Hi, Crime Junkies, Ashley Flowers here.
And I know that we said that we were gonna be off this week, and we are.
But I wanted to drop something special in the feed for a special reason.
So this Monday is Labor Day, happy Labor Day, everyone.
But it is also the day that 50 years ago, a family's life changed forever.
On September 2nd, 1974, 15 -year -old Mary Raker and her 12 -year -old sister Suzanne left their home for what was supposed to be a quick shopping errand.
But little did anyone know that when the two sisters left for the store that Labor Day afternoon, their family would be saying goodbye to them forever.
Now, this story may sound familiar to some of you, and that's because we actually did a two -part episode on their case back in July of 2023 on my other weekly show, The Deck.
But I know there are so many Crime Junkie listeners who haven't heard this story yet.
And now, because it is the 50th anniversary of the crime, and there are still no answers for the Raker family, I wanted to bring both parts of that story here for you today.
My hope is that one of my crime junkies out there has some kind of information or can share this episode with someone who does.
And we can finally give answers to the girls and their family, a family that has long awaited justice and has had to go a half a century without it.
So this is the story of Mary and Suzanne Raker, the two of hearts from Minnesota.
And if you enjoy this format, don't forget to go follow The Deck wherever you get your podcasts.
Our card this week is Mary and Suzanne Raker, the two of hearts from Minnesota.
On Labor Day of 1974, less than 24 hours before 15 -year -old Mary was to start her sophomore year of high school, she told her parents she needed to make a quick shopping trip to pick up some last minute school supplies and a winter coat.
Her younger sister, 12 -year -old Suzanne, tagged along and they waved goodbye to their father who was painting the exterior of the house when they left.
On a day so ordinary, it never crossed his mind that that would be the last time he'd see his two daughters alive.
I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck.
Everything looks different in hindsight.
Moments you want to rewind, pause and do differently.
Or moments that you just wish you'd paid more attention to because maybe they meant something.
Maybe you could have seen something or prevented something.
87 -year -old Rita Raker has spent almost 50 years now examining a few weeks of 1974 in hindsight.
There was something bothering her 15 -year -old daughter Mary, but she couldn't get her to say what.
And I don't know if you've tried talking to a 15 -year -old lately, but it wasn't any easier back then.
And with a house and a husband and five other kids to care for, the best Rita could do was continually remind Mary that she was there for her.
Things seemed to be looking up though.
It was Labor Day, and Mary seemed excited about leaving that evening to go back to high school roughly 45 minutes away from their St.
Cloud home in Little Falls, Minnesota.
She was returning for the second year, and she loved spending the week there, spreading her wings, having some independence, and then coming home to her family on the weekends.
Her carpool was going to pick her up at 4pm, so when Mary asked if she and her two sisters could go shopping for school supplies and a coat that morning, Rita was a little hesitant.
She reminded Mary that she just went shopping a few days ago, plus she wanted the girls to help with some yard work before Mary left.
But Mary seemed insistent, almost pleading and urgent.
So Rita agreed. At first all three of the girls were planning on going shopping, and for some reason our best seat was between Mary and Sue decided that she'd stay home.
And she wasn't even sure why.
She just kind of got the feeling that they'd rather go by themselves.
And generally, our best seat and Susie were the two who were always together, so that was kind of unusual that Susie happened to be with.
According to Robert M.
Dudley's book Cold Cases of Stearns County, Minnesota, the girls left just after 11am, and Rita went about her day doing chores alongside her husband when at some point the family's home phone rang.
On the other end was the person set to carpool Mary to school later.
Something had come up and they were going to have to get going later than they had planned.
They'd pick Mary up at seven instead of four, which was even better.
That'd give Mary more than enough time to help out around the house before she left.
Just as quickly as that call had come in, Rita forgot all about it.
The day had zoomed by, and before she knew it, three o 'clock had come and gone.
Rita was watching the clock by this time.
I mean, she had been clear with the girls about when they needed to be home.
With every minute that ticked by, her motherly frustration grew.
But at a certain point, a new feeling washed over Rita.
I just remember starting our evening meal and just being really concerned about it.
And it wasn't until shortly before five o 'clock, somehow at that point, I remember that that phone call had come and the girls knew they had to be home.
In an instant, Rita stopped everything and sprang into action.
She began calling neighbors and friends, anyone she could think of to see if people had seen her girls.
But no one she reached out to had seen them recently.
By now, the whole family was frantic.
