Missing

Susan Libby Marable The Disappearance of Susan Libby Marable: A 35-Year Fight for Justice In April 1991, 35 years ago, Susan Libby Marable vanished from Yakima, Washington. What followed is a tragic testament to systemic institutional neglect, police bias, and a family's decades-long relentless pursuit of truth and accountability. Susan had a very promising life. She was a registered nurse but when her fiancee died, addiction took hold of her, she lost her daughter and her nursing license. Prior to her disappearance, Susan’s life was marked by extreme vulnerability, survival, and immense trauma. Living unhoused in Yakima, she traded motel room cleaning for shelter or survived on the streets to afford food and support her addiction. However, her life had also been upended by a horrific act of violence: * Susan was picked up, raped, tortured, and nearly murdered by John L. Robinson near The Sports Center Tavern. She managed to escape, testified against him, and successfully put him away for life. * During his sentencing months later, Robinson threatened Susan and her family in open court. Left with severe PTSD, trauma, and anxiety, Susan was terrified of the area. She avoided The Sports Center completely. * Despite her struggles with addiction, Susan was trying to turn her life around. She told her mother she wanted to enter a residential treatment program, asked for legal help to regain custody of her three-year-old daughter, and planned to return home to Aberdeen, Washington. April 23, 1991: Susan was staying in a local man’s van. Around 9:00–9:30 PM, she told him she was walking about two blocks to the AM/PM on East Yakima Avenue and would be back in an hour. She never returned. When she didn't come back by midnight, the van owner searched for two days. When local police refused to let him file a report because he wasn't family, he called Susan’s mother in Aberdeen on April 25th. Susan’s mother immediately drove to Yakima and filed a report. Detectives dismissed her, telling her to go home because Susan likely "just took off... to party." Ignoring the police brush-off, her mother and the van owner spent months searching the area, but the Yakima Police Department (YPD) refused to log tips or properly investigate. For decades, a false narrative has persisted online and in reports regarding Susan's final movements: Five weeks after Susan vanished, a third-hand account surfaced via an acquaintance (who heard it from a bartender at the notoriously dangerous Blue Banjo tavern) claiming Susan got into a maroon pickup behind The Sports Center. YPD never verified this information, interviewed the source, or spoke to Susan's family. Instead, detectives eagerly accepted the unverified tip to link Susan's disappearance to that of Julie Moronda (who went missing from behind The Sports Center in December 1990), conveniently closing the book on investigative work. Susan’s family notes this narrative is entirely false; Susan was far too terrified of The Sports Center to ever go back there due to the trauma of the Robinson attack. Because of YPD's hostility and outright negligence, with officers dismissing Susan as a "throw-away" or remarking that "the street kind of does us a favor", Susan's mother and, later, her sibling took over the case. For the past 35 years, Susan's family has driven the investigation themselves. They have compiled independent leads and identified five top suspects, presenting these findings to YPD—only for police to ignore them. Last year, the family sent a comprehensive 13-page letter to the Mayor of Yakima and the Chief of Police. The response was dismissive, demonstrating that the institutional disregard for unhoused and addicted women persists decades later. Key Facts: Date Missing: April 23, 1991 Location Last Seen: Yakima, Washington (near East Yakima Avenue AM/PM) Agency Involved: Yakima Police Department (YPD) Key Obstacles: Systemic bias against unhoused individuals, lazy inter-case linking (the Julie Moronda connection), failure to follow up on family-led leads, and a 35-year lack of official casework. Despite decades of silence from authorities, Susan's family continues to fight to ensure her story is told accurately, demanding the dignity, truth, and justice that the Yakima Police Department denied her. @yakimapolice Please share this flyer, follow the Facebook page and help Susan’s family get long-denied answers.