the video was so dark that it was impossible to tell who was driving the car and whether Ledyard was alone.
Detectives do not believe Ledyard’s death was connected to a robbery and they don’t think she entered the Brandywine River where her car was parked, about 3 miles from where she was found, due to obstructions in that area and shallow waters between the two points.
Grassi said at a press conference last year that detectives believe the Honda drove directly from Ledyard’s house to the location where it was found. Ledyard was active for the next few hours, but investigators do not know her whereabouts during that time frame and do not know what caused her to leave her residence, he said.
From Accident to Murder
From the outset, the cause of death was determined to be bluntforce trauma and drowning, but Grassi said investigators quickly ruled out suicide.
“I can’t get into the nature of the injuries, the location or anything like that, but let’s just say that the type of inures weren’t consistent with an accident and her behavior leading up to the morning she was found wasn’t consistent with a suicide,” said Grassi. “She had been texting with friends and family that night. Her behavior not only in the texts, but just her general behavior wasn’t consistent with what you would expect from someone who is thinking of committing suicide.”
“In the beginning, our family thought it was an accident, a tragic accident,” said Morrissey. “In September, the detectives met with us and the first thing they broke was that she was alive until closer to seven in the morning. They knew that she had been active for another four hours after she parked, which was news to us. We thought it was something that happened very soon after she parked.”
Morrissey said detectives made that determination from her sister’s fitness tracker, which she was wearing at the time. Unfortunately, that particular model did not feature a GPS system, Morrissey said, but did relay that she was still alive until about 7 a.m., half an hour before she was discovered. It was a revelation that Morrissey described as mind-blowing.
“I remember feeling really jarred by that, because then I had to think about her and what she was going through for four more hours,” said
Morrissey. “You’re not thinking of the mindset longer than the period of time that she got in the car and drove down and then something happened. That’s bad enough, but then to think that whatever this was was four more hours, and then to try to get in her head and think of where she might have gone – at that time I wasn’t thinking of someone else being involved. I was thinking it was an opportunity for someone else to possibly have seen her, though.”
Morrissey said she originally went out into the community with that in mind, talking to neighbors, business owners and anyone else who might have seen something. She even made up flyers with the text, “Did you see Susan?”
When the detectives told her in September that they were contemplating a press conference, Morrissey said she felt a little guilty about all the attention her sister’s case was getting for just trying to fill in some information about an accident.
“And then the wheels started turning a little bit – maybe this wasn’t what we thought it was,” she said. “And then they told us on Oct. 7 that it was a homicide.”
“What Happened to Susan?”
That was when the idea of “Did you see Susan?” became “What Happened to Susan?,” the name of a Facebook page dedicated to Ledyard’s memory and finding out exactly what occurred during those four hours, Morrissey said.
“We don’t have much more than is out there,” said Morrissey. “It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year. I remember Detective Grassi telling us early on about another case that he had that had been (unsolved for) two years, and I remember thinking, ‘Two years?! That can’t happen.’ I thought two years sounded like 20 years.”
Now at the halfway point to that milestone, Morrissey said it’s hard to believe Ledyard’s family still doesn’t have the answer to their most burning question. She hopes it comes soon, as both of their parents are in their 80s.
“My father is the stoic sort,” said Morrissey. “I could tell in the fall that he was really struggling, because he wasn’t sleeping. Now, I can hear in his voice … that there’s a need to know what happened. We’re all shattered, obviously, but he’s hanging in there. My mother is really, really struggling.”
For her part, Morrissey is able to sort of disconnect from the case and look at it with a clinical eye, trying to discern clues or trace back the pattern of events. She has a binder with 260 pages of notes. The hard part is trying to get in her sister’s head at the end.
“It’s hard for me to think of her scared,” said Morrissey, emotion gripping her voice. “I can hold it together for any other aspect of the case, except for thinking of her being afraid. It just destroys me.”
Late-night revelry
Morrissey said she had been texting with her sister until about 12:30 a.m. the morning of her death, and it was a perfectly normal conversation. She did not sense anything out of the ordinary, and showing the conversation to Ledyard’s best friends, they did not pick up on anything either, Morrissey said.
