Susan Negersmith

Susan Negersmith was a 20-year-old woman from Carmel, New York, who had traveled to the Jersey Shore resort town of Wildwood to celebrate Memorial Day weekend in 1990. On May 27, 1990, her partially clothed body was discovered in a rear outdoor storage area behind a Wildwood restaurant. She had been out enjoying the holiday weekend and was found dead not long after, setting in motion a case whose official cause and manner of death would be disputed for years.

The initial investigation reached a conclusion that would later prove deeply controversial. Authorities ruled Susan's death accidental, attributing it to alcohol intoxication and exposure to the elements, despite an autopsy that documented numerous areas of trauma on her body, including bruising to her skull. Her family rejected the finding from the start, insisting that the injuries and circumstances pointed to a violent crime rather than a tragic accident, and they pressed for years to have the case reexamined.

Their persistence, combined with renewed scrutiny by the state's Division of Criminal Justice, eventually forced a reversal. The state brought in the prominent forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden to review the evidence, and he concluded that Susan had been raped and smothered. In July 1993 the state reversed the original accidental ruling, and by 1995 the county amended her death certificate to reflect that she had been the victim of a homicide. The case then became an active, if long-stalled, murder investigation.

For decades the killing went unsolved, even as investigators preserved a DNA profile developed from evidence on Susan's body and compared it fruitlessly against numerous persons of interest. The breakthrough came through forensic genetic genealogy. Beginning in 2018, the Cape May County Prosecutor's Office used genealogical analysis of the unknown DNA profile and identified Jerry Rosado, a man from Millville, New Jersey, as a match. In April 2022, nearly 32 years after Susan's death, Rosado was arrested and charged with second-degree sexual assault, though authorities emphasized he had not been charged in her death itself.

The apparent resolution did not hold. An appellate court subsequently ruled that the prosecution of Rosado could not proceed because the statute of limitations on the sexual-assault charge had long since expired, and the charges against him were dismissed. As a result, no one has ever been convicted in connection with Susan Negersmith's death. For the family that spent years fighting simply to have her death recognized as a homicide, the outcome was another bitter disappointment, an identified suspect who could not be tried. Her case stands as a stark illustration of how an early, mistaken ruling and the limits of decades-old statutes of limitations can combine to leave even a DNA-identified suspect beyond the reach of prosecution, and the homicide of Susan Negersmith remains, more than three decades later, unresolved.