Side-Eye & Sympathy | Through a Velvet Lens
Mary and Susanne ("Suzie") Reker
Double Homicide, Active Investigation
Phone:
320-259-3704 or 320-259-3732
Email:
Address:
St. Cloud, MN
Stearns County
Date of Last Known Sighting
September 2, 1974
The Anatomy of an Ordinary Monday: Mary & Susanne Reker
In the corner booth of the human experience, we often obsess over the "why" of grand gestures, but it’s the ordinary moments that haunt the most. On Labor Day, 1974, the "why" was as mundane as a Minnesota autumn: a fifteen-year-old girl, Mary, needed school supplies for a sophomore year that would never begin. Her twelve-year-old sister, Susanne, did what younger sisters do—she tagged along.
They waved goodbye to their father as he painted the house in the St. Cloud sun, two girls skipping off to prepare for a school bell they would never hear ring.
The Winter That Never Came
We are a people defined by our winters—the biting air, the heavy wool, the way the world turns quiet under a foot of snow. It’s a survival ritual we all know too well. But as Mary and Susanne walked toward the store, they were walking away from the only season they had left.
The 1974 Minnesota winter arrived with its usual frozen fury, but the Reker sisters never felt the bite of it. While the rest of St. Cloud was buttoning up against the October frost, Mary and Susanne were being found in a quarry, twenty-six days too late for a coat to matter.
The Side-Eye: A Narrative That Doesn’t Add Up
When we apply a clinical lens to the silence that followed, the "how" becomes as chilling as the "who." These weren't children who wandered; they were girls taught the sharp lessons of the Midwest—never talk to strangers, never get in the car. The true crime community and those who knew them best whisper a tough, logical truth: it likely took more than a stranger. It likely took... two. Two people to subdue them; two people they perhaps trusted enough to close the gap between safety and the quarry.
And then there is the prime suspect—a man who took his secrets to the edge of the grave. When Mary’s mother, Rita, stood by his hospital bed seeking the radical honesty we crave in this booth, he didn't offer a confession. He only offered a dark prophecy: “I’m going to hell.”
The Radical Sympathy
Our hearts stay with that house in St. Cloud—with a father whose last memory is a casual wave from a ladder, and a mother who looked into the eyes of a dying man and saw only a void where the truth should be.
We aren't just looking at a fifty-year-old cold case; we are looking at the "why" behind a lingering shadow. If it took two to take them, it will take all of us to remember them. The notebooks stayed empty, and the winter coats were never worn, but the story of Mary and Susanne Reker isn't over. Not as long as we’re still sitting in this booth, asking the questions.
The Forensic Baseline
Nothin' but the cold hard facts.
On September 2, 1974, Mary and Susan Reker left their home in St. Cloud to walk to a local store. They were last seen at the store during the early afternoon on September 2, 1974, and never returned home. Their bodies were found 26 days later in a quarry outside of St. Cloud. The investigation into the 1974 double murder of Mary and Susanne Reker continues to be an active investigation for the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office. If anyone has information about their murders or any other information that could be helpful, please contact Sergeant Brian Bohlig at 320-259-3704 or Lieutenant Zach Sorenson at 320-259-3732.
The Anatomy of the Absence: Case Investigation Timeline
September 28, 1974 - Current
September 2, 1974 - September 28, 1974
Trail goes cold. The case is still considered ongoing and an active investigation.
Bodies of both Reker sisters found in quarry outside of St. Cloud, MN.
September 2, 1974
The last time the Reker sisters were seen alive, they were doing something every Minnesota family understands: preparing for the change of seasons. On Labor Day 1974, Mary and Susanne set off to buy a winter coat and school supplies, waving a final goodbye to their father as he worked on the house. In the bright sun of a St. Cloud afternoon, there was no hint that this ordinary errand would become the 'who knows' of a fifty-year mystery.
The Suspects
Connecting the dots in a decades-old murder case always feels like staring at a shattered mirror—every jagged piece reflects a slightly different angle of the same tragedy, but none of them quite fit together neatly enough to give you the whole picture. When we look deeper into the St. Cloud shadows surrounding the Reker sisters' 1974 disappearance, a few specific names keep rising to the surface of the files. Let’s talk about the players who have haunted this investigation for years, and how their paths awkwardly—and disturbingly—collide with Mary and Susanne’s final day.
