South Australia 2002 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

Police are planning to dig up the backyard of a Port Lincoln home after launching a fresh search into the cold case disappearance of Susan Goodwin. On the afternoon of the 19th of July 2002, a friend drove Michelle Peterson home from the Port Lincoln Tuna Processes. When they pulled up to the house on Ma Crescent, Susan’s car was sitting in the driveway and it was locked.

 Susan never locked the car. She had been supposed to pick Peterson up at quarter 4 the way she did every weekday in 7 years together. She had never missed it once. That afternoon, no car, no call. Inside the house, dinner was sitting ready in the fridge. Her clothes hung untouched in the wardrobe.

 The toothbrush was on the bathroom shelf where she had left it that morning. The one item she carried with her everywhere she went. Police spent the next 23 years searching 25 km of Scrubland and coastline for her body. They had been looking in the wrong direction the whole time. Susan Marie Goodwin was born on the 5th of November 1962 in Bansdale in the east of Victoria.

 She was the fourth of five children born to Dawn and Margaret Goodwin. Everyone called her Suzy. She grew up around Archie’s Creek and Waggy in South Gibsland where the family had deep roots. Her father Dawn ran the pub at Archie’s Creek for a stretch and Susan pulled shifts on one side of the bar and spent what she earned on the other.

 She drove a blue Tana for years, blasting Suzie Quattro out the windows. After leaving Waggy Tech, she worked at Durham’s grocery store in town, then the cotton mills, then Smith and nephew. For a while, she pulled beers at the Miner’s Rest Hotel. She was 21 when the accident happened. On the night of the 9th of September, 1984, she was coming home from her grandmother’s place near Bansdale with three of her siblings and her cousin, Steven Shanahan, who was driving at about 1:00 in the morning.

The car hit a wooden bridge on Clifton Creek Road and dropped 5 m into the creek below. Three of Susan’s siblings died in the crash. Gary was 20. Heather was 24. Marie was 27. The cousin behind the wheel, Steven Shanahan, was 20 years old, and he died, too. Susan and another cousin, Christopher Bramage, were the only ones who walked away.

 In a single night, Dawn and Margaret lost three of their five children. The funeral was one of the biggest Waggi had ever seen. People came from across South Gibsland to be there with the family. Susan’s physical injuries from the crash were minor. The damage that did not show was harder to talk about.

 People who grew up with her said she was quieter afterwards, and the loss of her siblings sat with her in a way that never really faded. She kept moving. A panel van replaced the Tana, then a red Ford station wagon she hitched a caravan to for fishing trips up the coast. She drifted through towns along the Victorian coastline for the next decade or so and eventually landed in Port Lincoln in the mid 1990s.

It was as far from Waggy as she could get without leaving the country. Fort Lincoln sits at the southern tip of the air peninsula in South Australia, right on Boston Bay, where the water opens out into Spencer Gulf. The town calls itself the seafood capital of Australia. Tuna farming and commercial fishing keep the place running and about 26,000 people live there.

 It is roughly 280 km from Adelaide as the crow flies, but the drive runs to 646 because the Gulf cuts between the two cities. People in town leave their doors unlocked and neighbors know each other by name. When someone goes missing in Port Lincoln, the town feels it. Susan moved there in the mid 1990s with her partner Michelle Peterson and the two of them settled into a house on Ma Crescent in a quieter pocket of town.

 Peterson worked the tuna processes. Susan ran the household and picked up shifts at local pubs when she could. She fished off the jetties and from the rocks along Boston Bay. On week nights, she played pool in the local pub competitions and was good enough to hold her own on a team. Scotch was her drink.

 She liked quiet evenings at home with Michelle, cooking dinner, watching television, keeping things simple. The water was a big part of what drew her west. She had grown up around the creeks and rivers of Gibsland, and fishing had been in her life since she was small. The ocean gave her the same calm that casting a line into a river always had.

 Port Lincoln was 2,000 km from the place where she had lost her siblings, and nobody in town knew that history. On the morning of Friday, the 19th of July 2002, Susan went shopping at Kohl’s and Woolworths. She picked up groceries for that evening’s dinner, including the fresh meat she planned to cook when Michelle got home from work.

