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New Jersey cold case went from accidental death to suspected homicide | Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles podcast

Lee Digital Content Center
Apr 4, 2023
Apr 4, 2023 Updated Jun 2, 2023
1 min to read

Welcome back to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises podcast with host Nat Cardona. On this podcast, you’ll hear true crime stories as told by journalists from regional newspapers across the country.

For the next series of episodes, we will be diving into the 1990 cold case murder of Susan Negersmith in Wildwood, New Jersey. You’ll hear from reporters, past and present, who covered the case as it has unfolded throughout the years and the many twists and turns along the way.

Before we hear from one of the original reporters on the Negersmith case, we need to head down to the Jersey Shore more than 30 years ago.

Susan Negersmith was a 20 year-old woman from Carmel, New York. She was visiting Wildwood, New Jersey, on Memorial Day Weekend with friends in 1990. She said goodbye to her friends in the evening of Saturday, May 26, and by the early hours of Sunday morning, Susan’s partially clothed body was found behind a dumpster near a Wildwood restaurant. Her death was originally ruled accidental, although there were signs of a struggle.

An important thing to note about Susan Negersmith’s weekend trip with friends to Wildwood: this area is a destination for a debaucherously good time. Tourists flock there in the warm weather months to party hard. There’s a boardwalk packed with restaurants and bars packed with people from all over. Drinking heavily is a main activity. The reputation of the area for all of these things quickly comes into play in the early days of the investigation ... at the expense of solving Susan’s case in a timely fashion.

And for more on that, we are joined by Yvette Craig. She was a reporter at the Press of Atlantic City in the early 90s and closely covered Susan Negersmith’s case from day one.

Read more about the case