Herb Notch
If you spend enough time looking through the suspect files for the Reker case, Herb Notch’s name is impossible to ignore. Back in 1974, Notch was a 17-year-old alternative school student who happened to work as a bagger right where the girls vanished: the Zayre’s shopping center. Law enforcement didn’t immediately pin the Reker murders on him, but his subsequent violent history put him squarely on their radar. Two years later, in September 1976, Notch and an accomplice abducted a 14-year-old convenience store worker named Sue Dukowitz, driving her out to an isolated gravel pit to assault her. During that attack, Notch suddenly pulled a knife and tried to kill her. Investigators couldn't ignore the chilling overlap: young local males, isolation in a pit or quarry environment, knife violence, and sexual assault. Notch was known to carry a blade and had a strange habit of sitting in his car in the Zayre’s parking lot on his days off, just blankly staring at people. Though his polygraphs were inconclusive and physical evidence never definitively tied him to the Reker girls, he remained a prime shadow over the case until his death in May 2017—just a week after an 82-year-old Rita Reker confronted him on his deathbed at St. Cloud Hospital. He took whatever secrets he had straight to the grave.
Russ Platz
One of the most bizarre and unsettling twists in the Reker web is the presence of Russ Platz. He was a schoolmate and acquaintance of Herb Notch, and they shared an employment orbit around that same Zayre’s store. The dark irony of Platz's involvement in the timeline is that he was literally one of the teenagers who stumbled upon Mary and Susanne’s bodies in the quarry nearly a month after they went missing. But his connection goes beyond just being a bystander. Platz later came forward with red flags regarding Notch's behavior around the time of the murders, noting how Notch was constantly obsessed with playing with his knife and lingering around the shopping center lot. Platz even reached a point where he directly confronted Notch, asking him if he had anything to do with the girls disappearing. It leaves us standing right on the line between witness and accomplice, wondering how much people in that tight-knit circle actually knew.
Dukowitz
Sue Dukowitz’s name is tied to the blueprint of how Herb Notch operated. In 1976, she was just 14 years old, working a shift at a St. Cloud convenience store when she became the target of Notch and James Wagner. Her terrifying survival is arguably the closest look investigators ever got into the psychological profile of what likely happened to Mary and Susanne. By dragging her to an out-of-the-way gravel pit and attempting to murder her with a knife, Notch demonstrated a terrifying M.O. that mirrored the physical realities of the Reker sisters' homicides. If Notch was capable of doing that to Sue in '76, it completely shatters any disbelief that he couldn't have been capable of horrific violence two years prior.
What are your thoughts on this circle of local teens and coworkers? Do you think Platz knew more than he let on, or was Notch operating as an unchecked predator hiding right in plain sight among the Zayre's employees? Drop your thoughts below.
Silence or Single?
The exact paradox that drives every investigator crazy when looking at a decades-old cold case: the math of human behavior just doesn't add up.
When you look at a crime of this magnitude—brutal, targeted, and carried out against two young sisters in broad daylight—it defies logic that the person responsible could just zip up their jacket, walk away, and keep a clean slate for half a century without slipping up or running out the clock in a prison cell.
Let’s pull apart those two massive questions, because they get right to the beating heart of why this case remains so infuriating.
Who Talks? The Silence of a 50-Year Secret
People who commit crimes like this don't usually sit by quietly for 50 years just crossing their fingers. But criminal psychology tells us there are generally two reasons a killer stays silent for a half-century: paralyzing fear or absolute compartmentalization.
If you look at who has actually talked about this case the most over the years, it hasn't been the killer. It’s been Rita Reker, the girls' mother, who spent decades banging on every door, founding the local Crime Stoppers chapter, and keeping the media spotlight glued to the case until her final breath. Alongside her, local journalists, regional true-crime podcasts (Crime Junkie, The Deck, local papers), and investigators have done the heavy lifting to keep the names of Mary and Susanne alive.
As for the perpetrators? If it was a young local male or a duo of teenage boys like the circles law enforcement looked into (such as the Notch orbit), their "silence" might actually be built on a terrifying pact of mutual destruction. If two people share a secret that carries a life sentence, the psychological cage they built for themselves is just as strong as any iron bars. Every passing year makes confession harder, not easier—because admitting to it at age 20 is a ruined life, but confessing at age 60 means throwing away whatever elderly dignity or family life you managed to cobble together. They didn't stay quiet because they weren't tormented; they stayed quiet out of self-preservation.