 A friend who saw her at the house earlier in the day said she appeared visibly distressed, though nobody knew what was wrong. The friend later told police that nothing Susan said suggested she was about to leave the house. In 2002, detectives spent months trying to figure out what had been on Susan’s mind that morning.

 They worked through the people closest to her. Her family in Victoria, friends in town, the people she had known back home in Waggy who had kept in touch. None of them could put a name on what had been bothering her. What had distressed Susan that morning has never been publicly explained. Her friend left without resolution.

 Susan was gone by quarter 4. That afternoon drive was the fixed point in their daily life together, and Peterson had described the two of them as inseparable. She never arrived. Peterson got a lift home from a colleague and found the house quiet. The car sat locked in the driveway, and the fresh meat Susan had bought that morning was still in the fridge.

 Nothing had been packed, and the only thing missing besides Susan was the roughly $140 in cash she had been carrying. Her bank accounts showed no withdrawals that day, the next week, or anytime after. There was one detail that stopped Peterson cold. Susan had an obsession about brushing her teeth. Both her toothbrush and the small bottle of water she kept with it were sitting where she had left them that morning.

 Peterson called everyone she could think of, starting with friends and family and working through the people Susan saw regularly. None of them had heard from her since lunchtime that day. No one had seen another car in the driveway or noticed anything unusual on Ma Crescent that afternoon. She went to the police station that evening and reported Susan missing.

 While she filled out the paperwork, she kept expecting her mobile to ring. The call never came that night, and it never came at any point in the 23 years that followed. Within hours of Peterson’s call, the response on the ground was massive. Port Lincoln State Emergency Service crews pulled together search teams and covered roughly 25 square kilometers of bushland and scrub around the town.

 Volunteers walked grid lines through thick coastal vegetation, checked paddics, scanned the cliffs and beaches along Boston Bay. They searched for days and found nothing. Police worked the case hard from the start. Susan was a social drug user who had connections to people on the local scene. So detectives followed those threads first.

 They pulled her phone records and built a list of everyone she had called in the months before she vanished. The names came back one by one for follow-up. Detectives spoke to associates, casual acquaintances, and people on the edges of her circle and tracked who had left town suddenly after she disappeared. Over the months and years that followed, detectives named seven persons of interest.

 They investigated each one, questioned them, and eventually cleared them. Every lead that looked promising went cold. The evidence told detectives she had been murdered, but it did not tell them by whom. One piece of the puzzle kept investigators awake at night. Police worked out fairly early on that Susan had not been the one who parked her car in the driveway that afternoon.

Somebody else had driven it back to the house and walked away. Susan was already gone by the time the keys turned in the lock. In 2005, 3 years into the investigation, a tip sent detectives to the old Greyhound track on the outskirts of town. Peterson joined the search alongside the state emergency service volunteers.

 They turned over fragments of old clothing buried in the dirt. None of it could be connected to Susan. Senior Sergeant Hank Swallu told reporters that investigators no longer believed Susan was alive. The working theory was straightforward. She had been killed by someone close to her. Her body was somewhere within 30 km of the town, and more than one person was likely involved in disposing of it.

 The list of names who could have done all that was short. The $200,000 reward went up. Posters appeared across the Air Peninsula. Police printed her face onto drink coasters and dropped them into pubs and cafes across town. Then they branded marked patrol cars with her name and photograph. So every cruiser that rolled through Port Lincoln carried her face down its side. The years passed.

 The cruisers kept rolling and the case stayed exactly where it had been. It sat with major crime in Adelaide, reviewed and re-reviewed, handed between detectives as people retired and new ones took over the files. The Goodwin family in Victoria made the trip west when they could. Back in Wanhaggi, a local journalist named Richard Schmisel kept writing articles at Margaret Goodwin’s urging.

