The true and tragic tale of Susan Walsh

Here's a interesting story for you, just in time for Halloween. It concerns vampires, the Russian mafia and a vanished freelance reporter.

Her name was Susan Walsh, and she hasn't been seen since 1996. Susan disappeared after filing a story with the Village Voice - a story they would never print. It concerned "vampire" clubs in NYC, a phenomena that mixed the goth and S&M communities, and it seems Walsh's story was a little too sympathetic for her editors' taste. Friends say she wrote as if she believed some club-goers' stories of immortality, that she was even romantically linked to one man who claimed to be the real deal.

Despite the obvious appeal of the "Kidnapped by vampires" theory, role-playing club kids were not the biggest threat in Walsh's life. There was also the Russian mafia, who Walsh no doubt angered with her reporting on the sex industry. Walsh put herself through college by stripping, and she used her club connections to write an expose on alleged sex trafficking by the Russian mob. The piece ran in the Voice in the early 90's, and Walsh told friends she feared backlash for it.

Still, the biggest threat to Walsh may not have been external. She was attending AA at the time of her disappearance, and admitted to abusing drugs in college. She was on anti-depressants, including the heavy-hitter Xanax. Her marriage seemed to be deteriorating, and her journalism career seemed stalled.

Yet she was a good mother by all accounts, an avid writer and reporter, and a beloved daughter. And she left a son, who should know where his mother went.

I've known Susan's story for a while, but here are the links that refreshed my memory.

And away we go...

Here's our first post, and some news about the future of YES!Weekly.

Tap tap. Is this thing on? Can you hear me in the back?

Okay.

This is our first foray into the series of tubes, porn and spyware that is the internets. All right, maybe it's our second try, but cut us a break. We were young, and we needed the money.
Plus, when we had good stuff to write, we saved it for the paper.
Well, not no more!

This space will serve as a repository for all the crap not quite fit for print — behind-the-scenes takes on our feature stories; inside looks into newsgathering techniques and editorial decision making (hooray for transparency!); notes on artwork, photography, headline writing... all the mind-numbing minutiae of our jobs! And maybe a few tales of our office antics. Hilarious!

Let's lay down the ground rules:

Right now we're in free-for-all mode, and we'd like to keep it that way. But this is our turf, and we'll delete inappropriate comments and throw your ass out as we see fit.

That being said, the bar for tolerance is set pretty high — we're kind of a raw bunch, and we can't promise you that our content here will always be "family friendly."

We will allow anonymous commenters, with the caveat that, as reporters, we think anonymous comments are of dubious veracity. Also, it's kinda pussy.

You can get tough if you like — we're into rigorous debate. But be prepared to defend your positions, and don't get all pissy if someone disagrees. Don't be concerned with "winning" or "losing" a virtual argument so much as... refining the rhetoric.

Yeah, that's it.

Oh, and no SPAM.

Moving on...

We have big news.

As of Nov. 1 our Winston-Salem bureau will be up and running.

Crazy, right?

We're not leaving Greensboro — our Adams Farm offices will still be buzzing with activity — but we're dispatching a couple reporters to a space on Trade Street to gather news, sniff out feature stories and generally check out the scene. We'll be bringing the YES! Weekly brand of investigative journalism, spot-on news coverage, hard-hitting opinion and savvy cultural writing to the foothills, and it will debut in our Nov. 7 issue.

We're upping our distribution in Forsyth County as well. Publisher Charles Womack, the hardest working man in the newspaper business, and Marketing Executive Brad McCauley have been installing new distribution points all week.

Its exciting and, after nearly three years on the scene, long overdue. There are some incredible people and happenings in the Camel City. We want to give them the weekly they deserve.
That's all I got for now. I'll keep everyone posted as things develop.