Thirty-four years ago Sunday night, a 27-year-old ramp crew chief for Northwest Airlines named Susan Taraskiewicz took a break from her overnight shift at Logan, around 1 a.m., to pick up sandwiches for her crew. She did not come back. Thirty-six hours later her Toyota Tercel was found outside an auto repair shop on Route 1A in Revere, near 281 Lee Burbank Highway. She was in the trunk. She had been beaten and stabbed.
On Saturday, people who loved her stood at Constitution Beach in East Boston holding flowers, one for each year. Her mother, Marlene, is 84 now. “I know there’s somebody out there that knows about Susan,” she told CBS Boston. “I realize that even to this day there are people afraid to come forward.”
The theory that never closed
The case has never been cold in the way most old cases go cold. It has had a direction almost from the start. In the months after the murder, several Northwest baggage handlers were subpoenaed before a federal grand jury looking into a nationwide credit card theft ring run out of the airport. Court documents later showed that some of Taraskiewicz’s coworkers had harassed her and feared she would testify about the ring. One of them, Joseph Nuzzo, was eventually convicted on charges connected to the theft scheme and was named in court papers as having started it. He has denied any involvement in her death or in harassing her, and he has never been charged with either.
Her mother’s account of the workplace is simpler. “They thought by harassing her, they would get rid of her, and it didn’t work,” she said in 2023. “They thought she’d quit, but she never did.”
The State Police have said, in increasingly pointed language over the years, that they believe they know more than they can prove. In 2021: “We have reached the point, now, where we are in possession of information that brings these events into clearer focus. But we still need to punch the ball over the goal line.” In 2023, addressed to whoever has stayed quiet: “It’s a long time past September 14, 1992, but not too late to do what is right.”
Retired Trooper Bob Murphy, who carried the case for twenty years, was more direct on Saturday. “I can say with complete certainty that this is not a cold case,” he told CBS. “This case is extremely active and more importantly, it has a very specific focus.”
The reward
Northwest Airlines put up $250,000 in 1995. Northwest became part of Delta in 2008, and every few years someone wonders whether the reward went with it. Marlene Taraskiewicz has made sure. “I made sure I called Delta Air Lines,” she said last year, “and they gave me a letter that it was still in effect from 1995.” It is still in effect this year.
Her sister, Debbie Almonti: “Thirty-four birthdays have come and gone without Sue here to blow out her candles.”
Why this is a Revere story
Susan Taraskiewicz was from Saugus and worked in East Boston. Revere is where she was left. Lee Burbank Highway is the stretch of 1A between the airport and Bell Circle, a road of repair shops, rental lots and parking, the kind of place a car can sit for a day and a half without anyone looking twice. Someone drove that car there. Someone in this corner of the county, in September 1992, saw something, or heard something afterward at a bar or a kitchen table, and has been carrying it since.
The State Police Detective Unit for Suffolk County takes calls at (617) 727-8817. Anonymous is fine. A book about the case by a local writer, Dianne Braley, is due out, and a billboard campaign went up this year. None of that is what will close it. A phone call will.