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Wildwood slaying once ruled an accident remains unsolved

After 25 years, Susan Negersmith’s death still stirs emotion.

Susan Negersmith (left) was found dead in Wildwood in 1990. Her sister, Emily Negersmith (above), who was 2 when Susan was killed, is fighting to keep the case alive as a homicide investigation. “Someone was right there with her at the end,” Emily said.
Susan Negersmith (left) was found dead in Wildwood in 1990. Her sister, Emily Negersmith (above), who was 2 when Susan was killed, is fighting to keep the case alive as a homicide investigation. “Someone was right there with her at the end,” Emily said.Read more

WILDWOOD, N.J. - The ties that bind Emily Negersmith to this resort town are the reason she's never been here.

Negersmith, 27, lives in New York City, and the closest she's come to this popular Cape May County spot was earlier this month when she traveled to the county prosecutor's office to sit down with detectives.

That is about 11 miles from the back door of the eclectic seafood restaurant in the heart of Wildwood where her sister, Susan Negersmith, was found dead on Memorial Day weekend 25 years ago.

Emily was just 2 years old when her sister was murdered, and she has only a hazy recollection of her big sister at a family picnic and a brief diary the college student made for her. She's well-versed in the specifics, though, and in the muddled history of the autopsy and investigation that has frustrated her family, and she's committed to keeping her sister's name alive until a killer is caught.

"I am very familiar with all of the details," Negersmith told the Daily News on Wednesday. "My dad has an incredible amount of information on Susan's case, probably 25 notebooks and journals."

The details haunt Kent Negersmith, their father, every day, Emily said.

On the morning of May 27, 1990, the Sunday before Memorial Day, a worker found Susan Negersmith, 20, behind Schellenger's, a popular restaurant with a roof covered in nautical knickknacks, two blocks from one of the busiest sections of the boardwalk.

Her pink shirt and bra had been pushed up by her neck and her black jeans were wrapped around an ankle. She had a bloody handprint on her chest. Her shoes were missing, and her feet were facing the ocean.

Negersmith, a native of Carmel, N.Y., had come here with friends to party, just as young people still do today. The women rented a hotel room, drank a lot of beer and liquor, and friends last reported seeing her at 8 p.m. the night before her body was found.

According to a 1993 article in the Inquirer, Negersmith had partied with strangers in the early-morning hours of May 27 and was last seen with a 20-year-old man from Philadelphia. That man, according to the article, told police that he had left her near the restaurant.

According to published reports from the time, an autopsy found 26 areas of trauma to Susan Negersmith's body, including bruising to her skull. Tests showed that she "had sex not long before her death," the Inquirer reported.

It seemed like a classic rape and murder to Negersmith's family - yet the state and county medical examiners ruled that her death was accidental, due to alcohol intoxication and exposure.

A stranger's support

That ruling fired up an anger inside Terry Downey, a Sea Isle City resident who didn't know Negersmith, and that anger has not subsided.

Downey grew to know Kent Negersmith and his family, and she joined them in questioning the ruling. She's also made a name for herself in Cape May County by questioning investigations into the deaths of several other women there in recent years.

"It was the silence that appalled me about her case," Downey said of Negersmith yesterday outside Schellenger's.

Downey said the accidental-death ruling seemed absurd, particularly the issue of exposure, and it appeared to blame Negersmith for her own demise.

"It was like 57 degrees or something, and what they told the public was she was drunk and she had consensual sex on the sidewalk and afterward she was too drunk to get up and she froze to death in 57-degree weather," Downey said.

Today, Susan Negersmith's case is listed at the top of the "Unsolved Cases" page on the Cape May County Prosecutor's Office website as a "homicide investigation" - because Kent Negersmith, with the help of attorneys and private investigators, fought a protracted legal battle to have her death changed from "accidental."

The state's Division of Criminal Justice solicited the help of Dr. Michael Baden, a renowned forensic pathologist who once had his own HBO show, and he concluded that Negersmith had been raped and smothered.

The state reversed the original autopsy in July 1993 and the county relented to changing the death certificate in 1995.

Cape May County authorities say Negersmith's case has been the subject of an active and ongoing investigation. Capt. Mike Emmer, of the prosecutor's office, said his office is hoping that new technologies can help break the case.

"We're always looking for new information. We're looking at all possible leads and to see if anything can be retested or resubmitted," Emmer said yesterday. "We always have people working this case."

The major-crimes unit of the New Jersey State Police is assisting the prosecutor's office in the investigation.

Emily Negersmith said that her father is too ill to continue the fight and that he's forgotten some of the more horrific details after thinking about them every day since her death. She believes that may be a blessing in disguise for him.

Meanwhile, someone out there knows what happened to her big sister."She didn't disappear into thin air," Emily Negersmith said. "Someone was right there with her at the end."