 He kept the case in print across the years with pieces that ran in the Waggy paper and were picked up by the Port Lincoln Dies. The articles tried to keep Susan’s name in front of people who might know something. Every few years, a fresh round of questions went out to the same people in the same town. Port Lincoln is a small place where everybody knows everybody.

 Nobody stepped forward with enough to make an arrest. Susan had been 39 in July 2002. Each anniversary of the disappearance came and went, and her age did not change. Peterson aged, her parents aged. Susan stayed 39. In May 2017, police set up Task Force Lincoln. They were trying anything that might break the case open. Detectives printed the case onto playing cards and sent the decks into prisons across South Australia along with letters to roughly 400 inmates and paroleies.

 52 calls came into Crimestoppers after the cards went out. Some came from inside the prisons themselves. The tips confirmed things detectives already suspected, but none of them pointed to a killer. Detective Superintendent Dez Bray ran the task force out of Adelaide. He addressed the community in interviews and press conferences.

 The answer to this case, he said, lay in the local community. Back in Victoria, Margaret Goodwin was still placing her annual inmemoriam notice in the onehaggy paper, still listing her surviving daughters as the ones left to grieve. Margaret and Dawn were getting older. In 2017, Dawn recorded a video plea for information.

 He was 81 years old and his health was failing. Speaking from Victoria, he said he was getting older and crooer and asked anyone who knew what had happened to Susan to come forward while he was still alive to hear it. By 2017, they had spent 15 years not knowing what had happened to their daughter.

 Both of them died that year, within months of each other, without ever getting the answer. The DNA collected from the original investigation had been sitting in a storage room at Major Crime in Adelaide since 2002. It had stayed in the box where investigators had first sealed it. Detectives passed the file from one to the next.

 Some retired before the case was solved, and their successes picked up where they had left off. The methods to read what the samples could tell them had not arrived yet, and there was no way to know when they would. In 2023, forensic analysts went back to the evidence they had been holding on to since the start.

 The testing methods had changed in the years since the samples had been collected. What a lab could pull from a small or aged biological sample in 2023 was a different thing entirely from what had been possible 21 years earlier. The profiles came back cleaner, and the results were sharper. Traces that older methods could not read could now be processed and run against a name in a database.

 Investigators ran the material through the newer analysis, and the results changed the shape of the case. After 21 years of dead ends, the suspect field narrowed from a long list of possibilities to a single individual. That name pointed them to a specific address. Not in the scrubband west of town. Not near the Greyhound track.

 Not in any of the bushland where search teams had walked for two decades. The address was on Premier Court in Port Lincoln, the quiet residential street that ran directly behind Ma Crescent. In September 2025, major crime detectives came back to the Air Peninsula, and this time they brought the Australian Federal Police with them.

 The federal officers arrived with ground penetrating radar, the kind of equipment that scans below the surface without anyone having to dig. They aimed it at the Pameir Court property, and worked their way across the backyard, scanning section by section. The radar picked up an anomaly beneath the surface of the yard. On Wednesday, the 17th of September, 2025, an excavation team broke ground in the backyard. Within hours, they hit bones.

A forensic anthropologist from Forensic Science SA examined them on site and confirmed the remains were human. Forensic specialists and crime scene officers flew across from Adelaide to help work the site as the recovery continued. By Thursday, the 18th of September, police had uncovered a full skeleton alongside personal belongings buried in the same grave.

 Dental records confirmed her identity in the days that followed. She had been in the backyard of the house directly behind her own home for the entire 23 years. Search crews had walked grid lines through the bushland west of town. Michelle Peterson had pulled over on lonely stretches of road to check patches of scrub on her own for two decades.

 And all that time, Susan was less than 50 m from the kitchen where she had put the shopping away on her last afternoon at home. Late on the afternoon of the 17th of September, before the excavation in the yard was even finished, detectives arrested a 64year-old local man and charged him with murder. Police announced the arrest publicly that same day.

 Local media reported it within hours. Reporters from Adelaide started making the drive across the Gulf before the sun went down. His name was John Mislov. Mizov had owned the Premier Court property at the time Susan disappeared. The house where her remains were found had been his house. He had been her back fence neighbor. The Premier Court house was one of the last places Susan was seen alive on the 19th of July 2002.

