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REVIEWS:

By Anne Rice, author of Angel Time, the Christ the Lord series, and Interview with the Vampire, as posted at Amazon - http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AB4F6UHL20U95/ref=cm_aya_bb_pdp

By Dan Marvin, as posted at The LL Book Review - http://llbookreview.com/2010/01/review-133-this-night-wounds-time-by-shawn-sutherland/

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PRESS:

In the preface to This Night Wounds Time, I write, "The equation is a simple one: solved mysteries are revisited by the media ad nauseam while cold cases - the ones truly needing exposure - languish."

Thankfully, despite this truth, WFAA (the Dallas, Texas ABC-TV affiliate) and The Carrollton Leader recognized that the Madison/Smalley case is still a story worth telling.

Therefore, graciously giving credit where it is definitely due, I would like to publicly praise WFAA (Belo Corp.) and The Carrollton Leader (Star Newspapers), and particularly reporters Jason Whitely and Senitra Horbrook, for their creativity and a job well done.

Sincerely,
Shawn Sutherland
Richardson, Texas
February 2010
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"Unsolved disappearance of two girls detailed in new book"
By Jason Whitely/WFAA-TV
December 2, 2009
http://www.wfaa.com/news/Unsolved-disappearance-of-two-girls-detailed-in-new-book-78381357.html

DALLAS - For Ida Madison, the passing of time hasn't helped.

"My daughter still has not been found and I can't stop looking for her," she said.

Madison just wants to know what happened to her oldest daughter, Stacie.

As their classmates from Carrollton's Newman Smith High School started Spring Break, Stacie and her friend, Susan Smalley, disappeared March 20, 1988.

Volunteers passed out hundreds of fliers with the girls' pictures on them at shopping centers, but the two high school seniors seemingly vanished without a trace.

With no credible leads and a stalled investigation, their story soon faded from the headlines.

"I think this case has languished for too long," said Shawn Sutherland.

Almost 22 years after Stacie and Susan disappeared, Sutherland has revived their case.

As a 1982 graduate of the same high school, he was drawn to their story. Sutherland briefly met Susan before she disappeared when she worked as a hostess at the Steak & Ale Restaurant in Addison.

Over the last seven months, Sutherland, who is a paralegal, has spent his own time and money conducting an independent investigation that he recently self-published in a book titled This Night Wounds Time: The Mysterious Disappearances of Stacie Madison and Susan Smalley.

In the book, the original Carrollton Police detectives working the case, who have since left the department, admit Stacie's boyfriend was never entirely cleared in the case.

"As far as they know, his family and friends were never pressed and they should be," Sutherland said.

Her boyfriend, who is not mentioned by name, confessed to his new girlfriend that he killed the two girls and then immediately recanted. Investigators stopped pursuing him after he passed a polygraph.

Madison thinks Carrollton police did the best they could with the knowledge they had in 1988. But, she isn't convinced her daughter's former boyfriend had nothing to do with the disappearance until he's finally cleared.

"Maybe he did exactly what he told that girl he did do - that he hit them both over the back of the head and killed them, then he buried their bodies and took the car back," she said.

Madison doubts Stacie or Susan are still alive. Their disappearance remains one of the oldest unsolved cases in Carrollton. It's still classified as missing persons since there is no evidence of a homicide. Their missing poster still hangs inside the Carrollton Police Department.

"New book delves into mysterious disappearances of two teenagers"
By Senitra Horbrook
The Carrollton Leader
October 6, 2009
http://www.scntx.com/articles/2009/10/06/carrollton_leader/news/70.txt

Shawn Sutherland's chance restaurant encounter with Susan Smalley in early 1988 left a lasting impression. Little did he know, she would turn up missing with her best friend just a few months later, never to be seen or heard from again.

“Mention those two girls and anybody here in 1988 knows who you’re talking about,” Sutherland said.

Stacie Madison and Susan Smalley, seniors at Newman Smith High School, disappeared March 20, 1988. Sutherland, a paralegal who lives in Richardson, delves into the story of their disappearance with his book This Night Wounds Time: The Mysterious Disappearances of Stacie Madison and Susan Smalley.

“I have never felt called to preach, but I just felt called to tell this story,” Sutherland said. “By getting it back out there, somebody might offer what they know.”

Sutherland, a 1982 Newman Smith graduate, was home on break during his last semester at Abilene Christian University and heard the police were reaching out to the community for two missing Newman Smith students. At first, he assumed the two friends may have headed to South Padre for the weekend as so many high school students did back then.

“As I got ready to drive back to school, they still weren’t back,” he said. “After that, I got on with life.”

When he returned home from Abilene again a few months later he saw one of the many missing posters plastered all over Carrollton and realized Smalley was the restaurant hostess whose smile and friendly conversation made him forget his worries about grades, tests, graduation and the hope of finding a job.

“Staring back at me from that piece of paper was a blonde I did not recognize. The other face, though, I knew instantly,” Sutherland wrote in the first chapter. “The smile was unmistakable. It was the same one that had lifted my spirits that freezing cold night earlier in the year.”

It has been reported Madison and Smalley were last seen in the parking lot of Steak and Ale in Addison between 12:01 and 12:45 a.m. On Monday, March 21, Madison’s 1967 Ford Mustang was discovered in the El Fenix parking lot on Forest Lane, near Marsh. At that time, the area was known as the hot spot for teenagers cruising in cars and hanging out with friends.

“Nobody knows what their plans were - if they were meeting anybody,” Sutherland said. “Prior to that they’d done teenage stuff, gone shopping, visited friends in Arlington and came back.”

In his book, Sutherland details numerous interviews, including those conducted with family members, friends and officers who worked the case at various times.

“I don’t claim to have solved the mystery,” he said. “I explore probably what’s more realistic. They met up with somebody they knew or trusted or the other possibility is they were abducted by a complete stranger.”

When Sutherland decided to write this book, he was apprehensive about approaching the girls’ relatives.

“The scariest thing was approaching the people out of the clear blue saying ‘I want to write a story about two of your beloved that vanished and never appeared again,’” he said. “There were also some people who were friends of the girls that were a little suspicious, wondering why this guy is so interested.”

Sutherland said the police were also a little apprehensive about speaking with him.

“The Carrollton police have sort of got a bad rap over this over the years. They didn’t take it seriously at first,” he said. “When they found one of the girls’ cars a few days later, it wasn’t fingerprinted.”

When it came time to publish his findings, Sutherland knew it would be nearly impossible to sell the book to a mainstream publisher because the girls were never national news or household names.

“A bigger obstacle, though, was that, since it is the story of a cold case, the book would be minus an ending. And the public, or so I am told, is prone to avoid reading about unsolved mysteries unless they are of the most garish sort, such as the Black Dahlia, Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac,” he wrote in the preface. “I would later learn that the higher profile television programs devoted to capturing criminals had also declined for years to broadcast the details of the Madison/Smalley case because police lack a suspect whose photograph they can publicize.”

Sutherland went the self-publishing route and is selling the book at cost, meaning he will make no profit.

“Somebody out there knows what happened to these girls. Somebody knows where they are. I think it’s obscene they’ve been missing this long,” he said. “My thoughts are parallel with the officer I interviewed. He would just like to have a little closure for the family. That would be my reward.”
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