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Suzanne A. Bombardier

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Suzanne A. Bombardier Empty Suzanne A. Bombardier

Post by ophion1031 November 30th 2017, 2:00 am

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/A-search-for-justice-35-years-after-Antioch-6342900.php

At 14, Suzanne Bombardier was just beginning a life full of promise. She was on the honor roll at Antioch Junior High School and wanted to try out for cheerleading. She had many friends and was known for her big smile and spirit.

But something went horribly wrong after Suzanne babysat her nieces at her sister’s Antioch town house on June 21, 1980 — the first day of summer.

When her older sister Stephanie returned the next morning from a shift at a nearby restaurant, she didn’t see Suzanne but assumed she was sleeping upstairs. In fact, she had been kidnapped.

Five days later, hope was lost when Suzanne’s nude body was pulled from the San Joaquin River about a quarter mile east of the Antioch Bridge. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed in the heart.


Now, 35 years after her slaying, with few solid leads in the case, Suzanne’s family and two retired Antioch police officers who worked the investigation — drawn together by a stranger — are searching for justice.

Haunted by the killing, they want to pressure investigators to relaunch their probe and to push the cold case into the public eye. Suzanne’s slaying never drew the national attention that came with the kidnappings of other Northern California girls like Polly Klaas, Amber Swartz-Garcia and Jaycee Dugard.

“We were just so broken, all broken and devastated,” said one of Suzanne’s sisters, 60-year-old Sheron, who like other family members and friends asked to be identified only by her first name because of the sensitivity of the case and because the killer may be free.


“You know how there’s different stages of grief?” she said. “We’re still at that broken stage, 35 years later. That’s the problem, all of us.”

Suzanne’s mother, Cathy, 80, said her daughter’s memory remains strong in the family.

In a recent interview, she said, “I think the world lost a wonderful ...” Her voice trailed off, and she wiped away tears. “Somebody really nice,” she finished.

A night of babysitting

On the night she was taken, Suzanne babysat her nieces, ages 5 and 6, at her sister’s town house on Antioch’s Hudson Court.

About 8:30 p.m., she walked the kids to a nearby Mexican restaurant where her sister was working, because Stephanie had forgotten an article of clothing for her job on the late shift. Suzanne then returned to her sister’s place with the children in tow and put them to bed upstairs.

She watched a rerun of “Saturday Night Live.” Gilda Radner was one of her favorite cast members.

Early the next morning, from 1:30 to 2:15 a.m., Suzanne spoke on the phone with a girlfriend, according to police.

When Stephanie returned home about 4 a.m. after her shift ended, Suzanne wasn’t sleeping on her usual spot on the couch downstairs. Stephanie assumed her sister was upstairs. But by noon, she realized Suzanne was gone.

Authorities launched an intensive search of the neighborhood. But they were stumped. There were no signs of forced entry to the town house, and her clothes, shoes and overnight bag were still there.

Chilling phone call

On June 27, 1980, Antioch police Detective Gregory Glod got the call he had dreaded. The Contra Costa County sheriff’s marine patrol was in the process of recovering a body found floating in the San Joaquin River by a fisherman.

Already operating on little sleep, Glod nervously waited at the Antioch Marina for the boat to return. As he took a look at the body and saw the long blond hair, “I immediately became enraged,” he recalled.

It was Suzanne. Someone had discarded her body in the water like trash after sexually assaulting her.

Glod and Ron Rackley, who also worked the case, have long since left the Antioch police force. Glod left in 1983 for a two-year stint with the Concord police, followed by 26 years with the U.S. Secret Service. He is now deputy director of the threat analysis center with the police force that protects the Pentagon.

But he can’t forget the biggest case he was never able to solve.

“I have often thought of the fear Suzanne must have gone through that night, which has always caused me great pain,” Glod said. “I am no different than many police detectives and police officers who are exposed to the hideous, inhumane side of mankind.”

Glod said there are suspects in the case, but he declined to discuss them, saying he wants Antioch police, together with the newly formed cold case unit at the Contra Costa County district attorney’s office, to examine any leads.

“No stone should be left unturned until justice is served for Suzanne, her family and friends who have suffered for so many years,” said Glod. “It’s one of those cases that I just can’t let go.”

Rackley, 63, suspects the killer frequented the Mexican restaurant where Stephanie worked — and perhaps other local restaurants and bars — and may still live in the area after inevitable stints in jail.

The sheer passage of time, Rackley said, might encourage witnesses to speak up now, decades later.

“As time goes by and people age and time takes its toll on them, they might be more willing to step forward,” said Rackley, who now works as a law enforcement trainer after serving as range master with the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office.

Asked by The Chronicle about the case, Paul Holes, the chief of forensics for the district attorney’s office, who has been investigating cold cases, said he had been in contact with Antioch police.

“We’re going to get together and revisit the Bombardier case,” Holes said.

Killing’s profound impact

The killing had a profound impact on those touched by it — including one of the nieces Suzanne had been babysitting when she was abducted.

She’s now a 40-year-old Martinez resident with a teenage son of her own. The woman, who didn’t want her name used, said she doesn’t let her son spend the night at the homes of people she doesn’t know.

“I’m overprotective,” she said. Suzanne’s slaying “really affected my parenting as far as who I let my child around.”

A 49-year-old woman named Leesa, who was one of Suzanne’s closest childhood friends, said it was unfair that someone who “always found humor in everything that she did” was senselessly killed. For her, Suzanne will eternally be 14, the teenager who danced to Lawrence Welk polkas.

“That’s someone’s life that got taken before they even had a chance to go to a prom or start driving,” Leesa said. “There was so much that got cut short for her.”

A chance encounter

It was last fall when Leesa, the retired Antioch officers and Suzanne’s niece got together, thanks to Jennifer Kathleen Gibbons, an author from Lafayette, and a stroke of chance.

Gibbons, 43, had been visiting her grandparents’ grave at Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Lafayette in 2013 when she came across Suzanne’s grave site. She realized that Suzanne had died a month before her grandmother, and became curious about what happened to the girl with the blond hair and blue eyes.

Suzanne’s photo is on the gravestone, which is inscribed with the words, “You’re in my heart,” from her favorite song by Rod Stewart. Family friends sang the song at her standing-room-only Mass at an Antioch church.

Gibbons did some research on the unsolved slaying and wrote about it on a website called “Defrosting Cold Cases.” She became the catalyst that helped reunite the group now hoping that the case gets solved.

“My biggest hope is there’s a resolution,” Gibbons said. “I know closure sounds like a perfect cliche, because there is no real closure, but I would like the family to know what happened, and they could maybe find some peace in it.”
ophion1031
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