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- [00:02]
Tenderfoot TV Host
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- [01:20]
Celisia Stanton
Hi friends. I am so excited to share this new episode of True A Crime with you. If you want to listen ad free and get early access to all the episodes for this month's case, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts. It's also one of the best ways to support the show. Hi friends. Today's episode is the second half of our story and the finale of our third season of True Crime. Reaching the end of a season always feels a little bittersweet for me. You know, we spent months sitting with these cases, learning, questioning, trying to do our best to honor the people at the center of these stories. And you know, I want you to know this is not goodbye. Don't worry, we have a few bonus episodes coming later this month and we are already deep into what's next for the show. So if you want to stay in the loop, and I hope you do, be sure to follow us on Instagram X threadsandblueskyrucrimepod and subscribe to our newsletter@truecrime.substack.com we'll make sure those folks are know first so that's what we'll reach out about. New episodes, bonus content, and everything we're planning for the months ahead. Talk to you soon. Please be aware that today's episode contains descriptions of domestic violence. Please take care while listening. Jennifer Kirk's story didn't end with her death. Last episode we talked about how the 25 year old Inupec woman was found in 2018 under deeply unsettling circumstances on the property of Kotzebue's mayor. A rifle near her feet, bruises around her neck. And how within 24 hours, authorities labeled it a suicide and closed the case. No press conference, no meaningful investigation. For Jennifer's family, there was only grief and a hundred unanswered questions. For Kotzebue police, the case was over. But for me, it felt like the beginning. Because nearly two years later, before those questions could even fade, another tragedy hit. The exact same town. In early 2020, 30 year old Susanna Susu Norton, another young Inupec mother, another woman connected to the same powerful family, was found dead on the very property of where Jennifer Kirk died. And here's the detail I haven't been able to stop thinking about. On January 19, just weeks before her death, Susu changed her Facebook profile photo to the symbol of the missing and murdered Indigenous women movement. A red handprint over her mouth, A call for awareness, a show of solidarity. She had no way of knowing that she would become the next face in that movement. Two women, two years apart, same Alaskan property, same circle of influence. What looked like one tragedy was starting to look like a pattern and maybe even a cover up. This is the story of Jennifer Kirk and Susie Norton. Part two. I'm Celisia Stanton and you're listening to Truer Crime. Susu Norton grew up in Kotzebue. Like Jennifer Kirk, she was inipec. She was warm hearted, a helper in the truest sense. Her family remembers the small things. Her habit of cracking her knuckles, how she danced, how she used to talk about taking a Caribbean cruise. One day, her mother recalled to ProPublica the last moment she spent with her daughter. How Szuzu sat cross legged on the floor during a family gathering, patiently cutting a caribou hide into pieces. That was who she was. Present giving. When I learned that Susu shared a birthday with Jennifer Kirk, August 21, the detail stopped me. Another strange overlap in a story already full of them. And like Jennifer Sioux was in a relationship with one of the former mayor's sons. When she began dating Amos Richards, she built a small family with him. Two children and then a third on the way. But behind closed doors, their relationship was volatile, unpredictable and increasingly violent. In November of 2018, when Sousi was six months pregnant, that violence escalated into something life threatening. According to the police report she later gave, she Tried to stop Amos from drinking by pouring out his beer. He snapped, grabbing her by the hair, dragging her through the house, and then kicking her in the head, in the face, in the back, and brutally in her stomach. By the time officers arrived, her right eye was swollen shut. Her arms were swollen, too, from where she'd held them up to protect her head from his kicks. This wasn't some scuffle. It wasn't a domestic dispute. It was a pregnant woman being brutally beaten by the father of her child. And yet the prosecutor charged him with 4th degree assault, a misdemeanor, the lowest level of assault under Alaska law. As journalist Kyle Hopkins has noted in Kotzebue, you can be charged with fourth degree assault just for yelling at someone. Two weeks later, doctors airlifted Susu to Anchorage. Her water had broken prematurely three months early, and they believed the assault was caused it. She went into labor and delivered a baby girl, Eden, who weighed little more than three pounds. In the hospital, Susie posted a photo of Eden to Facebook. She asked friends to pray for them. She ended the post with a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, trying to anchor herself to something hopeful. But Eden had complications that required specialized care, and Kasivu didn't have the facilities to support her. So the Office of Children's Services arranged