They knew something was terribly wrong.
This wasn't like their girls, and they weren't about to just sit around and wait.
So while Rita stayed with the three of their kids, her husband Fred and their eldest son went down to the police department to report Mary and Susie missing.
But right away, Fred and his son were met with an apathetic ear.
I just remember my husband coming home and saying that whoever was at the desk just commented on two more runaway girls.
A report was taken, but police weren't out looking for the girls just yet.
That was left up to their family and a few good friends who rallied around them in their time of need.
Around 10 o 'clock, a friend of ours who was a surgeon here in town called my husband and he said, I can't sleep either.
He said, let's go out and look for them.
So they drove around town and stopped at a number of places that were open and just asked if the girls had been seen any place.
But it was more of the same.
No one had any idea where the girls were or who they could be with.
It made for a long, sleepless night, not just for Fred and Rita, but for all four of their other kids who even at their young ages understood the gravity of what was happening.
I don't think we've got hardly any sleep at all that night.
Our whole family, in fact, our bedrooms are in the upper story of our house and I remember we had one of these fold out down and ports and we set that up and my husband and I slept on that and the kids slept in the city bags all around us because we were just so scared we didn't even want to go upstairs
to our bedrooms. And by morning, all four of the other kids were in bed with us.
It was scary. So we knew, knowing our girls, that something was seriously wrong.
By morning, which would have been September 3rd, police were at least willing to send out a statewide broadcast to other departments about the missing girls.
They asked Rita and Fred for pictures of the girls and they began asking around, even though feelings within the department were still mixed in the early days as to whether they might just show up on their own or whether there were even kids to look for.
We were so traumatized during that time.
We tried to get a search party going and just weren't able to do it because back then it was like you had to prove that you even had children.
As unbelievable as this seems, it was the world Rita was living in, feeling like you got to prove you have a kid, prove they're worth looking for, and then we'll see what we can do.
So she tried, over and over, all the while begging and pleading for them to understand how serious this was.
For a brief moment that day, police thought they were right.
And Rita didn't care who was right, she just thought her babies might actually be safe because they had talked to a bus station attendant who looked at a photo of the girls and said, yeah, I sold them tickets to Little Falls, they were with a group of other girls.
Now remember, Little Falls is where Mary was going to school, so the place itself made enough sense, though why Mary would skip out on her carpool and take nothing with her except a sister who didn't go to that school wasn't adding up.
But this was seemingly all the proof police needed to call it quits, theory confirmed.
But it certainly wasn't enough for the Rakers.
They immediately made the roughly 45 minute drive to Mary's school where they found the girls who bought the bus tickets from St.
Cloud to Little Falls.
But none of them were Mary or Susie.
They took this news back to police, but to their dismay, though maybe not to their surprise, they were still met with pretty much the same response.
Rita and Fred felt completely alone.
Sergeant Brian Bollig, who's been on the case since late 2016, says Rita's feelings are valid.
I don't think it was as treated as seriously as it should have been, because I think at the time, law enforcement believed they were going to come home.
And then when they didn't return home, then people started getting bad feelings and some things were being done as far as, okay, maybe this isn't a runaway situation.
So if they didn't run away, then what happened?
How could two young girls just fall off the face of the earth without a trace?
Over the coming weeks, police tried to answer that question by tracing the girls' last movements.
They learned that shortly before noon, the girls were seen at Shopko Department Store by the manager who was familiar with them.
Now, the manager didn't interact with them or notice any strange behavior, and from all accounts, the girls were alone.
Officers weren't sure exactly what time they left the Shopko, but they were able to place the girls at another local store called Zayr's sometime between 1 and 2 .30 p .m.
The best comparison I can make to Zayr's is that it was kind of like 1974's Super Target.
They had everything you'd expect from most department stores, but there was also a grocery section as well as like a little food court.
And the food court is actually where one of the Rakers' neighbors was standing when he saw the girls come in the front door.
It was this guy named Jacob Younger.
Some old newspaper accounts say that he had a short interaction with the two as he stood in the food court area.
But Sergeant Bolig can't recall if this is accurate.
He thinks they may have spoken, and Jacob might have even offered them a ride home.
But if so, the girls clearly didn't take him up on it.
Jacob said that the last he saw the girls, they were walking off in the direction of the grocery section.
Even though that section was closed for Labor Day, it was the same direction you'd walk in to get to the section of the store that had winter coats, which was, after all, one of the reasons Mary said that she needed to go shopping.
