Susan Erickson Wiki

                                  Susan Erickson Biography

Who was Susan Erickson?

Susan Erickson was a 29-year-old mother of two young children who worked as a medical technologist and part-time nurse at a La Crosse hospital. In 1981, her killer, Terrance Shaw, caught a glimpse of Erickson through the window of her Onalaska home while driving that afternoon. She was a stranger to him, according to newspaper articles at the time.


The district attorney told the La Crosse Tribune in 2006 that he didn’t think Shaw should be released from prison.

Shaw broke into his house, where he bound, strangled, raped and stabbed Erickson to death. A piece of Shaw’s fingernail was found under the victim’s body, and the tip of his finger was found at the crime scene, helping authorities identify him. The killer later referred to the day the murder occurred as “a really bad day.”


He said he went “crazy,” newspaper articles at the time said.

Susan’s husband

Susan’s husband, Dennis, had taken his two young children, ages 13 months and 3 years, to a babysitter and gone to work. Susan was a part-time nurse and was going to paint the living room that day. The babysitter found her body in the basement of the house when she didn’t show up to pick up the children that afternoon. When her husband returned home from work, police cordoned off her home and told Dennis that his wife had been raped and murdered, according to a 1982 article in the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram.

Erickson had multiple stab wounds to his neck, heart, lungs, chest and back. Some of her knife wounds occurred after she died and others went through her chest. She was also strangled with a “band of bruises” around her neck and sexually assaulted, according to a 1997 article in The La Crosse Tribune. They cut her jugular vein and they cut an artery behind her ear. Part of her knife was “found lodged in her vertebrae,” an old Leader-Telegram article reported. She was also “tied up,” a pathologist testified.

Suspect



Shaw was identified as a suspect in Erickson’s murder when he was discovered loitering near the home of another Lutheran Hospital employee who he believed was being followed home from work. Inside her car? Meat hooks he had used to climb up the side of her house, according to an old La Crosse Tribune article. He had rubber on his shoes. Shaw lied many times during questioning, the article says. The arresting officer told the newspaper he wonders if Erickson’s murder was his first crime because Shaw killed Erickson, left town for a year, then came back to attack the other hospital employee. “It’s a case that still bothers me,” the officer said.

Source: https://wikisoon.com/