for Eden to stay with a foster couple in Anchorage, the Sunburgs, while she received treatment. Suzu trusted them, but she was still 550 miles away. So she did what she could. She sang to her baby in Inupak over Facetime. The Sundbergs remember her voice, how she tried to reach her daughter through a screen. Even Amos stayed in contact with the foster parents for a while. They talked about how Eden was doing and about the adoption process, because that was the plan. The Sundbergs were preparing to adopt Eden permanently. And so, despite everything Amos had done to her, Sisu and Amos were scheduled to fly to Anchorage together in March of 2020 to finalize the adoption paperwork. The week she died. They were supposed to be on that plane. I imagine that Sisu's last weeks were filled with the fragile kind of hope that comes after surviving something truly catastrophic. Hope tempered by exhaustion. Hope that is always bracing for the next blow. She was trying to build something steadier for her children, even if it meant being separated from one of them. She was still just 30 years old. And here's where her story shifts. Where the careful work she was doing to build a safer, more stable life was interrupted by something darker. Because the violence that had threatened her for years didn't disappear. It was still there, circling, getting closer. And in the final weeks of her life, it would reach her again. For Susu, that moment came in March of 2020, on the same property where Jennifer Kirk died, and the way her family learned what happened still haunts them. Come to DSW for the shoes, Stay for the fun. Because let's be honest, if shoe shopping isn't fun, are you even doing it right? So go ahead, try something new. Try something different, good different. Try something that feels like you, you know, the real you. And then definitely brag about it later. Because at dsw, you've got unlimited freedom to play. Find the shoes that get you at prices that get your budget at DSW stores or@dsw.com Let us surprise you a year from today. What would your dream private practice look like? 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- [10:25]
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- [11:28]
Celisia Stanton
9, 2020 at 8:32am Kotzebue Police responded to an emergency call at the Richards property. The temperature outside was 13 below zero. The kind of cold that bites through layers. The kind of cold that freezes breath into crystals. Officers found Susu lying on the ground, her head covered by a jacket. Someone had placed it over her, a gesture that must have only made the scene feel more haunting. The autopsy would later show what the officers might have already suspected. Susu had been beaten. She'd been strangled to death. The medical examiner listed the cause as asphyxiation due to obstruction of airways and compression of neck. They also documented multiple blunt force injuries to her head, neck and limbs. This wasn't an accident. It wasn't exposure. This was homicide. But even the basic timeline of sisu's final hours is murky. Kotzebue police said she likely died on March 5th or 6th. But her sister Vera says that Susu helped the family prepare caribou on the 7th or the 8th. So, in other words, someone got it wrong. And the response that followed only deepened the family's grief, because no one told Susu's mother, Mama sue, what had actually happened to her daughter. She didn't get a knock on the door, she didn't get a phone call or. Weeks passed before she received anything official. And then one day, an envelope arrived in the mail. Inside was her daughter's death certificate. That was how Mama sue learned that Susu had been strangled to death. That was how she learned her daughter had suffered head injuries, neck injuries, and bruising across her arms and legs. That was how she learned her daughter had been beaten before she died. Mama sue is a retired tribal healer, the kind of woman whose presence fills a room with warmth. In the ProPublica photo of her, she sits on a black leather couch, wearing a floral print shirt, glasses perched on her nose, bracelets resting softly at her wrist. She has kind eyes, the kind that tell you that she has many stories and many sorrows. She lived just three doors down from where her daughter was killed. And yet police never interviewed her, not once. They never asked what she knew, never walked the few hundred feet to her home, Never sat across from her and told her what they thought happened to her daughter. Susu's case, like Jennifer before it had begun slipping into silence, before her family even had the facts. In the months after Susu's death, the grief became unbearable. Mama sue suffered a stroke that temporarily took her ability to speak. Her body quite literally shut down under the weight of losing her child. But she recovered. She began fighting. My family is not going to have peace, she told reporters, until they find the person who did this. Years later, that peace still hasn't come. Susan Norton's killer remains free. Her children are growing up without her and her mother, three doors down from the place her daughter died, still waits, still prays, still refuses to let her daughter slip from the record of what happened on that property. Because two women dying on the same land, tied to the same family under violent and suspicious circumstances, that isn't something