Back in 77, the Minneapolis Star reported that Jacob was one of the people who helped Rita and Fred look for their daughters.
He told the newspaper that he burned tank after tank of gas driving all around looking for any sign of them.
Jacob's siding of the girls is one of the last that police would 100 % confirm as legitimate.
And maybe that haunted him.
But really, I think what haunted him more was what he heard Susie say just as the girls were walking away.
The exact words that Susie uttered to her older sister Mary have been lost to Jacob Younger's memory.
But the sentiment of what he heard was burned into his brain immediately.
According to the Minneapolis Star, Susie told her sister something to the effect of, I don't want to go with that man.
I don't like him. Or let's not.
I don't like that man.
Jacob went on to say that he remembered these details so clearly because he finished eating shortly after and when he left the store, he saw a quote unquote nervous acting man in a blue Chevy Impala outside.
To him, it seemed almost like this guy was waiting for someone.
Maybe those someones were Mary and Susie.
I mean, it made him so uneasy that he actually sat in his car just watching this guy.
After a while of him not doing much and the girls not coming out, Jacob took off.
But that wasn't the last that police heard of this mystery man.
Another Minneapolis Star article reported that two other witnesses put a similar man not only in the store but in the same department as Mary at the same time.
Like Rita, I imagine Jacob is plagued by hindsight.
What could have, would have been if he jumped up and followed the girls, asked Susie what she meant, made them go home with him, maybe called their parents or waited in his car just a little longer till they came out of the store.
And Rita probably thought about that too as days agonizingly turned into weeks.
Even though the rest of the world seemed to be moving on, kids were going back to school, adults were going to work and mowing their lawns, time stood still for the rakers.
None of this made any sense to them.
Why would this happen to their family?
Was there somebody who hated us or hated the kids or somebody in the neighborhood?
Or who would we even suspect?
And we couldn't come up with anybody.
We were just a young family raising six kids and trying to educate them.
So Rita was left to pick apart every last word and action in the time leading up to the girl's disappearance.
And it was mostly Mary's actions that stuck out to her, because Susie, or Sweet Sue as the family affectionately called her, was still just a little kid.
I know parents never know everything, but that summer, 12 -year -old Susie was still into dolls.
But Mary, something was going on with Mary.
Mary was acting different that summer and in a month prior to her disappearance.
Something appeared to be bothering her, according to family.
This shift in Mary happened over the summer while she was spending a great deal of time at her grandparents' house in Luxembourg.
Rita tried getting Mary to talk to her about what was going on, but she just wouldn't, though it seemed like Mary might have been trying to reach out to other people in her life.
In Robert M. Dudley's book, he says that Mary tried going to a teacher to talk about some problems she was having.
It's not clear based on the information provided when exactly this happened, but what is clear is that Mary never got to connect with the teacher to tell them what was going on.
Same can be said for her friend Ann Kinney, the one Mary had gone shopping with a few days before Labor Day.
She said that when they'd been out together, Mary was trying to say something about a thing that was bothering her, but either she hadn't gotten to it or Ann was so caught up in her own stuff that she didn't register it because she had no memory of what that thing was.
But make no mistake, there was a thing.
And we know this because sometime in the weeks after the girls went missing, a page from Mary's diary was found.
It was the last entry she ever made, written just a short time before Labor Day.
And what was written on it was terrifying.
I can't remember the exact quote, but I'll get real close.
Mary was talking about, I have reasons to fear for my life.
I believe she said she'd give her stuffed animals to one of her sisters, and then if I am killed, please find that justice is done.
And that's obviously from a 15 -year -old girl, it's not common.
I would say that's not a common thing that a young girl would write.
According to the Star Tribune, the exact quote is, Should I die, I ask that my stuffed animals go to my sister.
If I am murdered, find my killer and see that justice is done.
I have a few reasons to fear for my life, and what I ask is important.
You know, we have a life role over on my other show, Crime Genki.
If you have a secret, tell someone.
If you are scared enough to write an ominous statement like this, there has to be more context.
And clearly, Mary was trying to give some context.
And I'm sure part of her at 15 thought she'd be silly for adding more context.
Because when you're that age, you're invincible.
And even if you're scared, somewhere in the back of your mind, you think that bad things can never happen to you.
But they can. So clearly, there was someone Mary feared.
The question became, who?
And was she going to meet that person on September 2nd?
Both the Raker family and later police developed a theory that, yes, the girl -
