30 Years After Remains Found In IL State Park, Missing Mom ID'd

ILLINOIS — It was January 1993 when two girls made a gruesome discovery near an Illinois state park. The girls found a woman's head along a road in Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park near Ina, Illinois. Nearly 30 years later, a Massachusetts-based forensic genealogy company helped police and anthropologists identify the woman as missing Tennessee mom Susan Lund — although what happened to her remains a mystery.

On Friday, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office in Illinois said the remains were finally identified as Susan Lund, who left her Clarksville, Tennessee, home for the grocery store on Christmas Eve 1992 and never returned.

Lund was 25 years old and pregnant with her fourth child when she disappeared, ClarksvilleNOW reported. According to the Chicago Tribune, her three children were ages 6, 4 and 2.

Lund's husband, Paul, a soldier at Fort Campbell, soon reported her missing, but a multi-agency search for her turned up nothing. Police halted the search for her after just two weeks, believing she left "by her own choice" and was living across the border in Kentucky, ClarksvilleNOW reported.

"The official missing person's case was closed, but Sue's family did not stop looking for her," the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office and Redgrave Research Forensic Services said in a news release.

A month after Lund vanished, two girls found a woman's head near a road inside Illinois' Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park.

At the time, investigators believed the remains were that of a woman between the ages of 30 and 50, and believed she had torticollis, also known as "wry neck syndrome." They believed the condition would have caused her to have an extreme sideways head tilt.

For nearly three decades, the identity of the woman, referred to as "Ina Jane Doe," was unknown, even as Lund's family searched for answers.

In February 2021, University of New Hampshire University assistant anthropology professor Dr. Amy Michael approached the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office offering to re-examine the case, according to the release.

The new investigation determined that the woman likely did not have such an extreme head tilt in life. Michael's analysis prompted a new forensic image of the woman from artist Carl Koppelman, the release said.

Samples from the woman's remains were also sent to a forensic laboratory in California to create a DNA profile, authorities said.

Redgrave Research Forensic Services uploaded that profile to DNA website GEDmatch last month. Within a day, they found a potential match and passed it along to police.

A DNA sample from Lund's sibling helped investigators confirm that the remains were hers on March 6, Redgrave said.

Police still seeking answers

While Lund's remains have been identified, police are still searching for answers in her disappearance.

Anyone with information on Lund's whereabouts on Dec. 24, 1992, is asked to contact Detective Captain Bobby Wallace of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office at 618-244-8004 or bwallace@jeffil.us.