Post by Graveyardbride on Sept 15, 2014 1:19:51 GMT -5
Murder on the Graveyard Shift
During the graveyard shift of Sunday, September 13, 1992, 27-year-old Susan “Su” Taraskiewicz of Sargus, Mass., volunteered to pick up sandwiches for her co-workers at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Thirty-six hours later, her Toyota Tercel was found outside an auto body shop at 281 Lee Burbank Highway. Su’s body, stabbed multiple times and badly beaten, was stuffed inside the trunk. There were no signs of robbery or rape, ruling out a random assault.
Su was a trailblazer, a woman working in a man’s job on the tarmac of the airport. She was the second female to be employed by Northwest Airlines (since bought out by Delta) as a ground service worker and loved what she did. She had worked her way up from cleaning jets and after three years, was promoted to ramp supervisor, the first woman to hold that position. Her mother, Marlene Taraskiewcz, said: “Sometimes she’d come home and say, ‘I lifted a million bags today and they were 200 pounds each.’ She’d make a joke out of it. But she never complained about the job. She loved it. Susan was beautiful, intelligent, friendly and had a heart of gold.”
At the time of her murder, a group of Northwest employees were involved in a credit card theft ring. Mrs. Taraskiewicz believes her daughter knew about the thefts, but did not say anything because she was a woman working in a traditionally male job and had filed a grievance after being passed over for a supervisor’s position. “Nobody was going to force her out of her job, no one, and I’m proud of her for that.”
For more than a year, her family, especially her mother, grieved and Su’s room remained just as it had been when she left for work the last night of her life. Then, finally, at Christmastime of 1993, Marlene entered her daughter’s bedroom and was shocked by what she found. “I tried many times to go in Su’s room,” Mrs. Tarakiewicz explained. “You know, you’ve got to do this. It’s a year. You know you should. Let me get something that was special to her and we’ll just put it out. And I started going into her closet and I saw a briefcase there.”
Inside the briefcase was a diary, where, in vivid detail, Su Taraskiewicz described the sexual harassment she had been forced to endure on the job. There were shocking incidents she had never mentioned to her family. The journal included examples of the graffiti – insulting, demeaning and lurid – she had found written on walls and even in the cargo holds of jets. Marlene knew immediately the diary was important to the investigation. “What I read, the filth that somebody would write about my Susan. And I thought, is this why she was murdered? And we thought, this is it. We have solved Susan’s murder.”
On page after page, Su described acts of hostility. In one incident, she wrote of a co-worker named Bobby who purposely dropped her radio on the floor. Su’s boyfriend, who also worked at the airport, spoke to Bobby and demanded he replace the radio. Then later that day, Su confronted Bobby herself. During their conversation, he threatened to beat up and kill her boyfriend. Su filed several formal complaints with both management and her union, but little was done to stop the harassment. In fact, according to Laura Brown, a reporter for The Boston Herald, it increased, often in the form of nasty graffiti: “It wasn’t apparently just one or two pieces of graffiti that made their way up and then were washed away. It was repeated cases of graffiti of varying kinds. In some cases, it amounted to death threats against other workers who were supporting Su. Su also talks in her diary about getting anonymous phone calls at all hours of the night. She recorded some of the times the phone calls happened. She also had instances where her car was vandalized. Her boyfriend’s car was vandalized. Friends who were supporting her had their cars vandalized.”
Despite the abuse, Su’s career did not suffer and in February 1992, she was promoted to ramp supervisor and placed in charge of the employees she had once worked with on the tarmac. Initially, she had been passed over for the promotion. A man in her union had illegally bid for the job, so Su filed a grievance and was successful. But the victory made some of her co-workers uncomfortable, one of whom, Joseph Snow, admitted it was because Su was female: “A lot of them felt that they didn’t want any females being their boss, that that should be a man’s job,” Snow recalled. “It didn’t stop her from coming to work. It didn’t stop her from standing up to things that she thought was wrong.” A few months after her promotion, the graffiti became more sinister. Su once found where someone had drawn the outline of a coffin inside her locker.
Investigators believe Su’s murder was connected to a federal investigation of the Northwest Airlines credit card thefts the summer prior to her death. “The facts and circumstances of Susan’s brutal killing, including whether it was connected to people involved in the credit card thefts and sexual harassment or to other individuals, remains under active investigation by the Suffolk County District Attorney, the Massachusetts State Police and the Revere Police,” police disclosed in a written statement. Officers investigating the murder believe there are people who have information that will allow them to arrest the person or persons who killed Susan Taraskiewicz. Anyone with information, regardless of their current situation or circumstance, is urged to contact the State Police Detective Unit for Suffolk County at 617-727-8817.
In Season 2 of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Episode 11, entitled “Baggage,” was inspired by the Susan Taraskiewicz case but, of course, Detectives Goren and Eames got their man, who turned out to be an airlines baggage supervisor living the high life by selling stolen credit card numbers to the Russian mob.
Sources: MassachusettsLive; The Boston Globe; and MysteriesUnsolved.
