Diane Suzuki

Case background and investigation

Diane Yayoe Suzuki was a 19-year-old student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who also worked as a part-time instructor at the Rosalie Woodson Dance Academy in Aiea, on the island of Oahu. According to Wikipedia's summary of the case, she was born on May 14, 1966, and stood just under five feet tall.

On Saturday, July 6, 1985, Suzuki finished teaching a class at the studio and was expected to leave at around 5 p.m. She was not seen again. Her purse, her keys and her car were all still at the dance academy, which suggested to her family and to police that she had not left voluntarily. An extensive search of Oahu followed, but no trace of her was located.

The Honolulu Police Department initially handled the matter as a missing person case. Attention turned early to an acquaintance of Suzuki's who worked as a photographer at the dance school. According to a 2000 report in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, he was questioned soon after she vanished and reportedly failed a polygraph examination, but he was released without charges after his family retained an attorney. Police also searched a marsh area behind his home. He has never been charged with any offense connected to the disappearance.

Several years later, investigators returned to the studio and applied luminol, a chemical that reacts with traces of blood, in an upstairs bathroom. The test indicated what police believed to be blood, and the case was reclassified as a homicide. Wikipedia notes that this was the first Honolulu Police Department investigation to make use of luminol. The Star-Bulletin reported, however, that there was no record of Suzuki's blood type available for comparison, which limited what the finding could prove.

In November 1993, Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Keith Kaneshiro convened an investigative grand jury to put witness statements on the record under oath. The Star-Bulletin quoted him as saying that many people were called, including some who were regarded as suspects. No indictment followed. Kaneshiro explained that without a body it was not possible to establish a cause of death, which made it difficult to build a prosecution. The newspaper reported that the case had not been actively investigated since that time.

Suzuki's family held a memorial service for her on July 6, 1997, twelve years to the day after she disappeared. Her mother, Yuri Suzuki, died in December 1998. The case has continued to draw attention in Hawaii, including a podcast episode released in 2025 marking forty years since the disappearance. Diane Suzuki has never been found, and the case remains unsolved.