The "One-and-Done" Myth: Did They Really Stop?
Let's cut even deeper: Someone doesn't just kill two young girls on a whim, vanish into thin air, and live a completely normal, law-abiding life ever after.
And historically speaking, they usually don't.
When a predator escalates to abducting and murdering two children in a coordinated fashion, that is rarely a random, isolated statistical blip in an otherwise boring life. Which brings us right back to guys like Herb Notch.
Notice the pattern: Mary and Susanne were murdered in September 1974. Fast forward two years to September 1976, and Herb Notch is right back at it—only this time, he and an accomplice abducted 14-year-old Sue Dukowitz, dragged her to a secluded pit, and tried to murder her with a knife.
He didn't stop. He just got caught the second time because the victim survived.
If Notch—or someone operating exactly like him—was responsible for the Reker sisters, the only reason he didn't spend his entire life in prison for this specific crime is because law enforcement initially wrote the girls off as runaways, blowing the critical first 48 hours of evidence collection. By the time they realized what they were dealing with, the trail had gone ice cold. Notch did spend time entangled in the legal system later for other violent assaults, but the ironclad physical evidence needed to bridge the gap between him and the quarry in '74 just wasn't there.
They didn't necessarily stop repeating their behavior—sometimes, they just got better at hiding it, or the legal system only managed to catch them for subsequent crimes while the original masterpiece of horror slipped through the cracks.
Just when we thought we had all of the pieces...
When you start digging into the St. Cloud files from the fall of 1974, you hit a massive fork in the road that completely changes how you view the whole tragedy. Up until now, we’ve talked about the local shadows—the teenage circles, the guys hanging around the Zayre’s bagger lines, the tight-knit groups keeping decades-long secrets.
But then you drop the Georgianne Dreher incident onto the timeline, and everything gets thrown into a completely different kind of terrifying perspective.
The Stranger on the Bike
Right around the time Mary and Susanne were last seen, a young woman named Georgianne Dreher found herself chatting with an unfamiliar face right across the road from that exact same Zayre’s shopping center.
The guy had pedaled his bike across the asphalt, and when Georgianne casually asked if he knew of any decent spots to swim around town, he directed her straight toward the quarries—the very same desolate landscape where the Reker girls would soon be found. They rode out there together, and he introduced himself as "Lloyd," claiming he was a traveling carnival worker passing through the area.
It didn't take long for the vibe to flip. "Lloyd" suddenly turned vicious, pulling a sharp blade, slashing her clothes, and subjecting her to a brutal assault. The most skin-crawling part of his confession during the attack? He openly rambled about his specific fixations—including a twisted obsession with sisters. Georgianne only managed to claw her way out of the nightmare because a vehicle pulled up nearby, giving her the opening she needed to bolt.
The Face That Never Left
Georgianne reported the assault back in '74, but true to the frustrating investigative landscape of that decade, the pieces didn't get snapped together in real time. Decades later, she was still haunted by her attacker—particularly a distinct scar sitting right over his left eyebrow. Determined to find answers, she set up web alerts for keywords like "Lloyd" and "carnival worker," waiting for a ghost to show up.
Years down the road, those alerts finally pinged when a man named Lloyd Welch hit the headlines for the 1975 abduction and murder of the Lyon sisters out in Maryland—a high-profile case he was eventually convicted for. When Georgianne pulled up Welch's booking photo, the blood drained from her face. It was him. The traveling carnival worker with the scarred eyebrow.
Local Monsters vs. Drifter Predators
This revelation blows the whole investigation wide open. We have a traveling predator with a documented history of targeting young girls, a fixation on sisters, and a direct physical footprint starting at the exact same Zayre’s parking lot and ending in the exact same quarry system during the exact same week.
So, what are we really looking at here? Did Mary and Susanne fall victim to a localized circle of young men who protected each other behind a wall of silence for half a century, or did a completely mobile, opportunistic monster blow through St. Cloud on a bicycle, grab two girls doing their school shopping, and vanish back into the wind?
When you weigh a local predator hiding in plain sight against a transient serial offender crossing state lines, the puzzle only gets darker.
Are we dealing with home-grown evil, or did a drifter slip right through the fingers of a town that didn't know who was riding through its streets?