a community forgets. And it isn't something we should forget either. A year before Susu was killed, Kotzebue had another strangulation case on its hands. But that time the victim wasn't. It was a dog, a beloved pet husky owned by the city fire department. Still, the community rallied together to find the killer. The killing made news across Alaska. A reward fund was set up. Thousands of dollars poured in from people who wanted justice for the dog. Police released a surveillance image, and within days, someone came forward to identify the suspect. Judge Paul Roatman, the same judge who had reduced Anthony Richards bail in the sexual assault case, presided here too. In the end, the suspect pled guil, a felony. It was a textbook small town investigation. The community mobilized, police took public tips seriously, and the justice system followed through. And when you place that alongside what happened a year later, it becomes even harder to make sense of what didn't happen for Susu. When her body was found. Beaten, strangled, left outside in the negative 13 degree weather. Police never asked the public for help. They didn't alert neighbors. They didn't release a photo or narrative or timeline. As ProPublica reported, Susu's family, family didn't even learn she had been strangled until weeks later when her death certificate arrived in the mail. To this day, Susu's case remains unsolved and no one has ever been charged in relation to her murder. And because it's still open, much of the official record is sealed. We don't know why no one has ever been charged. We don't know who police considered suspects or who they interviewed or what evidence was collected, if any was collected at all. But ProPublica did learn something staggering. As of September of 2023, police had never interviewed Mama Sue. They had never interviewed Sioux's siblings. They had never interviewed the neighbors who live between Mama Sue's house and the Richards property. At one point, city police Sgt. Norman Hughes told Leslie Sundberg, the adoptive parents of Eden Sue's daughter, the police had tried to collect certain evidence but couldn't get a judge to approve it. Journalist Kyle Hopkins found this odd. Judges don't normally reject evidence before a suspect is even indict. When ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News pressed for clarity, Police Chief Roger Rouse said Hughes was likely referring to a search warrant a judge denied. He wouldn't say what evidence police had been trying to obtain, and he wouldn't say who the judge was. The handling of Szu's case was so concerning that Leslie filed a formal complaint against the Kotzebue Police Department. In it, she accused police of dishonesty and untruthfulness. One must wonder, leslie wrote, if there are unethical reasons why a native Alaskan woman, mother of three, daughter, niece, sister, aunt and well known community member's murderer has been swept under the rug. But the Alaskan Police Standards Council never reviewed the complaint. Under their policy, they can't investigate misconduct claims until after a criminal case is closed because Susu's case remains open, at least on paper. Leslie never received a response. In 2022, the state troopers took over the case. They told the Norton family they would be in Kotzebue that summer to investigate. According to the family, they never arrived. Months later, when ProPublica asked the Department what had happened, a spokesperson said the visit was still planned. They just hadn't gotten to it yet. For years, Susu's loved ones have lived without answers. They've navigated grief without even the small, often inadequate closure of knowing what even happened to her, who killed her. And I imagine this grief twists every time Susu's family is reminded that the investigation into her case hasn't brought them any closer to justice. And then there's the Richards family and Susu's partner Amos, who'd attacked her in the past. ADN reporter Kyle Hopkins reached out multiple times for their comment, and In June of 2021, he knocked on their door. Clement Sr. Answered. He'd lost his re election in 2018 and was no longer mayor. At that point, Kyle asked him about Susu's murder, to which Clement Sr. Responded, I have no comment. Before shutting the door in the yard, Clement Jr. Told Kyle he had no idea how Szu Su died, that he'd never asked. At one point he even suggested, without evidence, that she might have taken her own life. It's a common thing in Alaska, he said. In the lead up to publishing Kyle's investigative piece in December of 2023, ProPublica sent certified letters to multiple members of the Richards family detailing their findings. They called, texted, wrote Facebook messages. No one responded. When the story finally came out in 2023, the public outrage in Kotzebue was immediate. People wanted answers about Susu, about Jennifer. They demanded the police take a second look at both cases. A few months later, Police Chief Rouse released an open letter defending the department's actions. He explained why Kotz abused police, had closed Jennifer's case and stated plainly that they did not intend to reopen it. And in his letter, he warned the public against coming to erroneous conclusions by trying to interpret the case them. In an interview with Anchorage Daily News, Kyle Hopkins further explained the police's decision to keep Jennifer's case closed.
