Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Disappearance of Suzanne Lyall

However, he was not certain that he had seen her get off at the Collins Circle stop on campus, a short walk from her dorm. He could only say with certainty that she was not on the bus when he reached the end of the route downtown. A friend of Suzanne's says she saw her get off the bus there, though. It was approximately 9:45 p.m. She has never been seen again.

Investigation

The next morning, March 3, Condon, who attended a different college in the Albany area, called Doug and Mary Lyall to tell them Suzanne had not returned to her dorm the night before and was nowhere else to be found. She usually phoned or emailed him after returning from work and had not answered his calls to her dorm room. They called the campus police to formally report her missing, and were told that brief absences were not uncommon for college students, so they should not worry as it was likely that she would soon reappear.

But the Lyalls nevertheless did worry, as this behavior was unlike their daughter. "Suzie was not a risk-taker", her father said. "She didn't party or use alcohol or drugs". An officer who went to her next scheduled class did not see her. Her suitemates said that Suzanne had never returned to her room on the night of March 2, as they never heard her keys and fobs jingling as they always did whenever she returned.

The Lyalls also called Suzanne's bank, who contacted them later that day to inform them that their daughter's debit card had been used to withdraw $20 from an ATM at a Stewart's Shops convenience store in Albany at approximately 4 p.m. Two days later, a delay Doug Lyall later criticized, the campus police agreed after Suzanne missed another midterm, as well as her other scheduled classes, that her disappearance was not a typical case of a missing undergraduate and called in the state police for assistance. The Lyalls and SUNY Albany put up a $15,000 reward for information that would resolve the case. Fliers with Suzanne's picture were posted all over campus and nearby.

ATM withdrawals

In the first two weeks of the investigation, police looked into 270 leads and searched 300 acres (120 ha) near Collins Circle, including the wooded area and Rensselaer Lake in the eastern end of the Albany Pine Bush just across Interstate 90 from that part of the campus. The ATM withdrawal drew particular attention. The Stewart's where it was located had a security camera but it focused on the area around the cashier and did not show the ATM, so it could not be determined who was using it at that time. However, a man who might likely have been using it around that time, identified publicly by the Nike baseball cap he was wearing, was sought as a possible witness or person of interest.

Whoever had used the card knew the correct PIN. Condon said that only he and Suzanne knew it. She also always withdrew exactly $20 anytime she went to the ATM, according to her parents.

Yet her parents said that Stewart's, at the intersection of Central Avenue and Manning Boulevard 2 miles (3.2 km) southeast of the campus, was not in a part of the city where she would ever have gone. The clerk on duty at the time did not recognize her. Police eventually located the man with the Nike cap, and came to believe he had nothing to do with the case, although they could not completely exclude him.

The bank also told the Lyalls and police that their records showed that Suzanne's card was used to make two withdrawals from different ATMs on the day she disappeared. One had been in the morning at a machine near the Collins Circle bus stop, the other was in the mall at about the time she would have arrived there for work. Both had been for $20, so it seemed likely that she had made them. But Mary Lyall could not imagine why her daughter would have made two withdrawals in one day.

Suspicions of foul play

Investigators pondered a connection to a similar disappearance of another SUNY Albany undergraduate, Karen Wilson, who likewise had been last seen getting off a public bus 1 mile (1.6 km) away from campus almost 13 years before Suzanne, in March 1985. An intensive search at that time had yielded no evidence, and her case, too, remains unsolved as of 2018. A convicted rapist who had violated parole and left the area around the time Suzanne disappeared was briefly considered a suspect, but police interviewed him after he was returned to New York from Illinois and excluded him.