It’s been decades since Hang Lee and Susan Swedell disappeared. What happened to the teens?

Mara H. Gottfried, Mary Divine, Pioneer Press
Updated ·11 min read

Growing up in St. Paul, Laurie Finnegan remembers hearing about Hang Lee. She was 11 when the 17-year-old Lee disappeared under suspicious circumstances in St. Paul on Jan. 12, 1993.

Now, 30 years later, Lee still hasn’t been found, and Finnegan is a St. Paul police sergeant. When Finnegan became a missing-persons investigator two years ago, she said she knew she wanted to take on Lee’s case.

“It’s something that always stuck with me,” Finnegan said. “Unfortunately, we haven’t found Hang, but we also haven’t forgotten about her and, hopefully, we can someday find her.”

A search for answers weighs heavily on investigators and families of other missing people. Like Lee’s family, another grim anniversary is approaching for a Twin Cities family. It will soon be 35 years since Susan Swedell disappeared from Lake Elmo when she was 19.

Could the teens’ disappearances be connected? St. Paul police have long called Mark Steven Wallace, a convicted sex offender, a person of interest in Lee’s case.

The Washington County sheriff’s office also investigated Wallace in connection with Swedell’s disappearance, and he hasn’t been ruled out, a detective said recently.

What happened to Hang?

There have been developments in Hang Lee’s case in recent years — including digging in Wallace’s former backyard — though they haven’t resulted in finding Lee or in an arrest.

Lee was a senior at Highland Park Senior High School when she left her family’s apartment in the 200 block of Biglow Lane in St. Paul’s North End for the last time the night of Jan. 12, 1993. She told her brother she was going to a job interview with a friend’s boss, later identified as Wallace, who had a small painting business. He was 30 years old at the time.

Lee and her friend, who worked for Wallace, went to his business at Iroquois and Stillwater avenues on the East Side. Wallace then dropped off Lee’s friend at her residence in St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood and said he would drive Lee home. Lee was never seen or heard from again.

Lee’s friend informed police that she talked to Wallace the next day and he told her he dropped Lee off at Wong Cafe, where Lee worked, at Rice Street and Wheelock Parkway.

Police soon were looking into Wallace. A news article published in 1994, after Lee had been missing for a year, said that police had questioned Wallace but found him uncooperative and that he’d retained a lawyer who advised him to say nothing further.

When Lee disappeared, Wallace had been out of prison for about a year and a half after being convicted in two criminal sexual conduct cases. In one case, Wallace raped a 16-year-old girl in Cottage Grove who had gone with him on the promise of a job interview.

Then, in 2017, Wallace pleaded guilty to kidnapping. A 20-year-old woman told police she had been staying with Wallace, the father of a high school friend, in exchange for housework because she had no permanent home. Wallace, she said, later became physically and verbally abusive and wouldn’t let her leave, according to the complaint.

The young woman told police that she became aware of a murder in St. Paul and asked Wallace about it. “Wallace stated, ‘She entered my business and never came out,’ ” according to the criminal complaint in the 2016 case. She also said Wallace told her he would do to her what he had done to the girl in St. Paul, the complaint continued.

Searching for Susan

What breaks Christine Swedell’s heart is realizing that there is “no way” her older sister’s case could go unsolved today.

Susan Swedell’s family could have tracked her location using an app on her cellphone, and there would be security-camera footage of her everywhere, Christine Swedell said. “The media coverage would be immediate,” she said. “It would be all over social media. We didn’t have any of that 35 years ago.”

During a snowstorm on Jan. 19, 1988, Susan Swedell, a 1986 graduate of Stillwater Area High School, finished her shift at Kmart in Oak Park Heights at 9 p.m. and headed home to Lake Elmo to watch a movie and eat popcorn with her mother and her sister.

A half-hour later, a gas-station attendant gave her permission to leave her overheated car at the K Station, a mile from home. The clerk said she saw Swedell get into another car with a man. She hasn’t been seen since.

For months, Swedell’s family put up posters and distributed fliers. Law-enforcement officers canvassed the area. A $25,000 reward was offered for information leading to her whereabouts.

But it seemed as if Susan Swedell had disappeared off the face of the Earth.

When Swedell had not arrived home by 11 p.m. on the Tuesday night she disappeared, her mother, Kathy, and sister, who was 16 at the time, called the Washington County sheriff’s office to request that deputies search for her car — a 1975 maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass — in ditches between Kmart and the house they rented in downtown Lake Elmo.

Deputies found the car at the K Station, at the corner of Manning Avenue and Minnesota 5.

Investigators didn’t learn until the next day that she had left the gas station with a man.

The gas-station attendant told police that Susan Swedell pulled up to the station around 9:30 p.m., followed by a light-colored older-model car with sport wheels. The man was described as slim, 6 feet to 6 feet 2 inches tall, with long sandy-brown hair and a three- to four-day beard growth. He was wearing a leather jacket.

Swedell and the man talked for a few minutes, and then Swedell came into the station and said she was having car problems and asked if she could leave her car at the station.

Swedell was wearing a skirt and sweater and no coat or boots at the time of her disappearance, according to police reports. When police searched her car the next day, they found her glasses, driver’s license and purse.