- [20:39]
Kyle Hopkins
Well, what they're telling us is that they had sent the case to the MMIP unit of the State Troopers or the Alaska Bureau of Investigation, that a couple of state investigators had reviewed the Kotzubi Police Department's death investigation and concluded that there's no opportunity for new leads, that they didn't find suspicious elements, and that if Kotzubi police were to refer that case to the troopers, the troopers would not accept it because they didn't feel that there was an opportunity there for them to draw a different conclusion.
- [21:06]
Celisia Stanton
But as the Angridge Daily News reported, parts of the letter contradicted the department's previous statements. Rouse had earlier said Jennifer's case was closed the day after she died, before the autopsy was complete. Now, he claimed police spent 16 days working on the case over the following months. When pressed, a spokesperson said Rouse had simply misspoken. There were other contradictions, too, including the question of whether Jennifer could have physically breached the trigger of the rifle. The open letter said police confirmed that she could. But when ADN asked how police had determined that, Chief Rouse didn't respond. For Jennifer's family, the letter felt like another door shutting, another reminder that the system that they were asking for help had already decided not to hear them. Lucy Boyd, Jennifer's sister, told reporters that police had even declined to give the family access to audio or video from the investigation. It definitely took us by surprise again, she said. It was like adding insult to injury. Susu's family is living with that same ache, the ache of not knowing, of waking up day after day with no answers, no rest, no clarity. On the five year anniversary of Susu's death, the Alaska State Troopers released a video asking the public for help. If you have any information at all that could be relevant in this case, we ask that you reach out to Alaska State Troopers. Your information could bring closure and healing to Susu's family, her friends and the community of Kotzvieu. And Susu's family isn't alone in their grief. The numbers behind all of this are staggering. According to the Violence Policy center, women in Alaska were killed by male offenders at a rate higher than any other state in the country. In fact, It's a rate 2 1/2 times higher, higher than the National Average. And while Alaska has one of the smallest populations of any state in the United States, a 2018 report from the Urban Indian Health Institute found that Alaska had the fourth highest number of murdered and missing indigenous women and girls in the United States. That's not a coincidence. It's not statistical noise. It's evidence of a system that has failed or was never built to protect indigenous women in the first place. For years, Amos and Anthony Richards cycled through the justice system on domestic violence charges. They avoided felonies, avoided prison time, avoided consequences. Jennifer and Susu's families now sit at the other end of that pattern, grieving women whose cases were handled slowly, inconsistently, or not at all. In an interview about his investigation, Kyle told the Anchorage Daily News that families often run into the same wall. A system strained past its limits.
- [23:47]
Kyle Hopkins
You have too few people doing too many jobs. You have too big a caseloads. You don't have enough bandwidth. And I think if you start to look really closely at any of these cases, you start to see failure points that don't seem like they need to be failure points. In any given case. It feels like there's things that are more a matter of resource and attention. These cases don't have to go unsolved. I think that was my big takeaway and has been, is that this issue? There are people getting away with homicides because we are not equipped to. To appropriately address and tackle these homicides as they happen with enough attention and horsepower.