“I just can’t believe that two and a half hours later, she walked out the door and never came home,” she said.
An English teacher at Academy Park for about 13 years – and many more before that in California – Ledyard was described as a night owl during the summer months. Morrissey said her sister would have to get up at 5:30 a.m. when school was in session, so she took advantage of summer nights when she got to hang out late with her husband Ben.
Ledyard did not smoke during the day, but might step out for the occasional cigarette at night, according to Morrissey. And while it was conceivable that her sister would have been up late, Morrissey said 3 a.m. was something of a stretch for her to be leaving the house.
Morrissey said her sister was not enough of a smoker to have had to go get cigarettes at that hour – and, in fact, did not drive in the direction of the easiest stores to visit at that time of night. There was also no communication with anyone else that Morrissey knows of indicating why she left. It’s just another question in the case that remains unanswered, she said.
“I don’t have anything that tells me she had a reason to go out or a plan to go out,” Morrissey said. “I knew the people that she knew – most of them – and I spoke to everybody that night that texted with her, that I know of.”
A Long Haul
Morrissey said her expectations about the case have shifted since the fall. While it is still absolutely crucial that someone calls in a tip, she said she is coming to grips with the fact that that call might not come for some time.
“Not finding out what happened to Susan is not an option, but I am trying to prepare myself for a longer haul than I ever would have thought we needed,” she said. “In October if you told me we were going to be having this conversation in July, I probably would have had a panic attack. I wouldn’t even be able to fathom that.”
Morrissey said she had recently heard from Vince Mirack, the brother of murdered Lancaster County teacher Kristy Mirack. His sister was killed in her East Lampeter home in December 1992, but the case remained unsolved until 2018, when the half-sister of D.J. Raymond Rowe uploaded a DNA sample to a genealogy website. Detectives were finally able to pin the case on Rowe thanks to that sample, but as Morrissey said, he was never on anyone’s radar until that point.
“I just don’t know how on earth (Mirack’s family) got through that,” she said. “The fact that Vince was still standing and had the grace and generosity and the health to reach out to us, that definitely gave me strength. It made me think, ‘Yeah, I could do it if I had to.’”
A plea for help
One year on, friends, family and detectives are again asking the public for assistance in filling in the four-hour gap missing from the timeline, as well as any information that might lead to Ledyard’s killer. The Delaware State Police issued a release last week again seeking information in her death.
“The big thing we’re trying to accomplish is that over the course of time, people may forget about cases because another comes out that’s interesting and we hope that by reminding the public on the anniversary that if someone saw something or heard something that they’ve been holding back or that they didn’t think was significant at that time, or maybe having seeing our release, having this publicized, they’ll reach out to us and help us with the investigation,” said Grassi.
Morrissey said the family got together this past week and some went to leave flowers at Walker’s Mill along the Brandywine on the anniversary of her death. It was a rough year and an even rougher day, she said, but they got through it together, as a family, and Ledyard would have been proud of them for that.
“I would hope that anybody out there that knew anything, heard anything, might have seen something, no matter how small – they might not think it was important, but that along with something else could mean something,” she said. “Let the police decide what’s important. If they don’t want to talk to the police, they can message our page. There’s an anonymous tip line, but if they’re loathe to use the tip line, please, please reach out to our page, ‘What Happened to Susan’ on Facebook.”
Anyone with information is urged to contact Grassi at 302-3658441 or Lloyd at 302-365-8411. Information may also be provided by calling Delaware Crime Stoppers at
1-800-TIP-3333, via the internet at www.tipsubmit.com, or by sending an anonymous tip by text to 274637 (CRIMES) using the keyword “DSP.”
“It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year. I remember Detective Grassi telling us early on about another case that he had that had been (unsolved for) two years, and I remember thinking, ‘Two years?! That can’t happen.’ I thought two years sounded like 20 years.”
— Missy Morrissey, the older sister of beloved Academy Park High School teacher Susan Ledyard