Note: This post has been getting a lot of traffic recently and I couldn’t figure out why. The answer:  A biking blog linked to the post a few days ago because Pat Hines, one of the victim’s friends, has been in the news. I originally wrote the blog post about the Nov. 15, 1981, incident in 2005 for the 1947project.

Sue was 29, tall, blond and athletic with dimples every time she smiled—her big, clunky glasses the only thing that might betray a degree in quantum mechanics—when she left her husband in Austin, Texas, and a job writing for scientific journals, found an apartment right below the Hollywood sign and began turning out screenplays. She had just finished “Death in New Venice,” about a female detective.

Early one morning shortly before Thanksgiving, while it was still dark, she parked her Mercedes at Gladstone’s, 17300 Pacific Coast Highway, the usual gathering spot for the Santa Monica Swim Club, which was planning a bike ride up the coast to Point Mugu.

Some swim club members avoided this newcomer, who had arrived in Los Angeles two months before, because she seemed unsophisticated and took risks that weren’t appropriate for life in a huge city. “Her eyesight wasn’t that great, she’d never lived by the water and here she was swimming before sunrise in the cold ocean,” said Richard Marks, one of her friends.

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