 By 2025, Mslov had sold the house and moved on. Detectives found him still living in Port Lincoln when they came to arrest him. Detectives had spent more than two decades questioning seven persons of interest. The list had taken months to build in 2002 and had stabilized at seven by 2003. They had investigated each one, interviewed them, ruled them out, and shelved them.

 The names on the list had come from Susan’s social circle and from people connected to the local scene she sometimes moved in. Miss Love was not in either category. He had never been on the list at all. Miss Love himself was never questioned about Susan’s disappearance. He was never asked where he had been that Friday afternoon.

 His name didn’t appear in any of the appeals for information that went out across the Air Peninsula. He had been there the entire time until late afternoon on the 17th of September 2025. No detective had knocked on his door. Mizlov appeared in Port Lincoln Magistrate’s court on the Thursday afternoon, the 18th of September.

 Standing in front of the magistrate, he said he had made a mistake. Then he launched into a torrent of abuse directed at the magistrate and at the people in the gallery. The hearing was brief. Prosecutors told the magistrate that in the hours immediately after his arrest, Mizoff had made stunning admissions to police. What he told detectives in those hours has not been released publicly.

 The prosecution opposed bail outright. The magistrate agreed and Mislov was held in custody. His next court date was set for April 2026. The original investigation in 2002 had believed an accomplice was likely involved in moving Susan’s body. So far, no accomplice has been named. Mislov has not been charged with anyone else’s involvement, and the specifics of what he told detectives in the hours after his arrest are sealed and will stay that way until the trial begins.

 Whether he acted alone or whether someone else helped him that Friday afternoon is a question the court file has not answered. 23 years of searching and 25 square kilometers of screwland. A $200,000 reward and posters across the air peninsula. Drink coasters in every pub playing cards in every cell. Patrol cars rolling through town with Susan’s face down the panels.

 and the man charged with her murder had buried her in his own backyard right behind her house and never left Port Lincoln. Don and Margaret Goodwin had spent 18 years with Susan and Cheryl after they buried Gary, Heather, and Marie. Then Susan disappeared. Both died in 2017. When the news broke in September 2025, the surviving family released a statement through South Australian police thanking the detectives who had kept the file open and the community members who had kept Susan’s name alive.

The news brought both relief and renewed grief. Detective Inspector Mickstanding, who had handled the file in its later years, told reporters that Susan had been someone who considered life precious. Cheryl, the youngest of the Goodwin children, had not been in the car on the night of the 1984 crash. She had been a teenager at the time.

 By 2025, she was the last of the five siblings still living. Cheryl and other relatives traveled from Victoria to South Australia after the arrest for the first court proceedings. They came back across in November for the memorial. The news arrived 8 years too late for Dawn and Margaret.

 On the 5th of November 2025, on what would have been Susan’s birthday, roughly 200 people gathered at the Want Haggi Golf Club for a farewell, the service opened with Wish You Were Here and closed with Stairway to Heaven. Photos of Susan played on a screen while the music ran. People came from across Gibsland to say goodbye.

 Childhood friends from Dallas Primary, drinking mates from the Waggy pubs, tennis partners, fishing buddies from the coast. Many had not seen each other in decades. The cbrant told the room that for too long, questions had hung over the family without answers. She said the gathering was meant to bring some measure of peace.

 Susan had left the district 30 years before, but had never really left their memories. Susan will not be laid to rest in Wfaggi alongside her parents and her siblings. Because of the ongoing legal proceedings, her burial will take place in Port Lincoln itself, the place where she built her last home and where she was finally found, a house on Pameir Court, a backyard that search teams walked past while they combed the screwland and the coastline.

Susan Goodwin was 39 years old. At 21, she had survived a crash that killed three of her siblings. She had made her way west across the country, rebuilt her life near the water, and gone out shopping for dinner on a Friday afternoon in July. That afternoon, she never made it to the tuna processes at quarter 4.

 The furthest she got from her own house was the other side of the back fence. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.