Mark Wallace’s timeline, behavior and vehicle description matched with several details of Swedell’s case, said Washington County Sheriff’s Detective Nick Sullivan, who added that Wallace hasn’t been ruled out as a suspect in the case.

Sullivan said it has been several years since the sheriff’s office has received any “actionable” tips having to do with Swedell’s disappearance.

“Anything that comes in, we follow up on,” Sullivan said. “Hopefully, we’ll get something one day. Right now, though, it’s really quiet. We want to solve this. We want to bring that closure. There’s always that hope that maybe someone who knows something will be willing to come forward.”

Investigator and Lee went to same school

In St. Paul, Sgt. Laurie Finnegan took over the Hang Lee case in 2021.

Finnegan, who is six years younger than Lee, grew up in St. Paul’s Como Park neighborhood, and she remembers some teachers were still talking about Lee when she went to Como Park Senior High School. Lee had attended Como from 1989 to October 1991 before going to Highland Park High School, according to St. Paul Public Schools records.

“It breaks my heart,” retired Como art teacher Donna Gregory said recently of what happened to Lee and her family not having answers. She was Finnegan’s volleyball coach at the high school.

RELATED: A look at long-term missing-persons cases from Ramsey, Dakota, Washington counties

Finnegan joined her hometown police department in 2011 after getting her start in law enforcement at the Carver County sheriff’s office. She’s now a St. Paul police human-trafficking investigator who also investigates cases of missing people. While she mostly has to focus on current cases, she said she works on older cases when time and leads allow.

The Lee case is “always open and when we get tips in, I continue to follow up,” Finnegan said.

Searching Maplewood backyard

As Finnegan looked at the work of previous investigators, she focused on a search of a garage at the home where Wallace lived in 1993.

In 2009, investigators got permission to conduct a cadaver-dog search of the former Wallace property on Furness Street, off Ripley Avenue, in Maplewood. Three dogs showed interest in an area on the back wall of the garage, which had been completed in 2004.

A search warrant was granted to drill holes in the garage’s concrete floor to probe the soil underneath for the cadaver dogs to pinpoint the exact location of the evidence, according to a search warrant affidavit. When the dogs came back for a second search, most did not indicate an alert for human remains.

In September 2021, Finnegan received a tip that Lee had been buried in an old fire pit at Wallace’s former home. Finnegan contacted a company to survey the backyard using 3-D ground-penetrating radar.

“They had some areas that they said were ‘of interest,'” Finnegan said recently. “That meant there were areas where the ground was disturbed, which could have been a tree being removed, but we didn’t know.”

Finnegan obtained a search warrant to dig in the backyard, which she said the current homeowners also agreed to.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t find anything that led us to Hang,” Finnegan said. She noted the entire yard wasn’t dug up; police could request to dig in additional areas if they receive information that leads to it.

Anyone with tips in the Lee case can contact St. Paul police at 651-266-5612 or CrimeStoppers at 800-222-8477.

Civilly committed

In 2020, court records show Wallace was civilly committed to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program, which has secure facilities in Moose Lake and St. Peter.

The Minnesota Department of Corrections referred Wallace for possible commitment as a sexually dangerous person when he was serving his prison term for the 2017 kidnapping conviction.

Wallace had been living in Anoka County before his conviction and Anoka County Social Services brought forth the court case to have him committed. They cited his two convictions for sexual conduct and the recent kidnapping conviction.

In cases that were listed as “not charged,” the court file referenced Lee’s disappearance.

Wallace did not respond to a letter sent to him by the Pioneer Press through the Sex Offender Program, and his attorney in the civil commitment matter did not return messages.

Finnegan said she previously contacted Wallace, who is now 60, to see if he’d be willing to talk to her, but he was not. She hasn’t given up on trying again.

Can closure be found?

In 2002, detectives arranged for Kathy and Christine Swedell to have their blood drawn at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. Their DNA samples were then taken to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension headquarters in St. Paul — the first “missing person relative” samples in state history.

Given the number of cold cases being solved using DNA forensic genetic genealogy programs, Christine Swedell said she is hopeful she and her mother, 79, may one day find out what happened.

“The pandemic changed things for me,” said Christine Swedell, 51. “If she was still out there, Sue would have called us, so I don’t know what to think.”

A “Still Missing” poster featuring Swedell is displayed in Sheriff Dan Starry’s office.

“I see it every day,” he said. “We think about the Swedell family often, and we want to bring them answers.”

A $25,000 reward is still offered in the case. Anyone with information about Swedell’s disappearance is asked to call 651-430-7850.

“‘Closure’ is one of the words that I continue to grapple with,” Christine Swedell said. “Even if we found out what happened to Sue, I don’t know if we would ever have closure.”

Hang Lee’s brother, Koua Lee, also thinks about what closure means. Hang’s family held a “spirit release” ceremony for her in 2017, which had been their father’s wish before he died in 2013.

Koua Lee said he can still remember what his older sister’s face looked like as she left on Jan. 12, 1993. He said it pains him to think “that I could have spoke up and told her to stay.”

He said he hopes the person responsible for Hang’s disappearance can find it in their heart to tell the truth in order “to find closure within himself and redemption.”

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