- [24:25]
Celisia Stanton
A few years ago, the federal government declared Alaska's rural law enforcement capacity a national emergency. Millions of dollars were released. A statewide MMIP council was created. New training programs rolled out, new laws were passed. Necessary steps, yes, but too late for Jennifer, too late for Susu and for their families. All that progress still exists, miles away from what they actually need. Answers. None of it has brought them closer to the truth. None of it has brought them closer to justice. So where does that leave us? Two indigenous women, Jennifer Kirk and Susanna Susu Norton, who died on the same property in Kotzebue just two years apart. Same place, same family ties, same echoes of violence. And as ProPublica documented, unmistakable signs that both deaths warranted a full, transparent investigation. Instead, years later, not a single charge has been brought in either. And that weight only grows when you look at the promises that came after a new state council on missing and murdered indigenous persons. A pledge to listen, to change, to do better. But for Jennifer's family and for Mama sue, those promises haven't met answers. They haven't met accountability. And they haven't met justice. Not long ago, Mama sue began the quiet work of packing up her life. She was sitting on the floor of her living room, sorting through the things she carried for decades as movers prepared to take down the house her family once built with their own hands. A new place is coming. Brought up on a barge, it's warm, it's modern, it is running water. She'll have it for the first time, but it will stand on the same piece of earth she's always known. And from her new front window, she will still be able to see the spot where her daughter's life was taken, just 230ft away. There's a kind of grief that attaches itself to the land that refuses to be packed into boxes or carried away with the old flooring. It lingers. It follows. It becomes part of what you step over every morning, part of the view. That's where these cases sit now, with families still waiting, still asking, still carrying. What was never fully investigated, never fully acknowledged, never made right. Two women, two families, two stories that deserved more, and a silence that still stretches across the tundra, waiting to be broken. Before we close, I want to highlight an organization doing work that feels deeply connected to Jennifer and Susu's stories. Data for Indigenous justice, or DIJ, was created in 2020 after an advocate tried to gather a complete list of missing and murdered Indigenous people for a community rally, and what she found instead was this maze. Agencies at the local, state and federal levels all track MMIP cases differently, and the information is often scattered, if it even exists at all. So DIJ emerged to fill those gaps. Today they maintain a community sourced database of MMIP cases built alongside the families and tribes who refuse to let their loved ones become invisible in paperwork or institutional neglect. But their mission isn't just about counting cases, it's about honoring people. Every MMIP case represents a life lived, a community that's grieving, and a story that really deserves to be held with care and nuance. By naming and remembering those who've been lost, DIJ pushes for real accountability and pushes us all toward a world where Native survivors, families and communities are finally seen, heard and respected. To learn more, sign up for their newsletter or support their work. Visit data for Indigenousjustice.org as always in between seasons, you can keep up with truer crime on Instagram x threads and bluesky TruerCrimePod and subscribe to our newsletter at trueercrime.substack.com and if you want to keep up with me personally, I'm on Instagram and TikTok. LisaStanton and I also write a weekly newsletter called Sincerely Celicia where I share our recommendations, reflections and essays on politics, culture and life. You can read and subscribe@sincerelycelesia.substack.com A full list of sources and action items from today's episode are available@truercrimepodcast.com. True Crime is created, hosted and written by me, Celisia Stanton and is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. Additional writing, research and production by Olivia Heusingfeld. Executive producers are myself, Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. Editing by Liam Luxon, artwork by Station 16, original music by Jay Ragsdale and makeup and vanity set mix by Dayton Cole. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at uta, the Nord Group and the team at Odyssey. For more podcasts like Truer Crime, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us@Tenderfoot TV. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of True or Crime. If you want an ad free version of the show, plus early access to every episode for this month's case and tons of other great Tenderfoot podcasts, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts. It's a small way to support the work and it makes a big difference. Oh please, not that music. That music gives me nightmares from my childhood. Could we get something a little bit lighter? Some lighter music here? Are you a fan of true crime TV shows? And what about Unsolved Mysteries, the show that jump started all of our love of true crime? I'm Ellen Marsh. And I'm Joey Taranto and we host I Think Not a true crime comedy podcast covering some of the wildest stories from your favorite true crime campy TV shows all the way to Unsolved Mysteries. Baby. You will laugh, you will cry. You'll think about true crime in a whole new way. And you'll also ask yourself, who gave these people mics? New episodes of I Think not are released every Wednesday, with bonus episodes out every Thursday on Patreon. And every Monday you can listen to our True Crime rundown where we go over the top true crime headlines of the week. So come and join us wherever you listen to your podcasts.
- [31:48]
Kyle Hopkins
I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover, a show about people who lead double lives. We're presenting a special series from Australia. It's all about a family who was conned by a charming American.
- [32:02]
Celisia Stanton
When you marry someone, you feel like you really know them? I was just gobsmacked as to what's going on here.
- [32:08]
Kyle Hopkins
Does the name Leslie Mnookian mean anything to you?
- [32:11]
Celisia Stanton
Oh, you bet.
- [32:12]
Kyle Hopkins
Never forget her. Listen to Deep Cover presents Snowball. Wherever you get your podcasts.